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Constant comments on Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality - Less Wrong
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Hi,
I've been reading LW sequences sine a few months, and I find them very interesting, but I think you made a mistake in mixing politics (libertarianism, french/american revolutions, ...) into this post.
I won't go into explaining why I think economical libertarianism is deeply flawed and not similar at all to the process of Science (for once, I don't think it degrades well at all), but above that, by calling into very complicated and very debated concepts, you're just making following your core reasoning harder to follow.
I also think you make some factual errors : saying the "american revolution" is a success but the french one a collapse is a great mistake. Most of the progress of the French Revolution lasted for very long and still last. The whole concept of "Human Rights", both the "first generation" rights, like the freedom of speech, and the "second generation" rights like universal access to education, come mostly from the French Revolution (the Declaration of Humans and Citizen Rights, to my knowledge, predates the 1st Amemendement). Most countries of Europe and South America use a civil code derived from it. The abolition of slavery by the French Revolution in 1793 was temporarily undone afterwards by Napoleon, but it was a firm stone on which the abolitionist have built afterwards.
And some very fundamental measures of the French Revolution, that were totally opposite to economical libertarianism, like the "taxation du prix du pain" (state-fixed price of bread to block speculation on breads and flour (the "Accapareurs")) lasted for almost two centuries, protecting France from famine, and making the "french baguette" a world-renewed food (because, to the contrary of what economical libertarianism predicts, the fixed price of bread leaded to a massive development of the bread industry in France, making bread the fundamental food, and forcing the bakery to compete on quality since they couldn't compete on price). That's just a few examples among many. Wiping the jump forward in humanism that represented the French Revolution and its continuing consequences nowadays in a few words as you did is, in my opinion, just not true.
Anyway, thanks for those very interesting posts.
You claim to be critiquing "economical libertarianism", but in fact you are critiquing microeconomics. For instance, you critique the familiar critique of price-fixing by presenting a purported counterexample. But the idea that price-fixing has certain predictable perverse consequences comes, not from libertarians, but from standard microeconomics, since it's a simple deduction from basic theory of supply and demand.
Libertarians do, to be sure, make heavy use of microeconomic theory, but this does not warrant calling microeconomics "economical libertarianism", any more than the use of a bicycle by Mao to commute to work would warrant calling bicycles "transportational communism".
So, to reinterpret your post, taking you to be attacking microeconomics, you are saying that the science of microeconomics is not in fact a science, since it is immune to empirical refutation, such as by the purported success of price-fixing.
Well, I think my comment was misunderstood - I didn't want to start a full debate on economical libertarianism, economics or politics. To be done seriously, it would require much longer posts than a small comment on an article about science and rationality.
My point was mostly that the political issues about libertarianism and about the French and American Revolutions are highly debatable, and shouldn't be sorted out in a few bold sentences as Eliezer did on the post, and that by doing so, he's more making is core post about the differences between Science and Rationality harder to follow, because he's dragging into it a very heated and complicated debate.
For that, I pointed a few examples of things done by the French Revolution which were (in my opinion) very successful, but it was just an example to illustrate my core point which was : "don't drag politics in such a bold way in a post about rationality, you'll commit factual errors and antagonize people". A bit a variation over the "don't take QM as en example", that's all. Sorry for the noise ;)
The worst policy has good consequences, the best policy has bad ones.
The successes you cited would only be relevant if one understood Eliezer to be claiming that every consequence was bad or ephemeral from the French Revolution. While that is how politicians speak and how others speak much of the time, it's not charitable to interpret arguments as if they were from politicians.
In the French Revolution, they were really, really confident that things would be best if they could decide more or less ad hoc to kill tens of thousands for interfering with it. In the American Revolution, they didn't trust themselves so, they tolerated more anti-revolutionary behavior, and things turned out better. That's all.
Even if the French do make fantastic bread, the Reign of Terror was still not a good idea.