Axis of Evil: Laugh Riot — If the Axis of Evil held an Olympics of self-satire, North Korea would sweep the gold. At the official North Korean website, one can read side-splittingly banal anecdotes about Kim Jong Il, such as this inspiring gem:

It happened when the president gave field guidance to Kaesong area on September 14, Juche 61 (1972). He asked officials there what was the special food of the area.

And he made sure that a new restaurant was built there to serve only loach soup to the customers.

Gripping!

And don’t miss these breaking stories!

Poultry Makes Rapid Progress in DPRK

Books on Kim Jong Il’s greatness off the press

“Comrade Kim Jong Il, The Great Leader Of The Juche-Oriented Revolutionary Cause” (five volumes), a library comprehensively dealing with his greatness, on the occasion of his birthday.

It’s easy to laugh in the face of evil when you just can’t help it!

Now I Can Die — Message from Kathy Kinsley in the comments beneath the picture below:

I hereby declare you an honorary Bellicose Woman ™

I’m honored beyond the bounds of speech. Now if I could only honorarily date myself.

Picturing the Blogosphere — The photo frenzy over at Samizdata inspired me to search my archives for a picture of myself wearing camouflage, shooting automatic weapons, releasing a falcon, or something equally manful. I came up empty handed. Instead, I offer myself at seventeen years wearing a dress and wig in the classic drag farce, Charlie’s Aunt. Real men wear upholstery.

Best American Example of Enlightenment? — I was delighted to discover that this Yahoo! search phrase offers up, yes, The Fly Bottle!

Perry… So Very — Patriotic! Samizdata’s Perry de Havilland has some great thoughts on the meaning of patriotism for those of us with little allegiance to the notion of citizenship or the nation state. Recommended!

Blogger Pro — I’ve upgraded to the new Blogger Pro, not because I really need it, but because it only seems fair to shoot a little money Ev’s way for providing such a great free service for so long, and to keep this thing chugging. One new Blogger Pro function is the ability to send posts via email. Thus, I’ve created a YahooGroups list for those who’d like to get Fly Bottle posts in their Inbox. Send an email here to sign up.

Nozick vs. Friedman: Apocryphal? — I just got this message from David Friedman that casts doubt on my secondhand story in the Nozick piece below:

“A philosopher friend once related a story of Nozick’s one-upping David Friedman in a discussion first of philosophy, then of economics, and finally of particle physics. ”

David Friedman:

It isn’t impossible, but I don’t remember any such conversation. The only public exchange I can remember with Nozick was at an LP convention in New York, where I gave a talk on his book, he was in the audience, and we had an exchange after the talk. Interestingly enough, he didn’t try to defend the argument against anarchism that he gave in his book, but instead fell back on the (I think stronger) argument that if a-c was really workable, we would expect to see some examples.

Robert Nozick, R.I.P. — I’ve just heard that Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick, died this morning. It’s strange… I recently finished Nozick’s new book Invariances, and I was blown away, once again, by the depth and suppleness of Nozick’s intelligence. I was meaning to plump for Nozick as role-model, both political and epistemological, far superior to Popper. Yet, sadly, I didn’t get around to it. Let me try to correct that, at least a little.

Nozick was one of the most talented philosophers of the past half-century, making significant contributions to every major area of philosophy. However, to libertarians, Nozick was a giant. His first book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia , is universally considered a classic of 20th Century philosophy, and it inserted libertarianism, to the chagrin of the establishment, into the “conversation” as a serious intellectual position demanding respect and careful consideration. (Those who’d like a bit more info about Nozick, and some links to related sites, try this page I wrote for my employer.)

Nozick is one of my heroes. Not just because he was a libertarian of incredible intelligence (several of the smartest men I know have said that Nozick was the smartest man they ever met), but because he was singular in his intellectual independence and creativity. Nozick, true to his libertarian soul, espoused a “non-coercive” philsophic method that sought to open up new vistas of the intellect rather than craft airtight, drop dead arguments — arguments that tend to be sophistical in any case. Nozick was interested in everything, but you can’t accuse him of being a dilettante, because his knowledge of his varied subjects was profound. A philosopher friend once related a story of Nozick’s one-upping David Friedman in a discussion first of philosophy, then of economics, and finally of particle physics. This is no mean feat, David Friedman being the son of Milton, an economics professor, and a University of Chicago physics Ph.D.

Nozick’s books are odd in they way they range over subject matters, explore intriguing possibilities, raise profound questions and then leave them in the reader’s lap, unanswered. He never quite fits into existing “conversations” because his questions are very often his own, and he slips in and out of the philosophy literature as it suits his interests. Thus, his work never suffers from the clubbish, insular feel of so much Anglophone philosophy. The impression is one of a man who has an intense (even “burning”) curiousity about the way the world works, almost entirely innocent of preconceptions about the way the inquiry should turn out. That is to say, Nozick was a philosopher, in the very best sense of the word. May his work, and his example, live on.

The Frigging Enlightenment — Conservatives take a “chinese menu” attitude toward the Enlightment, picking up threads they deem properly sanctified by heaven and history, while leaving out some of the best parts — like men’s clubs that celebrated the liberating power of regular wanking, as this Guardian review reveals.

Best line:

Forward- looking proponents of commerce, members seem to have been enthusiasts for both free trade and free love. A prize possession was a snuffbox donated by honorary member George IV containing pubic hair from one of his mistresses.

Who wants to start a club? Let us now praise Enlightenment men!

Robert Altman: Idiotarian — From a piece in The Times, reprinted on FoxNews, director Robert Altman makes a major bid to join the leagues of the fluorescently stupid:

I am a political person,” Altman says, “but I don’t have to put a strong debate into a film. This present government in America I just find disgusting, the idea that George Bush could run a baseball team successfully; he can’t even speak! I just find him an embarrassment. I was over here when the election was on and I couldn’t believe it; and I’m 76 years old. Then when the Supreme Court came in and turned out to be a totally political animal, the last shred of any naivety that was left in me has gone. When I see an American flag flying, it’s a joke.”

I’m not enthusiastic about Bush, but Altman’s implicit identification of intelligence with verbality is inane. Literary folk surround themselves with a like kind, and within this peculiar tribe linguistic virtuosity is the sine qua non of intellect. If you don’t say things like, um… “sine qua non,” then you’re a bumbling dolt, like Bush.

Growing up in Iowa, you meet lots of men who are spectacularly competent, if not rousing orators. I’m not that kind of guy, I’m all fancy talk and no competence. But I admire that kind of guy. They know how to do things that utterly mystify me, like fixing tractors and feeding the world. Although he can’t fix tractors, Bush is that kind of guy. He knows how to make things work. The fact that he sometimes sounds like a small town businessman firing up the Rotary Club is both a strength and a weakness. Ordinary folk can genuinely identify with him, because he talks like ordinary folk (despite his chi chi pedigree.) But he’s an embarrassment to guys like Altman. And that’s a genuine weakness because the opinion makers are so often condescending assholes, like Altman. Yet I don’t doubt that Bush holds the reins in his administration, or that he know what to do with them.

Now, the American flag… If it stood for the executive and judicial branches of the government, then Altman might be approaching outlying areas of intelligibility. But it doesn’t. It stands for America — an idea and a people. “When I see an American flag flying, it’s a joke.” Like freedom and the people who love it are a joke. Who’s the embarrassment?

Then, this:

An enraged Altman suddenly checks himself, aware that he is on sensitive ground in our post-September 11 world. But, controversially, he thinks that Hollywood may have inspired the World Trade Center attacks. “We gave them the ideas: it was a movie,” he fumes. “We should be ashamed of ourselves.”

The filmmaker’s wet dream: all ideas and originate in the movies, and people are puppets manipulated by those ideas. Altman’s an idiot. He should be ashamed of himself.

The Far Left in A Nutshell — The antiglobalization postmodernist left is easy to understand if you see the position as a way to bring the following unstable convictions into equilibrium.

Old Left:

(1) Logic, reason and evidence (science) is good.
(2) Progress is good.
(3) Socialism is supported by logic, reason and evidence (it’s scientific!).
(4) Socialism is good.
(5) Capitalism is evil.

Together with Unavoidable Data:

– Socialism is undermined by logic, reason and evidence (see Mises, Hayek, history).
– Capitalism leads to progress, while socialism hinders it.

Leaves these options for the leftist:

(a) Reject (3), (4), and (5).
(b) Reject (1), (2) and (3).

The PoMo left takes option (b), rejecting logic, reason and evidence (it’s an oppressive, patriarchal, capitalistic construct, etc.) and rejecting the desirability of progress (let’s have “sustainable” stasis instead.) Further, they must abandon the claim that socialism has rational support. Thus you get:

PoMo Left:

(1′) Logic, reason and evidence (science) is a myth.
(2′) Progress is destructive.
(3′) Socialism is supported by ????.
(4′) Socialism is good.
(5′) Capitalism is evil.

But clearly, (b) is the much more desperate option. What about (3′)? Having dispensed with rational grounds for support, how can one argue that this bundle of convictions isn’t just arbitrary? Well, you can’t. And, strangely, it seems that original impetus to support socialism came from a more or less earnest belief in the desirability of material progress. Giving up on the desirability of progress is like setting one’s heart on driving to Miami, discovering that one has gotten on the wrong road, and therefore deciding that Miami’s a lousy place to go. You’d think you’d just switch roads. Why did people do this?

My hypothesis:

The earnest, progress-loving left came to identify support for socialism and rancor against capitalism as the criterion for personal virtue. So people in this coalition built their identity around this attitude, took pride in themselves as moral, and identified as immoral outsiders people who supported capitalism. When the case for socialism collapsed, coalition members were faced with a crisis. First, their sense of identity and virtue was threatened. It is hard enough to admit that you were wrong when you thought you were right. It’s really, really hard to admit that you were in fact bad when you thought you were good. Second, if one were to change one’s mind about socialism, then one would lose one’s network of social support, and that’s frightening. So, anything that allowed the maintenance of one’s sense of virtue, and one’s belonging in the virtuous community, was welcomed — although from the outside, it appears ridiculous and desperate.

This suggests that the views of the PoMo left won’t really stick to generations that came up after the theoretical and historical collapse of socialism — even though the PoMo left is largely in charge of educating the young. A vague feeling that leftishness has something to do with goodness does hang in the air, but the kids don’t really grasp the animus against reason, progress and the market, and so they are relatively easily swayed by experience and argument.

Well, it’s a big nutshell. What can I say?

Factual Correctness — Jonah Goldberg’s NRO piece on PoMo and the PC WTC firefighter sculpture is pretty funny. One can do a lot with words, but Jonah’s right, literary intellectuals do seem to resent the fact that you can’t power airplanes with adverbs.

Snap, Crackle, Popper — It’s bizarre that glass-eating mercenary independent scholar, Rafe Champion, suggests that I am a “true believer” for not developing a critical preference for Popperianism. I’m tempted to say, “Right back at ya, buddy.” I grew up philsophically among Ayn Rand devotees, and I sense a similarity in conviction among the Randians and Popperians like Rafe. I’m sure Rafe can appreciate that Popper’s epistemology just makes very little sense to me, and that I don’t consider his counterarguments “effective”.

Indeed, I am at a loss to understand how a “critical preference” for some proposition P over some proposition Q, is anything but the belief that P is more probable relative to one’s evidence than Q. What other basis for a rational preference is there? If P is more “corroborated”, then I need to have it explained how one can assign ordinal rankings of corroboration that do not correspond even roughly to degrees of probability. Corroboration is supposed to be a historical measure of experimental survival. Popper claims that it is rational to prefer the hypothesis that is more corroborated. But why should this preference be rational unless it is in fact the case that theories that have survived a lot of experimental tests are more likely to be true than theories that haven’t.

Anyway, I think I’m done beating on Popper, at least on the pages of The Fly Bottle. I understand that this kind of topic drives off a lot of readers. However, I do think this kind of issue is important, both for its own sake and for its implications. I am convinced that post-modern epistemologies are driven by politics. When it was shown by reason and evidence that communism is both ineffective and deadly, the folks on the far left had a choice: either give up communism or give up reason and evidence. The PoMos chose the latter. Of course, PoMo epistemology supports libertarianism just as easily as it supports Marxism, yet notice the overwhelming absence of libertarian postmodernists. When you’ve got reason and evidence on your side, like libertarians, you’ve got very little motivation to throw them away. Anyway, my point is that it is not only important to argue for libertarianism against the anti-reason PoMo left and the anti-reason Mystic right, but it is also important to make the case for reason itself as the proper basis for the political argument. If you can get folks to accept the proper standards of reason and evidence, you’re already way ahead in the argument with postmodernists and mystics. My practical problem with Popperianism is that I don’t think it really sets up intelligible standards of reason and evidence from which to argue against the dark forces of the left and right.

Inter-Blog Popper Wars: The Impotence of Falsificationism — (Note: If this bores the shit out of you, I’m really, really sorry about that.) The replies to my Popper criticisms, and the slow return of my philosophy of science courses from murky recesses of my brain, are deepening my sense that Popperianism is at bottom a skeptical philosophy of darkness, which, despite the enthusiastic rationalist rhetoric of Popperian advocates, shares more with Rorty-like post-modern pragmatism than pro-reason philosophies of light.

Popper is very much one with the positivists in his fixation on formal logic (which I think, of course, is justified like everything else by a kind of induction from experience). In any case, Popper notes that a universally quantified statement is equivalent to the negation of an existentially quantified statement, e.g., ‘All swans are white’ is equivalent to ‘There does not exist something that is both a swan and not white.’ So the discovery of something that is both a swan and white directly contradicts the theory. (If I were writing a song about Popper, I’d call it “Mad for Modus Tollens”.)

Now, a proposition, so it is said, isn’t scientific unless it is falsifiable. ‘All swans are white’ is scientific because ‘Here is a swan that is not white’ would falsify it. However, in order for a proposition to be decisively falsified, the falsifying proposition must itself be decisively true. That is, if ‘Here is a swan that is not white’ has a probability of less than one, then ‘All swans are white’ is defeated only partially.

However, according to Popper, there is no way to assign any positive probability to any proposition. And falsifying propositions must themselves be scientific, and therefore falsifiable. The probability of a basic observation statement like ‘Here is a swan that is not white’ is no greater than the probability of the theoretical statement, ‘All swans are white’. And a critical inquirer, it would seem, is under just as much an obligation to seek falsification of the observation statement (after all, the alleged non-white swan might be a white swan painted black, an animatronic swan, etc.) as of the original hypothesis, because the observation statement turns out to be just another hypothesis. And one can keep going at this forever, trying to falsify any statement that purports to falsify another. So one wonders how we ever get to falsification.

Well, according to Popper, while propositions cannot acquire any degree of confirmation, they can acquire some degree of “corroboration” by passing experimental tests (by not being falsified). The more and severe the tests, the more corroborated the proposition. Popper insists that this isn’t confirmation. You can’t assign a numerical degree of corroboration. You can just very roughly speak of positive and negative degrees of corroboration. (“This hypothesis is really, really corroborated!”) And of course, well corroborated propositions are, strictly speaking, still no more likely to be true than contradictions, but they have (unaccountably) some positive logical standing. So, if ‘Here is a swan that is not white’ is corroborated, then it can falsify ‘All swans are white’.

But how do you know a proposition is corroborated, or corroborated enough to have falsifying power? Well, there is no way. According to Popper, we (or the relevant scientists) just decide. This is what it comes down to. At some point, we just decide that we’re going to accept a statement as corroborated. But there is nothing to instruct the inquirer whether to reject a theory by deciding that a potentially falsifying lower level hypothesis is corroborated or to defend it by trying to falsify the hypothesis.

This seems far from the clear, deductive logic of science that Popper promises us. Indeed, it smells ripe for relativist appropriation. I can just imagine: “Your ethnic group (social class, sex, whatever) may have decided that hypothesis y is corroborated, and refutes hypothesis x. But our ethnic group (social class, sex, whatever) has decided that hypothesis z is corroborated, and refutes hypothesis y, and thus x is secure.” If there is disagreement about corroboration, I guess we can always resort to…. what? War?

For my part, I have not been made to see what is wrong with being certain in seeing mugs on desks, nor in the problem of a proposition becoming more likely true in light of new evidence. Americans tend to be a little perplexed by the enthusiasm for Popper in the Commonwealth. What is it with you guys?

Popper’s Champion — It is daunting indeed to debate a man named “Rafe Champion“, a name that evokes race car-driving secret agents, or a dangerous, seething, family-wrecking hunks from a “daytime drama”. Shows what you get when you disagree with the redoubtable Perry de Havilland: set upon by mercenary indedependent scholars named “Rafe Champion”.

Anyway, Champion believes that Popper’s epistemology solves some puzzle that needs solving. Popper’s work makes most sense understood as a response to the deficient epistemologies of the Vienna Circle positivists, such as Carnap, Hempel and company, but I shall not bore anyone with a rehearsal of that history. In any case, Champion argues that it is incorrect to understand scientific knowledge as a species of belief, and that Popper provides a way forward after the alleged failure of the “justified true belief” account of knowledge. According to Champion, in the classical epistemologies “there is no way to decisively (certainly) justify the beliefs that are supposed to be true.”

First, I am keen to know what knowledge is, if not a kind of belief. If I know that water is H2O (a scientific proposition), don’t I also believe it? Next, I find that I’m able to decisively justify all sorts of beliefs on the basis of experience. For instance, that there is a mug on my desk. I see the mug on my desk, and I thereby know that it is there. Science is rather more complex than looking at mugs on desks, but one surely can derive certain beliefs from the evidence of the senses. It’s not clear to me what bind Popper is getting us out of.

Everything Champion says about the imaginative, critical, entrepeneurial nature of science is consistent with just about every account of scientific discovery. Now, although a few scientists with dated educations are avowed Popperians, Popper’s theory fails to describe the actual successful practices of the scientific community. Scientists do in fact count positive experimental evidence, and other indications of theoretical success, such as simplicity, comprehensiveness and so forth, as confirmatory, and they are not wrong to do so. Scientific practice is more Bayesian than Popperian, and because scientific practice is so successful, I am inclined to think the scientists are doing something right. (I will resist the temptation to discuss the problem of prior probabilities.)

Last, I said nothing about limiting science to collecting confirming instances. All I was saying is that Popper is wrong that positive instances don’t raise the probability of a hypothesis. According to Popper and Champion, the probability of Newton’s theory being true, even after all its success, was the same as the probability of cats giving birth to elephants. And that’s absurd. Champion says that my arguments against Popper are “weary and worn out”. This isn’t quite to say that they are false, is it? Rather, it says that they are often used. And one might well wonder why that is.