I don’t have anywhere near enough time to elaborate on this, but I always feel compelled to respond when anyone mentions Austrian economics. I just want to say—for what it’s worth—that even though I’m well-versed in LW-style rationality and epistemology, I consider the work of Ludwig von Mises, and everything that’s been an extension thereof, to be in good epistemological standing.
But beware. Mises himself was extremely terrible at explaining the epistemological foundation of his work in a way that avoided being as impenetrable as it was reminiscent of the sort of philosophy most looked down upon on this website, and those who have more than a mere glimmer of understanding of where he was coming from are few and far between, and none of them are popular Austrian economists one would normally run into.
I implore you, and anyone else reading this who’s interested, to investigate and scrutinize the epistemological status of the Austrian School not by reading the incompetent, confused regurgitations of the work of a man who himself could hardly do justice to his method, but by analyzing Austrian economic theory itself, and let it stand or fall by its own strength. I know I know, the epistemological commentary makes it sound like religion. It does! But this is merely an epic failure of communication—something (I consider) monumentally unfortunate given the massive importance of what (I believe) this school has to offer to the world.
That comment was at −2 for several hours, but just now went back to 0. Judging from those two downvotes, some clarification may be in order. I think I may have sounded too confident about my unsubstantiated assertions while not being clear enough about the core issue I was attempting to raise.
What I was trying to bring up is that a school’s epistemological commentary and their actual epistemological practice need not necessarily be aligned. There’s nothing that says that one must know exactly what one is doing, and furthermore be able to communicate it effectively, to be competent at the task itself.
This, I believe, is the story of the Austrian school. Their actual epistemological practice is in many ways solid, but their epistemological commentary is not. All too many intelligent, scientifically-minded people reject the economic theory because the epistemological theory sounds so ridiculous or pseudoscientific. But what I’m saying is that these people are correct about the latter, but not about extending to backward to the former.
What basis does one have for rejecting the epistemological basis of the actual economic theory on the grounds that their epistemological commentary is bad? In what way does one’s commentary about what one is doing have that strong of a causal connection with the success of the endeavor itself? Instead, one must let the theory itself stand or fall upon its own strength.
Rather than looking at the economic theory itself, figuring out the epistemological basis (or lack thereof), and then deciding whether it stands on firm epistemological ground, they look to the Austrians to do their research for them. This, I believe, is a mistake. Mises was bad at communicating his epistemology (though I consider it in many ways solid), and others were just plain bad on epistemology. This does not mean the economic theory is (necessarily) on shaky ground.
How did this happen? Isn’t studying epistemology a tool for coming up with sound theory? Wouldn’t being terrible on epistemology be a huge red flag? Yes, but the basic story is that Mises was good on epistemology, but bad at communicating it. His predecessors then read and assimilated his economic theory and thus picked up his actual epistemic habits—what he actually did in practice, his mental hygiene patterns, etc.--while misunderstanding his epistemological commentary.
The result is a bunch of people who are good on economic theory, but bad at explaining where exactly all these mental hygiene habits came from or what their epistemological significance is. You could say that they all got there sort of by accident, because they don’t really understand why what they’re doing is good, but that’s beside the point. All that’s important is that Mises was a solid thinker, and a lot of people—for whatever reason—picked up where he left off.
Austrian theory would certainly be better if a team of LW-style rationalists could enter the scene and start explaining what the Austrians have failed to. Mises and his mental hygiene habits certainly have had some momentum, but the longer this goes on—the longer the school is dominated by people who’s only source of epistemological fortitude is the unconscious assimilation of an old thinker’s mental habits—the worse the school will spiral away from its grounded center, until nothing is left of the previous foundation.
It’s a tragic situation, to be sure. Austrian economics is as incisive and important at times as it is insane at others, and this is why I would always hesitate to identity myself as a follower of the Austrian school, despite the massive value I believe it has buried behind some of its more visible components.
Although I don’t fully understand the reference, I think I sort of see where it’s going.
Either way though, epistemological practice is what one does in coming up with a way of modeling economic activity or anything else, and epistemological commentary is one’s attempt to explain the fundamentals of what exactly is going on when one does the former.
In this case, you know it’s the result of epistemological practice when it’s an actual economic model or whatever (e.g., the Austrian Business Cycle Theory), and you know it’s epistemological commentary when they start talking about a priori statements, or logical positivism, or something like that.
In other words, they’re batshit crazy, but somehow manage to say some sensible things anyway? I’d be uneasy about assuming that getting the right answers implies that they must be doing something rationally right underneath, and only believe they believe that stuff about economics being an a priori science.
Re the Halo Jones reference: At one point, Halo Jones has joined the army fighting an interstellar war, and in a rare moment of leisure is talking with a hard-bitten old soldier. The army is desperate to get new recruits into the field as fast as possible, and the distinction between training exercises and actual combat is rather blurred. Halo asks her (it’s an all-female army), “How do you know if it was combat, or just combat experience?”. She replies, “If you’re still alive afterwards, it was just combat experience.”
Far from being batshit crazy, Mises was an eminently reasonable thinker. It’s just that he didn’t do a very good job communicating his epistemological insights (which was understandable, given the insanely difficult nature of explaining what he was trying to get at), but did fine with enough of the economic theory, and thus ended up with a couple generations of followers who extended his economics rather well in plenty of ways, but systematically butchered their interpretation of his epistemological insights.
People compartmentalize, they operate under obstructive identity issues, their beliefs in one area don’t propagate to all others, much of what they say or write is signaling that’s incompatible with epistemic rationality, etc. Many of these are tangled together. Yeah, it’s more than possible for people to say batshit insane things and then turn around and make a bunch of useful insights. The epistemological commentary could almost be seen as signaling team affiliation before actually getting to the useful stuff.
Just consider the kind of people who are bound to become Austrian economists. Anti-authority etc. They have no qualms with breaking from the mainstream in any way whatsoever. They already think most people are completely batshit insane, and that the world is a joke and is going down the tubes. There’s nothing really to constrain them from sounding insane on epistemology. It’s not a red flag to them if everyone seems to disagree.
Forget the epistemology. They’re just parroting confused secondary accounts of the work of a thinker who himself utterly failed in his endeavor to explain where he was coming from on this topic, and they’re parroting it to signal team affiliation, a break from the mainstream, etc. Beliefs don’t always propagate throughout the whole web, especially when they’re less usefully analyzed as “beliefs” and more as mere words spilled for the purpose of signaling something.
If you read enough and listen to enough of the modern Austrian school (which is a tragically hard prospect given how allergic most LW-style rationalists would be to the presentation and style of argumentation), you’ll find that what’s going on in the world, or rather what’s going so wrong in society, will become incredibly clear, and half of everything will fall into place. It’s one of the two major pieces in the puzzle—the other of which may be found on Less Wrong.
Your proposed synthesis of Mises and Yudkowsky(?) is moderately interesting, although your claims for the power and importance of such a synthesis suggest naivete. You say that “what’s going so wrong in society” can be understood given two ingredients, one of which can be obtained by distilling the essence of the Austrian school, the other of which can be found here on LW but you don’t say what it is. As usual, the idea that the meaning of life or the solution to the world-problem or even just the explanation of the contemporary world can be found in a simple juxtaposition of ideas will sound naive and unbelievable to anyone with some breadth of life experience (or just a little historical awareness). I give friendly AI an exemption from such a judgement because by definition it’s about superhuman AI and the decoding of the human utility function, apocalyptic developments that would be, not just a line drawn in history, but an evolutionary transition; and an evolutionary transition is a change big enough to genuinely transform or replace the “human condition”. But just running together a few cool ideas is not a big enough development to do that. The human condition would continue to contain phenomena which are unbearable and yet inevitable, and that in turn guarantees that whatever intellectual and cultural permutations occur, there will always be enough dissatisfaction to cause social dysfunction. Nonetheless, I do urge you to go into more detail regarding what you’re talking about and what the two magic insights are.
Oh sorry. I didn’t mean that “what’s going so wrong in society” is a single piece that can be understood given those two ingredients but is otherwise destined to remain confusing. I meant that what one finds on Less Wrong explains part of what’s going so wrong, and Austrian economics (if properly distilled) elucidates the other.
I should clarify though that Less Wrong certainly provides the bigger picture understanding of the situation, with the whole outdated hardware analysis etc., and thus it would be less like two symmetrical pieces being fit together, and more like a certain distilled form of Austrian economics being slotted into a missing section in the Less Wrong worldview.
I also didn’t mean to suggest that adding some insight from Less Wrong to some insight from the Austrian school would suddenly reveal the solution to civilization’s problems. Rather, what I’m suggesting would just be another step in the process to understanding the issues we face—perhaps even a very large step—and thus would simply put us in a better position to figure out what to do to make it significantly more likely that the future will go well.
Not two magic insights, but two very large collections of knowledge and information that would be very useful to synthesize and add together. Less Wrong has a lot of insights about outdated hardware, cognitive biases, how our minds work and where they’re likely to go systematically wrong, certain existential risks, AI, etc., and Austrian economics elucidates something much more controversial: the joke that is the current economic, political, and perhaps even social organization of every single nation on Earth.
As people from Less Wrong, what else should we expect but complete disaster? The current societal structure is the result of tribal political instincts gone awry in this new, evolutionarily discordant situation of having massive tribes of millions of people. Our hardware and factory presets were optimized for hunter-gatherer situations of at most a couple hundred people (?), but now the groups exceed millions. It would be an absolute miracle if societal organization at this point in history were not completely insane. Austrian economics details the insanity at length.
I have also found claims that one or a few simple ideas can solve huge swaths of the world’s problems to be a sign of naivity, but another exception is when there is mass delusion or confusion due to systematic errors. Provided such pervasive and damaging errors do exist, merely clearing up those errors would be a major service to humanity. In this sense, Less Wrong and Misesian epistemology share a goal: to eliminate flawed reasoning. I am not sure why Mises chose to put forth this LW-style message as a positive theory (praxeology), but the content seems to me entirely negative in that it formalizes and systematizes many of the corrections economists (even mainstream ones) must have been tired of making. Perhaps he found that people were more receptive to hearing a “competing theory” than to having their own theories covered in red ink.
Considering we already had a post on the epistemic problems of the school, would you be willing to write a post or sequence on what you consider particularly interesting or worthwhile in Austrian economics?
A possible analogy for how Crux views the Austrian economics might be how most of us view the Copenhagen quantum mechanics of Bohr, Heisenberg et al: excellent science done by top-notch scientists, unfortunately intertwined with a confused epistemology which they thought was essential to the science, but actually wasn’t. (I don’t know enough about Austrian economics to say if the analogy is at any level correct, but it seems a sensible interpretation of what Crux says).
I don’t have anywhere near enough time to elaborate on this, but I always feel compelled to respond when anyone mentions Austrian economics. I just want to say—for what it’s worth—that even though I’m well-versed in LW-style rationality and epistemology, I consider the work of Ludwig von Mises, and everything that’s been an extension thereof, to be in good epistemological standing.
But beware. Mises himself was extremely terrible at explaining the epistemological foundation of his work in a way that avoided being as impenetrable as it was reminiscent of the sort of philosophy most looked down upon on this website, and those who have more than a mere glimmer of understanding of where he was coming from are few and far between, and none of them are popular Austrian economists one would normally run into.
I implore you, and anyone else reading this who’s interested, to investigate and scrutinize the epistemological status of the Austrian School not by reading the incompetent, confused regurgitations of the work of a man who himself could hardly do justice to his method, but by analyzing Austrian economic theory itself, and let it stand or fall by its own strength. I know I know, the epistemological commentary makes it sound like religion. It does! But this is merely an epic failure of communication—something (I consider) monumentally unfortunate given the massive importance of what (I believe) this school has to offer to the world.
That comment was at −2 for several hours, but just now went back to 0. Judging from those two downvotes, some clarification may be in order. I think I may have sounded too confident about my unsubstantiated assertions while not being clear enough about the core issue I was attempting to raise.
What I was trying to bring up is that a school’s epistemological commentary and their actual epistemological practice need not necessarily be aligned. There’s nothing that says that one must know exactly what one is doing, and furthermore be able to communicate it effectively, to be competent at the task itself.
This, I believe, is the story of the Austrian school. Their actual epistemological practice is in many ways solid, but their epistemological commentary is not. All too many intelligent, scientifically-minded people reject the economic theory because the epistemological theory sounds so ridiculous or pseudoscientific. But what I’m saying is that these people are correct about the latter, but not about extending to backward to the former.
What basis does one have for rejecting the epistemological basis of the actual economic theory on the grounds that their epistemological commentary is bad? In what way does one’s commentary about what one is doing have that strong of a causal connection with the success of the endeavor itself? Instead, one must let the theory itself stand or fall upon its own strength.
Rather than looking at the economic theory itself, figuring out the epistemological basis (or lack thereof), and then deciding whether it stands on firm epistemological ground, they look to the Austrians to do their research for them. This, I believe, is a mistake. Mises was bad at communicating his epistemology (though I consider it in many ways solid), and others were just plain bad on epistemology. This does not mean the economic theory is (necessarily) on shaky ground.
How did this happen? Isn’t studying epistemology a tool for coming up with sound theory? Wouldn’t being terrible on epistemology be a huge red flag? Yes, but the basic story is that Mises was good on epistemology, but bad at communicating it. His predecessors then read and assimilated his economic theory and thus picked up his actual epistemic habits—what he actually did in practice, his mental hygiene patterns, etc.--while misunderstanding his epistemological commentary.
The result is a bunch of people who are good on economic theory, but bad at explaining where exactly all these mental hygiene habits came from or what their epistemological significance is. You could say that they all got there sort of by accident, because they don’t really understand why what they’re doing is good, but that’s beside the point. All that’s important is that Mises was a solid thinker, and a lot of people—for whatever reason—picked up where he left off.
Austrian theory would certainly be better if a team of LW-style rationalists could enter the scene and start explaining what the Austrians have failed to. Mises and his mental hygiene habits certainly have had some momentum, but the longer this goes on—the longer the school is dominated by people who’s only source of epistemological fortitude is the unconscious assimilation of an old thinker’s mental habits—the worse the school will spiral away from its grounded center, until nothing is left of the previous foundation.
It’s a tragic situation, to be sure. Austrian economics is as incisive and important at times as it is insane at others, and this is why I would always hesitate to identity myself as a follower of the Austrian school, despite the massive value I believe it has buried behind some of its more visible components.
How do you know when it’s epistemology and when it’s just epistemological commentary?
(“If you’re still alive afterwards, it was just epistemological commentary”—not quite from The Ballad of Halo Jones)
Although I don’t fully understand the reference, I think I sort of see where it’s going.
Either way though, epistemological practice is what one does in coming up with a way of modeling economic activity or anything else, and epistemological commentary is one’s attempt to explain the fundamentals of what exactly is going on when one does the former.
In this case, you know it’s the result of epistemological practice when it’s an actual economic model or whatever (e.g., the Austrian Business Cycle Theory), and you know it’s epistemological commentary when they start talking about a priori statements, or logical positivism, or something like that.
In other words, they’re batshit crazy, but somehow manage to say some sensible things anyway? I’d be uneasy about assuming that getting the right answers implies that they must be doing something rationally right underneath, and only believe they believe that stuff about economics being an a priori science.
Re the Halo Jones reference: At one point, Halo Jones has joined the army fighting an interstellar war, and in a rare moment of leisure is talking with a hard-bitten old soldier. The army is desperate to get new recruits into the field as fast as possible, and the distinction between training exercises and actual combat is rather blurred. Halo asks her (it’s an all-female army), “How do you know if it was combat, or just combat experience?”. She replies, “If you’re still alive afterwards, it was just combat experience.”
Far from being batshit crazy, Mises was an eminently reasonable thinker. It’s just that he didn’t do a very good job communicating his epistemological insights (which was understandable, given the insanely difficult nature of explaining what he was trying to get at), but did fine with enough of the economic theory, and thus ended up with a couple generations of followers who extended his economics rather well in plenty of ways, but systematically butchered their interpretation of his epistemological insights.
People compartmentalize, they operate under obstructive identity issues, their beliefs in one area don’t propagate to all others, much of what they say or write is signaling that’s incompatible with epistemic rationality, etc. Many of these are tangled together. Yeah, it’s more than possible for people to say batshit insane things and then turn around and make a bunch of useful insights. The epistemological commentary could almost be seen as signaling team affiliation before actually getting to the useful stuff.
Just consider the kind of people who are bound to become Austrian economists. Anti-authority etc. They have no qualms with breaking from the mainstream in any way whatsoever. They already think most people are completely batshit insane, and that the world is a joke and is going down the tubes. There’s nothing really to constrain them from sounding insane on epistemology. It’s not a red flag to them if everyone seems to disagree.
Forget the epistemology. They’re just parroting confused secondary accounts of the work of a thinker who himself utterly failed in his endeavor to explain where he was coming from on this topic, and they’re parroting it to signal team affiliation, a break from the mainstream, etc. Beliefs don’t always propagate throughout the whole web, especially when they’re less usefully analyzed as “beliefs” and more as mere words spilled for the purpose of signaling something.
If you read enough and listen to enough of the modern Austrian school (which is a tragically hard prospect given how allergic most LW-style rationalists would be to the presentation and style of argumentation), you’ll find that what’s going on in the world, or rather what’s going so wrong in society, will become incredibly clear, and half of everything will fall into place. It’s one of the two major pieces in the puzzle—the other of which may be found on Less Wrong.
Your proposed synthesis of Mises and Yudkowsky(?) is moderately interesting, although your claims for the power and importance of such a synthesis suggest naivete. You say that “what’s going so wrong in society” can be understood given two ingredients, one of which can be obtained by distilling the essence of the Austrian school, the other of which can be found here on LW but you don’t say what it is. As usual, the idea that the meaning of life or the solution to the world-problem or even just the explanation of the contemporary world can be found in a simple juxtaposition of ideas will sound naive and unbelievable to anyone with some breadth of life experience (or just a little historical awareness). I give friendly AI an exemption from such a judgement because by definition it’s about superhuman AI and the decoding of the human utility function, apocalyptic developments that would be, not just a line drawn in history, but an evolutionary transition; and an evolutionary transition is a change big enough to genuinely transform or replace the “human condition”. But just running together a few cool ideas is not a big enough development to do that. The human condition would continue to contain phenomena which are unbearable and yet inevitable, and that in turn guarantees that whatever intellectual and cultural permutations occur, there will always be enough dissatisfaction to cause social dysfunction. Nonetheless, I do urge you to go into more detail regarding what you’re talking about and what the two magic insights are.
Oh sorry. I didn’t mean that “what’s going so wrong in society” is a single piece that can be understood given those two ingredients but is otherwise destined to remain confusing. I meant that what one finds on Less Wrong explains part of what’s going so wrong, and Austrian economics (if properly distilled) elucidates the other.
I should clarify though that Less Wrong certainly provides the bigger picture understanding of the situation, with the whole outdated hardware analysis etc., and thus it would be less like two symmetrical pieces being fit together, and more like a certain distilled form of Austrian economics being slotted into a missing section in the Less Wrong worldview.
I also didn’t mean to suggest that adding some insight from Less Wrong to some insight from the Austrian school would suddenly reveal the solution to civilization’s problems. Rather, what I’m suggesting would just be another step in the process to understanding the issues we face—perhaps even a very large step—and thus would simply put us in a better position to figure out what to do to make it significantly more likely that the future will go well.
Not two magic insights, but two very large collections of knowledge and information that would be very useful to synthesize and add together. Less Wrong has a lot of insights about outdated hardware, cognitive biases, how our minds work and where they’re likely to go systematically wrong, certain existential risks, AI, etc., and Austrian economics elucidates something much more controversial: the joke that is the current economic, political, and perhaps even social organization of every single nation on Earth.
As people from Less Wrong, what else should we expect but complete disaster? The current societal structure is the result of tribal political instincts gone awry in this new, evolutionarily discordant situation of having massive tribes of millions of people. Our hardware and factory presets were optimized for hunter-gatherer situations of at most a couple hundred people (?), but now the groups exceed millions. It would be an absolute miracle if societal organization at this point in history were not completely insane. Austrian economics details the insanity at length.
I have also found claims that one or a few simple ideas can solve huge swaths of the world’s problems to be a sign of naivity, but another exception is when there is mass delusion or confusion due to systematic errors. Provided such pervasive and damaging errors do exist, merely clearing up those errors would be a major service to humanity. In this sense, Less Wrong and Misesian epistemology share a goal: to eliminate flawed reasoning. I am not sure why Mises chose to put forth this LW-style message as a positive theory (praxeology), but the content seems to me entirely negative in that it formalizes and systematizes many of the corrections economists (even mainstream ones) must have been tired of making. Perhaps he found that people were more receptive to hearing a “competing theory” than to having their own theories covered in red ink.
Considering we already had a post on the epistemic problems of the school, would you be willing to write a post or sequence on what you consider particularly interesting or worthwhile in Austrian economics?
Yes. May be a while though.
A possible analogy for how Crux views the Austrian economics might be how most of us view the Copenhagen quantum mechanics of Bohr, Heisenberg et al: excellent science done by top-notch scientists, unfortunately intertwined with a confused epistemology which they thought was essential to the science, but actually wasn’t. (I don’t know enough about Austrian economics to say if the analogy is at any level correct, but it seems a sensible interpretation of what Crux says).