[FRIAM] deductive fidelity (was Re: ideas are lies)

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

I find this "phase space" model of social (and more aptly personal)
dynamics very compelling.  It helps me to understand the myriad
accusations I have endured in my life of having *this privilege* or
*that privilege*... it was always offered (or at least taken) as a moral
failure on my part.   Realizing that the momentum component of the phase
space is in some ways more important than the 0th derivatives is very
helpful.   I could riff on anecdotal examples, as is my wont, but I am
refraining.   The *larger* socioeconomic system/landscape is clearly a
complex system where in many regions, outcomes *are* highly sensitive to
initial conditions.  I can reflect on my own life and notice how many
"saddle passes" or "bifurcation points" I transitioned over/through and
see how "but for the grace of Gawdess, there go I" when I notice others
in my cadre whose orbits didn't take them *quite* up to/over those
saddles/bifurcations, and if him properly humble, notice those who *did*
leave my orbit and tumble on into a whole new regime (a hoodlum I used
to cause trouble with in middle school now owns his own private jet and
flies parts all over central/south america and lives a lavish lifestyle,
a peer of my daughters is a famous movie director who got a break
apprenticing with James Cameron 20 years ago, etc.).  

Like the dynamic experience of downhill skiing and mogul
bashing/carving, however, I am left trying to understand the role of
agency and free-will in the slopes we "choose" to ski and the shape the
runs take on under the edges of our skis (willful choices)?

- Steve

On 9/29/20 8:31 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> Well, the reason I titled the post "ideas are lies" was in part due to our faith in deduction. If only we could hammer out the credibility of each sentence, we could automatically transform one truth into another truth. But we cannot. So, your radical skepticism regarding each sentence *facilitates* motivated reasoning. You can doubt the conclusion solely because you hold up deduction as ideal.
>
> But that's not how humans work. Human deduction is a dangerous idea. And it's just as much a lie as the free market or the orthogonality of social systems. Deduction is nicely computational. And many of us would love to live in a computational Utopia.
>
> Instead, humans are driven by consequence, constraint solving, as opposed to deduction. We arbitrarily (not randomly) *sample* the spaces in which we find ourselves. In this context, too, the assumptions of libertarianism are at odds with reality because libertarianism assumes a well-behaved *space* for us to explore. It's not a matter of individual free will. It's a matter of path dependence and historicity. Joe Sixpack's available space, like everyone else's, was bound by constraints before he ever *had* free will in the first place. Yes, the choices he makes at age 30 constrain/guide the possible choices he can make at age 50. But similarly, the choices he makes at age 0.1 constrain/guide the choices he can make at age 30.
>
> Most importantly for libertarianism's falsity, the choices Joe Sixpack can make at age 0.1 are constrained/guided by choices made by those in his various communities (geographic, informational, etc.), 30 years before Joe was ever born. Socialist systems like anarcho-syndicalism attempt to *design* society to optimize for freedom and competence. Individualist systems like libertarianism abdicate any responsibility to design society and then blame the victim for not solving problems it never had the chance to solve.
>
> If you want individuals to spend less time in space X, then *minimize* the size of space X. Don't blame the individuals born inside space X for their failure to escape that space. Buck up and start *designing* the world. Even Hayek would advocate that *where* you know how to do it, then do it. That's what justified his naive arguments that where you *don't* know how to do it, don't do it.
>
> Of course, because we only have 1 world, we have limited protocols by which to experiment. And most experiments are unethical. So we have to a) be manipulationist/perturbationist and b) quickly admit mistakes and re-manipulate when our actions cause more pain. Or we can simply plunge our heads in the sand, rationalizing our luck with post-hoc delusions about our own competence and "well-made decisions" while the unlucky riffraff suffer in droves around us.
>
>
> On 9/28/20 5:33 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> To Glen's point.... it's hard to evaluate the overall argument of a piece when almost every factual claim seems factually wrong, and a decent chunk of those claims are in my area of ostensible expertise... The entire "evolutionary psychology" part is just bunk...  I've also had enough training in economics, anthropology, philosophy, and other areas to suspect that much of the coverage of that is bunk..... so even if I could wade through enough to judge the conclusion, there is definitely no world in which I agree with the argument. When I say I'm suspicious of most sentences, that includes the transition sentences that create "the narrative." He says "X. And X therefore Y. So Y, and if Y we should definitely Z", and I not only think X is wrong, but also that even if X were true it would /not /necessitate Y; and even if Y was necessitated, that wouldn't mean we should Z. 
>> <mailto:echarles at american.edu>
>>
>> I think the comment about Libertarians assuming decoupling is /much /more interesting than all points in the original article put together. Well worth breaking out into a different thread, level interesting. That would be a way, way better discussion.... in contrast with trying to figure out what it would mean for evolution (?) to favor (?) a massive-fiction-masquerading-as-a-Machiavellian-lie that either originated in the 1770s or in the late 1940s (unclear which). 
>>
>> You said: Libertarians aren't "even questioning why Joe Sixpack would prefer to watch The Voice and drink Budweiser over inventing mouse traps in his basement, after having spent the last 8 hours being ordered around by someone half his age in a flourescent lit cubicle."
>>
>> And, like, yeah, clearly those are related. But I would phrase the issue slightly differently. I would say that one fundamental issue with Libertarian thinking is that it assumes something akin to old fashioned "free will." It would point out that SOME people do work on the mouse traps, and that while watching The Voice and drinking Budweiser might be an understandable response to cubicle drudgery, it is also "a choice the person makes." Some libertarians will go all abstract in their claims about what someone could or could not choose to do, that's very true. However, more grounded ones are referencing actual people doing the things they are talking about, to push back against claims that such behavior is somehow impossible. 
>>
>> It is quite possible that such a claim is functionally identical to acknowledging "dependencies" or "coupling", we'd have to dive in deeper for me to figure that out. Maybe "free will" isn't the issue as much as some notion of "self-directedness." We all know that some percentage of poor people get out of poverty. A larger percentage don't. Out of those who don't, we have a lot who seem to be perennially making bad choices, which isn't very interesting in the context of this discussion (but could be in the context of other discussions). More interestingly, we also know that some percentage of poor people seem to make similar decisions to those who get out of poverty, but the dice never quite roll in their favor. So there is coupling, and there are probabilistic outcomes, and all that stuff. But even after acknowledging all that, the question remains to what extent the choices made by the individuals in question affect their outcomes.
>>
>> And, of course, none of that is closely related to whether the cost of tree trimming is made cheaper by there being more than one person offering such services (a basic free market issue), nor whether or not a wealthy baron of industry should support random moocher relatives in luxury when it doesn't even make him happy to do so (a classic Rand example)