If it means anything to be a lover of truth, it means that anytime society finds itself stuck in one of these naked-emperor equilibriums—i.e., an equilibrium with certain facts known to nearly everyone, but severe punishments for anyone who tries to make those facts common knowledge—you hope that eventually society climbs its way out. But crucially, you can hope this while also realising that, if you tried singlehandedly to change the equilibrium, it wouldn’t achieve anything good for the cause of truth.This is stupid. Clearly, in a situation where people are too frightened to say 'The Emperor is naked' the very last thing you'd want is for this to become explicit 'common knowledge' because then the task of the Secret Police just gets very much easier. Essentially they'd just need to get an independent truth telling savant to say 'All subversives will be put to a very painful death along with their near and dear on the morrow of the xth night subsequent to this announcement- where x stands for the percentage of potential subversives we have targeted- unless, of course, these potential subversives have the good sense to top themselves first.'
Imagine an economy with homogeneous labour input (or else assume hatred of the regime is randomly distributed across occupations). A one off technological shock which raises productivity by ten percent might mean that the ten percent of the population who by a Pareto Law, represent most of the Subversion potential can be got rid off.
In this case the alethic Savant who makes it explicitly common knowledge that the regime is murderously efficient only in propagating a stupid lie- e.g that the Emperor aint naked- would also be the best, the most economical, instrument of the Secret Police. His announcement that such and such is the dastardly plan of those sociopaths would cause around ten percent of the population to commit suicide on the tenth night.
Actually, that isn't quite true. All rational agents with this 'common knowledge' would be committing to 'Newcombe' or 'Kavka' type mechanisms to guard against being 'potentially subversive' on the xth night. Thus any random decimation on the morrow of night x would be sufficient to not just fatally deplete the class of potential subversives but would set off an endogenous 'arms race' of increasingly costly signals of commitment to the 'naked Emperor equilibrium'. Indeed, to adapt the language of St. Paul, we would have a particularly robust, for 'mysterious', moral Economy.
In this context, can there be an action guiding epistemic ethics? In other words, is there something about studying a subject properly which also tells you what to concentrate on within that subject and how to deal with colleagues who may have different views or be more vulnerable to official displeasure?
Scott, believes in
‘the Kolmogorov option. This is where you build up fortresses of truth in places the ideological authorities don’t particularly understand or care about,’However this wouldn’t work in either Stalin’s or Mao’s Utopia because doing stuff the authorities don’t care about, more especially if it requires brain power, would be considered ‘bourgeois idealism' punishable by a spell in a Labour Camp.
People like Kolmogorov & Hua Luogeng showed the State that Mathematicians were willing to roll up their sleeves and do applied work so as to over-fulfill the 5 year plan or whatever. Luogeng was even able to save the lives of one or two 'bourgeois idealist' Pure Mathematicians.
Scott mentions Lysenko’s idiocy but doesn't get that it was useful to both Stalin and Mao. It gave them an excuse to starve the peasantry thus bolstering the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
In the West we are fortunate to have autonomous universities competing with each other, more especially in ‘games against nature’. Does this circumstance permit the deduction of a categorical imperative for Scientists of the sort given in Scott's post?
Certainly, under a specific type of Dialetheia which features ‘scientific truth’ discoverable in one way and ‘deontic truth’ discoverable in another way. However, this is inelegant and not robust.
If we forbid Dialethia we either have some sort of evidentiary decision theory- which is equally fraught with problems; we might end up ‘managing the news’ or else get caught up in backward causation type paradoxes.
Alternatively we could embrace Gibbard type ‘semantic normativism’ but this too has problems.
Finally, we could think of ‘Truth’ as the solution of a coordination game. However, if Knightian uncertainty obtains, we ought to be hedging through ‘discoordination games’ so similar problems arise.
Kolmogorov himself gives us a demarcation criteria for ‘alethic’ research programs separating them from ‘Preference falsification’ based ‘availability cascades’. Clearly, only a ‘bandwagon’ would instrumentalise complexity classes far beyond our computational capability for prescriptive purposes.
Sadly, this approach doesn’t take us very far either because it fails for co-evolved process
What is the Economic theory of ‘naked-emperor equilibriums—i.e., an equilibrium with certain facts known to nearly everyone, but severe punishments for anyone who tries to make those facts common knowledge’?
This sounds like a ‘pooling equilibrium’ on the basis of ‘cheap talk’. ‘A costly signal’ (e.g. something heavily punished) gives rise to a separating equilibrium- which means there is an arbitrate opportunity between coordination and discoordination games.
However General Equilibrium theory predicts that the moment this is exploited the whole becomes, at worst, ‘anything goes’, or at best ironic in a Hegelian manner. The ‘martyr’ becomes the bedrock of the everlasting Ecclesia founded upon the lie he exposed.
I think this question and its ironic outcome lies at the very origin of Western Philosophy in the duel between Isocrates and Aristotle. The former wrote a letter to the boy Alexander urging him to get shot of his tutor who was having him grapple with difficult and abstract subjects like Pure Mathematics. It is better, Isocrates says, to concentrate on perfecting rhetorical style and the arete proper to pre-eminence.
Isocrates is referred to in the Phaedrus where Socrates comes to the conclusion that the palinode (i.e. being able to change your mind) is paradigmatic of philosophy as something which gives birth to the new. Ironically, Socrates- a descendant of Daedalus- finds an Ariadne’s thread which leads him to become a pharmakos- a scapegoat- for his beloved Polis.
Isocrates’ ‘Antidosis’ (a Coasian mechanism design quirk in Athenian law whereby, if you were selected to discharge a public function then you could challenge some richer guy to do it or else swap estates) is the opposite of Socrates’ own defense against the charge of misleading the youth.
Essentially, in Scott’s terms, this ‘good heretic’ is saying he’d be better at the job of clothing the Naked Emperor in a seamless robe of diaphonous opulence.
This is an idea which the Russians were familiar with from Doestoevsky. If you want to get a job with the Secret Police, you pretend to be a dissident till they pick you up for interrogation at which point you turn the tables on them and explain how you are an even better agent provocateur than those they set upon you. Of course, the thing works the other way as well. A true dissident who really wants to change the system will have disguised himself as a secret policeman straight off the bat.
Perhaps this was the game everyone was playing. People like Luzin, by reason of their mystical leanings, were actually safer if denounced by their own. Those in real danger were the Old Bolsheviks.
The Soviets and the Americans develop O.R to a high standard at around the same time. Two very different systems begin to mirror each other in one respect- their Political Paideia can have a purely mathematical description. The Soviets had Nobel prize worthy mathematical economists just as the Americans did, but it was the latter which developed systematic schools attracting adherents across the globe. Ultimately, in the ’90’s we had the ultimate ‘antidosis’ competition. The Harvard Econ Dept was hired to give Russia an American type economy. We all know how that turned out.
Perhaps we became complacent at some point in the Eighties. It is sad that shrill complaints re. ‘trait based’ discrimination have vitiated proper statistical research into the genuine article as illumined by Sowell, Loury, Fryer & c. There are a lot of bright and good people doing Junk Social Science in order to show they are ‘engaged’.
Misology, too, is a type of ‘costly signal’. If a smart and erudite guy makes it a point to utter ignorant non sequiturs it must be the case that he really really cares, right? Either that or he’s just lazy and likes publicity. But, that’s the nature of our current ‘naked Emperor equilibrium’.
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