EXPLAINING PROPERTARIANISM TO MOM My mom. 80th birthday yesterday. Says to me ov

EXPLAINING PROPERTARIANISM TO MOM

My mom. 80th birthday yesterday. Says to me over coffee, that her friends can’t understand my work. And that she can’t understand my work. So I go into this little speech to try to make it accessible to those with life experience and last-century educations.

She says that philosophy classes ruined religion for her. I said, that’s because philosophy, like religion, like science, claims that they’re methodologically ‘right’ – and that they have a monopoly on understanding. Rather than that they are methods of answering questions with different amounts of information, and different degrees of skill, and different degrees of ability.

She asks me about precision.

So I explain first how most of us want utility, and we need to find others to test our ideas, and to get cooperation, and to organize by rallying.

Then how we might use science when we have a lot of information, history when we have a little less, philosophy when we have less information and can only rely on non-contradiction and internal consistency, and religion when we have exhausted our information and can only rely upon the wisdom of the past – ideas that have survived the test of centuries. That’s because with religion we need not require possibility, existence, consistency, or evidence, just wisdom. With philosophy we need not require possibility or existence or evidence, just consistency. With history we need not require causality, just evidence of existential possibility. And with science we require causality.

So we have developed languages that suit the amount of information that we have. And what we must watch for, and be cautious of, is the misuse of method given the information available – because that is how people lie.

Now, because people lie, we also have the opposite of those things that help us find ideas, get cooperation, and organize by rallying. Those things are mathematics, science, the limits of human beings, and the law of cooperation.

Now, everyone wants to think about possibilities, and rally people to their cause, and to obtain information in support of, and confirmation of their cause as ‘not immoral’.

But very few people want to think about how to test those things against ignorance, error, bias, and lies.

So to tie this back to what I do, I work in the negative: the law. How to measure (math), tell the truth( science), and to test cooperation (natural law).

In other words, I write about the laws of measurement, truth, and cooperation, as a defense against ignorance, error, bias, and lies.

And this is a specialized field. A technical field. And as people with experience in teaching, they know what STEM disciplines are mathematics, science(physics, chemistry, biology, sentience), technology/engineering, economics/finance/accounting/law. These are means of transformation, measurement, and decidability independent of our perceptions. They measure what we cannot feel and experience.

And there are non-stem disciplines: arts, religion, philosophy, politics, history, literature, education, psychology, sociology, social work, business, and its applications. These are not methods of measurement but of meaning – what we can feel and experience.

Now I wouldn’t expect ‘friends’ to understand advanced math, science, tech, engineering, econ, finance, or law terminology. I don’t know why people would expect to understand what I write about.

They won’t.

But what is fascinating about humans is our continued faith that we have some ability to grasp the moral, right and true, and immoral, wrong and false, at SOME SCALE BEYOND THEIR PERCEPTION any more than we can make any other judgements without tools at any scale beyond that of our senses.

And that is what STEM (and law) disciplines do: understand, measure, and decide that which is beyond our perceptions and ability to judge by personal experience.

(Or, to tease my mother – it’s a man thing. Don’t worry about it. lol.)

-Curt