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That is not at all what I said. I said:

"they might not be true until they are untrue"

I.E. ala Popper, they can only be proven untrue.

You wrote that theories might not be true until they are untrue, or, in other words, once theories are untrue then they might not be true.

hehe. After I posted, I thought about that. It totally contradicted the point I was trying to make.

The formula for kinetic energy, e=mv, was thought to be correct until Einstein showed that it was subjected to a Lorenz transformation.

That's a formula for momentum. Einstein showed that the classical formula for kinetic energy, m*v^2/2, is a special case, for low velocities, of his more general expression dm*c^2, where dm is the change in mass between reference frames, which is given by a Lorentz transformation, required by the invariance of Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism across reference frames.

I think I've figured out what's going on – he's talking about some _other_ person called Hayek. That's the only possible explanation.

I don't understand how you can disagree with what I wrote. The formula for kinetic energy, e=mv, was thought to be correct until Einstein showed that it was subjected to a Lorenz transformation. It's why they accelerate particles in particle colliders.

There is only one thing that I believe is universally true, and that is the speed of light in a vacuum. Everything else is tentative, and may remain so for a very long time.

Most people have it all wrong.

A genome is like a sentence, an environment is like an interpretor, and an organism is like the meaning which emerges when a sentence and an interpretor come together.

The same sentence, when interpreted by either Sam Grove or muirgeo, can have a very different meaning. Using this analogy, we can better understand why identical twins are not actually identical–merely their "sentences" are identical. Also, why can small differences in a genome result in a very different organism? Well, a small alteration to a sentence can have a significant impact on its interpretation, even when the interpretor is held constant, (comedians frequently make use of this fact).

So, an organism is like the meaning which emerges when a sentence and an interpretor come together. But imagine if someone proposed to investigate whether some part of a meaning was caused more by the sentence or by the interpretor. Suppose that he claimed that 70% of the meaning you take from this sentence is caused by the words on the screen, and the other 30% is caused by your particular interpretation, would he be making any sense?

But people are often fooled by statistical correlations (see Bryan Caplan).

Evolutionary biologists often specialise in the same way that ordinary biologists specialise. Different organs are studied as products of evolution, and the brain is one such organ. Evolutionary biologists who study the brain are, unsurprisingly, called evolutionary psychologists.

Unless a theory is tautological, it is, in principle, testable. Though theories propounded by evolutionary psychologists are often difficult to test, they are not untestable. But the relevant issue is how such theories compare to the alternatives. Which, among the candidate theories explaining the evolution of the brain, is preferable?

What Wolfe seems to object to is that evolutionary psychology is typically pessimistic about human perfectibility. These ideas seem to rub Wolfe up the wrong way, since they would throw a spanner in the works, so to speak, with regard to his "liberal" policy preferences. He champions the same kind of constructivist rationalism that Hayek so wisely critiques.

To quote — "Evolutionary theorists just cannot come out and say that human nature is purposive becaue that might imply that people make deliberate choices, their behavior cannot be so easily predicted by forces more powerful than themselves. We have, it would seem, freed ourselves from a supernatural power only to find ourselves enslaved to a natural one."

For Odin's sake, think before you type!

But they didn't try and ban the ideas altogether, just from rational debate.

Where did I suggest that anyone tried to ban ideas altogether? My whole point was that some ideas were delegitimised, because they were deemed in some respect undesirable. The result is that "rational"
debate is framed, before it even begins, in such a manner that only good thoughts are permitted entry.

Popper never said we should stop creating theories, just know they might not be true until they are untrue.

Karl Popper encouraged people to make imaginative and bold hypotheses, but he was also not concerned with delegitimising anything, and his views on science, evidence, and testing have been largely ignored because of that. The popular interpretation of his "falsificationism" is but a crude copy–perverted by assumptions and problems alien to Popper's own vision of rationality.

But anyway, do you understand what you wrote? Do you really think that Popper, or anyone with a brain, said that theories might not be true until they are false? Because that's what you just wrote.

Perhaps for his purposes, the distinction between classic and modern liberals is not useful, but for almost everyone else, it is very useful.

The distinction is meaningful, but it seems less useful to classical liberals these days. For better or worse, we have this two party duopoly in the U.S. More broadly, we this painfully simplistic, two dimensional political spectrum. You must either be a "conservative" or a "liberal".

Of course, these categories are incredibly vague, and their meaning changes continuously. "Conservative" seemed ascendant for a while, but the strange bedfellow coalition of neocons and Left Behind know nothings, who gave us Big Government Conservatism, have now soiled "conservatism" for at least a generation. Libertarians were never invited to the party in reality, so of course, "conservatives" will happily go along with blaming us for their puke all over the carpet.

So it's back to "liberalism", because "liberalism" is "the change we need", so libertarians need to persuade people who rarely think beyond simple labels that "liberalism" means classical liberalism and has always meant classical liberalism. That's just how politics works.

For those who asked, Wolfe's argument against evolutionary psychology (EP, for short) is that it seems to consist of observations of human nature coupled with just-so stories about how evolution caused those behaviors. EP theories have little or no predictive power, and no evidence analogous to the fossil record for straight-up evolutionary biology. Thus, EP can't be tested, can't be falsified, and doesn't offer much insight beyond that contained in the input observations of human behavior.

Martin Brock, that is an extremely interesting idea. Did you think of it?

I thought of it in the eighties, but lots of people have thought of it, before and since. Sam Nunn and Pete Domenici cosponsored an Unlimited Savings Allowance in the nineties. The New America Foundation has championed the idea more recently. The idea is taken very seriously at high levels of government, but I suppose "liberals" have opposed it for threatening their tax revenue while "conservatives" have opposed it for threatening the consumption of their constituents, as well as their revenue.

Although you don't hear much about it, I'm increasingly optimistic that some sort of progressive consumption tax is coming, because the Feds will soon need to generate a lot more tax revenue. They'll have no luck raising taxes on the middle of the income distribution, because the available income just isn't there, and if they try to raise marginal income taxes much without exempting investment, they'll strangle investment. They'll need to target marginal consumption to get the revenue they want without killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

That's not the reform I want. I want a progressive consumption tax that starves central authorities, but I'm not that optimistic; however, I can imagine steps in the direction of a progressive consumption tax in the foreseeable future.

Also, long-term yields have been very low for a while, and I don't see that changing. It's not just about easy money from the Fed. It's about demographics. With yields so low, we must save more to accumulate a retirement income, so lifting limits on tax deferred saving is very appealing politically. I'm maxed out now but would like to do more.

But they didn't try and ban the ideas altogether, just from rational debate.

Popper never said we should stop creating theories, just know they might not be true until they are untrue.