In the wake of the recent financial kablooie and under the influence of Nassim Taleb, Amar Bhide has decided to blame the Reverend Thomas Bayes. Taleb himself has not gone quite so far but instead stated that Bayes is “necessary but not sufficient“. Andrew Gelman points us to two reviews of “The Black Swan”, one of which is not content to vindicate one dead white male without trashing another. The odd thing about Lindley’s claim about Popper’s status being due to right-wing ideologues is that Popper himself was a social democrat.
Rather than Bayesian probability in general, Taleb’s ire seems more directed at the assumption of normal/Gaussian distributions. Though neither of us are statisticians, I thought Steve Sailer’s review of The Black Swan, sticking up for another dead guy (Francis Galton, implicitly) and the usefulness of bell curves, was worthwhile.
February 17, 2009 at 12:27 am
I’m not sure that Popper can really be classified as a social democrat. He was one of the founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society, and had a close friendship with F.A Hayek.
Even if the criticism of Popper in your link above and here, I don’t see how that makes him a social democrat rather than simply a classical liberal.
February 17, 2009 at 2:40 am
Yeah Popper was a classical liberal, not a social democrat.
February 17, 2009 at 11:10 am
If you want to argue that Popper was not a social democrat but a “classical liberal”, you should present supporting quotes from his work. That Popper was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society and was a close friend with Hayek does not make his views classical liberal.
Popper routinely attacks laissez-faire economics and defends welfare rights in his writings. This does not seem in the slightest compatible with classical liberalism.
For another discussion of Popper’s political thought see Jeremy Shearmur’s “The Political Thought of Karl Popper”, especially the section “The Democratic State and Protectionism” (p 50-57).
Here is Karl Popper on Karl Marx and the shameless exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie:
“For Marx lived, especially in his younger years, in a period of the most shameless and cruel exploitation. And this shameless exploitation was cynically defended by hypocritical apologists who appealed to the principle of human freedom, to the right of man to determine his own fate, and to enter freely into any contract he considers favourable to his interests. In view of such experiences, we need not wonder that Marx did not think very highly of liberalism, and that he saw in parliamentary democracy nothing but a veiled dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.(P.122 of The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume II)
In fairness, it appears that in his later years Popper increasingly moved away from such ideas but are there any corresponding writings on political philosophy to claim that he became an advocate of limited government?
See: http://www.the-rathouse.com/shortreviews/Quadrant-Hacohen.html
February 17, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Poor Thomas Bayes, he notices a simple result in the theory of Probability and now he is getting blamed for foreclosures in Stockton. This is no better than blaming, as Taleb does, Gauss’ central limit theorem for foreclosures in Vegas. This Quant scapegoating of the “Credit Crisis” is amusing but not very informative. Most statisticians, or anybody who studies the issue, would support Bayesian methods if the validity of the prior and likelihood, i.e., the model, could be firmly established. Since this is hard to do, some statisticians, like Lindley, try to “robustify” their model selection and analysis techniques by applying asymptotic theory and showing that if the sample size is large enough the results are robust to the wrong choice of prior or likelihood. This did not work out so well for Wall Street, maybe because these approximations work well in the center of the distribution but not so well in the tails. Regardless, it is unfair for the hedge fund managers to blame Gauss and Bayes because their models could not make it to Asympatopia (the utopia where all asymptotic results hold) or were otherwise wrong. I do not blame Alan Turing for the problems I have with Vista.
February 17, 2009 at 7:47 pm
A classical liberal does not say things like “We must construct social institutions, enforced by the power of the state, for the protection of the economically weak from the economically strong. The state must see to it that nobody need enter into an inequitable arrangement”. They are not given to top-down social engineering, even if it is piecemeal.
The Mont Pelerin society was mostly classical liberals, but I think we can allow a social democrat to work with them on certain issues, just as Tammy Bruce can have some common ground with social conservatives. People may contain multitudes.
February 18, 2009 at 12:46 am
Popper was always in favour of a minimum state because he saw any increase in state power as a danger, necessary in some instances but always to be kept under surveillance. He never understood the causes of monopoly and unemployment or he would have gone all the way to laissez faire. On the topic of “exploitation” a la Marx, he wrote that no explanation had been found. Of course not!
Possibly his strongest statement of classical liberalism is in a talk to the Mont Pelerin Society circa 1954 but he clearly became more worried about social democracy the more he saw of the welfare state. Hope the link works, otherwise http://www.the-rathouse.com/CRPublicOpinion17.html
February 18, 2009 at 2:33 am
Well, if you’d have to classify him on the basis of his actions, I guess he could be described as some sort of a social democrat — a rightist, more empirical version of this particular breed. But Popper himself did self identify as a classical liberal.
Don’t forget, Popper lived during the most statist minded times in European history. Most people were on board with some sort of welfare state and deemed people who resisted that urge as radicals and/or freaks not worthy of discussion.
I guess he’d either accepted some of the socialist retoric because of its sheir dominance in his time or because he wanted a place at the table, i.e. taken seriously in academia.
PS I’m not going to dig up some quote from his books. I know I read somewhere that he identified as a classical liberal.
August 25, 2009 at 5:00 pm
>”I guess he’d either accepted some of the socialist retoric because of its sheir dominance in his time or because he wanted a place at the table, i.e. taken seriously in academia.”<
Don't you think that kind of goes against the grain of the idea of Critical Rationalism? Popper questioned everything, and all pre-conceived concepts of what was true or valid. Popper would logically be looking to falsify any rhetoric that was simply "popular",to determine if it was demonstrably true. I have yet to see anything in Poppers philosophy to indicate any libertarian streak in him.
February 18, 2009 at 4:13 am
“Popper lived during the most statist minded times in European history.”
That is the heart of the matter. Friends and colleagues like Carnap could hardly believe that Popper would think about moving away from socialism, what is more the major alternatives to communism were (a) another form of socialism, namely the State socialism of the Nazis and (b) Roman Catholicism, in an authoritarian form.
“because he wanted a place at the table, i.e. taken seriously in academia.” Yes again! He needed to have credibility with people of good will who were mostly socialists of some kind (given the lack of alternatives by the 1930s). People like Orwell, Russell and Leonard Woolf, all self-identified as socialists. For the same reason he refrained from criticism of Marx as long as there was any hope of effective social democratic resistance to fascism.
It is clear from chapters 6 and 7 of OSE that he was a classical liberal at heart but some defective knowledge of history (the standard left interpretation of the Industrial revolution, plus failure to realise that state intervention caused unemployment) made him a social democrat in some ways. That is why my gloss on vol 2 of the OSE is critical in parts, compared with the exegesis of vol 1.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/OpenSocietyOnLIne/AATheProjectwithIndex.html
February 18, 2009 at 10:13 am
If Popper was a classical liberal “at heart” and his statements must be seen in a historical context, then his commitment to a minimal state should be evident in his *mature* political writings and statements.
And as “teageegeepea” points out, the idea of any kind of top-down social engineering, even if it is piecemeal, is not compatible with the limits on government that classical liberals advocate.
Mind you, I’d would really like to be persuaded that Popper was a classical liberal because I think his anti-justificationist framework has a lot to offer to thinking about science and society but why is it so hard to find this in his own statements?
For example, Ludwig von Mises was a classical liberal and we can simply confirm that by consulting his writings.
I also find it telling that libertarians who admire Popper usually quote from his epistemological writings and not from his political writings.
Here is a piece about Karl Popper that praises him for his resistance to “market fundamentalism” and further states:
“In his lecture The History of Our Time: An Optimist’s View, Popper held at the University of Bristol, he gave a list of essential atrocities which had to be solved primary. He gave in this specific order: poverty, unemployment and other forms of social insecurity, sickness and pain, cruelty in penal law, slavery, religious discrimination and racism, lack of educational opportunities, rigorous class separation and war. ”
http://www.flu.cas.cz/rethinkingpopper/papers/verhofstadt.doc
August 25, 2009 at 5:12 pm
>”He gave in this specific order: poverty, unemployment and other forms of social insecurity, sickness and pain, cruelty in penal law, slavery, religious discrimination and racism, lack of educational opportunities, rigorous class separation and war. ”
Sounds like a modern day liberal to me. If Popper was avoided by the Vienna Circle it’s most likely because he challenged the prevailing views that seem decidedly libertarian. I haven’t found that present in Popper or Bartley. One thing seems certain: both liberals and libertarians seem to embrace Poppers views, and conservatives have no chance of presenting a logical argument against them.
February 18, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Modern “progressive” liberalism of the sort associated with social democracy is itself a descendant of the older “classical” liberalism. Jeffrey Friedman frequently points out their continuity as part of his effort to get libertarians to move beyond liberalism. Popper can be considered an example of a social democrat unusually in tune to his classical liberal roots.
I do find it heartening that many righties can appreciate Popper, Orwell (and Jane Jacobs and others) even as they recognize their place on the left side of the aisle. Often when we find that a person is one of “them” we become dismissive of what they have to say. Perhaps, patterned after the Young/Left Hegelians, we could coin the term “Right Popperian”.
February 18, 2009 at 9:08 pm
You seem much more interested in Popper than Bayes which is a shame. Popper was well within the main stream of professorial opinion while Bayes was nearly a heretic on the important questions of his day. As an English Nonconformist he could not hold office or go to university in England. After being educated in Scotland and ordained as Presbyterian minister he had to leave that Church because he became enamored with the 4th century heresy of Arianism which is the first step on the slippery slope of Unitarianism. He was one of those ultracalvinist proto-universalist demons that Mencius Moldbug always complains about, much cooler than Popper ever was.
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/bayesbiog.pdf
February 18, 2009 at 10:25 pm
“Modern “progressive” liberalism of the sort associated with social democracy is itself a descendant of the older “classical” liberalism.”
Yes, I think that is a persuasive perspective. But I wonder if this applies to Hobbesian contractarian defenses of libertarianism. Unlike classical and modern liberalism, the contractarian case for liberty does not reflect a prior commitment to liberty, let alone an ambitious agenda to bring liberty to the people.
Have you read Anthony de Jasay’s “Choice, Contract, Consent: a Restatement of Liberalism”?
http://www.dejasay.org/bib_books_detail.asp?id=15
This work gave me a lot of insight into the question how classical liberalism could so easily transform into modern liberalism.
I think Jasay made an interesting observation when he wrote:
“The question of whether freedom is valuable or a free society is good ought not to enter at all into a properly thought-out political doctrine, liberal or other. It should be resolutely ignored. Whichever way the question were answered would, it seems to me, inevitably steer us in a teleological direction, and undermine the foundations on which the society that we could consider free might stand and survive.”
I tend to agree with this but I suspect such a perspective has more similarities with (secular) skeptical conservatism than classical or modern liberalism. I can imagine a school of thought that reconciles the thinking of individuals like Hume, Oakeshott, Popper, and Taleb with laissez-faire economics and ordered anarchy.
February 19, 2009 at 2:40 pm
The kind of social engineering that Popper advocated does not suffer from the totalitarian tendencies that freaked out the likes of Hayek. It is not “top down” in the sense of giving orders or directions, it is about maintaining a stable and predictable legal and political environment with the minimum of “regime uncertainty”. He took on board the distinction between rules and orders which is quite critical in making the case for the positive role of the minimum state.
Jan Lester made an exciting and compelling case for the zero state, taking on board ideas from the likes of Hume, Oakeshott, Mises and Popper in “Escape from Leviathan”. http://www.the-rathouse.com/shortreviews/Lester-on-Leviathan.html
February 19, 2009 at 7:49 pm
“sticking up for another dead guy (Francis Galton, implicitly) and the usefulness of bell curves, was worthwhile.”
Is there anything that Sailer does or says that isn’t implicitly sticking up for Francis Galton? He’s firmly ensconced in my list of modern Galtonistas, to coin a (I think) euphonious phrase.
February 19, 2009 at 8:14 pm
I actually never understood what was so heretical about Arianism. The Bible itself doesn’t say too much about what preceded the universe. I guess the Book of John is supposed to diminish the distinction between Father and Son, but it was always too abstract for me.
Aschwin, I haven’t read any of Jasay’s books. I started reading The State online, but I haven’t read all that much of it.
Rafe, what kind of government social engineering isn’t top-down?
I decided to mention Francis Galton because Malcolm Gladwell portrayed him (and his bell curves) as the nemesis of Taleb.
March 5, 2009 at 3:42 pm
“Rafe, what kind of government social engineering isn’t top-down?”
A good question, sorry about the delayed reply. I think the kind of rules vs orders approach that Popper advocated (following Hayek and Mises?) is as good as it gets if you see any role at all for the governemnt, that is unless you go all the way to the zero state (a la Jan Leser – see link above).
March 5, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Rules are as top-down as orders (they come from the same place and apply to the same people), but they are (hopefully) more general and provide more room.