Karl Popper Defines "Rationality"

Everyone is all in favor of "reason" and contemptuous of the other guys that substitute "feelings" or "faith" or "bigotry" for reason.

What we really mean is that "our" account of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is the correct one, the rational one, but the other guy... Well, he's probably living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Karl Popper is famous for the idea of "falsification." He argues that unless it is possible to test your theory against real-life data then it's not a theory but just a narrative.

By the way, he has nothing against narrative. Man "can invent stories, fairy tales, myths." But when a myth can't be tested...

Not that there's anything wrong with narratives. It's just that a narrative isn't science.

In Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In defence of interaction, adapted from a series of lectures given by Popper at Emory University in 1969 and published by M.A. Notturno, Popper develops his ideas. 

He has two Big Ideas to present. The first is the process of scientific discovery. It goes like this:

1. A theory has a problem.
2. Propose a tentative revised theory.
3. Test the theory.
4. Wait for the next problem.

The second Big Idea is his "Three Worlds" notion. It goes like this

World 3: the products of our human minds.
World 2: our mental states or processes.
World 1: physical states or processes.

When he says World 3 he means both scientific theories and actual physical products of the human mind such as windmills and temples and jet airplanes.

But at the end of the book, in the last lecture, titled "The Self, Rationality, and Freedom," he defines "rationality."

I mean by "rationality" simply a critical attitude towards problems -- the readiness to learn from our mistakes, and the attitude of consciously searching for our mistakes and for our prejudices. Thus, I mean by "rationality" the attitude of conscious, critical, error elimination.

Simplified, I would say that Popper sees reason and rationality as a process rather than a framework.

And, he says, we humans can only deal with one or two mistakes at a time. We cannot sweep the whole of knowledge-so-far in the trash and start with a blank sheet. So, "our criticism cannot tackle more than one or two problems or theories at a time". But, "there is no problem or theory... that is immune to being made  the object of our critical consideration."

Then, he attacks what he calls "the myth of the framework," the idea that two people cannot have a fruitful discussion unless their world-views are pretty much in alignment. On the contrary, he writes, dealing with someone with a significantly different "framework" can be really productive and interesting. But it does require both sides to admit to themselves that they might be wrong.

Finally he critiques the notion of "self-expression," that

the quality of the work we do depends on how good we are. It depends only on our talents, on our psychological, and, perhaps, on our physiological states.

Popper regards this as sick and wrong. That's because he regards all successful theory and knowledge as "objective knowledge" in his World 3. The point is that all scientific knowledge is a public thing. It is a monument that is pushed out into the public world. Then either you, or someone else, critiques it and tries to improve it. I suppose that the point is that if you make a scientific discovery it might be because of your astonishing talent. Or it might be because you got lucky and "noticed" something that nobody else did.

Either way, once you have created a new theory, it is back to the drawing board and on to the next thing. 

Doughnut Economics: Springtime for Activists

The "tell" in Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Brit academic Kate Raworth is right at the beginning when she describes the dilemma of a well-born Chinese woman.

Yuan Wang arrived at Oxford University to study economics. Born in China and raised in Yorkshire... [she] was determined to make a difference in the world.

She thought that economics was the way to do it, but soon got "frustrated."

She found the theory -- and the maths used to prove it -- absurdly narrow in its assumptions.

See, that's the basic religious and cultural meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for the well-born youngster. They want to do something creative, to make a difference. I call it Activism Culture.

And that is the underlying agenda of Doughnut Economics. How can we activists deploy economics to make the world a safer and a juster place, given that the two big problems are the Ecological Ceiling of planetary pressure or a Social Foundation of human well-being?

Well, current macroeconomics does not represent a useful knowledge base for dealing with an Ecological Ceiling of planetary pressure or a Social Foundation of human well-being. Something new is needed, and it must not be based on the economics of old that just wanted to increase GDP. The economics of Paul Samuelson and his hydraulic Circular Flow diagram just isn't going to solve climate change or transition from exponential economic growth to a sustainable economy and society.

The big problem with Kate Raworth is that economics cannot tell humans what to do. It is only an analytical tool to help humans get an idea of what might happen if they change the economy in accordance with the demand of well-born activists. Let's look at the seven things she thinks economics should be about in the 21st century. And my critique.

Proposal	Raworth's Justification	My Opinion
Change the Goal from GDP	to the Doughnut	Any "Goal" is political or religious
See the Big Picture	beyond market to "embedded economy"	But this is no longer economics but the entirety of human knowledge
Nurture Human Nature	with socially adaptable humans	This is religion, changing humans' experience of life's meaning
Get Savvy With Systems	understand complexity	Good idea, and recognize that no government or globalist plan will understand complexity to the depth it needs to
Design to Distribute	create economy that is distributive by design	You mean double down on the welfare state? Economics can probably help you understand that this is doomed to failure
Create to Regenerate	recycling by another word	Well, yeah. If you work on externalities, the cost of our actions on other people, you can help
Be Agnostic About Growth	because it won't last forever	I think it is fair to believe that when growth tapers off, or even declines, today's and tomorrow's economics have No Idea what to do about it.

OK. How many of these seven things come within the purview of any economics? The point about economics is that it is an attempt to understand the market and human action in a market system. And one aspect of that is to understand how government action affects the market and the behavior of market participants. One of the conceits of economics is that it is "value free." Thus Hilary Putman and his The End of Value-Free Economics. But economics tries not to impose its values on human interactions; it just tries to understand them. But anybody at all serious about economics tends to realize that as soon as you start imposing your values on human interaction, by government or by church, you pretty soon experience negative economic impacts as people find it harder to live their ordinary day-to-day lives 

The bottom line about Doughnut Economics is that it is not really about economics. It is all about politics. That has been the faith of left-wing believers since at least Marx, that by political means it is possible to create a juster society. So the honest thing to do would have been to call the book Doughnut Politics: 7 Ways to Think Like a Lefty Activist. Or, if you like, Doughnut Activism: 7 Ways to Change the World.

Of course, politics is not really mentioned in Doughnut Economics, not as such. But when you imagine the human world as a doughnut with an Ecological Ceiling and a Social Foundation, and if you experience penetrating the Ecological Ceiling of planetary pressure as causing an "overshoot of pressure on Earth's life-giving systems", and if you experience a fall through the Social Foundation below as "a lack of life's essentials such as food, education and housing" there is an unsaid assumption that educated and caring people -- activists -- are called upon to do something about it. And how are they going to do it? Obviously, by their domination of the political, cultural and secular religious institutions of global society. They are going to tell the rest of us what to do, because they know.

Suppose Raworth is right, that we have to Do Something about climate change and lack of justice in food, education, and housing. But is there is one thing we know it is that top-down direction of the economy does not work. Then the question becomes: what do we do when the elite and activist supervision of things environmental and social falls short of the mark? For instance, just this week I read about a minor cock-up on the doughnut front. In western Europe there was a lack of wind in the North Sea last week, worst in 20 years. That meant that natural gas plants had to step in and generate electric power to make up for the power that the wind turbines weren't generating and that meant that natural gas prices went through the roof and that meant that fertilizer factories closed down and that meant that carbon dioxide supplies for the food industry were cut off and that meant that grocery stores may run out of food.

Golly who knew?

See that's the problem with our current global ruling class. They know, they know, that they are the smart ones, and they know, they know, that their solutions to the world problems are what it is going to make the world Build Back Better. And the best way they know is to change things with politics and government.

But that is not how the world works. The world is "one damn thing after another," as someone said. Economics is the study of just how, with one damn thing after another and the help of the price system and the individual efforts of millions of people, somehow humans manage to struggle on from day to day. And, in the last 200 years, increase real per capita income by 3,000 percent. It asks: how did that happen? Not because of wise, knowledgeable elites and academics but by anybodies with a new idea changing the world, and fixing mistakes on the way, mistakes that you and I never hear about.

Kate Raworth and her student Yuan Wang beg to differ. They have a better idea. Maybe they do. But what happens when there is a small glitch in the Matrix, the most windless week in the North Sea in 20 years? Well, then the market system and its pricing steps in. And you may not like the result.

Now, at the end of Doughnut Economics on page 258 Raworth has "Table 2. The ecological ceiling and its indicators of overshoot" including Climate Change,Ocean Acidification, Freshwater Withdrawals, and so on, as compiled by Steffen et al. "Planetary boundaries: guiding human development on a changing planet," an article in Science in 2015. For each indicator Steffen et al. have proposed a planetary boundary. For carbon dioxide it is "at most 350 ppm" and we are at 400 ppm and rising.

Well? Is rising CO2 a problem? Experts say it is. And anyone that disagrees, including retired experts, is stigmatized as a "science denier."

This, of course, is the way it has always been in human history until quite recently. Anyone that challenged the received wisdom, as promulgated by elite academics and soothsayers was stigmatized, and perhaps executed as a heretic, an evil opponent of the Truth.

Or, as Bryan Magee writes in Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper,

[A]ll, or almost all human societies of which we have knowledge seem to have an interpretation of the world which was articulated in some myth or religion, and in primitive societies any questioning of its truth is usually punished by death.

Obviously this approach to human society has not changed much. The method of Soviet Russia and Maoist China was to direct society from the top and to punish, often by death, those that objected.

But our era has thrived on an opposite idea, that Magee calls "the era of criticism." In this notion all theories, scientific, economic, and political, should be constantly tested and criticized. And out of the criticism we will discover and develop new theories that resolve the problems -- and there will be problems -- in the current theories.

Kat Raworth imagines that her Doughnut Economics is a critique of "neoliberal" economics that she represents as coming from the folks that formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. Maybe. Only I get the feeling that she has never read the books by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek and Co. Reading Doughnnut Economics I do not detect the least whisper that she knows anything except the mainstream economics that goes from the classical economists to Marshall to Keynes to Samuelson. Samuelson is the guy she goes after. Well, I never paid Samuelson no nevermind, because I think his macroeconomics misses the point. I experience western macroeconomics as a crude effort to help welfare-state politicians avoid crashing the economy, and not really providing an insight into the way that the capitalist economy works. So how do you like them apples?

Let's get back to the big issue, climate change, the basic justification for Raworth's Rule of the Experts.

For instance, the UN's IPCC has sponsored the development of dozens of computer climate models. All of them predict significant warming of the planet, year on year. But the models all "run hot." They have predicted higher temperatures that have transpired in the record.

So? Well, in Magee's notion and Karl Popper's notion, we now start to subject the models and their assumptions to rigorous critique and try to figure out why they have prophesied an increase in temperatures in excess of the actual record. Is it because they misunderstand the way the climate works? Is it because they can't simulate the intertropical convergence zone? Is it because the models aren't detailed enough? Who knows?

And anyway, is it a problem if temperatures increase? And how would we know? The temperature record shows that the Earth has been quite a bit warmer than the present, as recently as the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warming. On the other hand, the Earth is presently in an "interglacial" period in the middle of an Ice Age in which CO2 in the atmosphere has been down to 180 ppm. And scientists say that C3 photosynthesis stops at about 150 ppm, meaning all the plants die.

But let us assume that the scientists are right and that global temperatures are increasing and the reason is the increase in CO2 due to burning of fossil fuels. If we do nothing, what happens?

Well, what happens is that humans adapt to the new climate. We move grain agriculture northward. And if the deserts move northward from Africa into southern Europe we migrate northward. And if the sea level rises we move cities inland. Is it possible that we encounter a real crisis where millions of humans perish? Certainly. And there will be wars and rumors of wars and frightful outcomes. Kinda like things have ever been.

But what we do not know is if the outcome from doing nothing is worse than the option of letting our educated betters decide for us.

For instance, our betters tell us, on the one hand, that we are running out of fossil fuels, and on the other hand that fossil fuels are going to change the climate. Well, if fossil fuels run out, that will take care of that, right? No more warming from increased CO2. And it's not as if we don't have the knowledge and technology to create nuclear fission plants. And it is not as if we are probably close to effective nuclear fusion energy.

See, the problem with the whole Ecological Ceiling thing is cui bono. Who benefits? And the answer is that a climate crisis benefits people like Kate Raworth that seem to go from international conference to international conference advising corporate execs on the right and proper way to respect the Ecological Ceiling.

Just as the problem with the Social Foundation thing is also cui bono. "Doing something" about social problems, for the last century, has been all about politicians buying votes from the proposed beneficiaries of programs to prop up the Social Foundation. Because justice.

Now my particular prejudice is that I believe that politics and government and elite academic ukases are the wrong way to deal with almost everything. Carl Schmitt says politics is about friends vs. enemy, and killing the enemy if necessary. It is all the other things, from work and markets and social interaction and religion and culture that really make the human world go round.

So my question to the Kate Raworths of the world is: are you really sure that your doughnut model -- even if it is a sensible understanding of the human world -- can really be managed with politics? And do you think that the stigmatization of people that disagree with you as enemies, that is inevitable in politics, is going to solve anything?

I'm sure you have never thought about such question in such terms. Of course not, because nobody ever taught you to think like that.

And anyway, Carl Schmitt was a Nazi. So there.

What Does a Culture of Real Criticism Mean?

In yesterday's post on The Emergence of Criticism I discussed the utter novelty of a society in which criticism was genuinely tolerated.

Normal human society has one myth and one religion and if you don't agree you are a problem.

I interpret this not as a scandal but as a profound understanding of pre-scientific society. In other words, before humans had a developed system of understanding and predicting the common events of life, it was perfectly serviceable to have myths and legends and evil spirits to explain things. If you don't have Newtonian mechanics, what are you supposed to do in the matter of understanding and prediction?

But then, after humans have developed a serviceable system of mechanical prediction, what are we supposed to do about the myth and legend and evil spirits system that got us here for the previous 100,000 years, or however long humans have had conscious minds that could gussie up myths and legends and evil witches.

Obviously, we have to think about it.

Obviously, I would say, humans need a myth that explains the meaning of "life the universe, and everything" for the time being, and we always will.

But, it probably isn't a good idea to burn witches and heretics at the stake or send saboteurs and wreckers to concentration camps. Or imprison mostly peaceful protesters at the January 6 riots for six months while they await trial, or until they agree to cop a plea.

Yesterday I pondered Bryan Magee's idea that Marxism makes complete sense, because the idea of a world in which everything is not tied down by a saving myth -- as proposed for the Era of Criticism -- is too terrifying to contemplate.

Now, our Founding Fathers imagined a cunning solution to this problem, for their time, with the separation of church and state. In that way, in the United States of the time, no one Christian sect could make itself the state church. Of course, when it came to the Irish Catholics in the mid 19th century the political punks of the time -- I mean you Horace Mann -- decided to do an end run around the Catholics with gubmint common schools that would use the Protestant Bible. But God said to the Irish, "first build the school, then the church," and it was so, and the Irish nuns ran the best schools in the nation for the next century.

In our day the end-run Horace Manns are the lefty activists that are too stupid to understand that their activism and their cancel culture amount to an establishment of wokey religion: worse, a combination of religion and politics that we have learned to call totalitarianism, and as such a very present danger to the Republic and in simple terms a monstrous and evil injustice perpetrated on all Americans that don't worship at the church of Woke.

And the worst thing of all is that the wokeys have No Idea. They have No Idea that their activism is really a religion. And they have no idea that politics leads directly to injustice, do not pass Go. And they have No Idea that the conjunction of their activist politics and government is totalitarianism, straight up. No Idea.

I think that the answer lies somewhere close to elevating the Culture of Criticism to a Holy Writ. It is interesting, of course, that our lefty friends believe that their Critical Race Theory does just that.

It is comical, really, that in fact the lefty implementation of critical theory in fact does the opposite, and far from being a genuine critique of the ruling class and the ruling narrative is is fact a cunning way of bullying all narratives critical of our present ruling class out of the public square.

But here's the thing. The point of Popper's notion of falsification and the notion of knowledge -- beginning with a problem that requires the imagining of new theories and their testing and probable falsification -- is that in the modern world the path of the single myth and narrative fails every time it is tried, Joey S, and Mao Z.D.

The only way to avoid disaster and killing fields and utter failure is to abandon the Single Narrative notion and let a thousand ideas bloom, and set forth the idea that the only way forward is by trying things out and correcting the errors and then doing the whole thing over again.

And that means the end of political supremacy and cancel culture and "disinformation" findings and naming and shaming and shunning, and marches through the institutions and faculties that are 95 percent liberal and silly woke girls in publishing houses deciding not to publish "controversial" authors.

Not because it is wrong, but because, you silly ignorant liberals, it will end up in disaster for you and your ideas.

Why do you fools and knaves not get this?

It seems to me that the key to all this is that Americans be taught to believe that wokism is a religion. And that wokeys be put on the rack until they agree that their beliefs are a religion, and as such must not be established in the government as a state religion.

So let's do it.

Karl Popper: The Emergence of Criticism

Karl Popper is famous for his notion of falsifiability. La Wik:

Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments.

Or, as my guy F.S.C. Northrop wrote: "knowledge begins with a problem," or when existing theory doesn't work in a particular situation. In his Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper Bryan Magee explains things thusly.

The old model of scientific method was:

1, observation and experiment; 2, inductive generalization; 3, hypothesis; 4, attempted verification of hypothesis; 5, proof or disproof; 6, knowledge.

According to Popper, it goes like this:

1, problem...; 2, proposed solution, in other words a new theory; 3, deduction of testable propositions from the new theory; 4, tests... observation and experiment; 5, preference established between competing theories.

Actually, I describe the process a little differently, as 

1. Problem with the old theory;
2. propose a new theory;
3. Make predictions;
4. Survive attacks on new theory. 

Until a new problem emerges. And it will. And I think that my description of the problem is better than Magee's. Maybe you have a better idea.

But then Magee goes on to say how radical this new approach is, not just in science, but in life. He calls it "the emergence of criticism."

[A]ll, or almost all human societies of which we have knowledge seem to have an interpretation of the world which was articulated in some myth or religion, and in primitive societies any questioning of its truth is usually punished by death.

There is One Truth, and you'd better not mess with it, peasant. 

But let us be fair. There was a very good reason for that in the days Before Science. Supposed you, Farmer Joe, changed the routine of farming that had successfully brought food for the table to your household. What's the odds that your brilliant idea is wrong, and your family starves?

We can see how this works in the recent COVID experience. The government and its bureaucrats decree what is going on and what to do about it. Any disagreement is banned by the media as "disinformation."

Nothing new here.

But we live in a critical age. Magee:

Popper believes that... the first schools to not only permit criticism but encourage and welcome it were those of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece... This spelt the end of the dogmatic tradition of passing on an unsullied truth, and the beginning of a new rational tradition of subjecting speculations to critical discussion.

In the old days, if society had a wrong theory, the whole society would die. Under the new dispensation, where criticism of existing theory is permitted, the wrong theory dies instead of society.

It is important to understand how radical this is: to allow heretics and intellectual rebels to argue their point. Humans are not programmed that way. We want to believe in the truth of our religion and our way of life, and it is extremely frightening to allow an open discussion of competing ideas. 

So Popper explains the emergence of Marxism. Marxism is a religion that pretends to be scientific and to predict, with scientific precision, that society will trend towards a perfect world because Marx claims to have discovered the "Natural Laws of capitalist production...  [and to] lay bare the Economic Law of Motion of modern society." You could call it the last stand of Newtonian mechanics.

It is natural, Magee says, for the modern "emergence of criticism" to inspire an opposite faith, in the One True Marxism. That's because the responsibility of searching out the best path to the future is terrifying, and most of us would rather leave the heavy lifting to the priests and the politicians.

Only, of course, if we leave everything to the priests and politicians, then when they are wrong we will all die. Hey Mao! How yer doin' pal?

Popper argues that the culture of criticism requires that we go forward piecemeal. We discover a problem, we propose a solution, we find it works, sort of, but not quite, so we admit our error and revise the solution. It's all very messy, and we humans don't like mess.

Indeed, I argue, the problem with churches and governments and hierarchies is that the leader is not allowed to admit a mistake. In the recent retreat from Afghanistan you can see this operating. President Biden cannot admit that his plan to withdraw was an absolute clown show.

It's not just that Biden made mistakes; the point is that social leaders down the ages have never been able to admit mistakes. The problem is nicely illustrated in the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven. If things start going wrong in China it is a sign that the emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven, and that means the end of the dynasty.

That is the old world.

But in the new world we accept that things are going wrong all the time, that we will be butting up against the limit of our knowledge all the time. But that's OK. It's not the end of the world. In the new order we try to figure out what went wrong and come up with a better idea, and try it out.

In a way, the Apollo 13 disaster shows us the modern can-do spirit in action. Two days into the flight in 1970 an oxygen tank in the Service Module failed, and this meant that there wasn't enough oxygen to sustain the crew in the Command Module. What happened next is that a team back on Earth went into a room with all the equipment available on the spacecraft and figured out how to jury-rig life-support for the crew long enough for them to return to Earth.

In other words, "Houston We Have A Problem" is the very essence on the modern culture of criticism and adaptation. We something goes wrong we don't all start pointing fingers at each other. Instead we figure out a way to solve the problem, and when anyone comes up with an idea, we test it to see if it will work.

Tell that to the politicians and activists.

There's a piece in Unherd today that acts as a corrollary to this. "Life is one big status game" is about how people always listen to socially dominant people, and how people are always taking advantage of social dominance to beat up the peasants with virtue-signaling. This is Old World.

New World is that techy nerds are out there in Nowheresville thinking up whacky ideas, and that every now and again one of them comes up with a whacky idea that works.

New World is adapting to climate change rather than completely changing energy use in accordance with a grand plan of Building Back Better from the rich guys in the World Economic Forum.

New World is ten thousand different schools trying out how to educate kids, rather than slavishly following the latest One Size Fits All No Child Left Behind ukase from on high.

Against Kimball: Science Advances by Breaking the Rules

Everybody says that they are in favor of logic and reason: St. Thomas Aquinas; the rational Enlightenment; conservatives. Even radical lefties say that modern capitalism and liberalism is all a lie because the truth is that capitalism and liberalism are all about oppression.

Now comes Roger Kimball with a piece in American Greatness on "Science!" He starts with statement that the two great scientific fraudsters, "the egregious Michael “hockey stick” Mann and St. Anthony “mask theater” Fauci, have recently received gratifying comeuppances." About which we can all agree. But then he starts attacking all my favorite guys:

[Paul] Feyerabend maintained that science is no more cognitively privileged than (for example) astrology, voodoo, or necromancy. The “only one principle that can be defended,” he wrote in Against Method, “. . . is anything goes.”

[Thomas Kuhn.] According to Kuhn, [in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,] scientific truth is “paradigm relative.” For example, what was considered true under the Ptolemaic view of the solar system differs from what we, having read Copernicus, believe. 

[Karl] Popper’s 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery made the curious argument that the distinguishing mark of a scientific theory was not (as everyone used to think) that it was verifiable by empirical evidence. On the contrary, Popper argued that a theory was scientific to the extent that it was “falsifiable.” 

Well, I think all three are right and Roger Kimball is wrong.

Feyerabend: The point here is that the record of the last century or so is that a new theory always busts up the assumptions of the reigning methodology. Maybe just a little, maybe a whole lot. Newton was based on absolute space and time; Einstein said that space and time are relative.

Kuhn: His argument is that the reigning princes of science will always defend the old ways. Only when the old generation dies off can a new "paradigm" get a foothold.  Of course this applies to everything. The current 80-year-old princes of the Democratic Party are about to retire and the Dems will only then complete their paradigm shift to lefty wokism.

Popper: The point of "falsification" is that if your theory explains everything it isn't useful. Climate change is an example. Everything that happens, from extreme weather to hurricane frequency, is said to demand that we stop using fossil fuels. Genuine science makes predictions upon which the theory stands or falls. The famous example of the 1919 confirmations of General Relativity is an example, including the "Perihelion precession of Mercury" -- which could not happen according to Newtonian theory -- and the "Deflection of light by the Sun" of a star that was close to the Sun during a solar eclipse. If these experiments "falsified" Einstein's equations instead of confirming them, it would have been "back to the drawing board."

The point that these three scientists are making is that every scientific theory is a stitch-up, good enough for government work. But once you start trying to apply it to more and more situations, then you are likely to find that, at some point, it doesn't work. The most obvious case is Newton's mechanics. It works at Earth scale. But when you get out into the universe, then it doesn't predict close enough.

And when scientists have to explain their anomalous results with things like "dark matter" and "dark energy" that is a "tell" that "Houston we have a problem." Nothing shameful about that: happens all the time. Here is an article that proposes that the "dark matter" explanation arose because scientists used Newtonian gravitation instead of relativity to model the behavior of galaxies. (Waat? Really?)

Now, my belief is that to understand what is going on here you need to understand the German Turn in philosophy and knowledge -- and Feyerabend and Popper were both born Austrians. Kuhn? He was Jewish American with a German name.

I have a lot to say about the German Turn, but it starts with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a Prussian. He wrote that we cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances. When we humans experience light hitting our eyes we process and interpret that light in our brains, and out of that processing we create an image of the world we are seeing.

For instance, I am sitting at a table. Hey, what more do I need to say? Well, if I wanted to construct a table, then I need to know more about the construction of tables, about materials, about tools, and so on. And if I were to use metals in my construction I would have to learn about the mining and smelting of metals. Behind what George Lakoff calls a "basic level" object hides an infinity of possibilities.

My argument is that Kant's theory of things-in-themselves and appearances set off the German Turn that leads directly, do not pass go, to relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are ridiculous at a "basic level."

So, whatever you believe, I suggest that you take the notions of Feyerabend and Kuhn and Popper, and ponder them in your heart.

Now, we conservatives and nationalists tend to ridicule the left and its "critical theory." Writes Andy Ngo in Unmasked, "Have you heard it argued that there is no such thing as objective reality and truth?" But the critique of objective reality and truth doesn't just come from Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. Kant's masterwork was titled "A Critique of Pure Reason."

My point is that if we want to own the future and banish lefty rubbish from the face of the Earth "we" need to understand "critical theory" from Kant to Kuhn and then go beyond it. That's Sun Tzu: To beat your enemy you must first understand him.

And this begins with admitting that there is no such thing as "objective reality." All realities are constructed, in our minds.

Suppose the Wildfires in California Are Not Due To Climate Change

Up here in Seattle we have smoky haze this morning, resulting from the California wildfires. According to the science, the wildfires are a consequence of global warming. Says former President Obama.

The fires across the West Coast are just the latest examples of the very real ways our changing climate is changing our communities. Protecting our planet is on the ballot. Vote like your life depends on it—because it does. pic.twitter.com/gKGegXWxQu

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 10, 2020

Yes. And here is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

“Mother Earth is angry,” the San Francisco Democrat said during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC. “She’s telling us -- whether she’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is … that the climate crisis is real and has an impact.”

Notice how the Catholic Pelosi uses religious language -- actually pre-Christian religious language -- to make her point.

Of course, climate deniers like this nobody say that the California wildfires are due to the environmentalists. 

I live here. Have a seat and learn something, sir. In the state of California the environmentalist lobby sets policy. Controlled burns? Bad for air. Logging to reduce forest density? Bad for the owls. Focus on replacing ancient transmission lines? Nah, we're building wind farms.

So who are you going to believe? The former President of the United States backed by the scientists or a nobody?

And, if you are a climate denier, that still doesn't believe, no matter what a former President of the United States says, what do you do about it? Particularly when all the best scientists agree with the former President of the United States.

I guess there are two available strategies.

The first strategy is to appeal to peoples' selfish interests. If you are campaigning in Pennsylvania, which has benefited enormously from the fracking revolution, you say that the Green New Deal will cost Pennsylvania jobs.

This is, after all, the strategy of the anti-capitalists for the last 150 years. Doesn't matter that the economics says that capitalism is great, that real per-capita income is up by 30 times in 200 years. When a factory closes down or a CEO makes a fortune, a Robert Reich will show up to blame "robber barons." And it works.

But pro-Green New Deal Joe Biden goes to Pennsylvania and declares that he won't ban fracking. Yep, and I gotta bridge to sell you.

The second strategy is to capitalize on failures of prophecy. Science is science: it is merely a technique for trying to understand how the world works. It has achieved amazing results, particularly in the last 500 years, particularly in the last century. But whenever science makes predictions about the future, it is still prophecy, just as in the old days. That is because science is not the final word on how the universe works; it is just the latest human attempt to figure out what is going on. Thus Kant: we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances. 

Only, modern science is a lot better at predictions than the old methods of divination and examination of intestines. Still, weather forecasting, despite the biggest computers in the business, is still a pretty chancy affair. So is hurricane prediction. So is stock-market prediction. So is climate modeling.

Ultimately a failure of prophecy is what will kill off the climate change religion. But not yet. For the climate-change enthusiasts have cunningly arranged that just about everything is a confirmation of climate change.

And it doesn't matter that Karl Popper declared that science isn't science unless it opens itself to "falsification." He meant that if everything is interpreted as confirmation of your theory you do not have science, you have prophecy.

The way real science works is the confirmation of general relativity in 1919 by Sir Arthur Eddington. Einstein's relativity predicted that light passing close to a heavy body like the sun would be slightly bent. Because space is curved by gravitation. And it was.

So, using the bones and the entrails of general relativity math, Einstein prophesied that light from a star would be bent as it grazed the surface of our Sun. And he was right.

The best way to understand prophecy is the helpful book When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. It's about a UFO cult in the late 1940s predicting that a UFO would come and rescue them before the Earth was destroyed. It didn't, and the Earth was not destroyed. Oops.

But a cult doesn't collapse the day after the predicted end-of-the-world. It takes a while. So even if the global temperatures stop increasing -- say, due to a new grand solar minimum -- it won't change minds, not right away. But a while after the failure of prophecy, the cult starts to break up, to make room for the next great prophetic cult.

Meanwhile, you can blame electrical blackouts on climate crazies. You can blame soaring electrical rates on climate activists. You can resist restrictions on automobile use. You can let billion-dollar light-rail projects wither on the vine. And you can vote against politicians that want to raise your taxes and kill your job.

What you cannot expect to do is discredit the ruling-class narrative. Not yet.

What Does Soros Want?

Over a century ago, it was Oscar Wilde (no, Freud) who worried about "what do women want." Now, the question is what does billionaire speculator George Soros want? And why?

I've been thinking about this for a while, and was prompted to focus my mind on it over the weekend when I read a piece about Soros and his Open Society operation: "Mapping the Open Society Network on Soros’s 90th Birthday." Hayden Ludwig dismisses Soros thusly:

Each group in the Soros Network is a cog in the larger “open society” machine, so named for Soros’s affinity for the philosophy of the communist-turned-lefty-libertarian Karl Popper, Soros’s professor and personal mentor during the young man’s time at the London School of Economics...

Their vision of an open society is globalist and utopian, rejecting both objective truth and established tradition in favor of technocracy: rule by the “experts.” The net result is open borders, supranational governments such as the European Union, enforced secularism, and dissolution of the U.S. Constitution by a new American Revolution designed by plutocrats to wipe away the republic and replace it with socially engineered tyranny.

OK, I decided, let's check out Karl Popper and George Soros and try to understand them. I have several of Popper's books and my rough feeling is that Popper isn't quite as eager to pull down the USA as George Soros. 

But there is this. Both Popper (b.1902) and Soros (b.1930) are assimilated educated Jews from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These folks all tend to be anti-nationalists and supra-nationalists. Like Stefan Zweig (b. 1881) in The World of Yesterday, they believe in Europe. It makes sense, of course, especially when you consider the opposing view of Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that ethnic Germans were getting the shaft in multi-cultural Austria-Hungary before World War I. The supra-national Austro-Hungarian Empire worked well for assimilated Jews, until it didn't.

You can see this attitude working out in Soros's equivocal attitude to Israel. His Jewishness wants to support it, but his anti-nationalism wants to deplore it. So he kinda sits on the fence.

I've always been a bit flummoxed about Soros and his anti-nationalism because I didn't read Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies as an indictment of the nation state, but as a broadside against totalitarianism from Plato to Marx and Marxist historicism, that "history unfolds inexorably according to universal laws." Popper believes in the transition from

the magical or tribal or collectivist society [that] will also be called the closed society, [to] the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.

So he believes in the opposition between magical thinking and logic and reason. But, of course, so do Plato and Hegel and Marx.

And I'm sure so does George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. But then, you might ask, why does the Open Society Foundation support the "trained Marxists" of Black Lives Matter?

I suppose because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." If Soros experiences nationalism as the enemy, then the Marxist enemies of the nation state are his friends.

Yes, but can't Soros see that the trained Marxists are just taking him and his money for a ride? It's a good question. I answer it by invoking my idiot theory of conspiracy. Don't think that there is a dark conspiracy out there that is cunningly planning the destruction of all we hold dear. The conspirators are probably bumbling idiots; they imagine themselves a lot smarter than they really are. I suspect that Soros, like the rest of us, has not really thought through exactly what he wants, and is reluctant to change his plans in the light of mistakes and new information. Plus, the guy is 90. His sons, that are already in charge of the Soros empire, seem to be ordinary woke members of the educated Gentry.

It comes down to this. Soros, like many of his generation in the educated Gentry, thinks that nationalism is the foundation of all our miseries. For him, the lesson of World War II is "never again." And I get it, for central European Jews like him, that the nation state is problematic.

How about another idea? The rule of the educated supra-national Gentry is problematic? That, to me, is the meaning of the populist nationalism of which we've heard tell. It is saying: hey wokies: you may think that you chaps are the first and the last in human wisdom and ordained by Gaia to bend the arc of history towards justice, and you may be right. But meanwhile, we Commoners think we are getting screwed.

See, what is going on right now is that the educated Gentry is just dismissing the critics of its rule as far-right, or white nationalist, or systemic racist, or whatever pejorative comes to mind. You can see this in its Three Layer theory of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." Who says that the "allies" really have the interests of the "oppressed peoples" at heart? Oh, the "allies" say that. Could it not be that the "allies" are interested, first of all, in their power and status and vanity? Just sayin'.

And that's the problem with George Soros. He's concocted this Open Society notion from his understanding of Karl Popper. But suppose that his understanding of Popper is mistaken and that his notions would lead to a closed society of lefty neo-tribalism and magical thinking? How would we know? How would he know?

Is all the "mostly peaceful protesting" and liberal prosecutors that Soros is funding going to lead to the political destruction of Donald Trump and systemic racism? Is the current Thing about mail-in voting and protests at the home of the Postmaster General really going to advance the Democratic cause? Or will it inspire a counter-movement?

Does George Soros really know what he is doing? Does Nancy Pelosi? Does anyone?

I'm reading Desperate Sons by Les Standiford about the Sons of Liberty in the ten years leading up to the American Revolution. It suggests to me that the opposition to British rule was deeper and wider than I had previously understood. One of my takeaways is that the Brits in London -- that were passing Stamp Acts and Quartering Acts and banking laws that resulted in severe deflation in the colonies -- really had no clue about what was going down in the colonies.

Same thing applies to George Soros and our global elite. They know they are the good guys, the evolved and educated guys, but they really do not know what is going down on the ground. They do not know whether their policies help or hurt. They just know that they are the good guys, so shut up, peasant.

Ch2a: The Emptiness of Supporting Political Causes

In his "Gray Mirror" Curtis Yarvin argues against political involvement, because all political action ends up supporting the regime. In "#2a: positive causes are vain and unaccountable" he argues against  the nuts and bolts of pro-regime politics.

Let's put the three points down in order. Yarvin says that "[P]ositive causes that become popular tend to be" 

1. unaccountable (not selected for plausibility), 
2. vain (selected for creating a sense of power and importance), and 
3. sycophantic (reinforcing the regime).

Obviously, the nearest-to-hand example of this is climate change. For instance, if global warming is a problem we might fix it with "global carbon emissions control" at a cost of $50 trillion versus a program of "geo-engineering" that would cost $50 billion. Obviously, global carbon emissions control wins in a landslide because it is "elegant... expensive... and more popular" than a boring old cloud-seeding program.

And nobody would know if the program would work, anyway. But the attraction of carbon control is clear.

Obviously, when you say we should emit less carbon, what you objectively mean is that you support power in forcing everyone to emit less carbon.

Clearly, the attraction of climate change policy is that it is a fantastic ego trip, just like a big war. Wow! Imagine converting the whole economy to fighting carbon! It's almost as cool as FDR sending the Greatest Generation all across the world to fight Nazis and Japs.

And, of course, such a program is unaccountable. A better word would be to use Karl Popper's notion of a good scientific theory being "falsifiable." Climate change politics fails this test; it is unfalsifiable. It only asks you to believe. This would be rather like blaming witches because the milk turns sour. And suppose you kill half the women in the nation as witches and the milk is still sour? When do you decide that your politics isn't solving the problem?

Or, maybe higher temperatures are a good thing: "higher agricultural yields; better weather up north; insurance against the next ice age…" But really, where is the excitement in "higher agricultural yields." Who is going to peacefully protest for "higher agricultural yields?"

I'd say that all political causes are unaccountable, and that's probably the best argument for limited government. We are always being asked to buy a pig in a poke. Which form of government is best? Which program will work? Doesn't matter what it is, the advocates will continue to argue for it forever and the opponents will argue against it forever, and there will never be true evaluation of its benefits. Or,

As I write, exuberant volunteers are trashing historical monuments (X) to help protect the underclass (Y).

What could go wrong?

And we should be unsurprised, when we see these complex chains between X and Y, to find that X also has some more immediate effect Z—which expresses power. Z often involves punishing, humiliating, or otherwise chastising the enemies of the regime.

Yep. That is always the funnest part of politics. Chastising the enemies of the regime. Until the shoe is on the other foot, of course.

And that's the problem with a guy like me. I really don't want to teach those nice liberal ladies up the street a lesson. OK, I might like to show them how the statement "Science is Real" shows a lamentable ignorance about science.

But if everything comes down in the end to punishing the enemies of the regime, then ordinary people might wonder what use the regime is to them. I mean, if you are not into punishing, either on the front end or the back end, what is the point of politics and the power of the regime?

Maybe the best in life is to go off into a corner and invent a fusion-powered spaceship to fly to Mars. That wouldn't be unaccountable, because it would either work or not; it wouldn't be vain -- well, just a little bit; and it wouldn't be sycophantic to the regime -- why it might help people escape the regime. 

Geroge Soros Doesn't Get It

George Soros is a remarkable man, a Hungarian Jew that escaped the gas chambers of Hitler's Germany and then lived to become a wealthy speculator and a follower of Karl Popper and his idea of an Open Society.

And so he has spent tons of money over the years promoting what he believes to be the idea of the Open Society.

Now he has written a kind of manifesto, telling us what he thinks, and why, and what has gone wrong and what needs to be done. Here is the center of his political system.

I distinguished between two kinds of political regimes: those in which people elected their leaders, who were then supposed to look after the interests of the electorate, and others where the rulers sought to manipulate their subjects to serve the rulers’ interests. Under Popper’s influence, I called the first kind of society open, the second, closed.

OK, he writes, that is too simplistic. But when the EU was founded he supported it.

Which means that George Soros supports the idea of an unaccountable elite whose rulers could seek "to manipulate their subject to serve the rulers' interests." Which is what the EU elite has done.

Just a thought, George. I would say that an open society is one in which -- never mind how it is elected -- the government is limited and the intellectual elite labors night and day to create a national culture that marginalizes the eternal yearning in everyone to live at the expense of others, through government free stuff.

And now Germany has become the hegemon of Europe, and is doing a bad job at it, according to Soros. Meanwhile the whole of Europe is coming under the influence of Vladimir Putin, "whose concept of government is irreconcilable with that of open society." Writes Soros:

I hope that Europe’s leaders and citizens alike will realize that this endangers their way of life and the values on which the EU was founded.

And of course, Donald Trump is a real problem. Under him, "the US will be preoccupied with internal struggles in the near future, and targeted minorities will suffer."

So now we know why Soros is anti-nationalist and pro Black Lives Matter, as I wrote in the American Thinker. He's all worrited about "targeted minorities." You mean like the white working class, George, marginalized since the 1970s by liberals like Norman Lear in his All in the Family?

The fact is that George Soros is a man of his time and class, and bows to the false gods of the global elite, just like an Obama or a Kerry. His idea, like the rest of his buddies, is that a wise, evolved elite will rule the world as a kind of transnational cabal.

But the truth is that government, all government, is a shambles. Above all, politics and government are a problem because they attract people that are interested in power and the use of force.

But the notion of social animals, and humans as social animals, is how to limit force and its destruction. How do you slow down the chaps and the chapettes that are interested in power? How do you arrange institutions so that people are encouraged to serve their fellows with products and services rather than guns and bullets?

The overarching fact of the last century or so is that rich kids all over have fallen for the notion that the peace of the world depends on people like them getting political power to fight against the bourgeoisie and lead the marginalized into safe channels by bending the arc of history towards justice. And they have made the biggest mess of things ever every time they have been given that power.

George Soros is, no doubt, a clever man, and a successful speculator. But when it comes to government and politics he is a fool, blinded by the ruling-class shibboleths of the age.

He just doesn't get it.