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

[Eric Charles]

Indeed!

Modern liberals don't usually think *obvious *eugenics is ok... so I wasn't
going to saddle uǝlƃ with that one... but it certainly* is* another option.

<echarles at american.edu>


On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 11:48 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
wrote:

> Disincentivize reproduction, you didn’t mention that option.
>
> On Oct 11, 2020, at 8:37 AM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> 
> 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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