Deficiency of Utility

Crackpot theory hour:

Deep connection between neoliberalism, market fundamentalism, efficiency above all else, and utilitarianism.

Each is deeply hierarchical in nature.

All hierarchical philosophies are ultimately inflexible and unresponsive in the face of contradictions. They reject dialectic and open-mindedness. This fundamental characteristic of inflexibility undergirds all ideology. In this way, dialectical anarchism can be considered not ideological.

Ironically, efficiency-minded purely consequentialist thought processes tend to miss their own goals because they lack an explicit ontology of damping and exploration, two somewhat opposite techniques that have been shown to be necessary for the most information-efficient machine optimization processes (machine learning) known to date.

You need an explicit ontology of damping and exploration! Machine learning shows this! All ultimately effective techniques for optimization use damping and exploration, two things which purely efficiency or utility-based ideologies lack any explicit theory of!

If you lack this theory, you may do better than those who have empirically incorrect theories of damping or exploration, but you will lose to richer theories which get these things right.

Let’s call damping and exploration corrective terms.

The difficulty is that there is no a priori way to arrive at corrective terms. You need to try the theories on real data and see which wins. This is dialectic! The thesis and the antithesis are two theories. One with one set of corrective terms, and the other with another set. Through time, the theories are tested, and we land somewhere in the middle: the antithesis. Importantly, this has direct analogy with the genetic algorithm in machine learning, which means it holds on the macro and micro scale!

Util = no corrective terms, meaning there is no way to correct for ideological oversights or systemic errors.

You may object that moral util may lose computationally, but that it is still the ultimate truth of reality. To this, I defend cultural relativism; who says util is the ultimate truth of reality? Maybe it is the case that the dialectic is more fundamental, as it respects the chaotic and partial nature of epistemology? Maybe certain fundamental questions really are impossible to answer, and the only philosophically coherent position is one that respects philosophy itself by not killing it. That is, the most coherent philosophy MUST have change and flexibility at its core, as change and flexibility seem more fundamental than utility. Dynamic over static.

We must preserve philosophy in order to remain alive in a chaotic universe.

The difficulty is that there is no a priori way to arrive at corrective terms. You need to try the theories on real data and see which wins. This is dialectic! The thesis and the antithesis are two theories. One with one set of corrective terms, and the other with another set. Through time, the theories are tested, and we land somewhere in the middle: the antithesis. Importantly, this has direct analogy with the genetic algorithm in machine learning, which means it holds on the macro and micro scale!

To be clear, the reason this is different than pure util is that it allows for ideological change.