Episode 132: Roughly Testable Theories (and Ancaps)
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Blue: Hello out there. This week on the Theory of Anything podcast, Bruce looks at how much critical rationalists do and do not subject their proposed best theories to critical testing. Bruce seems to be truly wrestling with how we apply the tools and ideas of critical rationalism, fallibilism, argument or debate, the demarcation criteria, falsification, and so on to our real world ideas about economics, politics, and other issues. I know I got a lot out of listening to Bruce here and I hope someone else out there does too.
[00:00:47] Red: Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. Hey Peter.
[00:00:50] Blue: Hello Bruce. How you doing?
[00:00:52] Red: Good. How was Christmas for you?
[00:00:54] Blue: Oh it was just one nice thing after another more or less with my family and we had some joyous times together celebrating this holiday and I hope we’ll have some more joyous times over this new year and how about you? How was it for you?
[00:01:15] Red: It was great. It was very fun. My son actually gave me a Theory of Anything podcast plaque to put up on the wall where I’m in the quote recording studio which would be my den. Wow.
[00:01:27] Blue: Yay. Okay.
[00:01:30] Red: So I’ll have to take pictures and show that or something because it was very cute that he made that for me. That is nice.
[00:01:37] Blue: That’s really nice. Well he knows how hard you work at this and yeah
[00:01:41] Red: I’m sure. All right. Let’s just a quick catch up. Unfortunately some of these ideas are ones that we’ve been doing over multiple podcasts and so I have to kind of do a recap like last time on the Theory of Anything podcast. So in previous podcasts the last couple or maybe last four even we talked about Popper’s critique of concepts and how he found theories to be a hundred times more valuable than concepts. Now I did critique Popper’s critique and I found room for some disagreement that concepts are actually quite a bit more valuable than Popper thought but only if you consider the conjecture side of his epistemology. I also argued that there is no clear cut demarcation between concepts and theories and that a concept is sometimes treated as a theory and a theory is sometimes treated as a concept. However I agreed with Popper.
[00:02:35] Blue: Honestly I don’t even know what a concept in a theory is anymore Bruce. You’ve gotten that so confused me so much that I just need to explain it to me again. I think most people would say they’re the same thing. Okay.
[00:02:50] Red: But Popper clearly had in mind that a theory was falsifiable right. Okay. He talks about how theories can be falsified they make certions about reality whereas concepts really don’t. That’s right. Okay now I agreed with Popper that a concept like wave we’ve been talking about the concept of a wave using Hofstetter’s example from Crispus but I agree with Popper that it’s not falsifiable that the concept of wave in historically instead of being falsified instead of taking the idea that a sound is a wave like water is a wave which is which is a strictly false statement right that instead of of saying oh that’s false we simply extended the concept of wave and we made it more abstract and more useful by doing that and eventually developed it into a theory of waves right that was eventually falsifiable. But the whole concept of a wave clearly wasn’t falsifiable right that we simply extended it and said well okay maybe sound isn’t exactly a wave like water is a wave but it’s sort of like that and instead we’re going to change the concept of wave so that it encompasses both.
[00:04:05] Blue: Great so just wait just so I’m clear so are you saying when people first came up with this idea that a wave is something in nature it was not falsifiable and then people made it falsifiable over time yeah is that what I’m understanding?
[00:04:20] Red: Well so okay it’s not even quite that like you could take the statement sound is a wave like water is a wave and you could say I’m going to treat this remember falsifiability is a choice it’s a choice you make I keep saying this and I really cannot overemphasize this you choose to make your theories falsifiable or not you do okay so that statement you could say look to count as being true or false every ounce of this thing we’re now calling a sound wave must be exactly like this thing that we were previously calling a water wave and if they differ in any way then we’re going to consider it false if you do that then it’s a false statement for sure because sound waves are compression waves and water waves are transverse waves or rather they’re hybrid transverse
[00:05:16] Red: longitudinal waves so and I went through this in the previous podcast we want the full details on this so it is a strictly false statement if you choose the lens of falsifiability okay but that isn’t what people do in real life what they actually do is they say well I think it’s kind of like a wave it’s not exactly like a water wave it’s it’s sort of like a water wave and then they extend the concept of wave through analogy and as long as it’s kind of close enough that it teaches us something about the world then we accept that the word wave now includes both sound waves and water waves okay and and the word wave has changed its meaning it has been extended to now include both then Hofstadter shows that once that happened once it kept happening and they kept coming up with new things that say well lights a wave well lights not a wave in the same sense of sound or water but it is it doesn’t even have a medium like those right and so eventually some wave like properties that’s
[00:06:20] Red: right right okay so it’s a strictly false statement but we we don’t falsify it instead we just expand the concept of wave and because the whole point of a concept is to keep expanding it and extending it via analogy like this of course it’s not going to be falsifiable exactly like popper claimed okay popper claimed they weren’t falsifiable and he’s right about that what popper seems to have missed is how valuable that is how valuable it is that concepts aren’t falsifiable and that instead you extend them through analogy okay so concepts then are almost by definition have this amazing level of flexibility that makes them unfalsifiable but this unfalsifiable flexibility is exactly what makes them so valuable to the conjecture process and this is why I I agree with popper that theories which are falsifiable by definition are a hundred times more valuable than concepts but only if we’re looking at the critical side of his epistemology not the conjecture side okay then we talked about how the critrack theory of what knowledge is and how critrack’s treat knowledge is less like a theory and more like a concept that is they determine what does or doesn’t count as knowledge not based on the properties of knowledge that come from the constructive theory of knowledge which if taken seriously would expose far more than two sources of knowledge but instead they base it on two canonical examples biological evolution and human ideas and then they adjust their understanding of the properties of knowledge on the fly based on those two canonical examples this is why the two sources hypothesis can never be falsified is because it’s not a theory at all it’s a concept and they’re they’re inverting the process instead of extending knowledge from those two canonical examples they simply always adjust back to the two canonical examples so there’s only two canonical examples and so I’ve argued that they’re not treating it like a theory at all they’re actually treating it like a concept
[00:08:28] Blue: now
[00:08:29] Red: let’s consider my favorite punching bag anarcho capitalism now I love anarcho capitalism I love libertarianism in general I’m a small um small government conservative I think the government’s way too big I think we way over tax you know I think the capitalistic system should be taking all sorts of things that currently the government’s doing and that the fact that we’re not doing that is causing systemic problems that is massively causing problems that we’re starting to see okay
[00:09:00] Blue: you know you know I really agree with how you you look at that I feel very aligned to you in that way people are so into putting themselves in categories and even beyond that putting them other people in categories it really is a much more a much better mindset probably more in line with critical rationalism too to think about things you when when you think about these ideologies to think about reasons that you agree with them right rather than disagree with them or at least do try to do that as much as as the the former I mean when you know when I think of leftism or liberalism or conservatism or libertarianism you know there’s aspects of all of these worldviews that I like and I think most people like right but they they’re just so focused on thinking about these things in terms of like you know demonizing other tribes or something and I really think it’s just a really negative way to view just this world of ideas yeah
[00:10:18] Red: yeah you know let me even go further on that like I just I used to see the left as an enemy and don’t get me wrong like I since I since most of my audience there’s probably very few leftists in the audience and they’re probably mostly libertarians or maybe a few conservatives I don’t know as
[00:10:36] Blue: small as our audience is I think we have quite a mix well we might
[00:10:39] Red: we might I from the ones I’ve talked to most of them are very libertarian leaning okay so um and I fully accept that the left has done some incredibly dangerous things okay let’s let’s for the sake of argument let’s call that wokeism as a general label that even the left flees at this point right
[00:10:59] Blue: yeah
[00:11:00] Red: and there’s just no doubt about that right I just can’t see them as the enemy like like once I fully understood the popper -preparian view of of politics and government good government there’s just no doubt that the left has been this amazing resource for finding problems that we then fix right
[00:11:20] Blue: yeah no
[00:11:22] Red: yeah I mean yes they put forward solutions that are awful but that’s exactly what I would expect like like it’s finding a problem is so much easier than finding a solution I can’t see the left as a as an enemy because they’re good at finding problems and yes they put forward really stinky solutions like awful solutions solutions that if if we implemented may even destroy the country right like I’ll like I’ll accept all of that is true but that’s exactly what I would expect because it’s so much easier to find a problem than to find a solution to a problem and so if they’re if they are our problem finders or at least for certain class of problems there are problem finders then when they find a problem of course they’re naturally going to say and here’s a solution and they’re going to believe it right and odds are it will be a really awful solution just because it’s so hard to come up with good solutions to problems right yeah well let me even go further and I’m going to borrow this from David Deutsch he you know when we’ve been talking about the left he he says that you know there there’s plenty of causes that the left have has championed throughout history that have been very positive for example in one generation
[00:12:42] Blue: we’ve gone from maybe two generations a time when it was very normal for children to be hit at school I mean it can even imagine it’s even like hard to get your mind around that now the teacher brings up this little child to the front of the school and inflicts physical pain on them right like if you did that practically anywhere I mean maybe there’s a couple of places left and I’m talking about America at least where you could still do that but I don’t think very many far more common is that your name is going to be put in the newspaper if not if you’re not going to be put in jail and this this change didn’t happen because in how children are treated that are didn’t happen because of conservatives it didn’t happen because of libertarians not even very many
[00:13:44] Red: libertarians which also didn’t probably exist back then
[00:13:48] Blue: it came because it happened because of leftists right making making an argument you know making changing laws and changing things there’s probably hundreds of there’s probably so many examples of that you know what
[00:14:04] Red: almost everything you can think of as moral progress came from the left and
[00:14:10] Blue: that’s
[00:14:10] Red: just the truth right yeah
[00:14:12] Blue: I mean the left you know I I do like separating liberalism from leftism to collectivism versus sort of individualism so there are but to me that just also gets and gets points to how complicated these yeah these these ideologies are and how wrong it is to to put people in these labels to like think about things more on terms of principles rather than then okay
[00:14:40] Red: you are doing a great job of explaining the difference between the paparian concept of a concept versus a theory okay poppers know poppers main point is that we don’t want to look at the general concept when we’re criticizing anyhow we don’t want to look at the general concept we want to know what your theory says about reality whether it’s assertions about reality that we can go test we can see if they’re right or not and we can error correct because what we really care about is getting at the truth okay so a general concept of the left it could I’m gonna argue it has a great many uses okay so I’m not saying it’s bad to generalize to the left or something like that or progressives or conservatives and and I self label all the time if nothing else labels are great for trying to get someone to get me into as quickly as possible into a the general ballpark of who I am right but um I have to find out these days I have to say Reagan conservative because like conservative means like trumpist and I’m like a never -trumper
[00:15:43] Blue: yeah so
[00:15:44] Red: like you maybe the labels shift over time right I think labels are super helpful and I hate it when people say we shouldn’t use labels I’m like okay just get real like okay let’s really let’s just get real
[00:15:56] Blue: okay um
[00:15:59] Red: but when it comes right down to it what I really care about isn’t are you from the left or the right or are you a libertarian or whatever what I really care about is what truth assertions are you making and can we test them okay
[00:16:14] Blue: now
[00:16:15] Red: this is actually why I’ve made anarcho capitalism in particular not so much libertarianism but anarcho capitalism which is one type of libertarianism
[00:16:25] Blue: a
[00:16:26] Red: kind of a punching bag is because they are making a truth assertion particularly the crit rat version of it that that I understand to be false okay so I’m going after not the whole category but the truth assertions that I feel are false secondly I believe very strongly that I shouldn’t accept arguments even if even if the argument is in my favor if the argument’s a false argument I shouldn’t accept it we talked about this in like just the last podcast or something right that we should reject bad explanations even when we agree with what they’re arguing okay and I do feel like this is a significant problem with with anarcho capitalism and I’m going to explain why in this in this podcast today but I want to make it clear that the fact that I disagree with anarcho capitalism doesn’t really reduce my admiration for the overall libertarian movement or even the anarcho capitalist movement okay it just it doesn’t work that way for me right like it may be that they’ve got some stuff wrong but they’re like so highly aligned with my own viewpoint like I would be an idiot to not see them as anything but you know strong maybe the strongest of allies right and yet there’s a part of me that would love to see them error correct some of their epistemological mistakes if if nothing else I think it would make the movement more viable right it would remove some of the errors and it would they wouldn’t come across so strange to kind of a normal person well
[00:17:59] Blue: I consider myself a futurist anarcho capitalist in the sense that a hundred or a thousand years from now sure of course we’re moving towards more freedom I mean if progress is real that’s gotta be the direction that we take more freedom less tyranny but like there’s something about it that’s so utopian yeah when they when they get into thinking that we can just you know a small number of nerds are going to like change all of the society overnight it’s right by the way did
[00:18:39] Red: you notice that Logan Chipkin who does identify as an anarcho capitalist that he actually made fun of people who thought that so I thought that was good he was
[00:18:48] Blue: he was a little bit yeah well I I mean my label for him probably he seemed to accept that when I called him an anarcho reaganite so you know I thought that was pretty pretty cool okay
[00:19:00] Red: let’s talk about this though does the crit rat community treat their anarcho capitalism as a falsifiable theory or do they treat it as an unfalsifiable and highly flexible and extensible concept I’m gonna argue that an archo capitalism really is a concept based around feelings around a certain canonical example in this case a certain desired outcome rather than a thoughtful falsifiable theory okay which is one of the reasons why I’ve picked on it okay so now here I I expect immediate pushback from crit rat anarcho capitalist they’re going to argue to me that an archo capitalism is a moral theory and moral theories are philosophical and thus not testable now I argue against this position in general in episode 115 where I ask is falsification falsifiable but for now let’s ignore my argument there instead let me take the crit rat concern here quite seriously and show that it is a concern that has some merit moreover I’m going to show that their concern here has enough merit to show that there is a problem with poppers demarcation criteria that needs to get fixed and we will see how Hayek attempted to fix it to consider why consider a real life discussion that I had with an ancap crit rat I kind of very died in the wall ancap crit rat they come in different levels of devotion this one’s I would dare say on the zealot side he wrote to me and he asked do you believe economics is a scientific theory or a metaphysical theory and I’d like to get your opinion on this so I spent a couple of hours writing up what I thought was a thoughtful response and he ignored everything I said entirely and then went on to explain his own opinion now at this point I realized he wasn’t really interested in my opinion on the subject he was this was really just an opening so that he could explain to me how mesian economics or praxeology the basis for an anarcho -capitalism sometimes wrongly called the austrian school of economics but they’re really not the same thing was a metaphysical theory and thus didn’t need to be tested and this was his stance recall the crit rats today tend to utilize what I’ve called the crit rat loophole where surprise it turns out all their pet theories just happen to all be philosophical or metaphysical theories so they can’t be tested so instead so goes the argument we’ll just have to debate those theories via criticism and then we’ll have to decide for ourselves if the theory is true or not based on our subjective feelings of which criticisms quote landed the best for us of course this ancap crit rat was trying to argue that to me and I should have known that he was trying to argue to me that I was wrong to claim an anarcho -capitalism is a bad explanation in his mind it wasn’t a bad quote unquote bad explanation it was a good quote metaphysical explanation that just happened to be untestable because it happened to be a moral or metaphysical theory so he personally in his mind had rigors rigorously criticized it and criticized its competitors which in his mind meant other schools of economics outside the Austrian one and he found that praxeology as an economic theory survived his criticism the best compared to all the competing economic theories that he had criticized and he found praxeology to be quote the best theory to have survived his rigorous criticism process quote unquote so he therefore quote knew that assuming we keep making progress of course that anarcho -capitalism was an inevitable consequence of quote the best theory of economics
[00:22:43] Blue: and can I can I throw in one thing yes you’ve mentioned just so to clarify this for our listeners you’ve mentioned hayek and mesis and then you’ve said that it’s a the myth I guess to put all these theories into one label meaning Austrian economics you know that’s what I’m getting from you I have I actually would say it’s
[00:23:07] Red: the opposite that I think hayek and mesis are both from the school of Austrian economics but I think they had drastically different economic theories
[00:23:16] Blue: okay I just want to clarify that I mean hayek was more of I’m more I don’t mean to come across like an expert on these guys because I’m not but hayek was much more of a classical liberal who thought that markets need the state yes whereas I at least how I’m thinking of them mesis is more like Rothbard and no sec yeah
[00:23:42] Red: Rothbard being a more extreme version of me they think of
[00:23:45] Blue: they think of markets is something that does not need the state or can exist without the state right so I mean right or wrong it’s a more extreme position than what hayek is saying right that’s
[00:23:57] Red: right that’s right even though they’re all from the Austrian school of economics one of the big things here is that hayek was the only paparian in the Austrian school of economics mesis was an inductivist by his own admission and he believed in foundationalism you you lay out praxeology these foundational ideas and you start with these and and they’re just obviously true they can’t be criticized they’re not open to criticism they’re just obviously true and then we use those to build out our theory of economics from that and because it was on a secure foundation it can’t possibly be wrong there’s no reason to test it because it’s just obviously true and it’s just a geometric geometric proof okay every ounce of what I just said if you’re a critical rationalist should have just made you turn over in your grave even if you’re not dead right because because it is so far at odds in every conceivable way with critical rationalism praxeology is like the opposite of critical rationalism okay now hayek was the opposite of that he
[00:24:56] Blue: and he was friends with popper right i mean they didn’t necessarily align on everything but they had sympathies for each other that’s right
[00:25:03] Red: that’s right and and he was the student of mesis so he was familiar with with both school both schools of thought and hayek came up from the standpoint of look this whole Austrian school of economics thing it’s got some merit but like it’s built on an entirely non -scientific foundation and it’s trying to be something that it’s never going to successfully be so he tried to reform it to a paparian economic school of thought right and that’s what we’re going to actually talk about today and not in depth like instead we’re only going to talk about the demarcation criteria and falsificationism okay now because the mesian of mesian economics or praxeology was supposedly a best theory according to this critrad i’m talking to it was not in his opinion a mere quote prophecy that someday assuming we keep making progress we’d abolish governments in favor of pure capitalism it was a prediction of a best theory if you’re familiar with popper you’ve got this idea of prediction versus prophecy predictions are okay prophecies aren’t so this is his explanation so to me this idea that you can project forward and say someday we’re going to do away with governments and we’re going to have just all capitalism like to me that’s an outright example of a prophecy the bad kind of thing from the paparian tradition to him it was a prediction because it came from a best theory well
[00:26:25] Blue: i have to say i i kind of did some real -time fact checking of what you just said and i asked if hyac ever criticized mesis and it basically confirms what you’ve just said yes that hyac was a believer in fallibilism mesis rationalism um the uh i mean it goes on and on but he uh basically mesis believed in certainty through logic in hyac believed in humility through ignorance which i assume he got from pop art or something that’s right
[00:27:01] Red: that’s right yeah
[00:27:02] Blue: no that’s an interesting distinction
[00:27:04] Red: now of course i feel that this is a pretty unsatisfying argument for a variety of reasons that this crit rat friend was making but we’re not here to criticize mesin economics or praxeology today not in depth anyhow i’ll do that in some future broadcast maybe okay today we’re here to talk about what is the epistemological mistake that this crit rat is making that allowed him to draw such a conclusion in the first place while thinking he is quote doing critical rationalism and as it turns out he does sort of have a fair point and i don’t want to downplay that right that he’s kind of making a fair point although his solution’s the wrong solution what i want to show is that he uh i want to show that what his fair point was though it’s not about mesin economics okay to see why he was making at least a fair point try yourself to answer his question is economics science or metaphysics in fact stop the show right now don’t listen any further try to work that out in your head before we continue the discussion and then turn the podcast back on and wait did
[00:28:08] Blue: you just say i think you misstated that what did you say again is
[00:28:12] Red: economic science or or metaphysics or is it philosophical
[00:28:15] Blue: it sounded like you just said or physics i was like okay yeah actually
[00:28:19] Red: one of the claims of the and our crit rat on oracle capitalist is that economics is physics so but that’s not what we’re actually asking today and of course
[00:28:28] Blue: that’s a silly silly statement science or metaphysics yes
[00:28:31] Red: or philosophy yeah so remember there’s a demarcation for popper you’re either science or your metaphysics okay you’re on one of those two sides of the line of the demarcation line which side is economics on that’s the question my friend is asking me and it’s a fair question and i want to emphasize it’s not an easy question to answer okay try to find an answer to that question in popper and you’ll struggle to find a concrete answer one one thing that we all know however is that economics is not easy to test in fact hayek the one popperian member of the austrian school of economics which was started by mesis loved popper’s epistemology and agreed with popper strongly and did his best to remake the austrian economics in school into something less dogmatic and more scientific and what hayek found was it was difficult to do how do you apply falsification the logic of scientific discovery to economics
[00:29:36] Red: hayek explains the issue by first acknowledging that he believes popper is correct that science is about falsification here’s an actual quote from hayek in free market monetary system and the pretense of knowledge quote we cannot be we cannot be grateful enough to such modern philosophers as of science as sir carl popper for giving us a test by which we can distinguish between what we may accept as scientific and whatnot a test which i’m sure some doctrines now widely accepted as science would not pass there are some special problems however in connection with those essentially complex phenomena of which social structures are so important an instance which make me wish to restate in in conclusion in more general terms the reasons why these fields not only are not only are there only absolute obstacles to the prediction of specific events um why in these fields not only are there not only absolute obstacles to the prediction of specific events but why to act as if we possess scientific knowledge enabling us to transcend that these problems them may itself become a serious obstacle to the advance of human intellect okay so here we have hayek saying economics poses a special problem for falsification but that he accepts that falsification is the correct dividing line between science and metaphysical theories hayek then explains his concern with popper’s demarcation criteria when applied to economics it’s just too dang complex to ever hope to come up with simple falsifiable tests quote this corresponds to which we are increasingly confined as we penetrate from the realms in which relatively simple laws prevail into the range of phenomena where where where organized complexity rules the issue is that if you have a theory of say supply and demand there are undoubtedly a thousand other forces that might impact cost so there’s no easy way to test the theory via falsification if you don’t get the result you expected it might be because there was some other unknown force that caused the discrepancy from the theory thus you could not strictly speaking falsify economic theories much less policies by testing specific predicted events that’s what pop that’s what hayek means by from the previous quote that i just read that you cannot he says the prediction of specific events that’s what he’s talking about it’s impossible to predict specific events in economics if hayek is right that you can’t falsify economics does that not then mean not make economics a metaphysical or philosophical theory exactly like my critrat and cap friend was arguing now if you strictly accept popper’s demarcation criteria then honestly i i have to admit that it seems like my and cap critrat friend must be correct if there’s literally only two options a theory that can be falsified by experiment or a philosophical theory and if you can’t falsify economics by experiment then it really does seem like logically speaking all you have left is to declare economics a philosophical theory and that was exactly what my and cap critrat mesian praxeology friend was trying to do okay now critrat and caps like the guy writing to me they love this line of logic mesis wanted his theory to be purely philosophical and untested an untestable theory and critrat and caps preferred to see their anarcho capitalism more as an untestable moral theory so this lines up very well in their view since critrat and caps seem moral theories as untestable philosophical theories by definition they’re pretty happy with this result they just wanted to clear praxeology and anarcho capitalism to be philosophical and avoid having to subject it to any sort of testing that might possibly falsify it
[00:33:37] Red: but this answer despite my and cap’s friend’s desire to clear economics metaphysical it seems very problematic to me and let me
[00:33:46] Red: explain why think about say solipsism now there we have a true metaphysical theory and a totally untestable theory economics seems nothing like solipsism to me for one thing you can test economics in a limited way this is part of the answer i wrote to my friend that he ignored okay first you can set up contained experiments with economics it isn’t very hard to set up an experiment in a lab to test supply and demand and you’ll find that it really works as per theory but that’s not a convincing argument uh convincing answer either for what we really want is economic policy that works in real life not in a lab setting but don’t we in some limited sense test economic theories all the time think about how we often try various economic policies and then we watch and see what happens like in real life we implement a policy economic policy and then we see what the impact is okay if it solves the problem we desire without desire dire unintended side effects there’s always some unintended side effects then we consider the economic policy a success and we may try it again if we find it either doesn’t work as intended or it does but with dire unintended consequences we abandon that economic policy and we don’t try it again we do this even though there is often a case to be made that there was some unrelated reason that caused the disaster so this is hardly the testability of physics but it’s much more testable than solipsism isn’t it i once pointed this out to sam kipers he’s an crit rat and cap um obviously and that my main objection to his anarcho capitalism was that it was untestable um compared to say a real governmental system now he rebuked me as misrepresenting the concept of testability governments and economics were not testable so he argued in a scientific like a scientific theory and he argued there was a danger in pretending that they were the same it was in his mind a moral theory and moral theories are not testable so he claimed now if i had by the by the word testable meant a scientific experiment then actually i’d agree with him i i am in that case misrepresenting governments they are clearly not scientifically uh testable by scientific experiment okay
[00:36:14] Blue: yeah i mean there’s a real grain of truth in what he’s saying too i don’t know i think both perspectives to kind of
[00:36:20] Red: have some truth here right
[00:36:22] Blue: yeah i can’t like completely discount both perspectives i don’t know i don’t know what’s right but maybe i can maybe you can tell me well see i didn’t
[00:36:31] Red: when i was saying it wasn’t testable i didn’t i wasn’t trying to use the word testable in its strict original paparian sense
[00:36:38] Blue: you don’t just look up the meta studies and you can tell what the best government is right
[00:36:44] Red: that’s
[00:36:44] Blue: not what you’re saying i was
[00:36:46] Red: actually grasping for a term and testable was the word that came to mind for an idea somewhat different than that let’s instead call it this idea that i’m grasping at that i that i maybe mistakenly even called testable maybe let’s give sam credit maybe i shouldn’t have called it testable within a critical rational circles because the word testable has been taken to mean scientifically testable okay and instead i’m gonna coin a new term roughly testable theories it’s the idea that you can test a theory by say trying it out and seeing what happens but you can’t control enough variables to be sure you’ve fully eliminated all alternative competing theories with the test but you can try to work out high level patterns though never specific exit events i suggest that we call this roughly testable theories but maybe we should instead call it implementable theories i’m gonna explain why i feel those two are the same in just a second here what i mean here is is that an economic theory can either be implementable it’s precise enough that we can actually try it out and see how it goes or an economic theory might be more like praxeology or solipsism where there is no way to try it out at all and all we can really do is argue philosophically about it okay because it doesn’t have the nature of being something that could be implemented today in real life and we could try it okay do you understand what i’m trying to say here i
[00:38:13] Blue: think so yeah no it’s an interesting distinction i
[00:38:16] Red: feel like this idea of roughly testable theories is in some sense some sense naturally flows from poppers epistemology we prefer more testable theories over less testable theories that is poppers epistemology in a economics that you learn in an MBA economics class today is a collection of the best corroborated theories we currently know about and are all implementable whereas anarcho -capitalism and praxeology is by its own admission wholly untestable and currently we have no idea how to even attempt to implement it thus from a paparian standpoint we would prefer the better tested theories rather than the utopian and or anarcho -capitalist theories but if you can admit that this is the case doesn’t that mean that the demarcation criteria isn’t quite right we just invented a kind of third in between category so if this argument is correct then my quit rat friend was correct though not in the way he hoped for he wanted there to be a clear cut demarcation between testable scientific theories and philosophical theories and he wanted his anarcho -capitalism to fall squarely into the philosophical camp so that he didn’t have to work out how to test it or really even how to subject it to any sort of objective criticism that might prove it incorrect that’s that way it it was really just up to him to criticize it quote in his own mind and decide for himself which theory seemed quote best for him to him okay what i’m suggesting is an alternative as an alternative is that instead of insisting on holding the demarcate demarcation criteria to strict scientific theories easily testable by falsification by a single experiment versus philosophical theories that we instead admit that the demarcation criteria is simply not that airtight instead we prefer whatever theory can survive whatever the best level of testing is available for that theory now if i’m correct then my ancap friends praxeology and anarcho -capitalism they are in trouble because practically every economic alternative to those theories would even buy their own admission the admission of this ancap be more testable than his theory and that would mean that his theory would be considered literally the worst possible status under critical rationalism due to its attempts to immunize itself but if i’m right this also means that poppers demarcation criteria was actually not quite right it was on the right track it really grasped the importance of severe testing there might be an alternative view possible here though namely that popper never intended his demarcation criteria to be so watertight in the first place in fact i think if popper were here today he’d almost assuredly argue both i and my crit rat friend are both misunderstanding his original intent popper would likely say and does say this in realism in the aim of science that he never intended falsification to be about if you can actually falsify a theory but instead it was meant to be about the relationship between evidence and theory now based on this popper would likely argue that economics is a scientific theory even though it can’t be strictly falsified in real life or maybe he wouldn’t argue that to be honest i don’t know since he never said it okay we have to kind of pull together what he did say and come to an understanding i i suspect though and this is my guess based on everything i’ve read that popper did unlike my anarcho -capitalist and cap you know my crit rat and cap friends that he did consider economics a scientific theory and not a metaphysical moral theory okay so
[00:42:02] Blue: that’s your that’s your best guess that’s my best guess based on i can i could it’s still unclear it’s
[00:42:09] Red: still unclear it would be nice if there was a specific quote where he said economics is a scientific theory or something like that you think there would be i mean he’s if he’s friends with economists and things but you
[00:42:22] Red: know maybe i missed the quote it might be worth seeing if somebody knows of a good quote where he does say economics is a scientific theory that that i was unable to find but like i didn’t find one so far so that’s why i can’t say i know for sure what he would have intended i think he intended something like economics to be considered a scientific theory now it’s interesting that hayek who is the only popperian to come out of the austrian school of economics he did make the argument that i am now laying out one thing to keep in mind is that hayek though a student of mesis and even today considered part of the austrian school of economics he was neither an anarcho -capitalist nor a praxeologist in other words if my and cap crit rat friend had looked up hayek’s answer to his question he’d have found that hayek wholeheartedly disagreed with him and that economics was to hayek a scientific theory precisely because he understood it to be at least to a degree falsifiable there is an interesting chapter in a book called hayek and behavior economics um and the chapter is called here’s the title of the chapter was hayek an austrian economist yes and no was hayek a praxeologist no and that book is by walter e block i i never actually read the chapter by the way so i don’t know what it says but like the title was so telling that i just had to include the name of that chapter in the podcast that book is from springer by the way and i i will include it in the show notes hopefully if i remember now hayek says quote as we advance we find more and more frequently that we can in fact ascertain only some but not all the particular circumstances which determine the outcome of a given process and in consequence we are able to predict only some but not all of the properties of the result we have have to expect often all we shall be able to predict will be some abstract characteristics of the pattern that we that will appear relations which between relations between kinds of elements about which individually we know very little yet i am anxious to repeat we will still achieve predictions which can be falsified and which therefore are of empirical significance so there you go right there there is hayek disagreeing with my and cap quit rat friends today economics is to hayek the pulperian and the austrian school of economics it is an empirical science to him okay so there is no doubt here hayek considered economics to be a falsifiable science and not merely a philosophical or moral theory he continues quote of course compared to compared with the precise predictions we have learned to expect learned to expect in the physical sciences this sort of mere pattern prediction is a second best with which one does not like to have to be content or put another way economics is to hayek a roughly testable theory only
[00:45:33] Red: i want to pause here for a moment and reflect on hayek’s hayek’s answer pay attention to how an old school pulperian like hayek was quite a bit different than a modern crit rat like my and cap friend to hayek having to admit economics was not scientific was unthinkable he knew economics was not a manby -pamby metaphysical theory so he took the time to work out how to apply poppers epistemology to economics because the idea that he’d have to declare economics a philosophical theory was embarrassing to him quote from popper irrefutable irrefutability is not a virtue but a vice said popper and hayek takes this view seriously modern and cap crit rats do not take this view seriously every single one of their pet theories gets declared metaphysical or philosophical as quickly as they possibly can so my and cap crit rat friend has a problem he’ll need to come to grips with it turns out that economics is a scientific theory under poppers epistemology at least according to the one man on earth most intimately familiar with both poppers epistemology and mises economic theories in detail but anarcho capitalism could not possibly qualify as a scientific theory okay then what is it we could hear fall back to my crit rats friend’s view of declaring it a moral theory and try to further immunize ourselves from criticism but let’s not do that my whole point on this podcast is let’s not do that if we can avoid it okay instead let’s compare anarcho capitalism with its best competitor now my friend’s mind the competitors were the other schools of economics i think that that was his mistake right there the best competitor to anarcho capitalism is the constitution of united states along with the institutions that implement those ideas that is i think the proper way to criticize both anarcho capitalism and proper and praxeology is to compare them to an actual working government one that actually is an open society the best in class and that’s your competitor that you’re trying to compete with when i do this that comparison here is what i see an open society is an implementable theory of what institutions are fair or just whereas anarcho capitalism and for that matter communism are vague ideas about a certain desired outcome the u.s.
[00:48:02] Red: democracy is a concrete theory of governance rooted in concrete and thus criticizeable institutions by comparison anarcho capitalism is really a vague totally irrefutable concept about a certain desired utopian outcome that they believe we should strive for there is no current quote theory of anarcho capitalism in the paparian sense in fact as i’ve argued on this podcast and elsewhere that anarcho capitalism is so vague and unclear it’s not even clear if we currently live in such a society or not now here i realize all anarcho capitalists that i’ve talked to will argue with me but i’d claim have our and they have argued this to me but i’ve claimed that they failed to do so in a coherent manner and let me summarize this just real quick because i do think it’s important my argument goes something like this you don’t get to pick outcomes you get to pick institutions if your institutions allow for governments then governments are legitimate outcomes of your theory i say this and it’s hard to imagine anyone arguing with me over this so far because this is such an obviously true statement so i’m gonna say it again you don’t get to pick outcomes you get to pick institutions if you’re instant because those are the things you can criticize right if your institutions allow for governments public governments then governments are a legitimate outcome of your theory for anarcho capitalists they would claim that their institutions are things like quote people have unlimited power to make contracts or quote all rights are property rights this is ones i’ve seen them say anyhow okay but using these two rules it’s easy to show that governments are to be considered legitimate parts of anarcho capitalism consider the louisiana purchase i’ve used this example before let me do it in a little bit more detail this time we can what we today call the the federal government of the us as an entity purchased land and then sold it or gave it to their citizens but with an understanding that accepting the land means you will accept the u.s federal government as your government i.e.
[00:50:12] Red: an organization with rights to make laws interpret them and enforce them first of all let me point out that this is a historically accurate understanding of america’s history so this isn’t a mere hypothetical this is what really happened and nothing in this story is at odds with the supposed quote theory of anarcho capitalism such as it is do and caps refuse to accept that we can set up organizations corporations let’s say that can own things no i hear often get an objection from and caps that the u.s government is not a corporation as if that what word we use to refer to an entity owning something actually matters it does not matter so i can put this criticism aside and a few and caps will argue that entities like corporations should not be allowed to own property which is really just an example of and caps in this case trying to put limits on the power of contracts as an ad hoc ad hoc fix to their theory so i feel i can set this criticism aside if the u.s government bought the land and then resold it do and caps allow that they have a right to set the terms of sale yes and caps do generally accept that so no problem there either this is just the unlimited power of contracts that and caps say they hold so dear do and caps allow you to sell partial rights to something for example can you sell land to someone without selling the mineral mineral rights to the land again and caps will answer yes so there’s no problem under can’t and cap theory here do and caps allow for geographical government like entities for example do they claim hoas are invalid contracts no they don’t now here i get two objections from and caps that i need to address that seem to me to be really just misunderstandings the first objection is that they’ll tell me they don’t much like hoas and that they think hoas are bad ideas but of course that’s meaningless unless they actually want to claim that such contracts are invalid which would then mean and caps are limiting the power of contract after all the second objection i get is that hoas are small geographies and governments are wide geographies but again this seems like a misunderstanding of the problem are they placing a limit on the power of contracts such that hoas must be limited in size geographically speaking if not then they have no real objection to hoas happening to be as large and as powerful as modern governments so long as they can convince people to buy their land and the u.s.
[00:52:41] Red: government easily convince people to buy or take their land in the case of the louisiana purchase so there was no problem under and cap theory here this is just their cherished unpun limited power of contract at play one interesting and telling argument i got from got here from a real life and cap the very one that we’re discussing was that quote no universal explainer this is not actually a quote i shouldn’t pretend it’s a quote um he argued to me that that no universal explainer would ever reasonably agree to an hoa the size and power of the government thus according to his rather circular argument the very fact that governments exist proves that some sort of coercion must have happened or it just would not have taken place all this is a all this is particularly bad for an cap theory because it explains why their objections um around so -called social contract theory are really just a misunderstanding under quote social contract theory you need to have a contract clearly citizens have no real contract with governments so social contract theory is suspect but there is no need for a bad explanation like social contract theory if governments actually own certain rights given um to them through the purchase of land of the louisiana purchase in this case given to them in the past so for example if a father gave his house that existed let’s say within an hoa to his son and the son would not be able to say i never signed a contract with this hoa so i’m not paying the association dues the reason why the son can’t do this even though he never signed a contract with the hoa is simple the hoa literally owns the right to be the hoa over that geography the father gave up that right before the son was was ever born so this explains why we’d not expect modern citizens living within the louisiana purchase to have signed contracts with the government today there was simply no need even under n -cap theory there was simply no need this is just the unlimited power of contracts at work essentially what i’m arguing here is that if the government buys louisiana purchase then gives the land away and says but we’re reserving the right to be the government for this land you would not expect anyone on that land ever again to have to sign a contract with the u.s.
[00:55:08] Red: government it you wouldn’t even be seeking it because they already own the right to be the government over that area of land okay this also explains why taxes are not necessarily theft legally speaking even under n -cap theory you’d have to first show governments don’t own the right to be the government to that territory if you if they do then taxes are a charge you’re obligated to so long as you live within a certain territory just like with hoa fees so it seems to me that any territory within the louisiana purchase which is over a quarter of the territory of the u.s.
[00:55:45] Red: today already is n -capistan the n -cap utopia n -caps just didn’t recognize it for what it was because they thought it would look very different because their real theory is not a set of fair institutions like a true open society but their real theory is a desired outcome and that desired outcome did not take place therefore they don’t see it as their theory the problem here is that n -caps don’t really care about the theoretical part of their so -called theory anymore than crit rats care about the three properties of knowledge compared to say the two sources hypothesis the canonical examples crit rat and caps aren’t interested in a specific set of rules and institutions which will always make governments which those rules of institutions will make governments legal even under their own theories and caps are really just interested in doing away with governments that is to say they are outcome oriented not institution oriented not unlike communism in this regard by the way what they really care about is the utopia utopian outcome that they desire this is why i consider it silly when crit rats and caps claim and our and our co -capitalism is a quote best theory and the u.s. democracy isn’t it’s why i can’t agree when crit rat and caps teach that and our co -capitalism flows naturally from preparing epistemology it doesn’t it’s the opposite of preparing epistemology so let’s go back to popper’s claim that theories are a hundred times more valuable than concepts because quote from popper theories may be true or false that is to say we can actually implement the government of the u.s.
[00:57:26] Red: based on a complex set of interlocking theories that can be tested and implemented in real life that is totally untrue for our knuckle and our co -capitalism as of today since it is just a desired utopian outcome and that’s all it is to put this in terms closer to hofstetter concepts are oriented not around specific assertions like theories are but instead are oriented around canonical examples that is exactly what the ancaps are doing they have a canonical imaginary in this case example of what an our co -capitalism would look like and they process whether or not something is quote legitimate under their quote theory not based on a specific agreed upon set of institutions and rules but instead based on how well or how poorly the outcome fit their imaginary canonical example crit -rat anarcho -capitalism is based on and capistan the imaginary and cap utopia rather than on implementable theories of governance this is why i say anarcho -capitalism is really a concept not a theory and also why i say it is both wholly untestable whereas its competitors are at least roughly testable and also anarcho -capitalism is wholly utopian by which we mean it is all about a desired outcome rather than a fair set of processes and institutions popper goes on to say quote concepts can at best be adequate and at worst be misleading or as i’ve pointed out who knows maybe someday will drift further away from having public governments and someday democracies will be a thing of the past replaced by some very specific implementable theory of privatized government or maybe not maybe there are good reasons unknown today why that will never happen because it will be undesirable in some way perhaps let’s say ethically speaking compared to other systems that we theorize are you so certain ancaps that privatizing air is a good idea ethically logan chipkin gave me a long talking to about how great it’ll be once we have the knowledge to privatize air and how much will keep air clean and unpolluted then but honestly i don’t know and neither does anyone else including logan chipkin thus he really said that he did yeah thus
[00:59:43] Blue: i mean it’s an interesting argument but it
[00:59:45] Red: might be true like i’m not saying it’s not true every
[00:59:48] Blue: molecule in air would be owned by someone i
[00:59:51] Red: what i’m saying is not that that’s not true what i’m saying is is that he doesn’t know that he’s prophesying
[00:59:59] Blue: okay okay
[01:00:00] Red: so thus quote from popper concepts are unimportant in comparison with theories and i agree or rather i agree if we’re talking about the critical method which in this case we are to me this is the inherent problem with many or maybe even all popular crit rat ideas today they often seem oriented to me around concepts rather than theories and thus can’t be meaningfully criticized or error corrected they are flexible ideas easily extended and modified on the fly there is an interesting question here um why is libertarianism so often focused on an outcome rather than good processes and institutions and specifically why are there so many libertarians that are anarcho capitalists which is explicitly outcome oriented and thus utopian okay there isn’t really any reason why this need be there are libertarians out there that are not anarcho capitalists and these libertarians would focus more on simply improving processes as much as we can via capitalism and they don’t really care if we ever get rid of the government or not this version of libertarianism doesn’t suffer from the same anti -critical rationalist problems that are that anarcho capitalism does and that’s because it is a non utopian variant of the same set of ideas okay in other words it’s not that hard to remove the anti -critical rationalist utopian element of anarcho capitalism and you end up with non anarcho capitalist
[01:01:39] Red: libertarianism Hayek himself probably qualifies as a rational non utopian libertarian so of course people like this do exist so it’s strange like it really is strange if you think about it that there is a strong tendency for libertarianism to drift into anarcho capitalism thus reducing the overall rationality of their viewpoint and if they just got rid of that element it would be a more rational viewpoint there must be a reason why this happens so often and it is super common like it’s not it’s not a little bit common it’s like really think about all your libertarian um crit rat friends almost i can’t think of any i mean i do know some that listeners of this podcast that would say i am a libertarian but i’m not an anarcho capitalist but if you’re thinking about the crit rat influencers like on twitter 100 % of them are anarcho capitalists okay and all they have to do to improve their theory to immediately make it no longer at odds with critical rationalism is drop the anarcho capitalist element and concentrate on good economics and a move towards trying to privatize as much as we can the emphasis being on as much as we can meaning that you’re open to the possibility that some things can never be privatized okay maybe they can maybe they can’t you don’t care maybe it’s not possible so there must be a reason why this happens so often and i really think the fact that it is so common for and i’m using this as one example but just don’t think of different ideologies out there it is just uber common for ideologies to have a a core rational grain of truth to them maybe more than a grain of truth core that is actually rationally correct but for some reason there’s this tendency for it to drift into irrationality and it happens with such a huge degree of consistency i think it’s like a pattern that’s worth exploring and explaining unfortunately that will be for a future podcast not this one
[01:03:41] Blue: well thank you for your thoughts berth i thought this was a an above average episode i enjoyed listening to you a lot and i hope you have another wonderful new years all
[01:03:55] Red: right you too thank you very much
[01:04:04] Blue: hello again if you’ve made it this far please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes as you probably know we are a podcast loosely tied together by the popper deutch theory of knowledge we believe david deutch’s four strands tie everything together so we discuss science knowledge computation politics art and especially the search for artificial general intelligence also please consider connecting with bruce on x at b nielson oh one also please consider joining the facebook group the mini worlds of david deutch where bruce and i first started connecting thank you
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