I’m going to drop the science/philosophy subject, mostly because I don’t believe the line between them is bright enough to support a detailed exploration of P’s contribution to S. Just today, I read a Medium article that credits “philosopher” Francis Bacon with inventing/discovering the scientific method. I could understand the view that he was “doing science” at the time. After all, how could I have taken a college course in “Philosophy of Science” if there weren’t some serious overlap.

Science by itself doesn’t supply the full picture of secular knowledge, since science doesn’t address normative questions.

I am not convinced that’s true. I get from “is” to “ought” via my old reliable plus-sum game. We ought to cooperate when cooperation is in our interest. Secular morality and religion create a coordinating authority where none actually exists. That’s really very cool. But like government being a form of bargaining, religion is a form of game theory. If the “science” of cooperation didn’t make cooperating a sound survival strategy, God would not command it.

I’m trying to pin down our main disagreement on economics. I’m not necessarily arguing that free market views are false. The question I raised in the article is whether this math-heavy, plutocracy-friendly economics is scientific or cult-like.

I guess that depends on whether bad science is scientific. Was geocentrism “cult-like” or scientific? When Newton tried to dope out how God ordered the universe, was he being scientific or cult-like? Is confirmation bias a factor in the dichotomy?

I often find myself paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law. Any sufficiently wrong view of reality is indistinguishable from cultism. Laissez-faire economics is cultish in my view because it draws an artificial line around “economic” activity. The error is egregious, and I believe it is made because those who make it want so badly to get where its being true would take them. Upton Sinclair observed how difficult it is to convince a man something is false when his salary depends on its being true. Substitute “fortune” for salary, and there’s no end to the shit people will believe.

Granted, psychology is in the middle of a replication crisis, but for basic evolutionary reasons, we should expect that we’re far from inherently rational; we use heuristics as often as algorithms, and the historical rise of scientific objectivity is largely accidental and exapted, its results being mostly counterintuitive.

I have greater respect for heuristics; I believe we have a lot of innate urges to do the what has been “revealed” by selective pressure to be statistically rational. Like those elks whose horns were too big, our adaptations can obsolesce, and when they do, we make a real mess of things, because “rationality” is largely an ex post label attached to something that turns out to have been optimal. But I believe that the arc of evolution bends toward behavior consonant with strategic rationality, if not to rational thinking per se.

For example, we tend to disbelieve valid warnings from unvetted sources. That’s because there is always someone who thinks the sky is falling, and we do not have the tools to separate the wizards from the fraudsters weirdos. So, the rational strategy is to disbelieve. Maybe the skepticism is genetic and maybe it’s cultural, but, either way, the default posture of disbelief is “rational” given the level of substantive ignorance at which we must operate.

Politics is broader than economics, in that the political structure of a society is free to be based, say, on explicitly religious considerations, as in the case of theocracy, whereas free-market economics is supposed to be modeled on science.

I disagree. “free-market” economics is not congruent with “economics.” The Ten Commandments forbid stealing. Building cathedrals provides jobs. Government is consistent with the economic interests of those who create and suffer it.

As I understand it, game theory assumes that people are rational decision-makers, where this kind of agent “has clear preferences, models uncertainty via expected values of variables or functions of variables, and always chooses to perform the action with the optimal expected outcome _for itself_ from among all feasible actions” (as Wikipedia puts it).

Game theory is the friction-free surface of human behavior. It does not theorize about what people will do; it theorizes about what they would do if they agreed on the value of outcomes and could do the math. Game theory explains Leviathan; the war of all against all is a zero-sum game in a world where plus-sum outcomes are possible through coordination. Game theory doesn’t say that a government will be created, but it helps to understand why Hobbes would say that one should be created, and to understand why, once created, the institution of government tends to endure. People value stability once they have it. That’s about all the rationality we can muster, but it is rationality.

Sure, you can reconstruct cooperation and the formation of government, based on this assumption of egoistic rationality, as in the case of social contract theory. But you could just as well reconstruct them based on blatant theology, saying God blessed the Founders of the US, and so forth. The facts can be spun in multiple ways, but the actual science falsifies or at least conflicts with both models.

I believe that’s too simplistic a view of things. Evolution operates by chance under selective pressure. What works survives. No matter how governments come to be constituted, they survive because they are existentially viable ways to do economics.

We’re not fundamentally rational,

I don’t know what “fundamentally” means in that claim. Is it quantitative or qualitative? Is the judgment made ex ante or ex post? At the micro or macro level?

The question here is whether we cooperate based on reason or on instinct, faith, fallacies, illusions, gullibility, or on other nonrational grounds.

I don’t find that question central. We cooperate because cooperation works. If it never did, we wouldn’t do it. Our genes wouldn’t predispose us to it, our religions wouldn’t command it, and we would not have governments. We don’t act out of rationality, but our behavioral stones are smoothed in a way that appears rational in retrospect. Have you read The Selfish Gene? Animals are less rational than humans, yet a lot of the experimental evidence (or maybe just anecdotes) in the book conform strikingly to game-theoretical predictions. Even our superstitions are shaped by experience, and experience reflects reality. Therein lies rationality in retrospect. Your demands that it operate ex ante seem to me too demanding. People do not have to be rational to behave as if they were rational.

To affirm that we form them on a rational basis, despite the falsification from cognitive science and the sordid history of economic deregulation, indicates that the free-market economist has either a cultist mentality or has helped perpetrate a fraud to sustain the palpable irrationality (unsustainability) of plutocracy and consumerism.

The free-market economist is a fool. But that’s because he fills in the de dicto blanks with the wrong de re data.

I would say the principle difference in our thinking is that I don’t respect boundaries. I don’t recognize a “thing” called “free-market economics.” I might attach that label to a particular misunderstanding of economics in a free society, while at the same time not recognizing a boundary between economics and politics. The result is that I am anti-radical; I don’t see “systems” that can be extirpated. I seek pressure points, misapprehensions that, if changed, will enable us to take advantage of opportunities. What you call “free-market” economics is a real cultish phenomenon, but it arises from a simple failure to grok that government is an economic actor. That “discovery” enables us to make a minimalist tweak to our understanding of economics, leaving the rest of the edifice standing.