I get the sense Hoppe is repulsive to you, but I am very open-minded to hearing a counter-argument and find out what I got wrong about him. For example, are you against a complete free-market in schooling? Or do you want a voter-based approach on the city/state/federal levels?

This is very much in the spirit of the thinking that led to the American Constitution, and Tom Paine's "Instead of having the King be the Law, we can have the Law be the King".

We need solutions that allow further thinking and design to be done.

One way to look at this is to ask questions about "human nature" and to what extent does it need to be followed and to what extent should we try to teach (even train) the children to act in "designed ways" -- for example, not trying to take revenge.

The interesting and difficult parts of goals like these are that we have humans in the mix while trying to come up with better societal designs. For example, even the best forms of socialism have been "gamed" incessantly, and often fatally, by humans only interested in "harvesting" for themselves.

This is one of many reasons why well thought out versions of social reform have often been destroyed when the implementation phase is started "Every one loves Change, except for the Change part!"

However, I disagree with your examples, specifically the Constitution. I apologize for disagreeing with you, but I still don't see how any form of state can function with a population in the double digits of millions. Even if 90%+ of the population were educated in Montessori-based systems.

It goes against the basic economic principles of "incentives". The state is still a monopoly (in the classical sense) of violence, even under a Constitution. The state is also the sole interpreter of its own laws.

Even under a Constitutional Republic, politicians have become the new monarchy, priesthood, and witch doctors. Just like when Christians find a backdoor for polytheism, so do the Citizens the same at the voting booth and in the media to worship kings and queens.

So the state is still the king. We just play musical chairs at each election. In fact, we even have fewer checks/balances on power today than the British Empire had under American Colonial rule. The US government has absorbed private institutions that could check it's power: It' subsidizes church(s), subsidizes and regulates private schools, the Ivy Leagues have become an extension of the state, and the US has become the #1 employer of scientists, engineers, lawyers, etc. This is a combo of socialism and fascism lite, that continues to grow through each election and generation, albeit slowly.

When the Law is King, people still rely on politicians to interpret and carry out the Law. They will defend "their" neo-king/queen (ie favored politican). Previously, they would have been suspicious of unelected officials." That suspicion was a de facto check/balance on power. But, not the sole check/balance.

Example: Obama (and Congress!) passed legislation to support Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. https://www.stpete4peace.org/Ukraine https://www.thenation.com/article/congress-has-removed-a-ban...

Where was the outcry? Trump is bad. But, Congress and Obama are just as bad. These are the politicians people want in power. These are the crimes people overlook and ignore. This is just one more example of how the voters let senators and presidents get away with crimes. It is easy to expose Trump as a shady/scheming politician and crooked entrepreneur (eg Trump Uni.). However, politicians like Bill Clinton, Reagan, etc. get away with murder and Congress is fine with it. So too are the voters. The Constitution has not prevent a global military empire.

Look at how the Constitution was promoted: with G. Washington's celebrity endorsement. The US was thus created partly by a militia leader who used warfare to overthrow a government and won wars. (Losing generals are unpopular.)

In practice, the Law was never in full hands of the King. The King/monarchy had checks and balances going back to the medieval periods. The various religions and churches (plural), guilds, Parliament, and so on.

The Constitution has given people a false sense of ownership and protection and lowered their distrust of the state. This is one of the reasons why parents love government schooling: they can blame tax-cheats for why Johnny can't read.

"Who cares if the Dept. of Edu. is unconstitutional? The ends justify the means."

Canada, Australia, and other states did not overthrow British rule, yet they still became multi-cultural and prosperous... without a violent Revolution that led to war widows, orphans and high taxes.

This is why I disagree with the idea of a state that would let politicians (including monarchs or dictators) have access to lots of money, weapons, etc. I've seen people much better educated and with high IQ ignore the crimes of entire political parties like Republicans, Democrats, and celebs like Lenin, Che, Mao, etc.

In other words: The Constitution, from my p.o.v., promoted political centralization and was a hidden psuedo-absolute monarchy in disguise. Nobles replace the absolute monarch. So I agree with your vision, but I just disagree with political centralization.

(Sidenote: The Constitution was passed despite the delegates not having authority to overthrow the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution expanded the state's power, did not solve the underlying issues with the Articles of Confederation, and set a bad precedent of upper-class members of the establishment being able to expand state power to solve problems at the expense of freedom. )

Thank you again for reading and putting up with this. I realize we disagree on a few things, but your patience is appreciated.

One key question for "civilization" has usually centered around the extent to which enough children can learn to reach beyond their genes to embrace ideas and behaviors that have been invented for the better.

Another key question revolves around the trade-offs between individual choices vs "smartest choices". This reflects the distribution of talents, outlooks, skills, knowledge, etc in any population. And also the distribution of what various people need to "feel whole". (These are often at odds with larger organizations of societies.)

I've never been able to pull this off, but McLuhan had a real point. Socrates had the idea (via Plato) that there "was truth" and careful thinking would get everyone to the same place. (Much of science has this assumption (if you throw in a lot of experimentation and debugging as part of the careful thinking). In any case, a reasonable explanation in science is not in the form of sentences.

One of the key ideas here is that modern understanding is a lot more than changing from one set of sentences to another. (This is a huge problem for humans because for tens of thousands of years and more there were no significant differences between our models and our sentences.) Now some of our models can't be reasonably represented in sentences, but for many cases we still have to use sentences to point at the models (or don't even use the models at all).

To me, the consequence of all this is that most of the work needed to be done on thinking about important difficult problems is not primarily "logic" (in the sense of dealing with premises, operations, and inferences) but "extra-logical" (trying to understand contexts and boundaries and models and tests before trying to do anything like classical thinking).

I often try to point out in talks that modern thinking is "not primarily logical" and this is what I'm driving at.

Is that because "logical" thinking makes sense in one context, but fails in a better context? (ie. Pink vs blue: Change the context, understand it, and then later the knowledge is found?)

This is an old idea (e.g. Euclid). The "modern" part of it is that the definitions are not assumed to be true outside the neighborhood. This is simple and powerful because the results are larger worlds that can be compared to others and to phenomena and experiment (and without setting up dogmas and religions).

Because of the way human minds work, there will be tendencies to think the definitions are "actually true" (and so the logic inside the boundaries) if they and the conclusions are appealing. But the form of this knowledge helps keep us saner if we are diligent about drawing the maps and boundaries correctly.

Much of science has this character, and the model helps to understand what it means to "know" something scientifically. Science is a negotiation between "what's out there?" and what we can represent inside our heads via phenomena on the one hand and the "boundaries and neighborhoods" on the other. Einstein's nice line about "math vs. reality" hits it perfectly ("As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.").

Newton's Principia was a huge step along these (and many other lines). He completely separates out the math part in the first large parts of the work. And only then does he start looking to see how the math models map onto observed phenomena.

To say it again, Science is partly about being very careful about how the definitions map to "out there".

In terms of context, if you are aware that you are in contexts -- the first step! -- and aware and careful about the ones you are using -- the next steps! -- there is a chance that "reasonable thinking" might happen.

I keep tripping on this part. Definition as in understanding the boundary? As in trying to find the boundaries between better, perfect, and the impossible (ie sweet spot)?

> Because of the way human minds work, there will be tendencies to think the definitions are "actually true" (and so the logic inside the boundaries) if they and the conclusions are appealing.

Does this mean?: Humans are pre-disposed to a model of how the Universe works: Zeus's thunderbolts, witches, Saturn/Satan/Santa, Geo-centric, etc. Science is a set of guidelines to help prevent us from shoehorning the Universe into the inaccurate mental models we are pre-disposed to believing?

> while the larger view from above knows the neighborhood is arbitrary

Can the leap from Geocentric model to Kepler's work be an example of this? As in: Geocentric model becomes irrelevant with Kepler's discoveries and p.o.v.?

A boundary for chemistry is the physics standard model. Within physics the model is pretty accurate but unsatisfying as far as knowledge. They would like to have a better boundary, and get the standard model (and the key constants) from it. But it makes a good boundary for chemistry to make excellent chemical models.

Similarly (oversimplifying here) chemistry makes a good boundary of definitions for molecular biology.

Note that in this scheme of thinking, the "knowledge and meanings" exist inside the boundary, but don't include the boundary.

One of the issues addressed in this approach is how to make progress in "knowing" without infinite regresses. Philosophically, it is a kind of pragmatism.

As I mentioned elsewhere, science is a negotiation between two different kinds of things not a set of truths. It has many things in common with mapping (and making good maps is a branch of science, and one of the real starts of real science).

2. We are predisposed to believe things. Bacon's notion of why we needed to invent a "new science" is to create a set of processes and heuristics that would help us deal with and get around to some extent "what's wrong with our brains".

As a young scientist, I got the warning that is given to most young scientists "Beware, you always find what you are looking for!"

Some of the interesting examples of good science turning into belief revolve around Newton and both Maxwell's Equations and the orbit of Mercury (neither are "Newtonian"). And if you look at the history you'll see that Newton was a lot less Newtonian than many of his followers.

And yes, we also seem to have some things that are easier to imagine than others -- gods, demons, witches, etc seem easy, but future floods etc seem hard.

3. Sure. E.g. if you think things have to be circles, then this will be part of your implicit context for thinking about orbits. Geocentric used circular orbits and then epicycles to correct them and save the theory (and some great metaphors there for lots of human thinking). But it's important to realize that Copernicus also used circular orbits, and they also used epicycles to save that theory. Kepler worked with Brahe and admired him, so decided to trust his measurements. This led to a different model. The planets themselves didn't care about any of the models.

The definitions are still not -true- and the neighborhood is still not the phenomena. It's just better. You only get Newton from Kepler, not Maxwell or the orbit of Mercury and then Einstein for both.

I seemed to look at the different schools of thought, pick the best one that answers as many questions as possible, and believe in it until something better comes along (ie can it solve more problems than the previous school of thought). (But, I was at least somewhat aware it was not scientific or scholarly. A combination of logic, emotion, and preferences.)

My peers in HS who went on to higher education (Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Worcester, MIT, etc.,) agree with the status quo, work within it, and have careers, children, so on. (Nothing wrong with that and there is no professional jealously on my part.)

I suspect, however, they are shipbuilders, who are treated as explorers. Scientific researchers who find juicy hacks and turn them into over-priced drugs with dangerous side-effects.

You, however, take on the far superior approach to accumulating and developing new knowledge. However, it seems to come more naturally to you than to your peers. (Even taking into account your mathematics/musician parents and good teachers you encountered.)

Which cities and universities around the world have been most receptive to your lectures? (I would assume it would be some in Canada, Scandinavian countries, and China. With the least receptive being in the US.)

How was poor Faraday able to contribute so much to science and technology despite the vast resources of the classical educated members of The Royal Institution and Royal Society? (Granted, there were many people who contributed before/during/after Faraday's time to allow him to make those discoveries. Then it took others like Maxwell to carry on even further.)

A very important first step in this is to put a lot of work into "learning to see the present" and then where it came from (this is a lot of work, and it's not what human minds generally want to do). This will free up most thinking, will open up many other parts of the useful past, and especially about much better futures.