= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Scientists do define their terms, much more precisely than we generally do in ordinary conversation. When scientists say matter has both wavelike and particlelike properties, they have a meaning so precise they can write it into a computer program. The issue here is not that their terms are faulty, it's that you don't understand what they mean.
Taking the outside view - that is, forgetting this is a conversation about QM - this sounds a little hand-wavy. It seems natural to ask for precise definitions of basic terms in an article about QM, and for consistency in their usage.
In fact, Mises explains exactly why probability is in the mind in his works almost a century ago, and he's not even a mathematician.
Claiming Ludwig in the Bayesian camp is really strange and wrong. His mathematician brother Richard, from whom he takes his philosophy of probability, is literally the arch-frequentist of the 20th century.
And your quote has him taking Richard's exact position:
The present epistemological situation in the field of quantum mechanics would be correctly described by the statement: We know the various patterns according to which atoms behave and we know the proportion in which each of these patterns becomes actual. This would describe the state of our knowledge as an instance of class probability: We know all about the behavior of the whole class; about the behavior of the individual members of the class we know only that they are members.
When he says "class probability" he is specifically talking about this. ...
They do not lead to results that would tell us anything about the actual singular events.
Which is the the precise opposite of the position of the subjectivist.
I didn't say he was in the Bayesian camp, I said he had the Bayesian insight that probability is in the mind.
In the final quote he is simply saying that mathematical statements of probability merely summarize our state of knowledge; they do not add anything to it other than putting it in a more useful form. I don't see how this would be interpreted as going against subjectivism, especially when he clearly refers to probabilities being expressions of our ignorance.
Maybe setting the bounds of the problem would help some. I'm assuming:
Some form of representative democracy as political context, in the absence of any better systems.
A system of law protecting most property rights -- no arbitrary expropriations.
Socialism no more extreme than in (say) postwar Scandinavian countries.
Libertarianism no more extreme than (say) late 19th century USA.
Regulated capitalism. The question is how much regulation or taxation.
Given those parameters, I don't need the Communist Manifesto or any radical anarchist works. North Korea, the USSR, pre-1980 China aren't so relevant.
If people disagree with any of those limits on the problem, I suppose just stating that would be of interest, perhaps with a link or two. I realize getting into arguments about such things could be counterproductive, but knowing of the existence of views outside of those bounds would be helpful.
I think you'll find the extreme cases (totalitarian economic controls vs. complete laissez faire) to be helpful to look at so as to challenge the way you're framing the spectrum.
Also, politics and economics go hand in hand, economics being - in terms of what it is usually actually used for - the study of how political actions affect the economy. For example, David Friedman argues that courts would produce better rulings if they were not run as a monopoly, and that the same is true with laws and regulations themselves. So at the limit it is not easy to separate them.
Another example is the libertarian argument that pollution is largely enable by weakened property rights due to laws passed in the 19th century (in the US case) preventing torts against polluters, and from the basic fact that the government essentially owns the waters and airways. These types of arguments tend to undercut the whole divide between economics and politics.
Short: I, Pencil by Leonard E. Reed
Long: Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Very long: Socialism by Ludwig von Mises, or any of F.A. Hayek's work on spontaneous order
(All available in pdf form by googling, though some may be copyrighted)
For specific questions, the Mises forums will happily supply you with arguments and tailored links for any economic questions. Just be sure to ask for arguments on consequentialist grounds since the forum is idealogically extremely libertarian (but friendly).
If you're looking for something more mild of the John Stossel or Milton Friedman variety, try anything by Friedman himself, or Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy - though these may not align with libertarian arguments on monetary policy.
Your proposed synthesis of Mises and Yudkowsky(?) is moderately interesting, although your claims for the power and importance of such a synthesis suggest naivete. You say that "what's going so wrong in society" can be understood given two ingredients, one of which can be obtained by distilling the essence of the Austrian school, the other of which can be found here on LW but you don't say what it is. As usual, the idea that the meaning of life or the solution to the world-problem or even just the explanation of the contemporary world can be found in a simple juxtaposition of ideas will sound naive and unbelievable to anyone with some breadth of life experience (or just a little historical awareness). I give friendly AI an exemption from such a judgement because by definition it's about superhuman AI and the decoding of the human utility function, apocalyptic developments that would be, not just a line drawn in history, but an evolutionary transition; and an evolutionary transition is a change big enough to genuinely transform or replace the "human condition". But just running together a few cool ideas is not a big enough development to do that. The human condition would continue to contain phenomena which are unbearable and yet inevitable, and that in turn guarantees that whatever intellectual and cultural permutations occur, there will always be enough dissatisfaction to cause social dysfunction. Nonetheless, I do urge you to go into more detail regarding what you're talking about and what the two magic insights are.
I have also found claims that one or a few simple ideas can solve huge swaths of the world's problems to be a sign of naivity, but another exception is when there is mass delusion or confusion due to systematic errors. Provided such pervasive and damaging errors do exist, merely clearing up those errors would be a major service to humanity. In this sense, Less Wrong and Misesian epistemology share a goal: to eliminate flawed reasoning. I am not sure why Mises chose to put forth this LW-style message as a positive theory (praxeology), but the content seems to me entirely negative in that it formalizes and systematizes many of the corrections economists (even mainstream ones) must have been tired of making. Perhaps he found that people were more receptive to hearing a "competing theory" than to having their own theories covered in red ink.
In fact, Mises explains exactly why probability is in the mind in his works almost a century ago, and he's not even a mathematician. It is a straightforward application of his Austrian epistemology. I hope that doesn't cause anyone's head to explode.
This intrigues me, could you elaborate?
Sure. He wrote about it a lot. Here is a concise quote:
The concepts of chance and contingency, if properly analyzed, do not refer ultimately to the course of events in the universe. They refer to human knowledge, prevision, and action. They have a praxeological [relating to human knowledge and action], not an ontological connotation.
Also:
Calling an event contingent is not to deny that it is the necessary outcome of the preceding state of affairs. It means that we mortal men do not know whether or not it will happen. The present epistemological situation in the field of quantum mechanics would be correctly described by the statement: We know the various patterns according to which atoms behave and we know the proportion in which each of these patterns becomes actual. This would describe the state of our knowledge as an instance of class probability: We know all about the behavior of the whole class; about the behavior of the individual members of the class we know only that they are members. A statement is probable if our knowledge concerning its content is deficient. We do not know everything which would be required for a definite decision between true and not true. But, on the other hand, we do know something about it; we are in a position to say more than simply non liquet or ignoramus. For this defective knowledge the calculus of probability provides a presentation in symbols of the mathematical terminology. It neither expands nor deepens nor complements our knowledge. It translates it into mathematical language. Its calculations repeat in algebraic formulas what we knew beforehand. They do not lead to results that would tell us anything about the actual singular events. And, of course, they do not add anything to our knowledge concerning the behavior of the whole class, as this knowledge was already perfect--or was considered perfect--at the very outset of our consideration of the matter.
Actually not even him, but he was usually extremely rational and rigorous in his approach - more than any other economist I know of - albeit often poorly communicated.
Interestingly, this is pretty much what I used to say about Marx when I was a Marxist.
My point was to indicate that not all people who put stock in the "Austrian school" accept post-Misesians as competent intepreters. I meant, essentially: Mises had it right, but read his original work (not later Austrians) and you'll be able to tell whether I'm right.
No one got it comletely right except Mises himself. Actually not even him
Um... and you - alone among the ignorant masses - realize and know all this because...? Sorry, but I don't have a high prior on your authority in the discipline.
I would have prefaced that with "in my opinion," but I thought that was obvious. (What else would it be?)
In response to
Open Thread, May 1-15, 2012
An economics question:
Which economic school of thought most resembles "the standard picture" of cogsci rationality? In other words, which economists understand probability theory, heuristics & biases, reductionism, evolutionary psychology, etc. and properly incorporate it into their work? If these economists aren't of the neo-classical school, how closely does neo-classical economics resemble the standard picture, if at all?
Unnecessary Background Information:
Feel free to not read this. It's just an explanation of why I'm asking these questions.
I'm somewhat at a loss when it comes to economics. When I was younger (maybe 15 or so?) I began reading Austrian economics. The works of Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, etc., served as my first rigorous introduction to economics. I self-identified as an Austrian for several years, up until a few months ago.
For the past year, I have learned a lot about cognsci rationality through LW sequences and related works. I think I have a decent grasp of what cognsci rationality is, why it is correct, and how to conflicts with the method of the Austrian school. (For those who aren't aware, Austrians use an apriori method and claim absolute/infinite certainty, among other things.) The final straw came when I read Bryan Caplan's "Why I am not an Austrian Economist" and his debate with Austrian economist Walter Block. Caplan ably defended BayesCraft. I - with emotional difficulty - consciously updated my belief in Austrianism to below 0.5. I knew I could no longer be an Austrian, nor did I want to be.
Caplan is an neo-classical economist, and neo-classical seems to be the dominant school of modern economic thought. So I'm reading my way through introductory neo-classical economics textbooks. (Specifically, Principles of Macreconomics and Principles of Microeconomics by Mankiw.) I am also looking to take some economics courses when I start university in the fall. My primary major will likely be mathematics, but I am considering double majoring in economics. Maybe get a graduate degree in economics? I don't know yet.
But I'm apprehensive about reading bad economics textbooks because I don't know enough good economics to sort out the bunk. And the reason I want to read economics textbooks in the first place is to learn more good economics. So I'm in a catch 22. I think I'm safe enough reading a standard intro to micro/marco book. But when it comes to finance? Banking? Monetary theory? I haven't a clue who to trust.
So I'm looking to take what I do know (cogsci rationality) and see where it is utilized in economics. If there is a school of economic thought that uses it as their methodology, I think that serves as very strong evidence I can likely trust what they say.
Block and Rothbard do not understand Austrian economics and are incapable of defending it against serious rationalist criticism. Ludwig von Mises is the only rigorous rationalist in the "school". His works make mincemeat of Caplan's arguments decades before Caplan even makes them. But don't take my word for it - go back and reread Mises directly.
You will see that the "rationalist" objections Caplan raises are not new. They are simply born out of a misunderstanding of a complex topic. Rothbard, Block, and most of the other "Austrian" economists that followed merely added another layer of confusion because they weren't careful enough thinkers to understand Mises.
ETA: Speaking of Bayesianism, it was also rejected for centuries as being unscientific, for many of the same reasons that Mises's observations have been. In fact, Mises explains exactly why probability is in the mind in his works almost a century ago, and he's not even a mathematician. It is a straightforward application of his Austrian epistemology. I hope that doesn't cause anyone's head to explode.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Depends how far apart you space them. In a black hole, you could crunch up all the particles in existence into the same space, and you still wouldn't be any closer to spanning the length of an inch.
We might not be able to visualize this, but our brains developed to help us operate on a scale where things actually do behave as if they were all made of substantial lumps of stuff which take up space and two things can't be in the same space because the space is filled. That's the sort of thing our brains evolved to deal with, so whether or not reality really works like that at the most fundamental level, we should expect ourselves to be bad at envisioning things that don't work like that. For a rather long time, scientists thought that reality was like that all the way down. But then when we developed the technology to do experiments which actually probe what's going on at that level, we started finding that reality simply doesn't work that way. You can try and envision matter as being made of tiny little lumps of stuff bopping around, but if you do, you will unavoidably end up drawing conclusions that contradict what we find is actually going on.
"I can't get a picture of this in my head" is not a rebuttal of a physical theory, because there's no reason that our heads must actually be equipped to create pictures of how the fundamental level of reality works.
Agreed, the basic structure of reality may be unvisualizable and otherwise incomprehensible to us. However, a theory is ostensibly a physical explanation, not merely a mathematical summary of the observed data. Reading over Monkeymind's posts, it seems the point he is making is that these theories sort of seem to "feel like" physical explanations, but in the end are "just math."
The question naturally arises, to the newbie at least, of what the difference really is between a mathematical summary of the data we've collected and a mathematical theory of how (by what mechanism) a physical phenomenon occurs.