Disclaimer: I’m aware that questioning some of these borders on crackpotery (at least the physics ones are associated with crackpots). I didn’t put too much energy into selecting them. I admit that I added/phrased some of these with an agenda. But don’t assume that I advertize any negation except possibly in limited circumstances.
I suggest thinking about some condition for each of these where the ‘truth’ might not hold (and if it is in the Alice’s sense of ‘thinking about six impossible things before breakfast’).
I’m not sure what you mean by this, but based on what I’m guessing you mean, I don’t think this is actually accepted as truth by physicists. In particular, physics is supposed to work the same in reverse.
Making humans overall (more) happy is good.
This is more of a moral claim than a psychological one; it’s normative, not descriptive.
Markets are efficient.
I don’t think most people believe this. I think the economists I know would say that it’s closer to something like, “Markets tend towards efficiency in the absence of outside influences.”
Capitalism requires continuous economic growth.
Not sure what you mean by this, but it sounds probably wrong to me intuitively. Why do you think this is true—or if you don’t, why do you think other people think it is true?
I don’t think this is actually accepted as truth by physicists.
That is mostly so because physicists know about falsifiability and are mostly ready to revise a theory for one that makes better predictions (provided it’s not their own).
In particular, physics is supposed to work the same in reverse.
That’s not what I meant. I thought more about something like Segals chronometric cosmology which “presents a continuation of the nonanthropocentric tradition, in that it distinguishes between the observed time x_0, which takes the same form as in special relativity, and global time t, which is sychnonous with x_0 in the short run …”. The development of the universe is usually pictured to have started with the big bang. But in Segals theory that is only because it looks that way due to the curvature. Every point in that universe model would see a different point (at 90°) as ‘big bang’. Note that Segals theory was found to make wrong predictions, but that doesn’t mean that other alike theories might be found which don’t.
“Markets tend towards efficiency in the absence of outside influences.”
That is exactly the ‘non-locality of truth’ meant by Nancy. The question is: What (kind of) influences.
Capitalism requires continuous economic growth.
Why do you think this is true—or if you don’t, why do you think other people think it is true?
Formulation is probably to strong. Cell behavior gets influenced through hormones and other external influences.
Retroviruses also have no DNA and there might very well by other organisms that only have RNA.
There is a universal arrow of time.
Might well be false. Gödel found a while ago cases where standard Einstainian fomula violated that principle and I think there are still cases near black holes where that doesn’t hold in string theory.
The many world hypothesis also replaces arrow with tree.
Evolution on earth explains the origin of live on earth.
That’s not a consensus belief. It very possible that life first existed on some other planet and a few microbes moved to earth after an asteroid impact and afterwards doublicated.
RSA encryption is safe.
It’s only safe as long as they are no quantum computers or substantial advances in the underlying math.
There are no interesting consistent and complete axiom systems (recently discussed here by probabilistic approches).
This depends pretty heavily on what you mean by interesting, since it requires something like being able to model Peano Arithmetic or at least Robinson arithmetic. But first order reals or first order C are “interesting” systems (in the sense that we study them and there are open problems that can be phrased in terms of them) and are consistent and complete.
First order reals [...] are “interesting” systems (in the sense that we study them and there are open problems that can be phrased in terms of them) and are consistent and complete.
I’m hoping for more specificity about where a generalization might break down.
That being said, I might include some mere noodling.
No one that I’ve asked seems to know much about how mathematicians choose axioms—there’s got to be some process of choosing axioms which are likely to generate interesting mathematics.
There are important parts of mathematics which don’t get explored because they’re too boring for mathematicians to want to work on.
There may be truths about the universe which are complex beyond the human ability to manipulate ideas. It might even follow that there are truths which are too complex even for any conceivable augmented intelligence. Reductionism has taken people a long way and will take us farther, but it might have limits.
I’m fond of the idea that life on earth might be on the receiving end of some alien meddling. This doesn’t undercut evolution in general, but it adds some history to what seemed like a relatively simple story of physics and chemistry.
Optimizing nutrition and exercise for basically healthy people might not do that much good.
Politics/economics: People don’t have much sense, whether they’re in business or government.
Organized crime is a significant part of economies and governments, and ignored by most theories.
Most of the economy isn’t measured or considered—I’m not just talking about organized crime, I’m including what people do for themselves and each other that doesn’t involve money.
Politics/economics: People don’t have much sense, whether they’re in business or government.
I’m not sure whether this is meant as a proposal for a ‘local truth’ or some reply/explanation to something else.
Organized crime is a significant part of economies and governments, and ignored by most theories.
You mean most economic theories I take it.
I’d guess that from an econimicsts point of view (organized) crime is not different from other economic transactions only that it involves a penalty of (temporarily) exclusion from trade or other costs that could be translated into monetary amounts.
The question is how much this aspect has actually been taken into account.
Yes. I also have always wondered why there seem to be no statistical approaches to modelling social population development. E.g. by measuring and predicting the moments of Bourdieus types of capital of a sample of the population.
Such an approach should allow to much better predict (and thus address) effects like social inequality, aging society, precariat development. It shoud be simple (much less particles involved that in climate models) and I really hope that it is not already employed to actually do steer society (to the unjust).
My point about organized crime is that its transactions are much less likely to be recorded, so they don’t go into economists’ calculations. Now that I think about it, the same applies to non-organized crime, but I assume it’s a smaller part of the economy, but really, who knows?
I thought most of organized crime was selling illegal products and services—drugs (not about redistribution of wealth), prostitution (I’ve heard mixed things about the % of slavery), lotteries (I wonder how they’re doing now that there are legal lotteries), and smuggling.
Racketeering’s also a traditional pursuit of organized crime, and one that’s more obviously coercive. In the modern era there’s also electronic theft and fraud to deal with—botnets, trade in stolen identity information, that sort of thing.
I’d agree that drugs, prostitution, and gambling are at least equally prominent no matter what era we’re looking at, though.
from an econimicsts point of view (organized) crime is not different from other economic transactions only that it involves a penalty of (temporarily) exclusion from trade or other costs that could be translated into monetary amounts.
Crime is rather different from other economic transactions primarily in that the transaction is not voluntary and is driven by the power differential. It also often enough involves a penalty of death which is difficult to translate into monetary amounts.
I’m not clear what you are driving at? The question was a statistical economic one, or? So my or other persons individual problems with this question do not matter for a valid incorporation of crime.
And easy could be meant morally or effortwise.
As a rationalist I obviously have no inhibitions on placing a monetary value on my life. Not placing a value on human life is a taboo intended to prevent dam breaking. It is not a truth. It won’t break a dam for me.
It takes some effort to arrive at a suitable amount though because there are so many aspects to take into account:
Economic value: Depending on your utility function there are multiple different cases:
** If you are seflish you will place a high value on your life—but only to ensure that you live, not to compensate others for your demise. Thus rather no life ensurance but instead safety measures against hazards of your choosing.
** You might also consider life or disability insurance if your loss will place your relatives in existential risks. Thus you consider your value to very high for your more or less large environment.
** You might avoid the social insurance if you think that you can invest yourself better. Thus you value yourself less for the society and/or your family (which might need/want to catch you if you fall).
Symbolic value: By placing a value on my life e.g. in the form of life-insurance I signal how much I value my life. If it is in the form of life or annuity insurance this may signal to my significant other that I cater for future safety in case of my demise. This is related to the financial value above but different in so far as the other person(s) may not completely grasp the derivation of the other aspects and just look at the symbolic value.
Societal value: Should I die that will be a loss for the society I live in. The investments the society made will not pay out as much as expected. This is measured by the SVL mentioned previously. As I care for the future well being of my society and feel obligued to it to some amount (partly because that society will host my relatives) I have to take that value into account to some personal fraction.
What does this mean for me? I didn’t do the complete calculation. I did calculate some figures for insurance (and didn’t blindly follow insurance agents recommendations).
For example when considering some top-up health insurance I estimated my personal risk of lengthy illness and the hazards it’d pose to my family and arrived at a figured I’d have to lay back for such a case and after some calculation arrived at a figure which was actually a bit above the monthly rate and thus I took it.
Same for life insurance and indemnity insurance.
Consequently I recently revised these values recently due to a changed life trajectory.
I’m not clear what you are driving at? The question was a statistical economic one, or?
Not quite. The question already morphed into what makes crime different from “normal” economic transactions and whether you can represent it as a only slightly different economic transaction.
As a rationalist I obviously have no inhibitions on placing a monetary value on my life.
So which amount of money would you be willing to exchange your life for?
As suicide has a high symbolic value (see my list above; in this case signalling to a large number of persons including to myself and my children) and that is not the kind of exchange I have thought about before (where I considered external causes for (my) life) I cannot easily say so.
Truths [...] which are complex beyond the human ability to manipulate ideas.
Interesting.
As a limit on ideas this implies truth (structures) which show no observable effect (otherwise the effect would allow to at least name the truth even if it cannot be understood fully).
As a limit on understanding of truth (structures) this implies irreducibility not only in the horizontal dimension (the number of parallel items cognitively manageable—those can be offloaded to computer) but at least also in the vertical dimension (the number of reduction steps required).
Examples of the latter might be structures which
change so little with each reduction step as to make the reduction undetectable in itself and build an unmanageable number of these on each other. Or
Contain reductions which feed back on lower reductions thus creating cycles. Something like humans which on a high reduction level (social) but feed back on effects observed under the microscope (an effect that probably (note: ‘probably’ is a catch-word) cancels out on the social level).
My intuition on these structures is that they are indistinguisable from noise. If they were there they couldn’t have an effect at all (except being there).
Theological note: Some beliefs in god imply exactly such irreducible undetectable truth.
I’m hoping for more specificity about where a generalization might break down.
My comment was more about horizontal exploration (before it most comments were physics-related) than about elaborating any details.
No one that I’ve asked seems to know much about how mathematicians choose axioms—there’s got to be some process of choosing axioms which are likely to generate interesting mathematics.
That is one aspect of my first item “Mathematics is explained by reduction of propositions to axioms”.
The axioms as “premise so evident as to be accepted as true without controversy” (Wikipedia) still possess or require some structure—albeit a non-mathematical implied and/or often ‘soft’ one.
I once had a discussion with a mathematician about this and also a longer web dialog about how vague notions crystalize into concrete structures but couldn’t convice anyone that this is a real problem instead of a wishy washy relativization of the truth of math.
I will address your other items with separate comments.
Some random ‘truth’ grouped by discipline:
Math:
Mathematics is explained by reduction of propositions to axioms.
There are no interesting consistent and complete axiom systems (recently discussed here by probabilistic approches).
Physics:
Dark matter exists.
The universe started with the big bang.
There is a universal arrow of time.
There is no cold fusion.
Chemistry:
All chemical substances arise in a dynamical equilibrium.
Meteorology:
The weather cannot be predicted more than a few days in advance.
Biology:
DNA defines cell behavior.
DNA is the unit of inherited behavior.
Evolution on earth explains the origin of live on earth.
Medicine:
Vegetables are healthy.
Sport is healthy.
Death is inevitable.
Psychology:
Humans err/are fallible (recently mentioned in a Discussion).
Making humans overall (more) happy is good.
Linguistics:
All humans share a universal grammar.
Economics:
Markets are efficient.
Capitalism requires continuous economic growth.
Computer science:
RSA encryption is safe.
Concurrency is hard.
Sufficiently complex software neccessarily contains bugs.
Misc:
There are no aliens (near earth).
Disclaimer: I’m aware that questioning some of these borders on crackpotery (at least the physics ones are associated with crackpots). I didn’t put too much energy into selecting them. I admit that I added/phrased some of these with an agenda. But don’t assume that I advertize any negation except possibly in limited circumstances.
I suggest thinking about some condition for each of these where the ‘truth’ might not hold (and if it is in the Alice’s sense of ‘thinking about six impossible things before breakfast’).
Oh man! Disagreement! I like disagreement!
I’m not sure what you mean by this, but based on what I’m guessing you mean, I don’t think this is actually accepted as truth by physicists. In particular, physics is supposed to work the same in reverse.
This is more of a moral claim than a psychological one; it’s normative, not descriptive.
I don’t think most people believe this. I think the economists I know would say that it’s closer to something like, “Markets tend towards efficiency in the absence of outside influences.”
Not sure what you mean by this, but it sounds probably wrong to me intuitively. Why do you think this is true—or if you don’t, why do you think other people think it is true?
How do you mean this?
You enjoy disagreements. In this case that I proposed opportunities for that.
You are happy to get an apportunity to disagree with what I wrote.
You see my comment as a disagreement with established truth.
That is mostly so because physicists know about falsifiability and are mostly ready to revise a theory for one that makes better predictions (provided it’s not their own).
That’s not what I meant. I thought more about something like Segals chronometric cosmology which “presents a continuation of the nonanthropocentric tradition, in that it distinguishes between the observed time x_0, which takes the same form as in special relativity, and global time t, which is sychnonous with x_0 in the short run …”. The development of the universe is usually pictured to have started with the big bang. But in Segals theory that is only because it looks that way due to the curvature. Every point in that universe model would see a different point (at 90°) as ‘big bang’. Note that Segals theory was found to make wrong predictions, but that doesn’t mean that other alike theories might be found which don’t.
That is exactly the ‘non-locality of truth’ meant by Nancy. The question is: What (kind of) influences.
I have heard this often. Ad hoc I can give only a German link: http://www.uni-protokolle.de/Lexikon/Wachstum_%28%D6konomie%29.html
Formulation is probably to strong. Cell behavior gets influenced through hormones and other external influences.
Retroviruses also have no DNA and there might very well by other organisms that only have RNA.
Might well be false. Gödel found a while ago cases where standard Einstainian fomula violated that principle and I think there are still cases near black holes where that doesn’t hold in string theory.
The many world hypothesis also replaces arrow with tree.
That’s not a consensus belief. It very possible that life first existed on some other planet and a few microbes moved to earth after an asteroid impact and afterwards doublicated.
It’s only safe as long as they are no quantum computers or substantial advances in the underlying math.
This depends pretty heavily on what you mean by interesting, since it requires something like being able to model Peano Arithmetic or at least Robinson arithmetic. But first order reals or first order C are “interesting” systems (in the sense that we study them and there are open problems that can be phrased in terms of them) and are consistent and complete.
I wasn’t aware of that. Can you give some link?
See here.
Thanks.
I know quantifier elimination from CS and it makes for some useful practical algorithms but it seems not to be very powerful.
I’m hoping for more specificity about where a generalization might break down.
That being said, I might include some mere noodling.
No one that I’ve asked seems to know much about how mathematicians choose axioms—there’s got to be some process of choosing axioms which are likely to generate interesting mathematics.
There are important parts of mathematics which don’t get explored because they’re too boring for mathematicians to want to work on.
There may be truths about the universe which are complex beyond the human ability to manipulate ideas. It might even follow that there are truths which are too complex even for any conceivable augmented intelligence. Reductionism has taken people a long way and will take us farther, but it might have limits.
I’m fond of the idea that life on earth might be on the receiving end of some alien meddling. This doesn’t undercut evolution in general, but it adds some history to what seemed like a relatively simple story of physics and chemistry.
Vegetables are not healthy for everyone—some people have digestive tracts which can’t handle them. Exercise isn’t necessarily good for people.
Optimizing nutrition and exercise for basically healthy people might not do that much good.
Politics/economics: People don’t have much sense, whether they’re in business or government.
Organized crime is a significant part of economies and governments, and ignored by most theories.
Most of the economy isn’t measured or considered—I’m not just talking about organized crime, I’m including what people do for themselves and each other that doesn’t involve money.
I’m not sure whether this is meant as a proposal for a ‘local truth’ or some reply/explanation to something else.
You mean most economic theories I take it. I’d guess that from an econimicsts point of view (organized) crime is not different from other economic transactions only that it involves a penalty of (temporarily) exclusion from trade or other costs that could be translated into monetary amounts.
The question is how much this aspect has actually been taken into account.
There is also Rational choice theory.
Yes. I also have always wondered why there seem to be no statistical approaches to modelling social population development. E.g. by measuring and predicting the moments of Bourdieus types of capital of a sample of the population.
Such an approach should allow to much better predict (and thus address) effects like social inequality, aging society, precariat development. It shoud be simple (much less particles involved that in climate models) and I really hope that it is not already employed to actually do steer society (to the unjust).
My point about organized crime is that its transactions are much less likely to be recorded, so they don’t go into economists’ calculations. Now that I think about it, the same applies to non-organized crime, but I assume it’s a smaller part of the economy, but really, who knows?
In that case what you care about is grey economy which is much bigger than organized crime.
The grey economy is also more important since it actually produces goods while crime activities tend to just redistribute wealth.
I thought most of organized crime was selling illegal products and services—drugs (not about redistribution of wealth), prostitution (I’ve heard mixed things about the % of slavery), lotteries (I wonder how they’re doing now that there are legal lotteries), and smuggling.
Racketeering’s also a traditional pursuit of organized crime, and one that’s more obviously coercive. In the modern era there’s also electronic theft and fraud to deal with—botnets, trade in stolen identity information, that sort of thing.
I’d agree that drugs, prostitution, and gambling are at least equally prominent no matter what era we’re looking at, though.
Crime is rather different from other economic transactions primarily in that the transaction is not voluntary and is driven by the power differential. It also often enough involves a penalty of death which is difficult to translate into monetary amounts.
Difficult maybe. But it is done youte often not only in economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
Statistically and externally, sure. But will you find it easy to translate the value of your life into monetary amounts?
I’m not clear what you are driving at? The question was a statistical economic one, or? So my or other persons individual problems with this question do not matter for a valid incorporation of crime.
And easy could be meant morally or effortwise.
As a rationalist I obviously have no inhibitions on placing a monetary value on my life. Not placing a value on human life is a taboo intended to prevent dam breaking. It is not a truth. It won’t break a dam for me.
It takes some effort to arrive at a suitable amount though because there are so many aspects to take into account:
Economic value: Depending on your utility function there are multiple different cases:
** If you are seflish you will place a high value on your life—but only to ensure that you live, not to compensate others for your demise. Thus rather no life ensurance but instead safety measures against hazards of your choosing.
** You might also consider life or disability insurance if your loss will place your relatives in existential risks. Thus you consider your value to very high for your more or less large environment.
** You might avoid the social insurance if you think that you can invest yourself better. Thus you value yourself less for the society and/or your family (which might need/want to catch you if you fall).
Symbolic value: By placing a value on my life e.g. in the form of life-insurance I signal how much I value my life. If it is in the form of life or annuity insurance this may signal to my significant other that I cater for future safety in case of my demise. This is related to the financial value above but different in so far as the other person(s) may not completely grasp the derivation of the other aspects and just look at the symbolic value.
Societal value: Should I die that will be a loss for the society I live in. The investments the society made will not pay out as much as expected. This is measured by the SVL mentioned previously. As I care for the future well being of my society and feel obligued to it to some amount (partly because that society will host my relatives) I have to take that value into account to some personal fraction.
What does this mean for me? I didn’t do the complete calculation. I did calculate some figures for insurance (and didn’t blindly follow insurance agents recommendations). For example when considering some top-up health insurance I estimated my personal risk of lengthy illness and the hazards it’d pose to my family and arrived at a figured I’d have to lay back for such a case and after some calculation arrived at a figure which was actually a bit above the monthly rate and thus I took it. Same for life insurance and indemnity insurance. Consequently I recently revised these values recently due to a changed life trajectory.
Not quite. The question already morphed into what makes crime different from “normal” economic transactions and whether you can represent it as a only slightly different economic transaction.
So which amount of money would you be willing to exchange your life for?
As suicide has a high symbolic value (see my list above; in this case signalling to a large number of persons including to myself and my children) and that is not the kind of exchange I have thought about before (where I considered external causes for (my) life) I cannot easily say so.
Interesting.
As a limit on ideas this implies truth (structures) which show no observable effect (otherwise the effect would allow to at least name the truth even if it cannot be understood fully).
As a limit on understanding of truth (structures) this implies irreducibility not only in the horizontal dimension (the number of parallel items cognitively manageable—those can be offloaded to computer) but at least also in the vertical dimension (the number of reduction steps required).
Examples of the latter might be structures which
change so little with each reduction step as to make the reduction undetectable in itself and build an unmanageable number of these on each other. Or
Contain reductions which feed back on lower reductions thus creating cycles. Something like humans which on a high reduction level (social) but feed back on effects observed under the microscope (an effect that probably (note: ‘probably’ is a catch-word) cancels out on the social level).
My intuition on these structures is that they are indistinguisable from noise. If they were there they couldn’t have an effect at all (except being there).
Theological note: Some beliefs in god imply exactly such irreducible undetectable truth.
My comment was more about horizontal exploration (before it most comments were physics-related) than about elaborating any details.
That is one aspect of my first item “Mathematics is explained by reduction of propositions to axioms”. The axioms as “premise so evident as to be accepted as true without controversy” (Wikipedia) still possess or require some structure—albeit a non-mathematical implied and/or often ‘soft’ one. I once had a discussion with a mathematician about this and also a longer web dialog about how vague notions crystalize into concrete structures but couldn’t convice anyone that this is a real problem instead of a wishy washy relativization of the truth of math.
I will address your other items with separate comments.