Scientific American — Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto: The Threatened Enlightenment

Relevant to the recent study showing that the majority of peer reviewed economics papers in prestige journals cannot be replicated.

Harry Kroto (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 1996): I'm gonna talk about what science is because it's a totally misunderstood sort of subject. There are aspects of science which are important and of course we know, the body of knowledge that you learn at school, all right?

The applications of those knowledge - technology, the only thing that journalists ever ask a general 99 percent of the time. Perhaps most important is the way that we discover new knowledge. But for me, the most important, by far, is that it's the only philosophical construct we have to determine truth with any degree of reliability.

Everyone should think about that. Because then it becomes a much bigger subject. In fact, for me, perhaps the most important subject there is. And the ethical purpose of education must involve teaching children how they can decide what they're being told is actually true. And that's not the case in general.

The teaching of a skeptical, evidence-based assessment of all claims - all claims - without exception is fundamentally an intellectual integrity issue. Without evidence, anything goes. Think about it. Common sense says the sun goes round the Earth. Who agrees with me?

Look at it. Starts over here, ends over there. It's uncommon sense that was needed to recognize that the Earth was turning on its axis. The uncommon sense of Copernicus, Galileo, Gendona, Bruna was burnt to death. We had to learn to be very careful and question everything.

Let me just check - how many of you know the evidence for Galileo to say that the Earth was going around the sun? Put your hand up. You've accepted it. Almost nobody's put their hand up. It's incredible.

Look at yourself. You've accepted this. You've accepted a lot of things without evidence. Find out what the evidence is for that. Find out what the evidence is for everything that you accept. 

And the pragmatic criterion clearly doesn't apply in the case of economics and policy.

Scientific American (July 25, 2013)
Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto: The Threatened Enlightenment
Steve Mirsky

William Manson — The Blank Slate: A Liberal-Totalitarian Dogma

By the end of the 20th century, influential anthropologists embraced the reigning “postmodernist” theories, and peremptorily rejected the very idea of a “human nature” as reactionary “essentialism.”

Yet, Homo sapiens, a species derived from its mammalian/primate roots, obviously requires certain socio-psychological conditions consonant with its nature. (Indeed, the eminent anthropologist Weston La Barre characterized the human species as “hyper-mammalian”: prolonged dependency, intensified mother-child bond, etc.). Such a universalist doctrine, based on the demonstrable facts about evolved human behaviors, could have scientifically bolstered the global human rights agenda—for example, as it focused on the real, bio-psychological needs of children everywhere.

Indeed, such findings of trans-cultural anthropology and comparative psychology (e.g., Bowlby’s UN research on maternal care, attachment, and mental health) are still critical to the recognition that human nature is de-limited, defined by specific psycho-social needs, and subject to suffering and pathology if these needs are denied or ignored. To recognize such fundamental, relatively intractable psycho-social needs is also to fundamentally challenge politically repressive institutionalized structures.

What he is calling "human nature" as a scientific concept is not "essentialism" in that it is naturalistic, based on biological similarities and their measurable effects that human share as a species beneath anthropological and sociological differences that result from setting and nurture.

The philosophical concept of human nature, on the other hand, was a secular and rationalistic substitute for the "soul" of theology. 

The naturalistic concept bears no resemblance to this, and to compare the two is to commit a category mistake.

And it is much more difficult to ground human rights on the naturalistic concept than the philosophical or theological ones. The former entails a utilitarian justification, whereas the latter is categorical. The words of the US Declaration of Independence,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,

are categorical. The beginning of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

is also categorical, its self-evidence being presumed.

These fundamental principles are to key to the historical debate, and this short post is worth reading for an elucidation of conflicting contemporary views of cultural anthropologists and biological/evolutionary (physical) anthropologists, with the implications for universalism.

Dissident Voice

The Blank Slate: A Liberal-Totalitarian Dogma
William Manson

Matt Bruenig — Tradition-Aggression-Desert Whack-A-Mole

Matt debates against the non-aggression principle and propertarianism.

Tradition-Aggression-Desert Whack-A-MoleMatt Bruenig

Tim Johnson — Scientific facts and democratic values

The logic of justification comes down to criteria. Are there absolute criteria? How would one know for sure that one knows that criteria are absolute?

Magic, Maths, and Money — The Relationship between Science and Finance
Scientific facts and democratic values
Tim Johnson | Lecturer in Financial Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh

Noah Smith — What does it even mean to "believe" something?

Peter Dorman in the comments:
Jeez, Noah, you need a stiff shot of (later) Wittgenstein. Now.

Exactly.

I did my dissertation on Wittgenstein's notes that were published posthumously as On Certainty. While the term "belief" has many meanings in ordinary language given different contexts, the type of belief under discussion is absolute unshakeable conviction in an assumption that is not grounded on publicly available criteria, without which there is no agreement outside that POV that the assertion is actually knowledge. See Plato on belief or opinion (doxa) v. knowledge (episteme).

Wittgenstein elucidates the logic of justification in ordinary language in contrast with formal languages where truth is deductive, being based on axioms or postulates. Wittgenstein's elucidations show how ordinary language description occurs through the lens of one's language, which is reflective of a worldview. I have been calling this a POV. Wittgenstein elucidates this using the Gestalt figure of a duck-rabbit, which can be seen as a rabbit from one POV and as a duck from another. We can conceive of two parties arguing over whether it is really a duck or a rabbit.

Certain propositions function as norms and criteria to delineate the boundary of one's worldview (POV). For example, functioning as normative they test admission and exclusion with respect to the POV.

While appearing to be descriptive propositions based on form and content, their function shows that they are not descriptive propositions in that they are not falsiable. This is, their position in the worldview privileges them from error. Their function is to assess other items in terms of inclusion or exclusion, truth and falsity.

Mises apriori method is a good example of this in economics and no evidence one adduces will falsify the priors for true believers since they are held to be "synthetic a priori" in Kant's sense. Same with religious dogmas and articles of faith. The invisible hand plays a similar normative role in conventional economics based on the neoliberal POV. But if one looks deeply enough into any POV, one will discover the boundary conditions.

We are all ideologues to one degree or another, because ordinary language use involves imposition of a POV in that there are no absolute criteria to ground general agreement. When there is general agreement, it is usually because we are talking to others who share that POV, which Wittgenstein calls "a form of life". But some POVs are more empirically based than other, hence, more "scientific." But that too involves the presumption that empirical criteria are paramount and that is in the final analysis a preference — pragmatically justified perhaps, but not known to be true in any absolute sense.

This is a quick summary and any explanation of Wittgenstein is bound to be wrong because he chose the method he did because the subject matter is ineffable. One has to see how the logic actually works since logic cannot describe itself without becoming involved in nonsense. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and, "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky" should be read by adults as nonsense in this sense. Lewis Carroll (Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a logician playing with logic.

Noahpinion
What does it even mean to "believe" something?
Noah Smith | Assistant Professor of Finance, Stony Brook University

Cathy O'Neil — Mathematicians know how to admit they’re wrong

Most people never even say something that’s provably wrong in the first place. And that makes it harder to prove they’re wrong, of course, but it doesn’t mean they’re always right. Since they’ve not let themselves get pinned down on a provably wrong thing, they tend to stick with their wrong ideas for way too long.

I’m a huge fan of skepticism, and I think it’s generally undervalued. People who run companies, or universities, or government agencies, typically say they like healthy skepticism but actually want people to drink the kool aid. People who are skeptical are misinterpreted as being negative, but there’s a huge difference: negative means you’re not trying to solve the problem, skeptical means you care enough about the problem to want to solve it for real.

Read it at Mathbabe
Mathematicians know how to admit they’re wrong
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe

(h/t paul in the comments)