Soros's Irrational Reflexivity

 Soros says 'the three key concepts on which all my other ideas—and most of my actions in business and philanthropy—are founded. These concepts are fallibility, reflexivity, and open society.'

Reflexivity is simply the notion that expectations can affect reality. This is what happens in the Social Sciences. What people believe can determine the type of Society they live in. This also means that affecting beliefs or expectations can change Society without there being any change in what is 'common knowledge' (i.e. stuff everybody knows everybody else knows to be true) for that Society. 

Soros's political interventions- which are of a holier-than-thou, but paranoid type- are meant to change expectations in a self-fulfilling manner. The problem is that 'preference falsification' or simple hypocrisy is ubiquitous. People pretend that they believe or prefer certain things. At one time, everybody in Europe pretended rubbing one out was just about the worst thing anybody could do. Now, Brussels wants Masturbation taught in primary schools- preferably as a substitute for Mathematics- which could totally tank Europe's porn industry which creates millions of jobs in deeply boring countries like Holland and Denmark. To be clear, us Brits don't wank. At least, we didn't till we joined the Common Market. If Brexit has achieved nothing else, it has confined the detestable practice of self-abuse to a shrinking minority of 're-moan-ers'.

Soros appeals to axioms of the 'masturbation will make you blind sort.' We may nod our heads either because we are being polite or because we hope Soros will put us on his pay-roll. 

Reflexivity in the Social Sciences would either lead to 'cobweb' type oscillation or, if there can be a correct economic theory (because preference and endowment diversity meets a Goldilocks condition), a hysteresis free  'Rational Expectations' solution of the type described by John Muth. No doubt, vested interest groups- or ideological nutters- can add noise to signal but there is no big signal-extraction problem. However, there may be no 'core' to a coordination game because discoordination games offer better hedging and income effects. But this means there is too much preference or endowment diversity.  

Soros believes there are 'historic events' which change our understanding of the world. This is foolish. Events can change the information set or the incentive matrix. But understanding does not change which is why we speak of an event having occurred.

Soros gives the following example- 'A truly historic event does not just change the world; it changes our understanding of the world—and that new understanding, in turn, has a new and unpredictable impact on how the world works. The French Revolution was such an event. 

Nonsense! Seventeenth Century Revolutions in England, culminating in the Glorious Revolution, and then the American Revolution in the late eighteenth Century, affected expectations in France. But the French Revolution was a shit-show. Napoleon's military victories did lead to political changes on the Continent which the 'Holy Alliance' was unable to wholly reverse. Still, the fact is, France didn't become a Republic till 1870. But this involved the crushing off the Communards. 

The distinction between humdrum and historic events is, of course, tautological,

It is arbitrary. 

but tautologies can be illuminating.

of the speaker's stupidity- sure. 

 Party congresses in the Soviet Union were rather humdrum, predictable affairs, 

Nonsense! Like everything else in the Soviet Union, Party congresses were tightly stage-managed. The Sixteenth Congress was a historic event. Stalin took supreme power and began purging Old Bolsheviks. There was a strong undercurrent of terror to such occasions. Tory Party conferences, back then, were humdrum. But Labor Party conferences were yet more boring. By contrast, the Liberals held homosexual orgies- or so I fondly believe. 

but Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress was a historic occasion.

No. What was historic was the death of Stalin and the killing of Beria. Kruschev's speech, like everything else he did, was clownish. Mao's breaking with Moscow was historic. 

 It changed people’s perceptions and, even if the communist regime did not change immediately, the speech had unpredictable consequences: The outlook of the people who were in the forefront of Gorbachev’s glasnost was shaped in their youth by Khrushchev’s revelations.

Rubbish! Brezhnev's 'stabilization of the cadres' had led to corruption, incompetence, and complacency. Economic, not ideological factors, drove Gorby's cackhanded perestroika. Then the cretin surrendered Party Control of the Economy and the Soviet Union crashed because of the resultant, wholly predictable, 'scissors crisis'. 

Soros is as ignorant as shit. He distinguishes a 'cognitive function'- which is a passive reception of some supposed pre-established social reality- from a 'participation function' which is strategic and imperative. The problem here is that participation is cognitive if one is a part of a particular reality. If one isn't, there is no reason to alter one's views. Thus, if you live in London, you deny that David Cameron hugged hoodies so as to trigger the hoodie riots during which mobs ran amok attacking Muslim owned shops and enterprises. Similarly, if you live in Ahmedabad, you deny that Modi incited Hindu mobs to attack Muslims. This is because a Londoner who says Cameron used hoodies to ethnically cleanse Muslims is either mad, ridiculously partisan, or in the pay of some bunch of lunatics. The same is true of a Gujarati. Of course, if I were visiting Pakistan, I might claim to be an eye-witness of Cameron's anti-Muslim pogrom. This might get me a bit of money and publicity. But this wouldn't really undermine the Tory party in Britain. Indeed, if my antics are publicized by British tabloids, it would help that party. 

Soros says- 

.. people think not only about the outside world but also about themselves and about other people. Here the cognitive and participation functions may interfere with each other without any lapse of time.

This is nonsense. I know Society thinks I'm a big fat loser. But I see myself as a smart Socioproctologist fearless pointing a finger, albeit from a safe distance, at stinky assholes. But that's why the perception that I'm a big fat loser is Muth rational.

Consider statements like “I love you” or “He is my enemy.”

They are imperative and strategic 

They are bound to affect the person to which they refer, depending on how they are communicated.

Nonsense! Trump may say he loves uneducated peeps like me. I don't believe him. But if he hates Soros and will tweet mean things about other such virtue signaling cunts, then I might enthusiastically support him- if that is what is in my economic interest.  

Or look at marriage. It has two thinking participants,

my ex-wife would disagree 

but their thinking is not directed at a reality that is separate and independent of what they think and feel.

Yes it is. A woman may put up with a really stupid husband provided everybody else thinks he is smart and is on track to be made Partner. I suppose, trophy wives get dumped when other people think they are no longer hot.  

One partner’s thoughts and feelings affect the behavior of the other and vice versa.

But actions- e.g gratuitous blow jobs- can have much bigger effects.  

Both feelings and behavior can change out of all recognition as the marriage evolves.

Because of actions or 'common knowledge' traits. You may stick with the stupid, irritating, spouse who- it is common knowledge- is a catch. You may feel you have to dump an affectionate spouse whom everybody else considers a turd in human shape. Cognitive dissonance is a real thing.  

If the passage of time can insulate the cognitive and participating functions,

it can only do this if there is no great cognitive dissonance involved.  

reflexivity can be envisaged as a kind of short circuit between thinking and its subject matter.

Which only occurs if cognitive dissonance exceeds a threshold.  

When it occurs, it affects the participants’ thinking directly, but the outside world only indirectly.

Not if thinking has a 'normative tie to action'.  

The effect of reflexivity in shaping the participants’ selfimages, their values, and their expectations is much more pervasive and instantaneous than its effect on the course of events.

Unless it isn't at all. Cognitive dissonance can increase such that people have multiple self-images without any threshold being crossed. There was a time when eye-brows might have been raised, down my local on a Match night, if I described myself as a gay, Tory, Muslim who identifies as a non-binary bunny-rabbit. Nowadays, the thing is more or less assumed.  

It is only intermittently, in special cases, that a reflexive interaction significantly affects not only the participants’ views but also the outside world.

This is only because 'significant' stuff happens intermittently. Soros is as stupid as shit. 

These occasions take on special significance because they demonstrate the importance of reflexivity as a real-world phenomenon.

So, a real-world event is significant if has special significance. This is because it demonstrates the importance of significance as a real-world phenomenon. Otherwise reflection or reflexivity wouldn't be significant though only reflection can distinguish the significant from the insignificant.

How fucking senile is Soros? 

By contrast, the endemic uncertainty in people’s values and self-images is primarily subjective. 

Nope. It is 'Knightian'. Subjectivity exists because all possible states of the world are unknown and unknowable. Thus the 'uncorrelated asymmetry' associated with being a particular subject determines the 'bourgeois strategy' that defines the Hegelian subject. 

Soros next demonstrates his ignorance of Economics- a salutary thing if you make your money as a glorified Chartist. 

the idea of indeterminacy has been vehemently denied by social scientists who assert their ability to explain events by scientific method. Marx and Freud are prominent examples,

They weren't social scientists. Marx had a PhD in Law but became a political journalist. Freud was a Doctor who initially tried to get rich by promoting cocaine as a cure all.  

but the founders of classical economic theory have also gone out of their way to exclude reflexivity from their field of study, despite its importance for financial markets.

Ricardo knew plenty about financial markets. The plain fact is that either the State, or non-market sector, changes expectations and puts the market in its place or else the reverse occurs. If the outcome is unpredictable it is not because of 'indeterminacy'. It is because the underlying Structural Causal Model is under-specified. Why? Knightian Uncertainty. Alethic investigation can diminish this. 

It is easy to see why. Indeterminacy, the lack of firm predictions and satisfactory explanations, can be threatening to the professional status of a science.

No. What threatens a profession is a lack of effective demand- i.e. punters willing for pay- for its services. It is enough for there to be a positive 'Expected Value' for the professional intervention to command a market.  

The concept of reflexivity is so basic that it would be hard to believe that I was the first to discover it.

It is nonsense. Cretins discovers shite like this all the time.  

The fact is, I am not. Reflexivity is merely a new label for the two-way interaction between thinking and reality that is deeply ingrained in our common sense. If we look outside the realm of social science, we find a widespread awareness of reflexivity. The predictions of the Delphic oracle were reflexive and so was Greek drama.

Fuck off! Few prophesies are self-fulfilling and, even if they are, there were highly ambiguous in the first place. Irony, not 'reflexivity', is what makes for satisfactory drama.  

Even in social science, there are occasional acknowledgments: Machiavelli introduced an element of indeterminacy into his analysis and called it fate;

Machiavelli says that Fortuna is a woman and should be approached with boldness which is cool till you find out how much babies cost.  

Thomas Merton

Soros, like Michael Polanyi, was a Hungarian Jew who moved towards Christianity 

drew attention to self-fulfilling prophesies and the bandwagon effect;

whereas we draw attention to Priests molesting choir-boys 

and a concept akin to reflexivity was introduced into sociology by Alfred Schutz under the name of intersubjectivity.

i.e. non-transcendental but still Husserlian shite. Mimetic effects give rise to intersubjectivity. But mimesis isn't 'reflexive' at all. Most people my age, clearing out their wardrobe, say to themselves 'skinny jeans! What was I thinking?' though, of course, when it comes to fashion, scarcely any fucking thinking is involved. 

do not want people to think that I am discussing some mysterious new phenomenon.

Soros is discussing shit he has pulled out of his own senile sphincter.  Now, he shows the cloven hoof of paranoia.

Yes, there are some aspects of human affairs that have not been properly accounted for, but that is not because reflexivity has only just been discovered; it is because the social sciences in general and economics in particular have gone out of their way to cover it up.

I recall my own puzzlement at the LSE's refusal to recognize that Macro-Econ is totes bogus because it don't actually make the dicks of those who study it much bigger. I now realize that James Tobin had been paid by Ronald Reagan to cover up the scandal of my horrendous sexual abuse at the hands of Margaret Thatcher. 

Reflexivity in the History of Ideas Let me try to position the concept of reflexivity in the history of ideas. The fact that statements may affect the subject matter to which they refer was first established by Epimenides the Cretan when he posed the paradox of the liar.

An impredicative or self-referential statement is only paradoxical if we are forbidden from applying a common sense hierarchy of types to it. A Cretan who says 'all Cretans are liars' is only saying that Cretans tell firs order lies. They may tell second order truths. This has nothing to do with self-fulfilling prophesies or whatever Soros means by 'reflexivity'.  

Cretans always lie, he said, and by saying it he brought into question the truth of his statement.

No he didn't. We get that Cretans- presumably a smooth talking commercial people- always shade the truth in first order discourse. They may say 'nice to see you!' when everybody hates our guts, and they may pretend that the wine they are selling you for a knock-down price is actually a potable vintage rather than pig-swill. But this doesn't mean they are deluded about their own habitual mendacity. If the thing serves a good purpose- viz. adding psychic value to transactions- the disarming confession made by Epimenides actually promotes trust. 

Being a Cretan, if the meaning of what he said was true, then his statement had to be false; conversely, if his statement was true, then the meaning it conveyed would have to be false. The paradox of the liar was treated as an intellectual curiosity and neglected for the longest time because it interfered with the otherwise successful pursuit of truth.

This is foolish. Every language user instinctively imposes a type theory on utterances. The reason the Liar paradox gained salience at the end of the Nineteenth Century was because Frege made a mistake. His 'Basic Law V' was based on 'unrestricted comprehension' rather than 'specification'. Russell showed this was not tenable. Impose a type theory and there is no problem.  

Truth came to be recognized as the correspondence of statements to external facts.

Nope. That was a theory of truth. The question was whether it could be successfully- not to say usefully- elaborated. As for 'recognition', that has to do with verification.  

The so-called correspondence theory of truth came to be generally accepted at the beginning of the twentieth century.

There speaks ignorance!  

That was a time when the study of facts yielded impressive results and the achievements of science enjoyed widespread admiration.

That time is this time. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is now seen as a dumping ground for affirmative action cretins.  

Emboldened by the success of science, Bertrand Russell tackled the paradox of the liar head on. His solution was

Type theory 

to distinguish between two classes of statements: a class that included statements that referred to themselves and a class that excluded such statements.

Russell used the term 'impredicative' to include intensional statements of a certain type. The problem is that we can never be sure that what appears extensional does not contain an intensional element and vice versa.  

Only statements belonging to the latter class could be considered wellformed statements with a determinate truth value.

Well formed 'formula'- yes. Statements are judged by informativity not truth value. Russell wasn't completely stupid.  

In the case of selfreferent statements, it may not be possible to distinguish whether they are true or false.

This is the case with any type of statement. Intuitionists deny the principle of the excluded middle. Constructivists may not, 'at the end of time'. 

Logical positivists carried Bertrand Russell’s argument further and declared that statements whose truth value cannot be determined are meaningless.

Which was silly. Informativity is what matters. Sadly, all sorts of tosh can be informative. It is pragmatic communication which should be parsimonious even when highly redundant. 

Remember, that was the time when science was providing determinate explanations for an ever-expanding range of phenomena, while philosophy had become ever more removed from reality. Logical positivism was a dogma that exalted scientific knowledge as the sole form of understanding worthy of the name and outlawed metaphysics. “Those who have understood my argument,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein in the conclusion of his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, “must realize that everything I have said in the book is meaningless.”

It was foolish, not meaningless. There can be no 'atomic propositions'. 

It seemed to be the end of the road for metaphysical speculations and the total victory of the fact-based, deterministic knowledge that characterized science. Soon thereafter Wittgenstein realized that his judgment had been too severe and he started to study the everyday use of language. Even natural science became less deterministic.

Determinism can be stochastic- indeed, for certain phases of matter, it must be. 

It encountered boundaries beyond which observations could not be kept apart from their subject matter. Scientists managed to penetrate the barrier, first with Einstein’s theory of relativity, then with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

No. These were the barriers to a Laplacian determinism. 

More recently, investigators using evolutionary systems theory, also known as chaos theory, started exploring complex phenomena whose course cannot be determined by timelessly valid laws.

Which doesn't matter if there is a fitness landscape which channelizes outcomes.  

Events follow an irreversible path

only if the arrow of time is irreversible- but that is true of everything.  

in which even slight variances become magnified with the passage of time.

This also happens with wholly determinate processes. If a development path- or creode- is robust, hysteresis gets locked in. But when the fitness landscape changes sufficiently, ergodicity is restored.  

Chaos theory has been able to shed light on many phenomena, such as the weather, that had previously proved impervious to scientific treatment,

It also shed bullshit all over the place. The thing ceased to be cool after the always irritating Jeff Goldblum invoked it in the first Jurassic Park movie. On the other hand, back in the Seventies, Marxists sought a way to be slightly less stupid by invoking the name of Ilya Prigogine. 

and it has made the idea of an indeterminate universe, where events follow a unique, irreversible path, more acceptable. It so happens that I started to apply the concept of reflexivity to understanding finance, politics, and economics in the early 1960s,

i.e. by the time Von Neumann's game theory was yielding rich dividends. Soros, poor fellow, was the wrong sort of Hungarian Jew- diligent enough to do well in trade but not blessed with a 'Martian' intellect.  

before evolutionary systems theory was born. I arrived at it, with the help of Karl Popper’s writings, through the concept of self-reference. The two concepts are closely related but they should not be  confused. Self-reference is a property of statements; it belongs entirely in the realm of thinking. Reflexivity connects thinking with reality; it belongs to both realms.

Hayekian spontaneous order or what later came to be known as autopoiesis have a long history in biology. Hayek's father and grandfather were Professors in that field. 

Perhaps that is why it was ignored for such a long time.

No. The point about Darwinism is that it gradually sinks in that only the fitness landscape matters. Evolution has no teleological arrow. Physics may always be on the point of forbidding Biology. Biology can't do shit about Physics. 

What reflexivity and self-reference have in common is the element of indeterminacy.

No. Everything not synthetic is indeterminate because we don't know which, if any, binaries 'carve up the world according to its joints'.  There is no excluded middle for anything sublatable or with insufficient, or too much, granularity. 

Logical positivism outlawed self-referent statements as meaningless,

in which case the predicate 'meaningless' is itself meaningless.  

but by introducing the concept of reflexivity I am setting logical positivism on its head.

The thing was dead. Why disinter it and make it perform somersaults?  

Far from being meaningless, I claim that statements whose truth value is indeterminate are even more significant than statements whose truth value is known.

Informativity matters. Significance is arbitrary or purely statistical- i.e. concerned with correlation not causation.  

The latter constitute knowledge:

No. Knowledge is merely that which is true by virtue of convention or some 'buck-stopped', protocol bound, procedure. But this is domain specific.  

They help us understand the world as it is.

But understanding something only matters if the only reason we keep doing stupid shit in that respect is because we are stupid.  

But the former, expressions of our inherently imperfect understanding, help to shape the world in which we live.

But so do expressions of our inherently perfect understanding of our need to pee or take a shit.  

At the time I reached this conclusion, I considered it a great insight. Now that natural science no longer insists on a deterministic interpretation of all phenomena and logical positivism has faded into the background, I feel as if I were beating a dead horse.

the idiom is 'beating your meat over a dead horse- or donkey or whatever'.  

Indeed, intellectual fashion has turned to the opposite extreme: The deconstruction of reality into the subjective views and prejudices of the participants has become all the rage.

Believing phenomenology isn't horseshit inevitably gives rise to identitarian miscshegoss.  

The very basis on which differing views can be judged, namely the truth, is being questioned.

Views are judged on the basis of utility. We are only interested in useful truths. But 'noble lies' too can be useful. 

I consider this other extreme equally misguided. Reflexivity should lead to a reassessment, not a total rejection, of our concept of truth.

No. Truth must remain a Tarskian primitive. Utility determines its pragmatics.