View source for Libertarianism: an unscience

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[[Category:Eli]]
[[Category:Jason Kuznicki]]
[[Category:Failures Of Libertarian Philosophy]]
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{{DES | des = "Sometimes I watch libertarians talk about epistemology and I just laugh and laugh."  Describes Jason Kuznicki as a typical example of bad libertarian epistemology. | show=}}
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Sometimes I watch libertarians talk about epistemology and I just laugh and laugh.
"Yes, I've seen models from early in the pandemic that predicted a much worse event than we seem to be experiencing. Those models were wrong, and on further scrutiny they turned out to be quite embarrassing. But...mainstream science updated itself and dropped those models as soon as better data became available."
Jason Kuznicki is not wrong here. Science isn't the thing where you're right the first time every time, it's the thing where you make an educated guess and then update your guess in light of evidence. That's why science is good: humans can't be right the first time every time, so the absolute best we can do (empirically) is to make an educated guess and then update the guess when new evidence comes in.

So, in that light, the rest of Kuznicki's article is pretty hilarious:
"If we look to similar cases in the past, no coercion was really needed. Norms of personal hygiene are widely shared and popular. We generally like seeming (and being) non‐infectious, and good personal hygiene norms help us both to signal and to be the healthy people that we want others to think of us as. Adopting a new norm in the face of a serious public health threat shouldn’t be too hard...

[L]ibertarian responses absolutely should be considered. They are stronger, perhaps, than we think them to be ourselves."
First, as a purely historical side note, it sure seems like Kuznicki is just plain lying here. "If we look to similar cases in the past," we'll see that "mask-wearing [during the 1918 flu pandemic] was sometimes enforced with fines, arrests, jail time and, in at least one case, gunfire." Moreover, Kuznicki himself never actually names any of the "similar cases" that he has in mind, which sure seems to suggest that he never bothered to research or substantiate his claims about what happened "in the past."

Anyway, though, besides all that, there's also the fact that he's now doing exactly the thing that he praises scientists for not doing. Remember, when scientists are wrong, they "update" their believes and "drop" the old, false, disproven theories "as soon as better data [becomes] available." And when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have plenty of data! To give only the one example that's most relevant to me personally, here's a simple graphic I created using the COVID infection stats for the county in which I live. (Remember that the disease has an incubation period of roughly two weeks.) See if you can spot a pattern:

Not exactly subtle, is it? When we were coerced into staying at home, the infection rate was very low. When the government foolishly decided that we were ready to try "[a]dopting a new norm," the infection rate shot up (and only started to go back down again because the government reimposed some coercive measures).

Again, this is only one example, but the story is the same everywhere you go. At least here in the US, the evidence is stark and unambiguous. Coercion is really needed, norms of personal hygiene aren't sufficient, adopting new norms is too difficult, and Kuznicki's "libertarian responses" are actually much weaker than we think.

In the spirit of what we're doing in this post, I won't blame him for the fact that his initial guess was stupid and wrong. Personally, I think that anybody with any sense would've known that "libertarian solutions" were a recipe for mass death in this instance, but this is a post about epistemology, so let's stick to the epistemological lesson. By and large, bad first guesses are excusable. What's not excusable - even according to Kuznicki himself! - is sticking to your bad first guess in the face of new evidence. So there really is no escaping the conclusion that Kuznicki is a fraud and an intellectual failure. We now have almost six months of real-life data about how humans are responding to the pandemic, and yet he still hasn't "updated" his hypothesis or "dropped" his bullshit beliefs.

And that's not a coincidence. As we saw last week, this problem is endemic within libertarianism. For your standard, garden-variety libertarian, all worthwhile economic and political questions have already been answered: regulations are bad, capitalism is good, when in doubt just say "freedom" a bunch and then walk away. And because they think that they already know all the answers, they never bother to test their beliefs against reality. Instead, they satisfy themselves with making sure that any challengers receive plenty of "attention in the...literature" (which is just to say that they do apologetics instead of research). Indeed, there are even some libertarians who go around claiming that we can learn key facts about the real world by sitting in our armchairs and pondering "highly unrealistic" fictions.

In the end, then, libertarianism is something like an unscience. It's not a pseudoscience, because pseudoscientists find ways to justify their beliefs using misinterpreted facts, janky experiments, or other forms of pseudo-empiricism. It's also not a straight-up religion, because religious epistemologies invoke the supernatural, whereas libertarianism is a strictly naturalistic affair. But libertarianism isn't scientific, either, because its naturalistic hypotheses never go through processes of testing and correction. To be a libertarian, you just make a guess about how the world works, and...then that's it. Then you simply stop and declare your job to be done. It's as though these people have looked at what it takes to be a scientist and said to themselves, "Well, I get it, but nah." It is, in short, an unscience.

Which is not to say that libertarianism is the only unscience. There are probably lots of them, some of which also live on the far left fringes of economics and politics. But there should be no debate at this point about the epistemological status of (at least 99% of) libertarianism. It's a sham. Again, you don't even have to believe me when I say that. Believe the libertarians themselves. When the libertarian Jason Kuznicki writes an article in defense of libertarianism in which he (1) says that all valid empirical methods must respond to new evidence but then (2) demonstrates that his own empirical method will never respond to new evidence, you should believe him on both counts. Theories about the world really do need to be tested. So, insofar as Kuznicki and his other libertarian colleagues fail to test theirs (and especially insofar as they openly admit that they don't even bother to try to test theirs), we should all reject their opinions out of hand.
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