한국사회의 좌편향, 하루 이틀에 이루어진 것이 아니다

 

 

마중가(중국 전문가)

'한국 사회의 좌편향 연구'란 명제는 한 편의 박사논문 혹은 적어도 한 편의 석사논문의 제목으로 될 수 있는 연구 과제이고 혹은 그 제목 자체의 著書도 가능한 매우 중차대한 카테고리라고 볼 수 있다.

대통령을 탄핵한 이번의 정유사화(丁酉士禍)를 통해 일단 온 사회가 좌편향되면 法이니 原則이니 眞理니 하는 公理들은 일순간에 휴지조각으로 되어버린다는 것을 목도(目睹)했으며 이렇게 되면 온 사회에는 어디서 나타난 것인지도 알기 힘든 괴상망칙한 망량(魍魎)들이 세상을 난무하면서 아주 쉽게 나라를 접수해 버린다는 사실을 알 수 있었다.

중국 속담에 '빙동삼척, 비일일지한(冰冻三尺,非一日之寒)'이란 말이 있다. 엄동에 땅이 석 자 깊이 얼어들어 가려면 하루 이틀에 되는 일이 아니라는 말이다.

엊그제 우리나라 5566개 중고등 학교에서 국정교과서를 채용한 학교는 하나도 없다는 보도를 보았다. 危重한 사태 아닌가? 문명고에서 채용한다니까 이번엔 학생들이 운동장에서 '학교의 주인은 학생이다'라는 홍위병의 플래카드를 들고 데모를 하지 않는가, 학부형들이 떼지어 달려들어 이 학교 그만두고 전학하겠다고 고래고래 구호를 부르지 않는가. 난리도 아니다.

오늘 한국 사회의 좌편향은 바로 한국의 보수언론, 원로정치인들의 근시안적인 사고 방식과 오늘만 생각하고 내일을 생각하지 않은 천식단견(淺識短見)에서 온 것이다. (발췌)

 

 

하이에크는 일찍이 1952년에 <The Counter-Revolution of Science: studies on the abuse of reason >를 발표했는데, 책의 내용은 서구의 과학주의를 비판하고, 사회주의 사상의 연원을 더듬어 프랑스의 생시몽에서 시작해 독일의 헤겔, 마르크스, 영국의 존 스튜어트 밀 들에 이르는 사상사를 기록한 것이다. 나는 이 책의 내용이 무첫 중요하다고 생각해서, 나의 책 <서구의학은 파산했다>(위퍼블 출판, 판매)에서 사회주의 사상사의 내용을 요약, 번역해서 부록으로 실었다.

 

한국 사회만이 아니라 지금 서구 전체가 프랑크푸르트 학파의 신좌파 이념에 물들어 있다. 소련을 비롯한 공산권이 사회주의 사상으로 파산했듯이, 이번에는 과학주의에 빠져 있고,  좌파사상에 제대로 대처하지 못한 서구사회가 파산할 차례인 듯 하다.

 

나는 서구의 이런 위기는 복잡계 사상으로 극복할 수 있다고 보고, 복잡계 혁명을 외쳤다. 또 지금은 기존의 환원론에서 복잡계론으로 패러다임의 변화가 일어나는 시기라고 주장해왔다. 지금 복잡계 사상을 세상에 전파하고 있는 대표적인 인물은 나심 탈레브, Yaneer Bar-Yam 등이다.

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홍준표

“풀은 바람이 불면 눕는다. 그런데 요즘 검찰은 바람이 불기도 전에 미리 누워버린다.

 

지금 검찰이 눈치 보는 것은 딱 한 명일 것이다. 그 사람이 (박 전 대통령을) 구속하라면 구속하고 불구속하라면 불구속할 것이다. 요즘 검찰 행태가 그렇다"

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결과가 정의로울 것이라는 말은, 좌파들이 흔히 말하는 "사회적 정의"를 실현하겠다는 뜻이고, 그것을 다시 말하면 소득을 재분배하겠다는 말이다. 그냥 좌파 사회주의를 실현하겠다고 말하면 사람들이 쉽게 알아들으니까, 저런 식으로 돌려서 말을 해서 대중을 기만한다.

 

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경북 영주시 부석사에 나타난 환일(幻日)현상. 해가 셋으로 보인다.
지난 해 경주에서 지진이 일어난 뒤에 촛불 난동이 일어났다. 이번 환일 현상은 무슨 사건의 조짐일까? 천인감응설(天人感應說)의 신봉자는 아니지만, 세상이 하도 혼란하니 예사일처럼 보이지가 않는다.   삼국사기에 보면 하늘에 해가 2개 또는 3개 떴다는 기록이 있었던 것 같은데, 그게 헛소리가 아니었다는 것을 알았다.

 

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새벽까지 대통령의 귀가를 기다리는 시민들


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                                            출처: 수컷 미술관
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모든 사회적 구성체(social constructs)의 해체는 핵분열처럼 거대한 에너지의 발생이라는 결과로 나타난다. 만일 우리가 대안적인 사회적 구성체 없이 사회를 해체하면, 우리는 잠재적으로 파괴적인 결과와 맞닥뜨려야만 한다.

 

Martin Erlić

I am a Java, Android, and web developer with a passion for social science modeling and simulation, incl. Complexity, economics, politics.

 

 

The Great Deconstruction

 

Social constructs, artificial though they may be, are part of the furniture of the Universe

 

 

Roughly speaking emergence breaks into two sub-views, epistemological and ontological emergence. The former says that complex systems are too complex to be explained by reductionistic practices, but that ontologically, reductionism holds. The ontological view is that new entities with their own properties and causal powers arise and are part of the furniture of the universe. — Stuart J. Kauffman

 

The purpose of identifying a social construct is typically and often incorrectly the creation of a rhetorical mechanism to simply deconstruct that thing, to gain the upper hand in an argument. But a construct is not always deconstructable. Social structures are real phenomena, real things that exist in the Universe for some reason or another, for perhaps structural, functional or otherwise game theoretic reasons. So, given that gender, race, religion, and creed are social constructs does not mean that their presence in the minds of those of us who occupy this Universe may simply evaporate because somebody wills that it do so.

 

The end result of the deconstruction of all social constructs is the release of a large amount of energy, in just the same way that nuclear fission leads to the explosion of an atomic bomb. If truly we endeavor to deconstruct society with no contingency for the alternative social constructions that will invariably rise in its place, we must be prepared to deal with the potentially destructive consequences.

 

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과학의 설명적, 개념적 기초를 재고하는 것이 비과학적인 행위인가?

 

Is It “Unscientific” To Rethink the Explanatory and Conceptual Fundamentals of a Science?

 

Posted on January 14, 2017 by Greg Ransom

 

Darwin, Galileo, Mayr, Copernicus, Edelman, Newton, and Hayek all rethought the very fundamentals of their sciences, from the problems and explanatory strategies of their disciplines, to the logical status and conceptual role of the elements of their activities. Yet among these, only Hayek is attacked by professors for being a “philosopher” — and attacked as not being a “scientist” — for having done so. And only the work of Hayek is constantly smeared by the professors as “philosophy” and not “science”.

 

Yet Hayek is hardly the only economist who has worried about the explanatory fundamentals of economics and the conceptual status and role of the elements of their explanatory practices. Indeed, economists are recurently agitated about their explanatory failures and the self-evident conceptual hand-waving they do when attempting to justify their cognitive practices to themselves, other economics, and to the public at large. The list of figures in economics who have done this begins with many of the leading figures of the discipline today and extend to almost every leading economist across the history of the discipline. For example, former IMF economist Oliver Blanchard has been attempting to defend his explanatory program in macroeconomics and his vision of the conceptual role of his preferred math models here, here, here, here, and here. Esther Duflo used her Ely lecture at the AEA to argue for conceiving economics not as science like physics, but as a field of blue-color engineering like plumbing. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has written a book trying to explain to economists and the public what economists are doing and what they are in fact justified in doing with all of the math modeling and statistical work. World Bank economist Paul Romer has launched an ongoing attack on the dominant explanatory practices current among many of his follow economists here, here, and here, and has offered a defense of his own explanatory practices and conceptual preferences here, here and here. The response to Romer has been almost endless, with responses and replies coming from across the discipline of economics, for example here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

 

There a some big issues involved here, almost none of them any different from the ones that induced and inspired Hayek to rethink the explanatory problems and strategies of economics and the conceptual role of its various logical elements. What I want to do here is lay out how economics constantly generates these problems, how Hayek has successfully resolved these problems, and why and how the natural of mathematical and logic, combined with our conceptual traditions in economics and our philosophical tradition, have blocked economists from finding their way out of conceptual fly bottle that sciences like Darwin’s explanatory science of biology have managed to escape. In the way will will resolve some linguistic issues concerning different uses we can make for central but conceptually brought words “philosophy”, “empirical”, “science”, “causal”, “explanation”, etc.

 

Larry Wright shows us how everyday reasoning and argument differs substantively from those points in our practices where we are advised to take time to deliberate and rethink what it is we are doing and what we might do instead. There can be all sorts of things which inspire us to deliberate and rethink things. Thomas Kuhn has written an important book and a number of essays on the topic as it arises in science. If you read closely the work of Darwin, Newton, Galileo, Edelman, Mayr, and Hayek etc you will find that this rethinking often requires a rethinking of the background tradition held among men of learning about what it is to do science or create knowledge. Newton, Darwin, Galileo, Mayr, Edelman and Hayek all discuss how their explanatory efforts defy and redefine both traditional and contemporary norms of what it is to do science and produce knowledge. Is science suppose to be demonstrative and not hypothetical, is science suppose to be induced from facts and justified by direct evidence, does it work with and support to Platonic kinds and Aristotelean forms, conceptions and categories? Newton, Darwin, Mayr, Galileo, Edelman and Hayek were prepared to defy all of these demands for what science and knowledge must be. What we will find in economics is a new set of dogmas, developed in the wake of Kant and the neo-Kantians, which continue to ensnare the minds of economists. Hayek, we will show, suggests a way out, one similar in important way to that taken by Darwin, and one which was seen already by Adam Smith, Carl Menger and in various ways by other giants of economic science.

 

But for now lets get back to simpler issues and more concrete examples, using Esther Duflo Ely lecture and economist Beatrice Cherrier’s discussion of that lecture as firm and easily understandable bone to chew upon. Cherrier points out that economists have repeatedly sought to conceive their science on the picture of what they imagine to be the practices found in other fields, from physics (here, here, and here), morals and art, to medicine , dentistry, and plumbing. What Duflo is working to do, it to encourage here peers to move from what is today the dominant physical picture of economics, to a more practical, hands-on conception of economics as the everyday, craftsman-level engineering of a plumber, water-system technician or pipe-fitter. So what are these two models and where do they come from?

 

Significantly, in large measure, these models of “physics” and “plumbing” do not come from the actual practices of physics or plumbing, they come from what economists imagine to be the practices of physics and plumbing, shaped by their training in elementary philosophy and from watching a plumber working on their pipes under the sink. That is, the conception of “physics” in the head of economics has much more to do with the philosophical ideas of Mill, Hume, Mach, Kant, Popper and Carnap than it has to do with what Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, or Einstein achieved or how they achieved it.

 

We can see this in any detailed study of the most influential economists of the last 80 years, as we can with such seminal figures as Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. Samuelson directly tells us that his model of “science” came from the Viennese positivist Ernst Mach and the American operationalist Percy Bridgman. Samuelson makes it clear both in his public declarations and in his personal diary that the philosophical picture of what “science” is came first, and his economic practice was derives from the lessons he took from that picture. As Samuelson writes in his diary in 1930:

 

 

“Science is essentially the establishing of Cause and Effect relationships. This knowledge can be utilized in controlling causes to produce desired effects. It is the realm of philosophy to decide what these objectives shall be, and that of science to achieve those decided upon.”

 

The prediction and control model of science suggested above by Samuelson was in fact part of the common currency of the time, and was put into canonical form in 1934 in Cohen and Nagel’s widely used textbook, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method. There is a history to this model of science, one that is due more to the work of Kant, Mill and Hume than it has to actual science, something of significance we will discuss in more detail later.

 

The “plumber” model of economics also has a history, one also tied to the philosophical tradition, but one which also reflects the ethos Frenchmen and Americans who imagined the role of economists as something like that of engineers and craftsmen who want to design things to do something and then tinkering with them until they “just work”. Math and statistics in this care are developed and collected with the ambition to use them to engineer systems and then re-adjust the system settings with updated data readings as you go. Duflo recent reminder is that much of any engineering project is handled at the mud and piping level my craftsmen such as plumbers with practical hands-on understanding of what needs to be done to make the job successful, as much as it needs engineers and technical people constructing schematics, taking measurements and re-dialing system settings.

 

So here we have two basics models of what economics is or can be, models which have done much to shape the course of economics as a discipline over the last 150 years. We have made clear that each of these models has more to do with the conceptions and ambitions in economists heads that it has to do with the practices and achievements of actual physicists and plumbers. And we’ve suggested that there is a history to each of these conceptions tied to the philosophical tradition. What I want to do now is ask a very basic question. If we were to use either of these models to understand another basic yet fundamental science, say Darwinian biology, do these models help? Are these models even minimally competent in grasping the nature of the massively successful explanatory endeavor which is Darwin’s biology?

 

Let me submit that the answer is no, and that these models fail just as spectacularly when it comes organizing our understanding of what we are doing when we are trying to make sense of the task of comprehending economic phenomena. Dissertations could be written on how Darwinian explanation charts an explanatory form unlike that of the physics taught to undergraduates, and indeed, many books and essays have been published laying out how explanation in Darwinian biology and much of the rest of the biological world differs fundamentally from explanation in many other parts of science. I’ve met and I’ve taken classes with leading figures in the literature, and I’ve written my own dissertation length essay touching on central aspects of the topic. I’d particularly recommend the writings of David Hull, Ernst Mayr, Larry Wright, Michael Ruse, Friedrich Hayek, Elliott Sober, and Alex Rosenberg on the topic, among that of many others. Michael Ruse and David Hull discuss a bit of the history of failed attempts to force Darwinian explanation into the vise of the classic “physics” model of scientific explanation (“the received view”) inherited via the philosophical tradition developed in the wake of Hume, Kant, the neo-Kantians, Mill, Frege, Mach and others. The story of how Wesley Salmon came to accept Larry Wright’s landmark work on functional and teleological explanation after first balking at Wright’s dissertation is paradigmatic of the vise grip hold the traditional model of science and scientific explanation once held on the imagination of university professors.

 

Perhaps the best concise account of the explanatory problem and causal explanation provided by Darwinian biology can be found in Ernst Mayr’s One Long Argument, and as full length explanatory narratives it is hard to beat Richard Dawkin’s The Blind Watchman and Darwin’s own On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

 

What do we find when we looks at Darwin’s explanatory problem and the strategy he conceived to account for the problem-raising phenomena identified in his problem? What we find are teleologically and functionally characterized entities and characteristics that when situated in a particular way give rise to a truly puzzling problem in our experience, one which helpfully and more clearly framed in the process of providing an underlying causal mechanism to account for the phenomena which give rise to the empirical problems asking to be explained.

 

    출처: Taking Hayek Seriously        

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지난 100년은 경제학이 물리학을 흉내 내서 과학으로 만들려는 시도의 연속이었다.

 

From physicists to engineers to meds to plumbers: Esther Duflo rediscovering the lost art of economics @ASSA2017

 

Posted on January 7, 2017

by Beatrice Cherrier

 

 

The last 100 years can indeed been construed as an irresistible march toward making economics a science, notably by emulating physics. Philip Mirowksi showed that this physics envy included borrowing methodological claims (Popperian deductive approach, economics being concerned with identifying laws), metaphors (“energy”, “body”, “movement”, values”) and mathematical models and tools (law of energy conversion them thermodynamics). The physics comparison was a rhetorical weapon, wielded by NBER’s Wesley Mitchell in the 1940s during the discussing following Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier report (Bush and his fellow physicists advocated federal funding for “sciences.” Alas, the resulting National Science Foundation, established in 1950, did not cover any social science). But the pervasive reference to physics also reflected genuine emulation, as seen in Roger Backhouse forthcoming biography of Paul Samuelson. In the late 1930s, the young Chicago sophomore decided to start a diary in the 1930 to reflect on Frank Knight, Jacob Viner and his other teachers’ ideas, Backhouse relates. Its first sentence set the tone of Samuelson’s (hence the whole profession’s) methodological vision :

 

 

“Science is essentially the establishing of Cause and Effect relationships. This knowledge can be utilized in controlling causes to produce desired effects. It is the realm of philosophy to decide what these objectives shall be, and that of science to achieve those decided upon.”

 

After World War two, Mirowski argued in a follow-up volume, economists gradually shifted to information science metaphor (“machine dream”). It was however another comparison that gained currency in that period: the economist as engineer....

 

But the plumbing epistemology cannot be one whereby a preexisting scientific framework is applied, her later arguments reveal. Though she is not explicit about breaking from the rationality assumption, plumbers consider economic agents as neither endowed with perfect information, foresight and computing abilities nor fully rational in their decisions. Though her talk leaves the science of economics intact because distinct from plumbering, the latter in fact has the ability to transform what the theorist focuses on and what phenomena he needs to explain. What she might implicitly suggest is that economists should be less deductive and more inductive. The economist-as-plumber cannot wait for scientific knowledge to be mature and complete, she eventually warned. There’s a good deal of guesses, trial-and-errors and tinkering that economists should be willing to accept. In arguing this, Duflo is exactly in line with Paul Romer’s recent statement that economists should emulate those surgeons who cannot afford to wait for clean causal identification to make life-and-death decision. “Delay is costly. Impatience is a virtue,” he concluded. The plumber comparison also echoes Greg Mankiw’s distinction between macroeconomists-as-scientist and macroeconomist-as-engineer. Duflo’s Ely lecture might be a sign, then, that economists have recently rediscovered the lost art of economics. (발췌)

 

 

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NassimNicholasTaleb‏

If you do not take risks for your ideas you are nothing.

Nothing.

 

당신의 생각에 대해 그에 따르는 위험을 걸머지지 않는다면, 당신은 아무 것도 아니다.

 

자신이 하는 일에 위험을 부담하지 않는 사람                

상(賞)이나 영예를 추구하고 오바마와의 악수를                   

영예로 여긴다 

 

 

 

자신이 하는 일에 영혼을 바치는 사람

 자신의 신념을 지키기 위해   죽음을                                                                                           

불사한다. 소크라테스, 예수, 잔다르크

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