David F. Ruccio — Socialism or truth

On truth and truthiness.

"We have the ocean in our bucket. We built a special bucket to contain it. So get lost."

Meanwhile, socialism rises.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Socialism or truth
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Elly Vintiadis — The Irrationality Within Us

So what does it mean to be rational? We usually distinguish between two kinds of rationality. Epistemic rationality, which is involved in acquiring true beliefs about the world and which sets the standard for what we ought to believe, and instrumental rationality which is involved in decision-making and behavior and is the standard for how we ought to act.

We are epistemically rational if we believe things for which we have good evidence and if we would change our beliefs in light of evidence against those beliefs. For example, it is epistemically rational for me to believe there is some wine in the fridge since it was left over from last night and I put it there myself. But that is not enough; I should also be willing to change my belief, for example if I am told that someone drank it in the meantime and maybe if I saw for myself that the wine in the fridge is no more. To still believe, for no other reason, that there is wine in the fridge despite this new evidence would be epistemically irrational.

We are instrumentally rational when we act in ways that are appropriate for achieving our goals – for instance when we go on a diet when we want to lose weight, or we study hard to do well in an exam.

In contrast, one is irrational when one’s beliefs or actions are not in accord with the requirements of rationality. For instance, if one wants to achieve a certain goal but acts in ways that do not lead to that goal; when one forms beliefs for which there is no evidence, or that fly in the face of available evidence; when one reasons faultily and so on. And, because we value rationality and hold it up as a standard we should aspire to, irrationality is understood to be a bad thing.

Recently, philosopher and head of the PERFECT project Lisa Bortolotti has offered evidence that though we tend to rationalize our decisions after we have made them, we do not make choices primarily by rational deliberation. Instead, most of our decision-making involves emotions and intuition and, often, these processes lead to better results than those achieved by reasoning through our choices.

Useful article. The above excerpt is the takeaway.

BTW, there are five criteria of truth. 1) The first is correspondence or conformity with facts and evidence. This is also known as epistemological or semantic truth. 2) The second is coherence or consistency, which is logical validity and mathematical consistency. This is also known as syntactical truth. 3) The third criterion is pragmatic or instrumental. It is suitability to an objective. It is also known as practical truth or practical wisdom. 4) The fourth criterion is simplicity or elegance. It is the most economical expression. 5) The fifth criterion is the coincidence of the previous four. It is called completeness or comprehensiveness.

"Rationality" is considered the ability to apply all five consistently without the intrusion of subjectivity, that is, emotion, preference, and cognitive-affective bias. Current research suggests that rationality in this sense is an unrealizable ideal owing to human brain functioning as revealed by cognitive science. The rational and non-rational are entangled in brain functioning to the degree that they cannot be completely unentangled. Moreover, the entanglement is subliminal and humans are not even aware of its operation. "You" as the conscious and intentional mind are the slave of your brain.

Scientific American
The Irrationality Within Us
Elly Vintiadis, philosophy instructor at the American College of Greece
ht Mark Thoma at Economist's View

David Edwards — Fake News About 'Fake News' - The Media Performance Pyramid

To reiterate, 'fake news' is said to refer to 'websites [that] publish hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation to drive web traffic'. A simple, table-top experiment can help us understand why this definition can be generalised to all corporate media, not just social media.

Place a square wooden framework on a flat surface and pour into it a stream of ball bearings, marbles, or other round objects. Some of the balls may bounce out, but many will form a layer within the wooden framework; others will then find a place atop this first layer. In this way, the flow of ball bearings steadily builds new layers that inevitably produce a pyramid-style shape.

This experiment is used to demonstrate how near-perfect crystalline structures such as snowflakes arise in nature without conscious design. We will use it here as a way of understanding Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's 'propaganda model' of 'mainstream' performance.

Imagine now that the four sides of the wooden framework are labelled to indicate the framing conditions shaping the corporate media:

1. Corporate nature, elite/parent company ownership and profit-maximising orientation
2. Dependence on allied corporate advertisers for 50% or more of revenues
3. Dependence on cheap, subsidised news supplied by state-corporate allies
4. Political, economic, legal carrots and sticks rewarding corporate media conformity and punishing dissent

When facts, ideas, journalists and managers are poured into this framework, the result is a highly filtered, power-friendly 'pyramid' of media performance. Every aspect of corporate media output is shaped by these framing conditions.…

Put simply, it is not reasonable to expect corporate media to report honestly on a world dominated by corporations. With perfect irony, the latest focus on 'fake news' is itself fake news because the corporate media never have discussed and never will discuss the framing conditions that make it a leading purveyor of 'hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation'.…

Media Lens — Editorial

Fake News About 'Fake News' - The Media Performance Pyramid

David Edwards | Editor
 ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Lord Keynes — The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism

It is high time that the Left dispensed with and put an end to the fashionable nonsense that is Postmodernism (or “Poststructuralism” as the French intellectual movement which gave rise to it was originally called).

I can, incidentally, speak on this subject from personal experience. When I was an undergraduate I learnt a lot of this Postmodernist nonsense myself, and encountered it frequently at university, but I had the great benefit of learning a considerable amount of analytic philosophy (an acid under which Postmodernism dissolves) and listening to, and reading, no-nonsense Leftists who always understood it for the idiocy that it was and still is.

This subject is relevant to economics, because there are some actual Post Keynesians who seem to think that they can adopt a serious “Postmodernist” methodology and epistemology as a foundation of Post Keynesian economics. This, in my view, is a terrible delusion.…

The logical issue involved is criteria, a subject which underlies both meaning and truth as the necessary grounds for communication.

Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism
Lord Keynes

See also

Steve Keen on Yanis Varoufakis

When YOU See Your Own Slow-Motion Train Wreck Proceeding ... What Do YOU Do?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

The Truth About the Wars 

"AS a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, I lost 80 soldiers. Despite their sacrifices, and those of thousands more, all we have to show for it are two failed wars. This fact eats at me every day, and Veterans Day is tougher than most."

The truth about the wars is just one consequence of the truth about our national policy apparatus and current politics.

What's the way forward?

ps: just got this feedback from a guy in Texas, disgusted with both parties, his gov (Rick Perry) & Obama:

"The Obama admin is a train wreck – Washington is being run by a bunch of lying Chicago gangsters who honed their skills at the Richard M or Richard J Daly School of Government – which is governance by edict or something akin to way things run in Tehran, Caracas, Moscow, or Pyongyang – Chicago knows nothing about Jeffersonian or Madison Democracy."

Well said!!!

And what does that say about our electorate? A slow-motion train wreck?

When YOU see your own slow-motion train wreck proceeding ... what do YOU do?

We're all in this together. Blame isn't good enough. We need to coordinate some solutions on a scale bigger than ever before seen.  It's up to us.

David Glasner — Two Cheers (Well, Maybe Only One and a Half) for Falsificationism

Philosophy of science. Mostly on Popper v. Logical Positivism. Good comments, too.

Uneasy Money
Two Cheers (Well, Maybe Only One and a Half) for Falsificationism
David Glasner

A Reckless Disregard for Truth and Sanity - Is That Covered In ANY Economics Textbook?

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Guess it happens in EVERY aspect of policy?

i.e., ideological momentum, instead of a simple, open search for truth (as the pathway to maximal options; aka, more degrees of freedom).

Reckless Disregard for Truth and Sanity In Foreign Policy (this time re Syria)

Chuck Spinney - Pentagon Reformer par excellance

Chuck Spinney's Blog

Guess that explains the anomaly of a faux Nobel Prize in Non-Science

IMF / Europe Brinkmanship Over Failing Greek Experiment

Is this going south? Was the Nobel Peace Prize an admission of the end?  Seems unbelievable that "working on it" until 2020 is actually a serious strategy, given the declining GDPs, emigration, bankruptcies, unemployment and suicides that have marked the early work!  There's an apropos maxim in political-economics research, "Do your experiments on the institutions, NOT the electorate."

Will there be political upheaval in multiple countries? Or just turnover of leaders in existing parties?

So why didn't Germany allow Greece to escape, before so many were bankrupted, impoverished & even committed suicide?

Rodger Mitchell (RMM) makes a lot of sense in a segment from his latest article.

And now, for (at last) THE TRUTH:

Spiegel online: Top German Economists Say Greece Is Lost

Chancellor Angela Merkel had been hoping that her trip to Athens earlier this week would help demonstrate Germany's solidarity with Greece as it struggles to overcome its debt crisis. Just two days later, however, leading economic institutes in Germany have darkened the mood considerably. The institutes presented their autumn economic forecast on Thursday, and cast doubt on whether Greece would be able to remain part of the euro.

"We believe that Greece cannot be saved," said Joachim Scheide from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, one of several top economic institutes tasked by the German government with examining the state of the country's economy twice a year.

Oliver Holtemöller, of the Halle Institute for Economic Research, was also pessimistic at the Thursday press conference called to present the evaluation. He said it is unlikely that Greece will ever be able to free itself from its debt burden -- and called for a new debt haircut for the country.

RMM: O.K., that almost was the truth. The real truth would have been:
"Let's face it. Giving up our Monetary Sovereignty was giving up our freedom. It's dooming us to endless unpayable debt and economic misery for our citizens (except for the richest ones, of course).

"The euro was our ill-considered attempt at unity, which has resulted in our being united -- in poverty.

"If Greece leaves the euro, and readopts its own sovereign currency, it will be able to pay all its debts, past, present and future, while investing money to grow its economy.

"Within a couple years, Greece can be (if it handles its Monetary Sovereignty correctly) one of the wealthiest nations on the continent, while the rest of us keep laboring under the yoke of monetary non-sovereignty."

Now that would be the real truth, but don't hold your breath waiting for the EU to admit it.

Eric W. Dolan — Cognitive researchers find truth in Colbert’s ‘truthiness’

Scientists in New Zealand and Canada have found Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness” isn’t just a late-night ruse to get laughs; the concept can also help explain how the human brain evaluates claims 

“We wanted to examine how the kinds of photos people see every day — the ones that decorate newspaper or TV headlines, for example — might produce ‘truthiness,’” the lead researcher, Eryn J. Newman of Victoria University of Wellington, explained. “We were really surprised by what we found.”

Colbert has explained that truthiness is “truth that comes from the gut, not books.” In their study, published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, the researchers used the term “truthiness effect” to refer to a category of phenomenon where things that don’t provide proof of a claim nevertheless caused people to shift toward believing that claim.

Raw Story
Cognitive researchers find truth in Colbert’s ‘truthiness’
Eric W. Dolan

Eye opening glimpse of the media and why we never get the truth

Cenk Uygur out at MSNBC and his explanation of why it happened is quite eye opening. Possibly explains why my attempts to get on board at MSNBC went nowhere. They surely knew me and my views and style. Watch video and you'll see what I mean.