Marx vs. Smith

On the left, Marx and on the right, Smith: They are facing in opposite directions and yet there is an ironic connection. Marx despised government as the protector of the property of the owning classes, to be done away with in a communist classless society of common interests. Likewise some of Smith's libertarian followers see Government as the problem rather than the solution and seek to minimise it. But neither the pure communist nor pure libertarian visions have ever been realised and tested in practice. The ideal role of Government may in fact be that of a democratic argumentative forum protecting us from the totalising & hegemonic visions of radicals and idealists whose efforts ultimately favour anarchy in the first instance followed by anarchy's drastic antidote in the second instance - dictatorship. 

Recently Blogger seemed to be corrupting posts when they were edited. Hence to be sure of fidelity the rest of this article can be found in the PDF  here

Matt Ridley's Facts vs Science Paradigm

No models, no science. More facts better models. Why can't Matt Ridley take on board the scientific epistemic?

The Ptolemaic model of the heavens was actually not bad at making predictions, but  philosophical presuppositions which permitted only the use of circular motions with all measurements being made relative to the earth gave the model a limited sell-by-date. The use of epicycles was a crude kind of Fourier analysis that would require more and more harmonics to be added in order to converge on the observed motions

With motions measured relative to the Sun the Copernican system, although initially based on Sun centred  circular motions, opened up new theoretical potential leading in turn to Digges, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein and finally Poincare's chaos calculations, each ushering in a conceptual departure which embraced new anomalies in the incoming data. Atomic theory went through similar phases from Rutherford, the Bohr atom, Wilson & Sommerfeld's quantisation rules, Schrodinger & Heisenberg, Dirac & Feynman; but where was gravity in all this? The overall lesson is that even the best models never quite capture everything about the creation. 

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This post follows my post about Matt Ridley's mental block with scientific modelling describing the epidemiology of Covid19, 

Recently Blogger seemed to be corrupting posts when they were edited. Hence to be sure of fidelity the rest of this article can be found in the PDF here.