Episode 132: Roughly Testable Theories (and Ancaps)

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Unidentified speaker: Hello, out there.

[00:00:01]  Peter: 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]  Bruce: Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast.

[00:00:49]  Unidentified speaker: Hey, Peter. Hello, Bruce.

[00:00:51]  Peter: How you doing?

[00:00:52]  Unidentified speaker: Good. How was Christmas for you?

[00:00:54]  Peter: 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?

[00:01:14]  Bruce: It was great.

[00:01:15]  Unidentified speaker: It was very fun.

[00:01:16]  Bruce: 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.

[00:01:25]  Unidentified speaker: Wow. Yay. Okay.

[00:01:29]  Bruce: So I'll have to take pictures and show that or something, because it was very cute that he made that for me.

[00:01:35]  Unidentified speaker: That is nice. That's really nice.

[00:01:37]  Peter: Well, he knows how hard you work at this and...

[00:01:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure. All right.

[00:01:45]  Bruce: Let's, so let me 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 100 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.

[00:02:33]  Unidentified speaker: However, I agreed with Popper.

[00:02:35]  Peter: Honestly, I don't even know what a concept and a theory is anymore. Bruce, you've gotten that so you’ve confused me so much that I just need to explain it to me again.

[00:02:46]  Bruce: I think most people would say they're the same thing.

[00:02:49]  Peter: Okay.

[00:02:50]  Bruce: But Popper clearly had in mind that a theory was falsifiable, right?

[00:02:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:02:55]  Bruce: He talks about how theories can be falsified, they make assertions about reality, whereas concepts really don't.

[00:03:00]  Unidentified speaker: That's right. Okay.

[00:03:02]  Bruce: Now, I agreed with Popper. That a concept like wave, we've been talking about the concept of a wave using Hofstadter's example from Chrysippus. 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 a strictly false statement, right? That instead 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.

[00:04:04]  Unidentified speaker: And so just wait, just so I'm clear.

[00:04:06]  Peter: 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?

[00:04:18]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:04:18]  Peter: Is that what I'm understanding?

[00:04:20]  Unidentified speaker: Well, so, okay, it's not even quite that.

[00:04:22]  Bruce: 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.

[00:04:34]  Unidentified speaker: It's a choice you make.

[00:04:35]  Bruce: I keep saying this, and I really cannot over emphasize 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.

[00:05:03]  Unidentified speaker: 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 longitudinal waves.

[00:05:18]  Bruce: So 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 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.

[00:05:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:05:55]  Bruce: 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, light's a wave. Well, light's not a wave in the same sense of sound or water. But it is, it doesn't even have a medium like those.

[00:06:15]  Unidentified speaker: Right? And so eventually...

[00:06:18]  Peter: It has some wave-like properties, though.

[00:06:19]  Unidentified speaker: That's right. Right. Okay.

[00:06:21]  Bruce: So it's a strictly false statement, but 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.

[00:06:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:06:41]  Bruce: 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.

[00:06:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:06:55]  Bruce: 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 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 CritRat Theory of what knowledge is and how CritRats 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 Constructor 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.

[00:08:07]  Unidentified speaker: It's a concept.

[00:08:09]  Bruce: And 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 that 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. Now let's consider my favorite punching bag, anarcho-capitalism.

[00:08:34]  Unidentified speaker: Now I love anarcho-capitalism.

[00:08:36]  Bruce: I love libertarianism in general. I'm a small government conservative. I think the government's way too big. I think we way over tax. 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.

[00:09:00]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:09:00]  Peter: You know, I really agree with how 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 the 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 you think about these ideologies, to think about reasons that you agree with them.

[00:09:37]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:09:37]  Peter: Rather than disagree with them, or at least try to do that as much as the former. I mean, 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.

[00:10:01]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:10:01]  Peter: But they are just so focused on thinking about these things in terms of demonizing other tribes or something. And I really think it's just a really negative way to view just this world of ideas.

[00:10:18]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:19]  Bruce: You know, let me even go further on that.

[00:10:23]  Unidentified speaker: I used to see the left as an enemy.

[00:10:25]  Bruce: And don't get me wrong, 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.

[00:10:35]  Peter: I don't know, as small as our audience is, I think we have quite a mix.

[00:10:38]  Unidentified speaker: Well, we might. We might.

[00:10:40]  Bruce: From the ones I've talked to, most of them are very libertarian leaning.

[00:10:43]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:10:45]  Bruce: So, and I fully accept that the left has done some incredibly dangerous things.

[00:10:52]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:10:52]  Bruce: Let's, for the sake of argument, let's call that woke-ism as a general label that even the left flees at this point, right? And there's just no doubt about that, right? I just can't see them as the enemy. Like, once I fully understood the proper Popperian view 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]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:21]  Bruce: I mean, yes, they put forward solutions that are awful, but that's exactly what I would expect. Like, it's finding a problem is so much easier than finding a solution. I can't see the left as an enemy because they're good at finding problems. And yes, they put forward really stinky solutions, like awful solutions, solutions that if we implement it, may even destroy the country, right? Like, I'll accept all of that as 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 are our problem finders, or at least for a certain class of problems, they're our 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?

[00:12:17]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:12:18]  Peter: Well, let me even go further, and I'm going to borrow this from David Deutsch. He, you know, when we're talking about the left, he says that, you know, there's plenty of causes that the left have has championed throughout history that have been very positive. For example, in one generation, we've gone from maybe two generations, a time when it was very normal for children to be hit at school. I mean, can you even imagine?

[00:12:53]  Unidentified speaker: It's even like hard to get your mind around that now.

[00:12:56]  Peter: The teacher brings up this little child to the front of the school and inflicts physical pain on them. 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 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. There's not even very many libertarians.

[00:13:45]  Bruce: Which also didn't probably exist back then.

[00:13:47]  Peter: It came because, it happened because of leftists.

[00:13:54]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:13:55]  Peter: Making an argument and making, changing laws and changing things.

[00:13:59]  Unidentified speaker: And there's probably hundreds of, there's probably so many examples of that, you can't even. You know what?

[00:14:04]  Bruce: Almost everything you can think of as moral progress came from the left.

[00:14:09]  Unidentified speaker: That's just the truth, right?

[00:14:11]  Peter: Yeah, I mean, the left, you know, I do like separating liberalism from leftism to collectivism versus sort of individualism. So there are, but to me, that just also gets points to how complicated these ideologies are, and how wrong it is to put people in these labels, to like think about things more on terms of principles rather than [tribes?].

[00:14:39]  Bruce: Okay, you are doing a great job of explaining the difference between the Popperian concept of a concept versus a theory, okay?

[00:14:47]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, I didn't even know.

[00:14:48]  Bruce: Popper's 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, what are its 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.

[00:15:09]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:10]  Bruce: So a general concept of the left, it could, I'm going to argue it has a great many uses.

[00:15:17]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:17]  Bruce: So I'm not saying it's bad to generalize to the left or something like that, or progressives or conservatives. 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 the general ballpark of who I am, right? But I have to, these days, I have to say Reagan conservative because like conservative means like Trumpist and I'm like a never Trumper.

[00:15:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:15:44]  Bruce: So 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]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:59]  Bruce: 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?

[00:16:12]  Unidentified speaker: And can we test them? Okay.

[00:16:14]  Bruce: Now, this is actually why I've made anarcho-capitalism in particular, not so much libertarianism, but anarcho-capitalism, which is one type of libertarianism. Kind of a punching bag is because they are making a truth assertion, particularly the CritRat version of it, that I understand to be false.

[00:16:34]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:16:35]  Bruce: 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 the argument is in my favor. If the argument is a false argument, I shouldn't accept it.

[00:16:49]  Unidentified speaker: We talked about this in just the last podcast or something, right?

[00:16:52]  Bruce: That we should reject bad explanations, even when we agree with what they're arguing.

[00:16:57]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:16:59]  Bruce: And I do feel like this is a significant problem with anarcho-capitalism. And I'm going to explain why 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 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 nothing else, I think it would make the movement more viable, right? It would remove some of the errors and they wouldn't come across so strange to kind of a normal person.

[00:17:59]  Peter: Well, I consider myself a futurist, anarcho-capitalist in the sense that 100 or 1000 years from now, sure, of course we're moving towards more freedom. I mean, if progress is real, that's got to be the direction that we take. More freedom, less tyranny. But like, there's something about it that's so utopian.

[00:18:24]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:18:25]  Peter: When they get into thinking that we can just, you know, a small number of nerds are going to like change all of society overnight.

[00:18:38]  Unidentified speaker: It's just preposterous.

[00:18:39]  Bruce: Did 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.

[00:18:48]  Unidentified speaker: He was a little bit, yeah.

[00:18:49]  Peter: Well, 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 cool.

[00:18:59]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:19:00]  Bruce: Let's talk about this though. Does the CritRat 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 going to argue that anarcho-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.

[00:19:29]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:19:30]  Bruce: Which is one of the reasons why I've picked on it.

[00:19:32]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:19:33]  Bruce: So, now, here I expect immediate pushback from CritRat and anarcho-capitalists. They're going to argue to me that anarcho-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 CritRat 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 Popper's 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 CritRat. Kind of very dyed-in-the-wool Ancap CritRat. They come in different levels of devotion.

[00:20:27]  Unidentified speaker: This one's, I would dare say, on the zealot side.

[00:20:31]  Bruce: 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. This was really just an opening so that he could explain to me how Misesian economics or praxeology, the basis for 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.

[00:21:09]  Unidentified speaker: And this was his stance.

[00:21:10]  Bruce: 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 happened 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 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 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]  Peter: And can I throw in one thing?

[00:22:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:22:46]  Peter: You've mentioned, just so to clarify this for our listeners, you've mentioned Hayek and Mises, and then you've said that it's a myth, I guess, to put all these theories into one label, meaning Austrian economics.

[00:23:04]  Unidentified speaker: If that's what I'm getting from you, then...

[00:23:06]  Bruce: I actually would say it's the opposite, that I think Hayek and Mises are both from the School of Austrian Economics, but I think they had drastically different economic theories.

[00:23:15]  Peter: Okay, I just want to clarify that. I mean, Hayek was more of... 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.

[00:23:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:23:34]  Peter: Whereas, at least how I'm thinking of them, Mises is more like Rothbard and Nozick.

[00:23:41]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, Rothbard being a more extreme version of Mises, right?

[00:23:45]  Peter: They think of markets as something that does not need the state or can exist without the state. I mean, right or wrong, it's a more extreme position than what Hayek is saying, right?

[00:23:56]  Unidentified speaker: That's right. That's right.

[00:23:57]  Bruce: Even though they're all from the Austrian School of Economics. One of the big things here is that Hayek was the only Popperian in the Austrian School of Economics. Mises was an inductivist by his own admission, and he believed in foundationalism. You lay out praxeology, these foundational ideas, and you start with these, and they're just obviously true. They can't be criticized. They're not open to criticism.

[00:24:21]  Unidentified speaker: They're just obviously true.

[00:24:22]  Bruce: 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 proof.

[00:24:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:24:36]  Bruce: 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 it is so far at odds in every conceivable way with critical rationalism. Praxeology is like the opposite of critical rationalism.

[00:24:52]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:24:53]  Bruce: Now, Hayek was the opposite of that.

[00:24:56]  Peter: And he was friends with Popper, right? I mean, they didn't necessarily align on everything, but they had sympathies for each other at least.

[00:25:02]  Unidentified speaker: That's right. That's right.

[00:25:04]  Bruce: And he was the student of Mises, so he was familiar with 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 entirely non-scientific foundation and it's trying to be something that it's never gonna successfully be. So he tried to reform it to a Popperian economic school of thought, right? And that's what we're gonna actually talk about today. And not in depth, like, instead, we're only gonna talk about the demarcation criteria and falsificationism, okay? Now, because the Misesian economics or praxeology was supposedly a best theory, according to this crit rat 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.

[00:26:04]  Unidentified speaker: So this is his explanation.

[00:26:06]  Bruce: 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 Popperian tradition. To him, it was a prediction because it came from a best theory.

[00:26:25]  Peter: Well, I have to say, I kind of did some real-time fact-checking of what you just said. And I asked if Hayek ever criticized Mises, and it basically confirms what you've just said.

[00:26:39]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:26:39]  Peter: That Hayek was a believer in fallibilism, Mises' rationalism, I mean, it goes on and on. But basically, Mises believed in certainty through logic, and Hayek believed in humility through ignorance, which I assume he got from Popper or something.

[00:27:00]  Unidentified speaker: That's right. That's right. Yeah. No, that's an interesting distinction.

[00:27:04]  Bruce: 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 Misesian economics or praxeology today, not in depth anyhow. I'll do that in some future podcasts 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 is the wrong solution. What I want to show is that he... I want to show that what his fair point was, though it's not about Misesian 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.

[00:28:00]  Unidentified speaker: Don't listen any further.

[00:28:01]  Bruce: Try to work that out in your head before we continue the discussion and then turn the podcast back on.

[00:28:07]  Unidentified speaker: And we will pause.

[00:28:08]  Peter: Wait, did you just say... I think you misstated that. What did you say again?

[00:28:11]  Bruce: Is economics science or metaphysics?

[00:28:14]  Unidentified speaker: Or is it philosophical?

[00:28:15]  Peter: Oh, it sounded like you just said or physics.

[00:28:17]  Unidentified speaker: I was like, okay. Yeah.

[00:28:19]  Bruce: Actually, one of the claims of the... CritRat anarcho-capitalist is that economics is physics. So, but that's not what we're actually asking today. And of course, that's a silly, silly statement.

[00:28:29]  Unidentified speaker: Science or metaphysics. Yes. Or philosophy. Yeah.

[00:28:33]  Bruce: So remember, there's a demarcation for Popper. You're either science or you're metaphysics.

[00:28:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:28:40]  Bruce: 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 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 Mises, 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? 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 A Free-Market Monetary System and The Pretense of Knowledge. Quote, We cannot be—we cannot be grateful enough to such modern philosophers of science as Sir Karl Popper for giving us a test by which we can distinguish between what we may accept as scientific and what not. A test which I'm sure some doctrines now widely accepted as science would not pass.

[00:30:09]  Bruce: 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 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. 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 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.

[00:31:52]  Bruce: Thus, you could not, strictly speaking, falsify economic theories, much less policies, by testing specific predicted events. That's what Popper, 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 ANCAP friend was arguing? Now, if you strictly accept Popper's demarcation criteria, then honestly, I have to admit that it seems like my ANCAP CritRat friend must be correct. If there is 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 Ancap CritRat Misesian praxeology friend was trying to do.

[00:33:00]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:33:01]  Bruce: Now, CritRat ANCAPs, like the guy writing to me, they love this line of logic. Mises wanted his theory to be purely philosophical and untestable theory. And CritRat ANCAPs preferred to see their anarcho-capitalism more as an untestable moral theory. So this lines up very well in their view. Since CritRat ANCAPs see moral theories as untestable philosophical theories by definition, they're pretty happy with this result. They just want to declare praxeology and anarcho-capitalism to be philosophical and avoid having to subject it to any sort of testing that might possibly falsify it. But this answer, despite my ANCAP friend's desire to declare economics metaphysical, it seems very problematic to me. Let me 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.

[00:34:04]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:34:05]  Bruce: 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, 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, um, 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 Kuypers.

[00:35:26]  Unidentified speaker: He's a CritRat ANCAP, obviously.

[00:35:31]  Bruce: And that my main objection to his anarcho-capitalism was that it was untestable, 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, 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 word testable, meant a scientific experiment, then actually I'd agree with him. I am, in that case, misrepresenting governments. They are clearly not testable by scientific experiment, okay?

[00:36:13]  Peter: Yeah, I mean, there's a real grain of truth in what he's saying too.

[00:36:17]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:36:17]  Peter: I think both perspectives.

[00:36:19]  Bruce: Kind of have some truth here, right?

[00:36:21]  Peter: Yeah, I can't like completely discount both perspectives.

[00:36:25]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:36:26]  Peter: I don't know what's right, but maybe you can tell me.

[00:36:29]  Bruce: Well, see, when I was saying it wasn't testable, I wasn't trying to use the word testable in its strict, original Popperian sense.

[00:36:38]  Peter: You don't just look up the meta-studies and you can tell what the best government is.

[00:36:43]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:36:44]  Peter: That's not what you're saying.

[00:36:45]  Bruce: I was 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 maybe mistakenly even called testable. Maybe let's give Sam credit. Maybe I shouldn't have called it testable within a critical rationalist circles because the word testable has been taken to mean scientifically testable, okay. And instead, I'm going to 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 events. I suggest that we call this roughly testable theories but maybe we should instead call it implementable theories. I'm going to 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.

[00:38:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, do you understand what I'm trying to say here? I think so. Yeah, no, it's an interesting distinction.

[00:38:16]  Bruce: I feel like this idea of roughly testable theories is in some sense, naturally flows from Popper's epistemology. We prefer more testable theories over less testable theories. That is Popper's epistemology in a nutshell. And the 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 Popperian standpoint, we would prefer the better tested theories rather than the utopian and 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 CritRat 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 way it was really just up to him to criticize it, quote, in his own mind, and decide for himself, which theory seemed, quote, best to him.

[00:39:47]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:39:47]  Bruce: What I'm suggesting 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 by 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 Popper's demarcation criteria was actually not quite right.

[00:40:49]  Unidentified speaker: It was on the right track.

[00:40:50]  Bruce: 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 CritRat friend are both misunderstanding his original intent. Popper would likely say, and does say this in Realism and 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 suspect, though, and this is my guess, based on everything I've read, that Popper did, unlike my anarcho-capitalist, and my CritRat ANCAP friends, that he did consider economics a scientific theory and not a metaphysical moral theory, okay?

[00:42:02]  Peter: So that's your best guess.

[00:42:05]  Bruce: That's my best guess based on-

[00:42:07]  Peter: It's still unclear.

[00:42:08]  Unidentified speaker: It's still unclear.

[00:42:09]  Bruce: It would be nice if there was a specific quote where he said economics is a scientific theory or something like that.

[00:42:16]  Unidentified speaker: You’d think there would be.

[00:42:17]  Peter: I mean, if he's friends with economists and things, but-

[00:42:21]  Unidentified speaker: You know, maybe I missed the quote.

[00:42:23]  Bruce: It might be worth seeing if somebody knows of a good quote where he does say economics is a scientific theory 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 Mises 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 ANCAP CritRat 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 Behavioral Economics, and the chapter is called, here's the title of the chapter, Was Hayek an Austrian Economist?

[00:43:34]  Unidentified speaker: Yes and no.

[00:43:35]  Bruce: Was Hayek a Praxeologist?

[00:43:38]  Unidentified speaker: No.

[00:43:40]  Bruce: That book is by Walter E.

[00:43:41]  Unidentified speaker: Block.

[00:43:42]  Bruce: I never actually read the chapter, by the way, so I don't know what it says, but 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 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 to expect. Often all we shall be able to predict will be some abstract characteristics of the pattern that will appear.

[00:44:32]  Bruce: 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 ANCAP CritRat friends today. Economics is to Hayek the Popperian 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 learnt to expect, learnt 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. I want to pause here for a moment and reflect on Hayek's answer. Pay attention to how an old school Popperian like Hayek was quite a bit different than a modern CritRat, like my ANCAP friend. To Hayek, having to admit economics was not scientific was unthinkable. He knew economics was not a mamby-pamby metaphysical theory. So he took the time to work out how to apply Popper's epistemology to economics, because the idea that he'd have to declare economics a philosophical theory was embarrassing to him. Quote from Popper, irrefutability is not a virtue but a vice, said Popper. And Hayek takes this view seriously. Modern ANCAP CritRats do not take this view seriously.

[00:46:21]  Bruce: Every single one of their pet theories gets declared metaphysical or philosophical as quickly as they possibly can. So my ANCAP CritRat friend has a problem he'll need to come to grips with. It turns out that economics is a scientific theory under Popper's epistemology, at least according to the one man on earth most intimately familiar with both Popper's epistemology and Mises's economic theories in detail. But anarcho-capitalism could not possibly qualify as a scientific theory.

[00:46:51]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, then what is it?

[00:46:53]  Bruce: We could here fall back to my CritRat friend's view of declaring it a moral theory and try to further immunize ourselves from criticism.

[00:47:00]  Unidentified speaker: But let's not do that.

[00:47:01]  Bruce: My whole point on this podcast is, let's not do that if we can avoid it.

[00:47:06]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:47:07]  Bruce: 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 the United States along with institutions that implement those ideas. That is, I think the proper way to criticize both anarcho-capitalism 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 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 US democracy is a concrete theory of governance rooted in concrete and thus criticizable 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 Popperian 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, 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.

[00:48:52]  Bruce: 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.

[00:49:12]  Unidentified speaker: So I'm going to say it again.

[00:49:13]  Bruce: You don't get to pick outcomes, you get to pick institutions. If your institutions, 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.

[00:49:51]  Unidentified speaker: Consider the Louisiana Purchase.

[00:49:52]  Bruce: I've used this example before. Let me do it in a little bit more detail this time. What we today call 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 US federal government as your government, i.e. 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 ANCAPS refuse to accept that we can set up organizations, corporations, let's say, that can own things?

[00:50:36]  Unidentified speaker: No.

[00:50:37]  Bruce: I here often get an objection from ANCAPS that the US 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 ANCAPS will argue that entities like corporations should not be allowed to own property. Which is really just an example of ANCAPS, in this case, trying to put limits on the power of contracts as an ad hoc fix to their theory. So I feel I can set this criticism aside. If the US government bought the land and then resold it, do ANCAPS allow that they have a right to set the terms of sale? Yes, ANCAPS do generally accept that. So no problem there either. This is just the unlimited power of contracts that ANCAPS say they hold so dear. Do ANCAPS allow you to sell partial rights to something? For example, can you sell land to someone without selling the mineral rights to the land? Again, ANCAPS will answer yes. So there's no problem under ANCAP theory here. Do ANCAPS allow for geographical government-like entities? For example, do they claim HOAs are invalid contracts?

[00:51:49]  Unidentified speaker: No, they don't.

[00:51:50]  Bruce: Now here I get two objections from ANCAPS 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 ANCAPS 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 US government easily convinced people to buy or take their land, in the case of the Louisiana Purchase. So there was no problem under ANCAP Theory here. This is just their cherished, unlimited power of contract at play. One interesting and telling argument I got here from a real life ANCAP, the very one that we're discussing, was that, quote, no universal explainer.

[00:53:05]  Unidentified speaker: This is not actually a quote. I shouldn't pretend it's a quote.

[00:53:09]  Bruce: He argued to me 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 particularly bad for ANCAP Theory, because it explains why their objections 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 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 ever born. So this explains why we would not expect modern citizens living within the Louisiana Purchase to have signed contracts with the government today. There was simply no need. Even under ANCAP Theory, there was simply no need. This is just the unlimited power of contracts at work.

[00:54:52]  Bruce: 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 US government. You wouldn't even be seeking it because they already own the right to be the government over that area of land.

[00:55:14]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:55:15]  Bruce: This also explains why taxes are not necessarily theft, legally speaking, even under ANCAP Theory. You'd have to first show governments don't own the right to be the government to that territory. 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 US today, already is ANCAPistan, the ANCAP utopia. ANCAPs 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 ANCAPs don't really care about the theoretical part of their so-called theory any more than crit-rats care about the three properties of knowledge compared to say the two sources hypothesis, the canonical examples. CritRat ANCAPs 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. ANCAPs 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 utopian outcome that they desire.

[00:56:53]  Bruce: This is why I consider it silly when CritRat ANCAPs claim anarcho-capitalism is a, quote, best theory and the US democracy isn't. It's why I can't agree when CritRat ANCAPs teach that anarcho-capitalism flows naturally from Popperian epistemology.

[00:57:08]  Unidentified speaker: It doesn't.

[00:57:09]  Bruce: It's the opposite of Popperian 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 US based on a complex set of interlocking theories that can be tested and implemented in real life. That is totally untrue for anarcho-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 Hofstadter, 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 anarcho-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. CritRat anarcho-capitalism is based on ANCAPistan, the imaginary ANCAP 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.

[00:58:45]  Bruce: 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 we'll 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.

[00:59:04]  Unidentified speaker: Or maybe not.

[00:59:06]  Bruce: 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 will be once we have the knowledge to privatize air, and how much we'll keep air clean and unpolluted then. But honestly, I don't know, and neither does anyone else, including Logan Chipkin.

[00:59:40]  Unidentified speaker: He really said that? He did, yeah.

[00:59:43]  Peter: I mean, it's an interesting argument.

[00:59:45]  Unidentified speaker: It might be true. Like, I'm not saying it's not true.

[00:59:47]  Peter: So every molecule in air would be owned by someone.

[00:59:52]  Bruce: 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.

[00:59:58]  Unidentified speaker: Okay. Okay.

[01:00:00]  Bruce: 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. 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 anarcho-capitalism does. And that's because it is a non-utopian variant of the same set of ideas. 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 libertarianism. Hayek himself probably qualifies as a rational non-utopian libertarian. So, of course, people like this do exist.

[01:01:48]  Unidentified speaker: So it's strange.

[01:01:49]  Bruce: 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 a little bit common. It's like, really, think about all your libertarian crit-rat friends.

[01:02:19]  Unidentified speaker: Almost, I can't think of any.

[01:02:22]  Bruce: 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.

[01:02:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:02:36]  Bruce: 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.

[01:02:58]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:02:59]  Bruce: 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 go think of different ideologies out there. It is just uber common for ideologies to have 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]  Unidentified speaker: Well, thank you for your thoughts, Bruce.

[01:03:43]  Peter: I thought this was an above average episode. I enjoyed listening to you a lot and I hope you have another wonderful New Year's.

[01:03:54]  Unidentified speaker: All right, you too. Thank you very much.

[01:04:04]  Peter: 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 Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch'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 BNielson01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[01:04:48]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.