The social sciences today are built around collecting data. Polls seem very important. Opinions are gathered and regressions are performed and truth is finally synthesized. Except, there is a problem with social experiments: namely, they have proven quite difficult to replicate.
Much of what is being done in the social sciences today is what Steve Sailer aptly points out is marketing research. The reason that social experiments can't be repeated is because they have only spotted a particular trend, not identified a truth about mankind. This is a problem on several fronts, for instance: 1) predictable human behavior is often used to justify state force in the marketplace and 2) the people most interested in justifying state force are in position to fund or subsidize research.
Spotting trends is important for marketing campaigns aimed at reminding people to buy products or to convince new people to buy products. As a justification for state force: well... just imagine cigarette commercials from the early 20th century as being metaphors for political policies today.
Should policies be based on trends? In the early 2000s, housing prices maintained the same trajectory that they had been trending for decades. Understanding that this trend reflected a general truth about housing, policies were put in place to open access to mortgages for people who otherwise could not achieve the American Dream. Under the ostensible impetus of increasing drug crime, policies emerged to combat this rising trend. The housing policies turned out to be an incredible boon for people with variable rate mortgages and the economy in general; and, the drug crime of the late 80s has virtually been eradicated. And smoking Lucky Brand cigarettes builds vigor.
Predicting the future, on the other hand, tends to be a bit of a ball-and-cup game. Some people continue to make the same predictions, only to be proven right like a broken clock: the doom-and-gloom forecasters, the benevolent bureaucrats, the commodity analysts. These people have a consistent message and when they are right, you're wrong; and when they're wrong, it was a timing issue.
Science fiction has a had a pretty good track record of predicting technologies, institutions and cultural turns. Jules Verne foresaw the submarine and the scuba tank; Arthur C. Clarke predicted the sling shot maneuver; Phillip Dick presaged the pre-crime of DUI checkpoints and the various other guilty until proven innocent show trials of the modern day.
On another spectrum entirely are economists: part seers, part scientists. Cantillon described the process by which devalued money drives overvalued money under the mattress. This allows us to make fairly accurate predictions given a particular circumstance that it describes. Same thing with supply and demand curves. Perhaps the most famous (least talked about) prediction is that of von Mises logical assessment of the decline of the Soviet Union. While other prominent economists praised the foresight of a command economy, Mises explained that the lack of market feedback in terms of pricing would inevitably crush the Soviet Union. But that took 70 years.
Can we really say that people have had any success predicting the future? And if they haven't, how should our institutions reflect this general truth? Mises was right about the Soviet Union specifically; but his general ideas are rarely given proper, much less short, shrift. Complex economies require freedom of action to establish prices; prices bake a pretty complex cake with ingredients about past behaviors, present behaviors and possible future ones. Hayek called this process decentralized knowledge. Under this viewpoint, the future is unknown and ideas compete to allocate resources to satisfy future wants. The ideas of Mises and Hayek predict a general rise in living standards concomitant with freedom of prices, which appear to correspond to societies operating under those policies. Am I hedging or is that about as close a description of a natural phenomena that we can get?
Showing posts with label empiricism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label empiricism. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Monday, June 6, 2016
The Overton Window and Epistemlogical Bias
Contemporary Western culture presumes to sit at the pinnacle of progress. It was not always so. The Greeks, those scions of reason and logic (who borrowed much from Egypt), believed that they lived in a period following a Golden Age of men and gods. A belief in progress as a linear march of history, with each successive generation building on the accomplishments of the last, is a relatively recent one.
It is easy to correlate this idea of progress with the material benefit of scientific empiricism since the early 19th century: the explosion of scientific discoveries of the last two centuries has been a blessing in helping elevate the standard living of Earthlings. I believe, though, that this easy correlation belies the growth in something equally (probably more) important and, conversely, nonmeasurable: the growth in the idea of liberty and the enormous impact of increasing the accuracy of prices which rises in proportion to free exchange.
Science benefited from the growing acceptance of liberty as an ultimate end as more and more scientists found opportunity in the greater availability of capital and the social and political freedom to pursue previously unacceptable ideas about how the world might work. Before Locke and Hobbes, Rousseau and Hume, Kant and Adam Smith, the Overton Window of acceptable discourse was framed primarily by religious considerations. The church did not object to an error in Galileo's thinking so much as object to his presumption of offering a more accurate view of the world than could the church. The church was the authority and the authority could not be wrong, which is to say: the church made a power play more than a good argument; a play that we still see being evoked today. Galileo had an empirical view; the church had a theoretical one. In this instance, the empirical view flowed from the Renaissance of Greek logic into the Enlightenment. Empiricism would come to frame the Overton Window for centuries.
Theoretical knowledge and the possibility of gaining understanding without experience (through apriori synthetic deduction) is an old idea. We see in early oral histories a transmission of a kind science in which past experience becomes a story with a moral or a lesson. These lessons helped human civilizations persist through calamity by nipping in the bud the consequences of repeatedly making errors in judgment. The theoretical code of the various churches presented various systems by which people could live in peace and prosperity. As an invention, religion codified the nonmeasurable truths of human interaction (or tried to). If you believe that stories have no real meaning in human history (you're wrong), then math is a good and old example of apriori theoretical knowledge.
That the epistemological bias of the church suppressed the work of Galileo is unequivocal. That the epistemological bias of contemporary politics suppresses the works of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and Hoppe is contentious.
In discussing the political institutions today, the Overton Window encompasses how to use government, not whether we should use it. Few things remain free from the influence of the state today and it is rare that a situation that arises for which we find the consensus answer: wait before we act, it is likely that there are unseen forces acting as we speak to solve this problem before we make it worse. This is the pejorative, Partisan Gridlock, which impedes the bureaucrat from perfecting his fellow man.
Practical political discourse today evokes restlessness - a sense of needing to do something; in the future, perhaps we will swing back towards humility in the unseen hands of nature. As the discussion stands, communication is made all the more contentious by the unwillingness to acknowledge the current epistemological bias towards empiricism. Thus, the Overton Window will only accept ideas framed by this bias even when the outcome will likely aggravate rather than alleviate the problem.
It is easy to correlate this idea of progress with the material benefit of scientific empiricism since the early 19th century: the explosion of scientific discoveries of the last two centuries has been a blessing in helping elevate the standard living of Earthlings. I believe, though, that this easy correlation belies the growth in something equally (probably more) important and, conversely, nonmeasurable: the growth in the idea of liberty and the enormous impact of increasing the accuracy of prices which rises in proportion to free exchange.
Science benefited from the growing acceptance of liberty as an ultimate end as more and more scientists found opportunity in the greater availability of capital and the social and political freedom to pursue previously unacceptable ideas about how the world might work. Before Locke and Hobbes, Rousseau and Hume, Kant and Adam Smith, the Overton Window of acceptable discourse was framed primarily by religious considerations. The church did not object to an error in Galileo's thinking so much as object to his presumption of offering a more accurate view of the world than could the church. The church was the authority and the authority could not be wrong, which is to say: the church made a power play more than a good argument; a play that we still see being evoked today. Galileo had an empirical view; the church had a theoretical one. In this instance, the empirical view flowed from the Renaissance of Greek logic into the Enlightenment. Empiricism would come to frame the Overton Window for centuries.
Theoretical knowledge and the possibility of gaining understanding without experience (through apriori synthetic deduction) is an old idea. We see in early oral histories a transmission of a kind science in which past experience becomes a story with a moral or a lesson. These lessons helped human civilizations persist through calamity by nipping in the bud the consequences of repeatedly making errors in judgment. The theoretical code of the various churches presented various systems by which people could live in peace and prosperity. As an invention, religion codified the nonmeasurable truths of human interaction (or tried to). If you believe that stories have no real meaning in human history (you're wrong), then math is a good and old example of apriori theoretical knowledge.
That the epistemological bias of the church suppressed the work of Galileo is unequivocal. That the epistemological bias of contemporary politics suppresses the works of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and Hoppe is contentious.
In discussing the political institutions today, the Overton Window encompasses how to use government, not whether we should use it. Few things remain free from the influence of the state today and it is rare that a situation that arises for which we find the consensus answer: wait before we act, it is likely that there are unseen forces acting as we speak to solve this problem before we make it worse. This is the pejorative, Partisan Gridlock, which impedes the bureaucrat from perfecting his fellow man.
Practical political discourse today evokes restlessness - a sense of needing to do something; in the future, perhaps we will swing back towards humility in the unseen hands of nature. As the discussion stands, communication is made all the more contentious by the unwillingness to acknowledge the current epistemological bias towards empiricism. Thus, the Overton Window will only accept ideas framed by this bias even when the outcome will likely aggravate rather than alleviate the problem.
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