I’d like to focus on just a few areas. You say, ‘But I am making the judgement [about Ben Cain’s political bias] based on your disquisitions on the evils of White men and capitalism that you are inclined to argue ad hominem, i.e. as if the only people who believe that rational modeling is sound are “fraudsters and cultists.” I have offered a view of rational economic modeling that treats the “system” as “self-regulating” by treating government regulation as a form of bargaining. You seem reluctant to engage with that approach because it makes impugning motives and intellects insufficient to take down capitalism. I may be wrong about that, but it’s what I see when you lapse into snark.’
I don’t see that I’ve committed any ad hominem fallacy here. I don’t believe I’ve argued that scientism is false because its proponents have personally done bad things. That would be ad hominem. My point in bringing up the foundational American atrocities was that a game-theoretic account of the founding of America whitewashes history, because of the account’s apparent scientistic, utopian celebration of human rationality, whereas cognitive science shows rationality isn’t as paramount as we think it is in human behaviour.
But here the semantic issue again arises as to what we mean by “rationality.” You come out and say the atrocities (slavery, genocide, etc) were rational, which is in line with my point that you’re using “rational” in a very broad sense. You’re right, of course, to distinguish between logical validity and soundness in argumentation, and I see the relevance of distinguishing also between rationality (as valid inference) and “misapprehension of pay-offs.” But I take it the kind of rationality you’re finding in game theory is just the instrumental kind, the optimal selection of effective means for achieving certain ends. Game theory is meant to be scientific or at least objective in leaving out any evaluation of the ends.
And indeed we can judge the objective effectiveness of various techniques for achieving a goal that’s taken for granted. Thus, we can say a serial killer is rational in the game-theoretic sense, assuming the killer chooses effective weapons and tactics for achieving his goal of killing innocent people. There’s simply no moral assessment of that goal as part of game theory or of scientistic economics. If a game theorist were compelled to criticize the murderer, the criticism would be that the murderer fails to apprehend the probable pay-offs, meaning he fails to see that killing isn’t really in his interest, because he’s likely to get caught and spend his life in prison or be executed by the state.
This misapprehension goes to the selection of goals, though, or to assessments of utility or welfare, which means it’s an externality, an irrelevance as far as a model of instrumental rationality is concerned. The reason for that reluctance to assess goals is that game theory is supposed to be rigorously consistent with capitalism, consumerism, neoliberalism, and American hyperpower (game theory was developed by the RAND Corporation for the US government). If we start assessing the likely payoffs of our goals, we have to start wondering whether capitalism and consumerism are as counterproductive and unsustainable as serial murder, since we might be destroying the planet’s ability to support our parasitic and predatory way of life.
I think you’re leaving out something else, which is the possibility of nonrationality rather than just of irrationality. The point may be not that the Founding Fathers were strictly irrational, for example, but that their decisions were at least partly nonrational (unconscious, instinctive, coerced, and otherwise causal rather than deliberate and personal). Again, I refer you to the finding of cognitive science that we don’t think as much as we presume we do. We act on emotions or because we’re pressured into following a group. We’re suckered by con men or we fall prey to certain biases and fallacies that come naturally to us. In short, our behaviour is often best explained in causal terms, because we act impersonally, as cogs in a machine, as a mob, or as glorified animals. Game theory and scientistic idealizations obscure that unpleasant truth.
In any case, I’m interested in a narrower form of rationality, one which is more philosophical and religious than scientific, and which I lay out in my writings in existential and cosmicist terms of “enlightenment.” I think there are better and worse choices of goals, depending on how enlightened we are (how in touch we are with our existential predicament, which is also a measure of our so-called “spirituality”).
Lastly, regarding your attempt to expand economic modeling by treating government regulation as a form of collective bargaining, this analysis would seem to me to have only superficial appeal at best (assuming I understand it). To say the government engages in collective bargaining on behalf of its citizens, as though the latter were employees in a union, is to say the government doesn’t have a monopoly on the use of force in the society, that the corporations in question are so powerful that the government can’t just outlaw their behaviour by fiat but has to bend the knee and grovel for fairer treatment.
If this economic model is meant to acknowledge that the real power structure in certain democracies is one of plutocracy, that’s fine except that this account would have to be kept quiet to avoid shattering the majority’s confidence in their democracy and in their ability to govern their affairs. Thus, far from ensuring that the society would be self-regulating, this kind of expanded economic analysis would lead to civil war, anarchy, or revolution, assuming its assumptions would be widely accepted.
Moreover, as I said, governments aren’t charged just with doing business in capitalistic terms. The government isn’t a corporation. Governments have values that aren’t quantifiable. Governments are supposed to protect the welfare of their citizens, and there’s no price on that responsibility. Governments don’t act selfishly, since they’re supposed to take into account future generations. You could say the economic context allows for and even encourages the “game players” to have a narrow assessment of payoffs, meaning that we’re supposed to be selfish to let the invisible hand of the market take care of optimizing the distribution of goods. In the political context, however, governments (and voters) are supposed to think more long-term, to plan collectively/socialistically for the future so their children aren’t overly burdened.
That’s why governments do long-term research and development that aren’t feasible for businesses which have to face the stock market and focus on quarterly earnings and their shareholders’ opinions. (Indeed, the existence of game theory is one such fruit of government’s socialistic rather than capitalistic investment.) It’s the job of parasitic big businesses, in turn, to take the fruit of that research and development and to avoid paying taxes, using an army of lawyers to search for every available loophole in the tax code (and to have written in those loopholes in the first place, via lobbying). That’s the circle of death.
That latter point is intended as a joke, not an ad hominem argument.
