Boydstun

The core practice of “scientism”, as framed by Hayek, is that the methods of Science are appropriate in “their proper sphere”, but are not appropriate when they are the “slavish imitation of the method and language of Science”. This applies most pointedly to the social sciences. The questions that immediately should spring to mind is, what is the nature of scientific methods, and to what are they appropriately applicable? If we know that, we might have some idea when the application of those methods to some other sphere of knowledge is “slavish”.
In fact I agree that methods are often applied slavishly, even in the hard sciences. This leads us to our first definition of scientism, as being “the uncritical application of a methodology in pursuit of knowledge, motivated purely because of the unjustified belief ‘that’s how (this) science works’”. I am familiar with various scientific sins in the acoustic analysis of speech, the problem being that numerical methods (signal processing) are often applied inappropriately because “that is how we do it”.
Application of the methods of physical sciences to human behavior suffers from a particular defect that might lead one to conclude that human behavior cannot be studied scientifically. We should pause for a moment to consider what the alternative to science is. You might say that rather than drawing any general conclusions, a social scientist should only passively record what happened at a particular time and place (old-school ethnography). The enterprise of acquiring knowledge – science – is not just limited to making concrete observations, it involves reasoning about causation behind the behavior. The problem with many scientific theories of human behavior is that we can’t plug in a number or equation that accounts for the fact that humans chose their actions (well, their chosen actions, you don’t choose for your blood to circulate, it happens automatically). Some people ignore free will in their attempts to scientifically model human behavior; some people eschew the attempt to devise causal models of human behavior.
One thing that Objectivists bring to this discussion is our epistemological stance, that the universe is knowable; and, we should check our premises. We operate in terms of well-defined concepts, not floating abstractions – Objectivism is the scientific method applied to everything, even art! Science focuses on what objectively is, not on subjective appearance, and so does Objectivism. Hayek’s objection to “inappropriate scientism” is really an attack on a particular view of science which is incapable of yielding scientific knowledge about human behavior. The anti-cognitive, positivist behaviorist view that held sway over social sciences has been beaten back somewhat, to the point that his objections would need to be reconsidered in the contemporary millieu.
Politicized science is really something completely different: it is the rejection of the scientific method in the hard sciences.

As an example of algorithmic ‘serendipity’ , YouTube presented this video to me on Whitehead and though not touching on any politicization of science and obviously nothing on O’ist definitions, the lecture speaks to the connection of science to metaphysics and the role philosophy should play in distinguishing a hierarchy with a view toward how western science has made progress to rational understanding but underscores ,I think, a divide or in-congruency that could lead to “scientism”.
Though I do not know the O’ist stance toward Whitehead ‘officially’ , listening to the lecture is a good exercise in detecting similarities and differences in theories and explanations eg the mechanisms of concept formation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY2vDesht8o
 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/
 
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-hayek/
 
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/
Ayn Rand 1966:
 

It should be noted that the Sharon Statement from 1960 (the foundational document of YAF)  begins:
In this time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths.

We, as young conservatives, believe:

That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;

whereas the present statement says
In order to ensure that America’s best days are ahead, we affirm the following principles:

1.      Liberty. Among Americans’ most fundamental rights is the right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force: a right that, in turn, derives from the inseparability of free will from what it means to be human. Liberty is indivisible, and political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom.


 
The similarity is well beyond what might have arisen from like-minded individuals across 63 years expressing common sentiments: the omission of God must have been an essential choice that they made. In the current context of conservatism as even more fundamentally religious as it was 6 decades ago, this is an almost shocking (pleasing) omission.

Pretty nice.
One misrepresentation: "But the core of her belief system is quite simple: Individuals are inherently "heroic," while governments only restrict human freedom, potential and happiness."
No. The core of her philosophy, even the human-value part of it, is not anything political. And within the political, it is false that Rand held that all governments "only restrict human freedom, potential and happiness." That is someone else's political view, not Rand's. On this point the author was doing the usual of distorting Rand's views to suit his own or his boss.

Pretty nice.
One misrepresentation: "But the core of her belief system is quite simple: Individuals are inherently "heroic," while governments only restrict human freedom, potential and happiness."
No. The core of her philosophy, even the human-value part of it, is not anything political. And within the political, it is false that Rand held that all governments "only restrict human freedom, potential and happiness." That is someone else's political view, not Rand's. On this point the author was doing the usual of distorting Rand's views to suit his own or his boss.

I spotted this article: https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/five-reasons-ayn-rand-loved-united-states-america-right-live-ones-own-judgment
It's positive and covers the basics for somebody who might have never heard of Ayn Rand before.
I did not know that there was any news outlet that would still publish such a thing. (Many are too Leftist or too Christian.)

A rational man acts according to his nature, which means that he survives by reason. An irrational man does not live by reason: he may behave randomly, in exact opposition to reason, or according to emotion. We have a moral code which we apply to our choices that says what exactly that entails, therefore I know that it would be immoral for me to blow out my brains right now since life is great (that’s a fact about the current context, not the idea of blowing out one’s brains qua absolute). We can apply that moral code to the evaluation of others, and conclude that Putin is, by nature, immoral (not just once, but as a general fact of his character).
I am currently under irrational government compulsion to hand over part of my wealth to the government robbers (multiple governments!). I would not do this if I had a free choice, however, the government threatens me with force if I do not comply. A person’s response to force is by nature outside of the scope of reason – force is the denial of reason. Me paying taxes is not “rational”, it is the best I can come up with in light of reality and my hierarchy of values.
You have drawn a dichotomy between moral and immoral, but there is actually a trichotomy. The actions that another takes when under compulsion cannot be morally evaluated. The slave’s choices are outside the scope of moral evaluation, precisely because of the contradiction created by force. A further problem with your scenario, and with many hypothetical moral philosophy scenarios, is that it isn’t epistemologically consistent, instead it flits between the perspective of the individual and an observer. As an observer, we do not know the slave’s hierarchy of values – his actions cannot be morally evaluated. Evaluating the choices of others in such an epistemologically-impoverished circumstances is not reasonable, I might even say irrational, but I won’t.
The more interesting question is, what would you do in this circumstance, and why? I pay my taxes because even though I value freedom, I also value my life, and I recognize that knuckling under to the demands of government is necessary in order for me to live my life qua me (as opposed to living off the grid in the Sahara desert, where the weather sucks). I recognize that surviving purely by reason is impossible, but I have discovered that living is still possible. That means that the choice to exist, the primary choice, still remains at the very top of my hierarchy of values.
Your scenario adds a strange complication, that the master will free the slave if he engages in a silly symbolic act that he would never otherwise engage in. Equally “applicable” would be the mandate to drink a cup of kombucha in order to gain freedom. At this point, I am starting to think that the slave is not simply “failing to act purely by reason”, I think he is positively insane, in refusing to rectify his enslavement because he has been the victim of force. Change the scenario just a little: a person is subject to improper government compulsion, and he is given the choice of replacing the existing dictatorship with a less-cruel but still not perfectly rational government which still uses improper force. He would ordinarily not choose an irrational government which employs improper force. Since my hierarchy of values is different from that of the slave whose highest value is to not be the victim of force, I have a hard time evaluating this guy.
Since one’s hierarchy of values is chosen, I would conjecture that the person is indeed irrational because he bought into a contradictory philosophy which makes “be free from compulsion” be his primary choice. I would try to get the guy to read Galt’s Speech, to see if that might straighten out his crazy hierarchy of values.

 

The WSJ article mentions in passing, but does not give appropriate analysis to, the contribution of “Section 230”, which is 47 USC 230, in the censorship debate. That piece of law relates to a legal distinction between expression and mere transmission. For example, if you make death threats, you can be prosecuted. If you knowingly tell lies to the effect that Smith is a rapist, you can be sued for defamation. It’s not just the person uttering the word who can get in legal hot water, it is also those who “publish”, for instance the New York Times or the Fort Bend Star. The reason is that the newspapers knowingly and deliberately made the defamatory statements public (private writing of false lies is not legally actionable). A crucial distinction is made under the law between a publisher and a distributor, that the truck driver who delivers the newspapers to the newsstand is not held liable for his role in making the falsehoods public.
The role of section 230 is that it declares that an “internet service provider” is not a publisher, therefore unlike any other publisher, an internet publisher has no liability for publication of other people’s defamatory statements (or other torts excluding copyright infringement, though §230 does not immunize against criminal, copyright-infringement, or obscenity cases). Now the question is, is this legal immunity a good thing or a bad thing? On another page, we can debate whether defamation should be legally actionable, the crucial point is that it is actionable, but in a limited fashion where an internet publisher is deemed to not be a publisher, therefore not responsible. The law also immunizes an internet publisher from a breach of contract lawsuit for removing user content, if the publisher finds the content to be objectionable. This means that an ISP does not have to contractually own up to their arbitrary removal powers.
Section 230 creates a twisted plate of conceptual spaghetti that is very difficult to untangle. Should there even be a legal cause of action for defamation; should a publisher be allowed to call on a hidden contractual provision; should internet publishers be treated differently from other kinds of publishers? The matter is exacerbated by the fact that the courts do still hold internet publishers liable about half the time. The crux of the variation is whether the company is just an “internet service provider”, or is it an “information content provider”. Normally, if a business exercises editorial control, it is not just a distributor, it is a publisher. But internet publishers enjoy special privileges, that they can exercise control over objectional content without exercising editorial control. Say what? No wonder people get confused about censorship.

Religion in Human Evolution – From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Robert N. Bellah (Harvard 2017)
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975347&content=toc
Start with chapter 7 for your interest in Ancient Greeks and their prelude. Jump back to earlier material in the book for needed wider layout and the terminology (use Index).
The Beginnings of Western Science – The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450
David C. Lindberg (Chicago 2007, 2nd edition)
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo5550077.html 
1. SCIENCE BEFORE THE GREEKS
     What Is Science?
     Prehistoric Attitudes toward Nature 
     The Beginnings of Science in Egypt and Mesopotamia

2. THE GREEKS AND THE COSMOS
     The World of Homer and Hesiod
     The First Greek Philosophers
     The Milesians and the Question of Underlying Reality
     The Question of Change
     The Problem of Knowledge
     Plato’s World of Forms
     Plato’s Cosmology
     The Achievement of Early Greek Philosophy

3. ARISTOTLE’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
     Life and Works
     Metaphysics and Epistemology
     Nature and Change
     Cosmology
     Motion, Terrestrial and Celestial
     Aristotle as a Biologist
     Aristotle’s Achievement
. . .
 

I studied the history of science with David Lindberg as my professor at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s. He instilled in me and interest in this topic that has continued till today.

Religion in Human Evolution – From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Robert N. Bellah (Harvard 2017)
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975347&content=toc
Start with chapter 7 for your interest in Ancient Greeks and their prelude. Jump back to earlier material in the book for needed wider layout and the terminology (use Index).
The Beginnings of Western Science – The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450
David C. Lindberg (Chicago 2007, 2nd edition)
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo5550077.html 
1. SCIENCE BEFORE THE GREEKS
     What Is Science?
     Prehistoric Attitudes toward Nature 
     The Beginnings of Science in Egypt and Mesopotamia

2. THE GREEKS AND THE COSMOS
     The World of Homer and Hesiod
     The First Greek Philosophers
     The Milesians and the Question of Underlying Reality
     The Question of Change
     The Problem of Knowledge
     Plato’s World of Forms
     Plato’s Cosmology
     The Achievement of Early Greek Philosophy

3. ARISTOTLE’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
     Life and Works
     Metaphysics and Epistemology
     Nature and Change
     Cosmology
     Motion, Terrestrial and Celestial
     Aristotle as a Biologist
     Aristotle’s Achievement
. . .
 

Odd and beautiful.

Reminds me of a purported sign on a fence:
 

DEA officer stops at a ranch in Texas and talks with an old rancher.   Ghost Girl, studied Literature, Languages, and Communication at Foreign Langauges (2011) Posted May 10 He tells the rancher, "I need to inspect your ranch for illegally grown dr*gs."
  The rancher says, "Okay, but do not go in that field over there," as he points out the location.
  The DEA officer verbal...
 Read More »      

Of course, it's understood that the Objectivist definition of 'selfish' includes 'rational' in its definiens.
I'll look up that ballet. 

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Objectivism holds that promoting the general welfare is not a proper role of government. So an Objectivist could not honestly swear to pledge allegiance to that principle. So, if you consider yourself to be an Objectivist and honest, then, by your own advocacy, you don't have a right to be in the United States. So next up for you (along with how many other oath scofflaws) is a plane ride to anywhere in Somalia where the plane will land just long enough to push you out and then take off back to the good 'ol U S of A without you. Not sure though what happens to your property. I think maybe the law is that you have a week to liquidate it and you bring the cash with you wherever we decide to drop you.
Meanwhile, I'm in big trouble too, since I vehemently oppose that all states, no matter their size in population get the same number of votes in the Senate and that that it is regarded in the Constitution as such a fundamental principle that it is the only thing in the Constitution that the Constitution disallows being changed by amendment.

https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/2-2-psychodynamic-and-behavioural-psychology/ 
(Some of the things said about types of psychologists in this linked report are incomplete, too coarse-grained, and out of date.)
Neuropsychologists study consciousness as belonging to brain processes.
Tad, concerning epistemological v. metaphysical, the biological is what consciousness is. That likely means it is included under what you may mean by the metaphysical. I propose that when Aristotle talks of earth, wind, fire, and water, what one should now switch to for reality best we know it is the chemical elements and to states of matter such as gas, liquid, or solid. When he speaks of substance, what one should best switch to for best capture of reality is mass-energy and to matter & fields and to more modern-science aware metaphysics, such as in replacement of Aristotle's 'substance' with Rand's 'entity'. The biological is physical. 
Then too, the epistemological should not be something vaguely floating around the philosopher's armchair, but informed by modern cognitive psychology (including developmental cognitive psychology) and neuropsychology. Serious epistemology includes, these days, assimilation of results from empirical psychology research.
There has been some work on how Freud's speculations and key concepts stand up under modern scientific research. Some of the things he drew attention to can be observed in one's own mental operations. If you come awake while dreaming, you therefore will be able to remember some of the dream. Look for your use of objects and events of the previous waking day that you have put into the dream story. Freud called that the day residue, and I find it there just as he did.
I have shied away from Freud's "the unconscious" and usually use instead the less elaborate Objectivist concept of "the subconscious." The powers of Freud's unconscious have seemed to me a long time to have too much the character of a unified agent and one implausibly autonomous from the regular agent we call a person.
When I was college age, I read Freud's On the Interpretation of Dreams during a period I had been without funds to continue school. Concerning Dreams I recommend also a book by Jonathan Winson (1985) titled Brain and Psyche: The Biology of the Unconscious. At the time Freud was writing Dreams, he was also writing Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which I also found interesting.
 
 

The recitation of plaintiff and defendant arguments in the background section is standard practice, and you can’t automatically read endorsement into these words, especially when it comes to a crucial question that both sides agree on, that she is not discriminating against any individual on an illegal basis such as sex or religion, which simplifies the court’s task. It is true that plaintiff in their petition for a writ of certiorari did submit as one of the question to be decided “Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent, contrary to the artist’s sincerely held religious beliefs, violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment”, but the court did not answer the religion fork of the question, they focused on the Free Speech issue. That means that I too as an atheist cannot be compelled to worship or compose sermons, or to compose progressive-statist praise poetry when a customer do asks (as was possible until this ruling). But that would be the case if Free Speech only applied to religious matters.
Every petition to the courts uses a huge-bore shotgun in the hope of hitting something, so I am not surprised that they played the religion card.Notice that the Free Exercise Clause is not mentioned even once even in the dissent, a clear indication that religion was not an issue. Plaintiffs also invoke Employment Division v. Smith which was about religious actions (not expressions) which leads to their question 2 of “[w]hether a public-accommodation law that authorizes secular but not religious exemptions is generally applicable under Smith, and if so, whether this Court should overrule Smith”, and again the ruling completely ignores the religious prong, never citing Employment Division (because religion is irrelevant to the question).
I’m not inclined to listen to the entire two and a half hour of the argument, which is here, since the party arguments are not proof of anything about the court's reasoning. I doggedly insist that what matters is the legal principle established here, namely the holdings.

 

Koch spending $70 million is peanuts compared to $350 million Mark Zuckerberg spent in 2020,  see: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/943242106/how-private-money-from-facebooks-ceo-saved-the-2020-election .  That spending was just on getting the votes counted (for Biden) and wasn't part of the more than one billion spent by the Biden Campaign. 

Eiuol,
Your post reminded me of an episode that occurred in Rand's life in the fall of 1940. Except for the link and the square-bracketed text I added, the following is from Barbara Branden's biographical essay "Who Is Ayn Rand?" (1962), based on interviews of Rand by Mrs. Branden.
 

Savage is not a philosophically precise word. But she is still talking about specific cultures with specific standards and methods of operation. Or lack of standards in this case, in her view. As your quotes show, she characterized different cultures as savage, such that they have no legitimate political claims. As far as concerns about borders, Rand's comments about Native Americans are all we have, most likely against people who said that Europeans "stole" land from the natives. 
But this doesn't at all get into people who are leaving the so-called savage culture into the more advanced culture politically speaking. Whatever she thought, incorrectly, about natives, she may give a completely different evaluation when talking to people seeking out the stronger and more developed country. Being an immigrant herself, almost certainly viewing Russia as savage politically, I don't think she would use the reasoning that "people choosing to leave savage cultures are more likely to be savage themselves". If anything, Rand would say that people choosing to remain within savage cultures are savage themselves. 
What Rand did is classify cultures as savage, whether she did that rightly or wrongly is another question. 
What you seem to be doing is classifying people as savage based on nothing but their country of origin. Maybe Rand would say that many people in Africa are savages when it comes to the way they treat politics and technology, but immigrating to the US or Western Europe for example usually indicates recognizing that there is something better and worthwhile. I think she would recognize this fact too. 

There is a very important distinction to be made between Objectivism and Ayn Rand’s views. Objectivism is the philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand, but “Ayn Rand’s views” is an extensional bag of everything that she thought. Too often, in my opinion, people think that Objectivism is whatever she said, rather than being an integrated system of non-contradictory concepts and propositions.
Some of what she thought is part of the system, and one good way to tell is that she wrote it and published it after thinking it over. For example, Atlas Shrugged, or ITOE. Spontaneous answers in response to a Ford Hall Forum question (the homosexuality canard, best reported here) makes clear that her personal reaction is not part of the philosophical system), same with other personal communications such as her reported (positive) view of tiddlywink music and
or her dislike of Mozart or Beethoven, which does not dictate what music an Objectivist should like.
Let’s return to the opening statement, that “Rand suggested that the colonisation of North America was fair play because the inhabitants did not recognise individual rights”. Let’s actually investigate what part of her philosophical system suggests something, and what exactly is suggests or better yet actually says. It’s guaranteed that she never said that it was “fair play”, which is an idiom invented long after her death. Instead of looking for scientific errors where she she said more than she knew, let’s look for any elements of her philosophy that would support a loyalty oath as a requirement for being in a rights-respecting nation.

 

Thank you.
Save one, all of those ideas of Rand's are at least partly false. One statement is true. It is made by you, and it is claimed (correctly) for Rand: only human beings have rights (because if authentic, they are moral relationships possible only between autonomous agents).
I'd not take "recognize" as so intellectual and so explicitly articulated as you do here in reading Rand using "recognize" in these right-action contexts. When Rand has passengers on a train killed through wrong conduct of train operators causing an accident, poetic justice is in play, not advocacy of the death penalty for people holding the mistaken views displayed in the minds of those passengers. The chorus of uncharitable readings of this scene notwithstanding (e.g., agree with Rand's philosophy or be sent to the gas chamber by those who do.)
I'd like to reiterate what I said upstream: The people participating at this site have shown themselves to be independent thinkers, paramount for them is what is true and right, and they do not determine the answer by trying to figure out what Rand said on the issue. There are Objectivist-types like that (holding to a "hockshop of authority" contra Rand's counsel; I've encountered a few on Facebook), but they do not write here, at least not in the years I've been here. (I'm not an Objectivist, meaning there is at least one essential of the philosophy I think false, but like most others here, I have intellectual and personal-survival debt to Rand, interest in philosophy, including hers, and significant agreement with her on some issues significant to me.)
The audience Rand indicates she thinks she is addressing in the Galt's Speech of Atlas Shrugged are not fully in agreement with her philosophy therein, because she is the inventor of it and is breaking the news of it. She repeatedly assumes all sorts of good and bad things in the audience of the radio speech, and she holds forth people's wrong bases for those things or only glimpsed correct bases for them, which she tries to diagnose and remedy out in the light. They do not have her philosophy, yet "whatever living moments you have known, were lived by the values of my code." They have and do authentic good without knowing her code.
Rand did not take issue with the act requirement for use of lawful government force. Had she known the specific history behind the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from the Southeastern United States in the 1830's to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), she might have faced up to the complications of such historical developments. Certainly, she should have. And she should have learned more about those land-takings before describing the historical facts behind the takings in the American history more generally. That was a crucial taking and removal of population I knew of from childhood and schooling out there, and I've been amazed how often people growing up in the Northeast don't know a blessed thing about it.* *

It is in the nature of rights that a man may live his life according to his sole judgment, and he is not required to justify his choices to others. The burden of proof therefore lies on the government to prove that a man’s actions constitute initiation of force. The assumption that failure to recite a loyalty oath or take any other symbolic act is proof of initiation of force is entirely unreasonable. As in, by what logic does such non-action constitute initiation of force?
Not only do we not have to accept your two claims, we must reject them. Those who have not fully internalized and accepted the Objectivist ethics still have the legal right to claim the benefits of the Objectivist ethics for themselves, moreover, no claim need be made since a man is free to enter and remain in the country (state, city) to the best of his ability. No man can question this right, any man who attempts to use force against a foreigner for not satisfying his personal criteria for virtue can be properly arrested and punished for initiation of force. Blocking entry of foreigners is not a legitimate function of government, because entering a national territorial jurisdiction is not initiation of force, any more than being in a national territorial jurisdiction is. Your proposal reduces to a perpetual requirement to justify one’s existence to the authorities.