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

[Eric Charles]

Much delayed reply....

I'm not sure I'm overly obsessed with deduction. If anything, I probably
think formal logic is overrated. In its place I prefer a rough notion of
coherence. For example, let's say you had asked to evaluate the following
argument:

   - Two plus five times ten is an even number and is greater than 100.
   - Trump hasn't started a war, which makes him the greatest president
   ever.
   - If the Twin Towers had been built with wooden-high-rise technology
   <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvHx_NS9wWw> they would have held up
   longer, allowing more people to escape, which means the Bush conspiracy
   started in the early 1970s, because why else would steel have been used?
   - And that's why I conclude that everyone should have a front yard
   garden.

In the face of that, I would say that I *agree *more people should have
front yard gardens, so the thrust of the conclusion seems ok. But also: 1)
"Everyone" seems ok if we acknowledge it's hyperbole, but for sure not
literally everyone. 2) Each sentence before the conclusion is a weird mix
of stuff that is right and wrong, and the transitions make no sense, and
put together as a whole it isn't any better. 3) So, if you are asking what
I think of *the argument*, then the answer I am going to tell you "it's
crap."
   ---   ----   ----  ----     ----
*"But what about the state dependencies part?", you ask. Which is good,
because I still assert that is the much more interesting thing to discuss. *

You claim that libertarianism is "at odds with reality" because human
activity has path dependence and historicity. I would say that
libertarianism is not at odds with that reality, it is at peace with it.
Let's go with a concrete example - concrete for me, at least, because I
dealt with directly for about 6 years.


   - Around 150 years ago a bunch of young adult's great-great-great-great
   grandparents decided to move from more rural parts of Appliacia to Altoona
   Pennsylvania, because it was a thriving train town and they didn't want to
   "waste their lives" milking goats like their parents had (while others
   stayed and took over the goat farms).
   - For 3 or 4 generations the families were solidly middle class laborers
   in the locomotive industry, and hardly anyone left Altoona (but some did).
   - By the 1930's the train jobs had finally dried up for good, and the
   modest fortunes fell (unless key family members had shifted to other jobs
   already).
   - Nevertheless, the families decided to stay in Altoona (except the ones
   that didn't).
   - Let's say that your father ended up a trucker driver, bossed around by
   a guy with a Penn State business degree. In fact, every one of your
   father's friends didn't have a degree, and spent most of their lives in a
   job where they were bossed around by someone who had a degree and made at
   least double what the workers made. So your dad and all of his friends told
   you that for sure you were going to college, because that was the golden
   ticket.
   - Most (most) of your friends were told the same thing, and most (most)
   who were told that did go to college.
   - Of the friends that headed that advice, most (most) ended up at the
   glorious Penn State Altoona, because you grew up hearing what a great
   college it was, and you could save money by living at home while you go
   there (i.e., by historic accident, it is the close). And you and your
   friends picked a wide variety of degrees, influenced by all sorts of path
   dependencies. And, of course, you can graduate with good grades from Penn
   State Altoona without really learning much, so for the vast majority of
   students you can't even make an "education for education's sake"
   argument (although a small number in every graduating class did manage to
   get a good education).
   - And when you graduated you found out that the local area generally
   doesn't have many jobs (something that would have been obvious at any time
   in your life had you chosen to look, but you didn't). Worse, even the few
   jobs that are around aren't paying top dollar for theater or psychology
   majors. And even for your two friends who picked business and engineering,
   respectively, while there are some prospects, they aren't nearly as
   glorious as your parents expected them to be, because unlike when your
   parents were kids, the area is now flooded with people who have 4-year
   college degrees.
   - And now you and your parents are $120K in debt (because they
   co-signed), and you need to decide whether to leave the Altoona region,
   where you can draw upon the support that exists by the historicity of 7
   generations of your extended family staying put, and which you have never
   been more than 50 miles from in your whole life, in order to gamble for a
   better job and life elsewhere, or whether to stay in Altoona and take a job
   you could have had straight out of high school and be in crippling debt for
   your entire "young adult" life.
   - And 70% of the kids from your elementary school are in basically the
   same situation, which is 60% of the grandkids of the last prosperous
   generation of city residents, which is 40% of the
   great-great-great-great grand kids of those who moved to Altoona in the
   1880s.
   - And out of all the choices that exist across all people in the
   country, by the time you are in your 30s, only 0.001% of those choices are
   available to you.
   - And a decent chunk of the constraints on your choices were predictable
   based on your great-great-great-great grandfather's decision to leave the
   goat farm for Altoona.

There is *nothing *about any of the details in that example that is "at
odds" with libertarianism. Because nothing about that is at odds with
libertarianism, nothing about it is evidence that libertarianism is
"false". We can only start to touch upon libertarianism when we try to
figure out what to do about the bad situation those people find themselves
in. Generally speaking, libertarianism is the position that the dilemma
described is not a problem the government (particularly not the federal
government) should be working to solve. It isn't kids starving to death
because their families are destitute, it isn't fascism threatening to take
over Europe, it is a large number of young adults finding themselves in a
frustrating situation due to path-dependencies, historicity, and their own
choices.

But we COULD try to fix it using federal intervention I suppose. What kind
of policies could we have put in place to provide more options? If I was
thinking about policies that had a serious chance of being effective, they
would be things like this:

   - We could have made your college free. That would relieve you of the
   crippling debt, but also make college attendance even easier such that even
   more people in the area who had a degree in hand would be doing jobs they
   didn't need degrees for (with the associated personal frustration, and the
   associated family strife because their truck-driver parents don't
   understand how that is possible). It also wouldn't fix the problem that
   most of your friends got through college not knowing much more than they
   did out of high school. But the lack of debt would be better, in some
   important sense, for you.
   - We could federally mandate that colleges be more rigorous (by making
   more hard-core use of the existing college-accreditation system). If we did
   that, several of your currently "college educated" friends wouldn't have
   gotten in, and several of those who got in wouldn't have graduated, but
   also a greater number of your friends would have stepped up to the
   challenge and gained from the experience, at least education-wise. Their
   lack of job prospects would remain the same (unless they were willing to
   leave the area).
   - We could have required an agreement that you would leave the area in
   pursuit of work, as a condition for college attendance.
   - If the presence of family support is really as crucial as it seems, we
   could pass a rule that mandates that a minimum of 50% of each generation
   move away from the Altoona region, so your support network would be spread
   out more.
   - We could do none of that and just go the Nick-Thompson route of
   randomizing babies at birth throughout the nation. Under that plan we would
   still have the same number of people facing the exact same constraints, but
   it would be the result of *someone else's* great-great-great-great
   grandfather's decision. I'm not sure how that helps anything, but several
   people on FRIAM seems to think it does.
   - We could use federal funds to ensure that no industries fail, in which
   case Altoona could still have a thriving coal-locomotive-repair industry,
   providing the same jobs the great-great-great-great grandparents were happy
   to have.
   - We could go the Soviet Russia route of guaranteeing all people (except
   the ruling oligarchs) get the same pay no matter what they do.
   - We could also limit people's choices of degrees to things wise members
   of a federal committee deem useful, and then have a wise
   bureaucratic system that informs people which job they will be doing
   post-graduation, no matter where in the country the job is or who they
   would be working for. And we could design such a system to maximize the
   income-based opportunities available to people on average.

Are any of those the type of federal regulation you are thinking of?  If
not, what government-run programs would you suggest we implement in order
to fix this very real predicament faced by a large number of 5th, 6th, and
7th generation Altoonans?

Out of all of those, I would be most in favor of stepping up the college
accreditation rigour. Un-accredited colleges could still exist, but would
have to make that reality clear in their promotional material, and they
wouldn't be eligible for federally-backed student loans.

Eric C


<echarles at american.edu>


On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 10:31 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> 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)
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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