I think you're spending a lot
of time on condemnation when even the well-read
in the areas would admit there are problems.
As a parallel (other than the Communist one,
where Capitalism was attacked but not decent
alternative was proposed, other than
"people's committies"), consider genetic
chemistry. A tremendous work has been done,
but very few magic bullets have been made.
The fundamental reasons are dawning: the
complexity of figuring out the tiny shifting
environments need to make things happen.

The social sciences are similar:
we can do a fair job making analogs of
'forces', 'masses', and 'motions', but
at some level, the models simplified to
make them locally true don't work more
globally or dynamically.

So you have two challenges, actually:

1) develop a more universal set of
players and interactions
(and more important than that, a universal
language)

2) develop a way to scale up in number or
intensity of action without losing
predictive of proscriptive power

But....you want a more credible opening.
Examples say this isn't just a reactionary impulse.
They can even happen on the grand scale.
Some hint about your way of discovering basic
elements would give confidence.
You can back up to something simple to start.

If you get past admitting a problem,
some inkling of a solution has to be there.
What is the most fundmental, concrete, real problem?
If you can't enumerate anything yet, it looks
like a complaint against reality.

I can predict what a flea does,
not so much for a cat,
hardly at all for a man (at least, over
longer time and less stress)...

Why is that?

Self-evident self-organizing seemed like a good
way to start out....it offers bubbles of success
in the wasteland. Successful villages,
birds and people who talk to get honey, etc...

Just some thoughts.

Complexity is the main trouble with modeling
complex systems. It's easy to see chaos, but
there are some who recognize self-organization
takes place. Manuel Delanda has some very
interesting ideas on how large complex sytems
like hurricanes, geological systems, and
office politics form and change. There are
lectures on youtube. The somewhat stable
quanta of behavior are like the
"strange attractors" that appear in chaos theory.

Positive approach:

Might as well try at a language/model.
Per the physical sciences:

force, substance, motion, data


What is your smallest (for now) unit of motivation?
(or, enumerate the simplest forces)
What is the smallest unit actor?
(a person...or one personality among a few, or a mood, that sort of thing)
What is the unit of action?
(phsical acts, signals, gestures...etc).
How do we know for sure what is felt or happens?
(epistemics: damage, expressions, etc..)



If I were to model a person, a family, a town, or a country,
how would I break that down? Or...build it up, if you're still
working on the person.

All I can toss out is that there seem to be complex quantum states
of a person (at work, fight/flight, digging, angry, etc) that
form up around a stress or peasure.
Jung tried to break personalities down....thus the acronyms for
what kind of personality you are...
Kant tried to purify what is always right...for building blocks.


Wher do you start building? Presumably, with something so
small and incontrovertible you can trust the next step up.

OK, OK...heh...I believe your sociological home turf,
and I was more conciliatory recently than what you
are responding to..

It seems your core of experience is sociology
and the core of your proposed mending is the difference
between sociology and psychology. Definitely a a good area to
improve on. I have a fair amount of psych in my background
(I was physics major psychology minor). It always struck me
how accurately psych could describe things but how
very little it could do much about them. There are terribly
loose areas like schizophrenia (has a strong organic streak
anyway) and more accurate areas like cognitive psychology.

I think the transition from psych to socio is a great thing to look at.
You seem to have some specific problem sets or cases.
Do you feel you can take a try at a language to
describe one? From a physics pov I would be drawn to
a way to model behavior based on motivation and make
sociology a "many body" problem.

Pointing out problems in the social sciences is easy.
If you have a general idea (unified language), you
can earn a lot of cred. by showing it put to use.
Marx said capitalism sux, the workers take the machines,
and that's it. The result was a wreck. Capitalism says
competition gets rid of lazy bums, but anti-ocmpetitive
takeovers and cronies can render it almost as bad if
anti-competitive cheats aren't controlled.

So....especially if your gunnin' for politics
(that seems way beyond socio to me),
you need positive examples, or else the wrecking
of one Babel could simply lead to the erection of
a Vatican, or another Babel.

twpatry wrote:
I am afraid you are mistaken LM.


I am mistaken...and the world, I'm afraid.
I'm going by a few universities
and wikipedia.


The social sciences are sociology and psychology.


This is your personal take.


Anthropology seems to be redundant but if it mattered at all it would be a social science too.


Another clue to highly personal epiistemics:
dismissal of something extremely high
in evidence as not mattering.




The rest of the things on your list are the social equivalent of engineering. Engineers take physical science and apply it to technology.


Interesting and highly personal...OK.



I agree that Law has dire purpose. So does politics. It breaks my heart to see the things that are happening in both fields in the US and I blame shoddy social science.


Politics is always a mess. That is is its nature.
Most law (that isn't overturned) has roots
in common law and goes back many centuries.
Read some state judicial supreme court opinions.



Social science is the science behind social applications such as law and politics. However, social science is so bad that these two fields have had to stumble along using TRIAL AND ERROR rather than any actual understanding leaving a trail of broken lives. (This isn't hyperbole. Bad laws and bad systems of government have killed many and ruined many more.)


There is a peculiar 'tail wags the dog' going on here.
Politics is people sloshing around, and being sloshed around.
Sociology mostly watches.
Psychology can be used to manipulate politics, but then,
that means it is effective, doesn't it?
Is a bullet evil, or the shooter?




So that we are clear, I am not calling for everything on your list to be lumped together. I am calling for sociologists and psychologists to start using the same terms.


Ah....this is good.
for your core, you don't need to scope "social science" and
conflict with the world definitions.


I think the resulting social science will lead to advances in social technology such as law, politics, etc.

I'm not completely sure...
that is, will a unified language of desription
advance applications?


I like your scoping on the areas and causality.
There is something clear once we look under the hood.
What seems to be missing is universally (or nearly)
agreed-on ethical/value principles. We could describe
how someone feels, what that does, or how a group moves,
but how do we decided what the right thing to do is?

Also, will a common language solve problems in
each field? Will it cure Schizophrenia? I think not.
Will it fix poverty, unemployment, abuse from above,
laziness from below? I can't see the language fixing
these things. If we use the one common link,
mathematics and statistics, it describes fuzzy collections,
but it can't account for individuals, or troublesome
groups.

Still, you are fairly clear now.
That's unusual on these personal crusades.
If I were to venture some imagined breakthrough
it would be in the field of dynamically modeling
groups and the discrete states of personality of people.
Complexity is a problem in most sciences now.
Maybe common descriptive language would
allow some nice modeling and discovery
in psychology/sociology.

As a first step, I would say that treating
people as averages should be the first thing to go.
Personalities have "quanta", very different stable
states someone can be in that answer a problem.
So do groups and societies. That's my theory.

You say social science has no purpose.
Law has nothing but purpose. Dire purpose.
Linguistics has the purpose of describing
how people communicate. It does that fairly
accurately.

Are you actually alluding to Sociology?
Perhaps you need to sharpen your pencil.

As the years pass here,
the problem of gross
concept mapping errors
repeats a lot.

Here are the social sciences:

Anthropology
Economics
Education
Geography
History
Law
Linguistics
Political science
Public administration
Psychology
Sociology

The big thing they have in common
is having to do with multiple people.
After that, they have their seperate jobs
to do.

Asking for one common edifice
seems a bit futile. The softest is
Sociology. Anthropology is by its very
nature intensely based on observation
and statistics.
The human being is a messy edifice.
Groups of these human things even moreso.


It seems that complaining about
their lack of clean solid commonality
is like complaining about the weather.
Proposing common links and ways forward
would be a more worthy task.

Some social science has studies, statistics,
and tests. Some does not. Like economics
or psychology, it deals with the shifting sands
of the human mind, on a larger fractal scale.
There are many statistical studies for some areas.
Others...not so much.

It seems a bit peculiar to say all social science
needs to be unified in a philosophy forum,
where almost every theory of thought is still
extent and there is practically no requirement
for validation on the epistemics. In social sciences
I could never get away with saying a child can
count without instruction, and therefore all math
is 'synthetic a priori'. Yet philosophers usually
turn a blind eye to overwhelming evidence about
cognitive development and development.

Are you simply indicting a large fuzzy edifice
due to the failure of portions and the confusion
of ignorance for lack of personal satisfaction?

..to act upon a maxim which can not be universalized is irrational.


Not all Kantians believe that, but I can see how many would.

Now..."universalized" and "ideally universalizable" are a bit different.
The Categorical Imperative test is about what should be regarded as
a universal maxim. It doesn't address whether there are violaters.

If someone sets a perfect standard for "universalized", it seems nothing
complies, given human accidents and intents. I would call that disproof
by 'radical skepticism'.

If a Kantian said..."some strays are possible, but the principle
is still worth holding", that would be fine.

A categorical imperative is not exactly about what behavior can
be expected...it's more about what should be universally applicable advice.
So, I suspect many Kantians would not actually see some violators
as making the imperative irrational. I can see how some would have
the accident: using plain logic as "rational", you would call only
perfect expectations "True". Anything that might be false sometimes
would be called "False".

But the context is what should be the universal maxim, not
whether it's unversally attainable.

So....it looks to me like you are right, but also
like the "Kantians" you're talking about really missed the
point of a CI-compliant maxim. The first 30 pages Kant uses
to hatch the concept make it clear. Many never loop back to
the actual definition.

I believe the term used is usually "categorical",
as in the Categorical Imperative, but it means
universal, no exceptions, just as you say.

As to how that is 'rational', Kant was setting out in
search of certain absolute values from which to build more
specific moral logic.

There are issues with the Categorical Imperative, such as the
miscarriage apparently highlighted in Kant's
"On the supposed right to lie because of philanthropic concerns"..
...(you even tell the truth to enable a killer to find the victim,
a far more severe violation of societal trust than a lie
to a known bad guy to defend a neighbor)...
The principle that causes the epistemic fudging Kant employs
is known as "sacrificial mimesis", where somebody must be sacrificed
to preserve a special ideal.

It's a little confusing, but I think you are talking about
something a little different, that is, doesn't the Categorical Imperative
become naive or even dangerous when there are people who cannot
be trusted always loose in the world. That is a bit like the
'tell the truth to a murderer' case....Kant would want you to
suffer the consequence of a categorical-imperative-compliant maxim
for the greater good.

Most people would find extremes of the CI to be more than
they can tolerate. I think the epistemics (what we say is real and true)
of Kant get fudged and the scope of consideration is sometimes fetishisitic.
IE: he wants your words to be true, even if that means your effect
on actions cannot be trusted (like, you said where your slaughtered
neighbor was hiding)... Words become a 'golden idol', you see. Kant
says they are the building blocks of "good will". It is a fetish
for the abstract that makes him care more for words than results
or even means, though. This is a lot like literalist religious
fundamentalism, with similar consequences. The saddest part is
when the words and priorities themselves become altered in definition
from common usage, just to suit some imperative. Seems like cheating to me.

Anyway, there are some things to chew on.
You probably want to make your case clearer....examples work wonders.

kowalskil wrote:
They were aware of this possibility. That is the amount of hydrogen consumed was reported. It was less than 1% of what would be needed to generate the measured amount of excess energy.

Ludwik Kowalski
.

Their figures do not show that.
Your "less than 1%" doesn't jibe with the multiplication
they claim (lower) either. Hydrogen takes a considerable
amount of energy to actually produce.

We are left with a fuel cell among many fuel cells.

It runs on hydrogen, nickel (a potent catalyst),
and a "secret catlyzer", which is probaly the
actual oxidizer. Despite the obvious dark
curtain the prevents validation in any
meaningful way, the process is shot down
before it even makes it to the unit, because:

hydrogen requires enrgy to make.

There have been many claims to produce
"limitless" and "clean" energy with hydrogen.
That means nothing because the enrgy to make
hydrogen comes from something else.

Even methane at least has a know source.
Hydrogen doesn't.
Is water a source of hydrogen?
Not really: water plus electrical energy
makes hydrogen.

A "source" is not a source here.
Hydrogen is only a transmission modality.

I'm not going to their site to play the
straight man in an argumentum-ad-infinitum
game. It must be proven to add up in a wholisitc
sense, and it won't unless the hydrogen is proven
to be available with no energy use.

It isn't.

A vacuum might have dark matter.

It might not have dark matter.

Dark matter does NOT follow a lack of our matter.


You cannot say our vacuum is full or empty
of energy or matter. That's magical thinking.
It is not logical thinking.

If there were some passing dark matter or energy or other "undetected" particle, can it still be called a vacuum?


From our point of view...it can, for all intents.
The rate of conversion is somewhere down past 10^-12 power.

I see what you're getting at, though..

Because I tend to think that for it to be a vacuum, it would have to be absolutely absent of everything, wouldn't it?


If you mean someone who invokes dark matter
to say a vacuum is full of power is having it
both ways, yes indeed.



Sort of like calling a dark room empty just because it's too dark for you to see anything inside it.


Almost...though not quite.
The amount of dark matter is not uniform,
so a 'vacuum' to us may or may not be empty...we can't tell.
This is where "the vacuum has great power" falls to the ground.
A vacuum is not the same as a place with dark matter.
That's a logical fallacy if it depends on dark matter.




Likewise, I don't believe we can say that some form of God-figure or deity presides in that dark room just because nobody can say there isn't one either.


Yup. That ties in with my take.
A lack of anything seen does not mean
a fantastic presence of anything, as
our friend claims. It may or may not mean
a big bang, a god, a seashell, or a guru.
It's far more likely to be....nothing.

If we measure a vacuum in a big area and
we see reverse-gravitational effects there,
we do know there's a bunch of dark matter somewhere
around there, though. Still no God that anybody
knows, though, unless you simplify scripture
to say God spends 99.99999999% of his time and power
pushing things apart.

I can't resist one example to try and
keep things upbeat:

--------------

Sentence 1:
A panda walks into the bar, eats, shoots, and leaves.


Sentence 2:
A panda walks into the bar, eats shoots and leaves.

-----------

In sentence 1, the panda comes in, has a quick snack,
shoots at someone, and goes away.

In sentence 2, the panda walks in, and is serves proper
panda food, shoots-n-leaves. End of statement.

---------------

Most people would see the bar in sentence 1 as a tough place,
simply by virtue of the casual shooting.

Most would see the bar as some kind of progressive organic
green tea fuzzy place in sentence 2. It served shoots and
leaves, after all.

-----------------


Plain logic based on the truth values would fail miserably.

Punctuation ripples meaning through the whole thing.

The whole sentence has a state of greater and greater
clarity of meaning as you read it, though.
It is the truth (likelihood) of the combination
and corroboration that solidifies the sentence,
not switching truth and falsehood.

The sentence has context around it usually, too.
It also radiates context. It speaks of a world,
and is spoken by a world. In parsing, we assess
its likely meaning based on other usage.

There are hundreds of systems (one per philosopher) of explanation,
dozens if you want to look at the important ones. There is no easy
way to say which is right or wrong, real or not.

So what do we talk about? I look for self-consistency and
coherent support of claims. Which is where your question
seems relevant:

Is reality the same reality that the reader is imagining, or is it a necessary product of Wittgenstein's logic?


Wittgenstein does actually claim to know what is going on in
someone's mind at key points, such as in the use of language.
Since the Tractatus is huge, and many have said you have to read it
all to understand it, and many who do disagree with each other,
it seems the slippage with the reality of the reader's minds
is already occuring, so the ability to cover real people's usage
of language is handicapped to say the least.

But that's the end result of all the rumination and writing.
The base theories are pretty straightforward and very systematic.
It seems as though as he moves through presumptions about the
use of language things get further and further away from what
linguists, anthropologists, and cognitive psychologists know
and can prove....the partial conclusions he posts seem to be
less coherent. I sort of concur with Grayling, but I think the
'unsystematic content' is following where thought leads. That
would be fine if it boiled down to either an improvement in
coherence or an improvement in concordance with what real
language studies have shown. It may just be the result of
someone talking to himself and constructing an internal path
that cannot relate to populations of people and what they do.
There is concept ans usage drift around the world, so
without checking yourself against actual uses you can drift
into...yourself, actually. And the result could be,
well, something like Tractatus. It's the coherence of the
conclusions and waypoints that bothers me.
I think it's a question of creeping epistemic tweaking.

That would be an interesting study, would it not?
What Witt asserts, when, and how that unravels the
sweater of language into long threads of discussion
with less attachment. Self-consistency can be too tempting
and too localized to quit on. Sooner or later you
have to say approximations and culture live and breath
successfully with or without you.

Just an opinion..

The coincidence of a parameter does not
equate two things. There is a logical
fallcy to the inference.

The "temperature" of a black hole is
only to connote the almost-zero
emissions of radiation, even thermal.
In a place with huge mass and no seperate
particles or molecules, any thought
of the 'internal temperature of a black hole'
is like talking about 'the hair style of the moon'.
There is no meaning.
If we drop a thermometer into the black hole,
we see that it superheats, tears into pieces,
bursts into radiation, and is assimilated.
Hardly the sort of behavior the temperature implies.


The "temperature" of a vacuum means nothing
because there is nothing there, other than perhaps
some passing dark matter or energy that cannot
be measured for temperature anyhow.


Adding a 3rd party, the 'black body',
only seems to intensify the relevence problem
by adding another post-hoc fallacy to the mix.