jabowery

The general point is that there is a practical path forward and beyond (but consistent with) Quigley in social science that has been available since the early 1960s based on advanced computation theory and, despite the enormous efforts put into computational "statistical analysis" over that period (for example SPSS) it has been not only neglected, but, in more recent years, actively resisted.

There is a lot of background knowledge required to get all the nuances of the issue but that is not necessary to get the general point: Ockham's Razor, rightfully pointed to by Quigley as important in forming social theory, has for over half a century been formalized in the theory of automated science (Solomonoff induction) with specific application to data-rich areas that are not amenable to controlled experimentation. This knowledge has had zero impact on social science, a data rich field hobbled by the lack of controlled experimentation. For instance, if the National Science Foundation set up a prize for the smallest executable archive of the General Social Survey database, it would ignite a firestorm of private sector statistical analysis to form the most comprehensive social model -- and no money would be spent by the government unless a superior social model were developed.

This elides my primary thesis: To the extent that we can say culture is artificial and that culture affects evolution, we can say culture is artificial selection. You are saying I "pointed out": Culture is subject to natural selection. I didn't point that out because it is "old news" and doesn't bear on any notion of moral agency. I am saying something that is a bit more novel and, indeed, radical: That the stigma attached to "eugenics" and, indeed, "race" is, to a much larger measure than is acknowledged by moral philosophers, an inescapble aspect of moral action.

I decided to take a look at Carroll Quigley's "The Evolution of Civilizations" not because it is considered a prerequisite for discourse about civilization in these fora, but because, for some time, my own focus is on the abysmal state of the social sciences qua sciences. The social sciences are so abysmally unscientific that it is a revolutionary act of genius for anyone to bring to bear anything remotely resembling scientific method. Moreover, if one attempts to bring the social sciences into consilience with the larger body of human knowledge, one is attacked with religious fervor as evidenced by the treatment of E. O. Wilson by his Harvard colleagues in the 1970s over the nascent field of sociobiology. So Quigley was a revolutionary genius -- not so much because he offered anything fundamentally new, but simply because he spoke of a few obvious truths about science in a field of virtually universal deceit: the social sciences of the 20th century. Quigley's approach, however admirable given the horrid context, can too-easily lead one to accept premises of his which have subsequently shown themselves to be both scientifically inadequate and ethically vacuous. First, and foremost, the ethical vacuity on display in "The Evolution of Civilizations" is shared by the entire field of the social sciences. It may reasonably be summed up by comparing the ethics of medicine. In medicine, even if one has conducted double blind controlled studies of the safety and efficacy of a treatment (ie: one has established strong evidence the treatment causes beneficial effects) -- even then it is considered unethical to apply the treatment to human subjects without their informed consent. Accepting Quigley's proclamation that control experiments cannot be conducted in the social sciences to establish causality, the first duty of the ethical social scientist should be to denounce the use of his findings in a way that would violate the informed consent of human subjects in social engineering. Let me re-emphasize in stronger terms: Quigley, is not only not alone in this absence of ethics among social scientists, his posture is universally de rigueur. Nevertheless, those who hold Quigley up as an exemplar, however justified, have an ethical obligation to point out this ethical vacuity. Secondly, Quigley, himself, describes the social science equivalent of statistical mechanics -- averaging large numbers to make predictions. At the same time, he goes to great lengths in his discourse about "human nature" to emphasize that "culture" determines, for practical purposes, the outcome for statistically significant numbers of individuals. This is, essentially, the Boasian dogma of 20th century anthropology. It is upon this basis that we have seen the diagnosis of "institutional racism" held up as the "explanation" for statistical outcome differences between racial groups. This, in turn, has expended many trillions of dollars in social engineering projects spanning over a half century with outcomes that are, at best, questionable and, in any event, violate the scientific ethics of informed consent when treating human subjects, as described above. Having now made my essential critique of Quigley's otherwise reasonable premises, I want to point out what he got _very_ right in his presentation of scientific method, and how, with modern advances in universal intelligence based on mathematically defining Ockham's Razor in pursuit of automated science, we may be in a position to push beyond Quigley's limits. Ray Solomonoff essentially proved Ockham's Razor as essential to science in terms of computer theory and did so at the dawn of the computer age. However, over a half century into the computer age, we still aren't even beginning to exploring those implications in a practical way. Here's an obvious implication that should have been pursued almost from the outset in the 1960s: Whenever you have a dataset and are trying to come up with a predictive model, you have two basic options that avoid overfitting: Use the data you have, not to create the model but to test it. Approximate the data's Kolmogorov Complexity program as best you can so as to approximate Solomonoff Induction. #1 invariably ends up being impractical since you can't _really_ construct a model out of first principles. In any event, as you start to "consume" your data in tests of your models, you end up refining your models which gets you into the land of post hoc theorization thence overfitting as you consume more data. The best you can do is what Enlightenment philosophers came up with: Experimental controls -- which is to say, you have experimental setups, all identical except being treated in a slightly different way (including no treatment called "the control"). The social sciences have become the modern equivalent of a theocracy given their impact on public policy -- but social scientists haven't reached the level of scientific ethics required for them to insist that their theories not be taken as justification for imposing experiments on massive human populations as is required by Federal arrogation of social policy from the Laboratory of the States. If social scientists had anything worthy of being called "ethics" they would insist on devolution of social policy to the States and Federal support of migration of people to the States whose social policies they find mutually agreeable. This directly addresses the scientific need for experimental variation as well as the ethical need for informed consent when dealing with human experimental subjects. In the absence of such humility, the social sciences did have one other option: Data compression to approximate Kolmogorov Complexity. Note that I am not here talking about a general algorithm for data compression. I'm talking about a much simpler and obvious idea: Comparing theories by how well those theories -- losslessly -- compress the same datasets. And this is where I come to my perception of a "religious aversion" to Solomonoff Induction: Whenever I see arguments against the utility of Solomonoff Induction in the aforementioned role -- comparing theories by the size of executable archives of the same datasets -- they are _invariably_ (in my experience) strawman polemics. Yes, Kolmogorov Complexity is incomputable -- but that's not the argument. We're not trying to come up with a program to compress the datasets! There is a difference between a program that compresses the datasets and a program that DEcompresses the datasets (the latter being the approximation of the KC program). This difference is so obvious that its conflation in these arguments -- its _predicatable_ conflation -- is reminiscent of Orwell's notion of "Crime Stop": Selective stupidity to avoid violations of Ingsoc or the official ideology of The Party. There are other, less obviously stupid, strawmen that arise from time to time but these are almost invariably in the category of philosophical attacks on Cartesianism or the scientific method itself. While it is fine to have those philosophical arguments, it seems rather silly to hold up practical application of Solomonoff Induction on that basis as virtually the entire structure of technological civilization is Cartesian.

How does Stefan avoid incorporating "Darwinian Truth" in his, "Systematic Truth" when he says, in UPB: The idea that nature was a self-generating and self-sustaining system was almost unimaginable. The Darwinian revolution, the idea that life was not created, but rather evolved, brought this idea from the material to the biological world. Before science, at the centre of every complex system lay a virtuous consciousness – without which this system would fly into chaos, and cease to be. Unfortunately, this “virtuous consciousness” was merely an illusion, to put it most charitably. No such gods existed – all that did exist were the pronouncements of priests. Thus what really lay at the centre was the bias of irrational individuals, who had no idea how mad they really were. We have yet to apply this same illumination to our conceptions of society – but it is now essential that we do so. ? Why is one not justified in asserting that Stefan's UPB axiomatically incorporates Darwinian truth?

How does "systematic internally consistent individualistic form of truth" incorporate the individual's death, or birth for that matter, without, also, incorporating so-called "Darwinian Truth"?

Culture cultivates. What does it cultivate? Proximately, we can say culture cultivates that which is valued by the people from whom the culture arose, be it songs or smart phones. But these are phenotypes -- not replicators as are memes and genes. It is a popular cowardice to deny responsibility for the evolutionary consequences of our cultural choices -- to, in effect, declare all that happens is "natural" selection. This puerile denial of responsibility for consequences of our cultural choices results in phenomena such as "Being on the right side of history." when all that is promoted is the entropic indulgence of high time preference. They may as well say, "Being on the right side of entropy." But every choice we make that impacts the evolutionary viability of people in society is a consequence for which we bear moral responsibility. So what does culture ultimately cultivate? A race of people. It is in this sense that the cultural determinists are correct but for the wrong reasons and on the wrong time scale. Moreover, it is in this sense that cultural determinists lay claim to the moral high ground that belongs, not to them, but to the morally responsible adults in the room they accuse of being evil.

Yes, I know. However, you addressed it by telling me to go read a book -- a non-trivial demand on my limited time and resources. My question regarding the book (whether it addressed the distinction between eusocial and sexual aggression) was to determine whether it would be worth it for me -- as well as establishing the degree to which the book was pertinent to the present discourse. As long as we're telling each other "go read a book before I consider you worthy of further discourse": Read "The Social Conquest of Earth" by Edward O. Wilson for the best current understanding of the biological roots of civilization.

In the context of Stefan's most recent video on H-1b (which prompted me to post this), the answer would be, for reasons that should be obvious, "Yes." For instance, Bill Gates and these other SV billionaires are the primary perpetrators of H-1b abuse. Thus, the "Yes" is not due to the fact that this makes me more credible but because my perspective has access to pertinent information that may not be widely available. If my position were then the party line of such interests ("Jobs western programmers won't do." "US education system has failed the STEM professions." etc.) then clearly I would not have contributed much and, even if my statements were true, they would contribute nothing new. However, to have that close association with wealth and take a position that amounts to "Wealth has corrupted my wealthy associates." should be at least a little "surprising" -- enough, at the very least, to require it being discounted with amateur psychoanalysis, such as "envy", etc.

In any communication -- nowhere more so than in forum posts (or worse, tweets) -- the critique of "over simplification" is certain to be valid. The key to good faith reading in such discourse is to grant the participants the benefit of the doubt and seek clarification with questions -- which can serve double duty as Socratic method. In the present instance, I could take your use of "over simplified" to mean that: 1) The "excess" enjoyed by network effect businesses like Facebook, Microsoft (Windows), etc. does not substantially contribute to the H-1b corruption. 2) I failed to appreciate the function of "excess" in providing leisure necessary to, for example, philosophy and other higher levels of abstract social structures. To illustrate civil discourse, I'll now ask the (possibly Socratic) question: Did you intend #1 or #2?

Not having read "The Evolution of Civilizations" I cannot absolutely guarantee that Quigley failed to address the essential difference between eusocial force (war) and sexual force (natural duel) but if he did I'd like to see a cite. Chapter and verse please.

In software since 1974, I'm one degree of separation from Bill Gates and 2 degrees from several other software industry billionaires. Do I have your attention? Good. The two primary causes of the H-1b disaster are not addressed by the book "Sold Out": 1) "The Non-Aggression Axiom" is flawed and has resulted in government subsidy of wealth -- hence subsidy of the bad business practice known as rent-seeking. 2) Cultures with a long history at carrying capacity, such as those in Asia, are more highly evolved at rent-seeking -- whether in the public or private sector -- than are younger, individualistic cultures such as the US with its recently-ended land settlement. Stefan should drop what he's doing and pay close attention to what I'm about to say since it is at the foundation of his moral philosophy: Aggression is integral to sexual species -- particularly masculinity. Failure to properly incorporate this into moral philosophy results in civilizations that are sexually and economically perverse. Think about an immigration policy that admitted only young women without children. Moral philosophers need to think about counterfactuals like this. Why have they never even thought about this before? Are they unaware of the importance of sex differences, territory and aggression? Of course not. They are aware of these things. However they have never properly integrated it. The reason, I would submit, is that moral philosophers are too "civilized" to imagine anything remotely resembling the real "the state of nature" out of which founding contracts might arise. The founding contract of civilization, that no longer obtains, is a mutual insurance company with these terms: I, an individual man, abjure my natural right to challenge other individuals to natural duel -- a natural right enjoyed by the males of all sexual species. I will also come to the defense of the rights recognized as legitimate by this company. In exchange, I am to be granted, upon reaching adulthood, one voting share and the dividends proceeding from the insurance premiums. Note that this is a contract with _men_. Every viable civilization starts out with some approximation of this contract and, with time, shifts toward taxation of economic activity to pay for the protection of property rights. This shift subsidizes wealth which corrupts the wealthy and creates an evolutionary environment selecting rentiers. Civilizations can remain in a moribund state for millenia cultivating ever more sophisticated rentiers. Opening up to these cultures without correcting the non-aggression axiom is suicide.