OSE volume 1 page 57:

the need to distinguish between two different elements in man's environment--his natural environment and his social environment. This is a distinction which is difficult to make and to grasp, as can be inferred from the fact that even now it is not clearly established in our minds ... Most of us, it seems, have a strong inclination to accept the peculiarities of our social environment as if they were 'natural'.

It is one of the characteristics of the magical attitude of a primitive tribal or 'closed' society that it lives in a charmed circle of unchanging taboos, of laws and customs which are felt to be as inevitable as the rising of the sun, or the cycle of the seasons, or similar obvious regularities of nature. And it is only after this magical 'closed society' has actually broken down that a theoretical understanding of the difference between 'nature' and 'society' can develop.

OSE volume 2 pages 89-90:

I am developing a view to which I subscribe myself ... the problem of the so-called rules of exogamy, i.e. the problem of explaining the wide distribution, among the most diverse cultures, of marriage laws apparently designed to prevent inbreeding ... [J.S.] Mill [and others] ... would try to explain these rules by an appeal to 'human nature' ... and something like this would also be the naive or popular explanation ... however, one could ask whether it is not the other way round ... whether the apparent instinct is not rather a product of education, the effect rather than the cause of the social rules and traditions demanding exogamy and forbidding incest ... [in this case] it would be difficult to determine which of the two theories is the correct one, the explanation of the traditional social rules by instinct or the explanation of an apparent instinct by traditional social rules ... [example where Karl Popper says experiments have shown that aversion to snakes, which was commonly thought to be instinct, is actually learned] ... This example should be taken as a warning. We are faced here with an aversion which is apparently universal, even beyond the human race ... The universal occurrence of a certain behavior is not a decisive argument in favour of its instinctive character, or of its being rooted in 'human nature'.

Here are two theories of how people make decisions.

One theory -- weighted decision making -- says that there are many factors that go into a decision. Each factor is given a weighting proportional to its importance, so it's not one vote per factor but rather the more important factors count for more. Then all the factors are added up, and the decision with the most support is made.

In this model, genes could have an influence in a decision for one side or another, and a 10% weighting, and thus would have some influence, and would sometimes tip the scales in close decisions. They could have a 50% influence in another type of decisions, and 90% in another. An environment could have different percent influence for each, and so on. Dozens of factors could be included. In general, there is no serious difficulty in proposing there's one more factor with a small weighting

In this model, the theory that genes have an influence, varying from 0% to 99%, and averaging around 50%, is plausible. It doesn't contradict anything about the model.

The second theory -- explanatory decision making -- says that decisions are made by conjecturing a set of possible decisions, and then criticizing each possibility. If only one possibility remains, that decision is made. If more than one remains, that is a significant problem (omitting details for brevity, just understand that this is considered a rare case). How options are ruled out does not depend on weighting the importance of anything. It is an all or nothing proposition -- either the option survives a criticism or it doesn't. (The only way it's not all-or-nothing is that we might propose a variant of an option which changes a few things in order to survive the criticism.)

In this model, we never add anything up to get a result. Nothing ever outweighs something else. Rather we always find a single explanation of why we think our decision is the best one.

In this model, the way to influence the decision making process is to offer conjectures, explanations and criticism. That takes thought, or pre-existing relevant knowledge. And influences are never 10% or 50%. Rather they are good ideas that are accepted (or accepted with minor changes) or they are bad ideas that are rejected in full.

In this model, the theory that genes have an influence on decisions, averaging around 50%, is incoherent. It's incompatible with this model. The only time genes could have an influence is when they encode ideas which could be considered in the decision making process, and then accepted or rejected on their merits (the result would be exactly the same if the idea came from a friend or a gene -- it depends entirely on what the idea is).

http://www.ox.ac.uk/oxford_debates/michaelmas_2008_laissezfaire_capitalism/opposers_opening.html

They have a debate about whether "The current financial crisis sounds the death knell for laissez-faire capitalism"

These quotes are from the (supposedly) *pro* capitalist person. She begins:

It is too early to sound the death knell for laissez-faire economics. Although tarnished, the capitalist system still ...

then, after saying capitalism is tarnished and may die later, she says

government and institutions are acknowledged even in the fundamental precepts of a capitalist system ...

With these foundations provided by government, markets develop. ...

Examining real examples, it has always been the case that government has played a large role in even free markets

So her defense of markets is: don't worry, the Government has been involved the whole time.

Her solution to the current crisis is: increase the role of Government in the market:

Regulators did not keep up with the market and allowed bankers to take on too much risk and gamble with our money ...

The banking system should not have been permitted by the government to ...

Then she brings out her very best argument for capitalism:

Finally, perhaps the main reason why laissez-faire capitalism is not dead, or even nearly so, is because there is no viable alternative.

In other words, she thinks capitalism sucks (but no one has a better idea).

Tom Robinson said to me:

Bad people try hard to get you to hate them.

People put more effort into labelling their opponent's position than into deciding where the truth lies.

Popper
OSE p174-5

There are many people living in a modern society who have no, or extremely few, intimate personal contacts, who live in anonymity and isolation, and consequently in unhappiness. For although society has become abstract, the biological makeup of man has not changed much; men have social needs which they cannot satisfy in an abstract society.

It is unfortunate that Popper has swallowed this propaganda. This sort of biological fatalism is a way of denying that people bear responsibility for their personality traits. There are no arguments that biology determines personality or needs. There never have been. No one has ever invented a quality explanation of how it could be the case. So why did Popper adopt the idea?

Calling these things "needs" is used for the purpose of advocating violence. If I want something, I am not justified to take it. If I need it, and declare that you do not need it, then I have a case to force you to give it to me (not a good case, but one that the new left will find convincing). If all people have a particular "need" then that is used as a justification that the Government provide it, in order that it be guaranteed to everyone. And if I don't want it, and don't want to pay for it, that's my tough luck (which is a euphemism for my turn to be forced to sacrifice what I wanted). And if I need something which my society does not provide for (including providing ways it can be attained) then I am doomed to unhappiness, so I will ask my society to change, and if it does not I am justified in starting a violent revoultion to change it. If two people need contradictory things, and cannot talk the other person into conceding, then there is nothing let for them to do but fight it out. Why has Popper used the language of the violent new left?

bad starting question: what is good?

good starting question: how should i live?

initial answer: in a way that creates a lot of knowledge

some might object that this is vague, abstract, and useless, and won't help them with practical problems.

that, of course, is due to their lack of knowledge :)

anyhow, i'll connect it to 4 practical issues.

1) how do i save money for a car?

by getting a job and spending less money.

but i don't know how to do that!

well then you need more knowledge. you need to learn about those things.

how do i do that?

think about them, read books, make guesses at the answer, and then subject the guesses to criticism, use trial and error, etc (read Karl Popper's books for more details, or it's in my blog archives somewhere)

2) i don't like criticism. is it ok if i don't listen to it?

suppose you're wrong about 10 things. everyone makes mistakes sometimes, so that's nothing special. if you never listen to criticism (including self-criticism) then you'll never find out about the areas where you're mistaken. if you do listen to criticism, it might sometimes help you identify one of those areas. the policy of ignoring all criticism prevents *correcting errors*.

what does that have to do with creating knowledge?

if you have 3 good ideas and 3 bad ideas, and then you correct an error and now you have 4 good ideas, and 2 bad ideas, then you have more knowledge. knowledge is the good parts of your ideas but not the bad parts.

3) my kid keeps asking for stuff and i say "shut up; i'll make the decisions in my house" and ignore him. is that ok?

if one of his requests is a good idea you'll never learn that by ignoring all his requests. your policy prevents creating knowledge of which of his requests are good. it also prevents you helping him create knowledge about his requests. if he learned more, then he'd make less bad requests because he'd know how to evaluate them himself. so, no it is not ok.

4) should i get married?

marriage means promising to be together forever. to reasonably make that promise you have to have a plan for how you will avoid drifting apart. if, after 10 years, you find that you have completely different interests than your spouse, and no interest in doing anything with them, then you will spend all your time apart and your marriage will be pointless and you've broken your promise. so you gotta have a way to prevent drifting apart. what causes or risks drifting? new interests. when you learn new things you change, if you change you might end up different than your spouse. the growth of knowledge is unpredictable, so you can't guarantee your spouse will change in the same ways. preventing drift means keeping change and learning under control. so marriage is the opposite of open-ending knowledge creation. so you should not marry.

David Friedman recently gave a talk about market failures which I heard about second hand. In the talk was the following story, which is a typical example of a public good problem:

Two armies face off. One has horses. The other has only spears. The men with spears can do two thinks: hold a line against the charge, or run away. Horses are faster than people, so if they all run away they will die. So the best outcome is that they face the charge. But the best outcome for an individual is that everyone else face the charge while he runs away. That is in his self interest. So everyone will individually decide to run away, and they will all die. So the question is: what can be done to make sure everyone holds the line? This is said to be an example of a market failure: the market cannot make everyone hold the line, but the Government can.

The public good is holding off the charge, but people can become free riders by running away (they get the benefits of the charge being held off even though they didn't participate). And the question is how to make sure everyone stands the line.

I think public good problems are a mirage, and the arguments for them are flawed in a variety of ways. Here I want to talk about one flaw in this story which I think is the worst one.

The situation has, as a premise, what the best outcome is. It treats "What should the people do?" as a given. Because the correct outcome is a premise, the scenario is fundamentally different than all real situations. In particular this approach makes the following question worthless: "What is the best thing to do?" Having the correct outcome be an unquestionable premise prevents all debate, discussion, argument, brainstorming, and criticism about what the people ought to do.

By contrast, in real life we never know what we should do with certainty, and such debate and discussion is critically important. Such thinking and discussing is how people come to learn, to agree, and to cooperate. It is the very mechanism which solves problems like market failures and public good problems. And it's exactly the area where the Government is at its weakest.

The Government's strength is forcing policies on everyone that it believes are best (whether they are mistakes or not), and its weakness is creating knowledge. That's why Government intervention always appeals to people who think they know the truth and that there is no need for further debate. And in seems appealing in situations where the best outcome is given as a premise. The market's strength is creating knowledge and its "weakness" is using force. Using a premise that obviates any need for knowledge creation, and hints that the correct outcome is so good that it's best even if force is used to bring it about, fundamentally distorts the scenario in a heavily Government-biased direction.

The is/ought problem is the claim that theories should be supported by facts, but that moral theories apparently cannot be supported by factual statements about what exists. This leads to the problem: how can we justify our moral theories? Can we somehow bridge the gap and infer moral theories from facts? Can we derive moral theories in another way? Or are moral theories always to be mere assumptions or guesses without any sound basis?

This is a bad problem, and we can avoid it.

We should start with the moral question: "How should I live?"

And we should start with the life we have now, not take a revolutionary view and try to discover morality starting from absolutely nothing.

We should take our current life, and our ways of making decisions, and we should try to improve them. In particular we can criticize them and look for problems in our life, and then we can try to think of new ways of life that wouldn't have those problems. Through this process of brainstorming and criticism we can improve on our life. Then we'll have a better life. We'll have made moral progress. We'll have learned something about morality, which means to have created moral knowledge.

And thus the is/ought problem is circumvented. The is/ought problem is only important when you approach morality in the wrong way, e.g. by asking "What is good?" or by asking "How can we justify our moral theories?" If we are not essentialists or justificationists (ways of thinking that Karl Popper refuted) then we won't care too much about those questions. If they were fruitful then they'd be fine, but if we find they are not (which is the thing the is/ought problem asserts: it says that these questions are very hard to answer) then that is not a serious problem, we are not required to answer them.