TRUTH GIVES YOU, AND US, POWER (interesting) It’s not that I don’t make mistakes

TRUTH GIVES YOU, AND US, POWER

(interesting)

It’s not that I don’t make mistakes. I do. Often. Or that I’m all that arrogant (other than when it suits marketing purposes). It’s that it’s simply very, very, very, hard to use testimonialism and propertarianism and not become aware of your errors, biases, wishful thinking, attempts at suggestion, obscurantism, overloading, and deceit. It allows you to dramatically increase the ratio of true and false propositions.

There is no substitute however for the market for criticism by equally testimonial means. One simply cannot think of everything on one’s own.

So I find most of my errors are errors of interpretation of others, or of historical facts that I use as illustrations and examples. These are errors of meaning, not errors of construction.

But even in construction, when we are subjectively testing the incentives that cause the decisions of others, we can be easily ignorant of the factors involved (inputs) that the individual is weighing. it is very easy to judge one’s misrepresentation of those weights, but if we are not aware of them we cannot subjectively test (judge) them.

This is why discourse, jury, and market are so effective in improving our polities, commons, products, services, and information **IF** they consist of testimonial language and warranty (truth) … and why they are so destructive in its absence: because self correction is not only difficult but increasingly impossible. And manipulation by others is so trivially easy.

The most expensive commons we have built in the west is truth telling (testimony), in an effort to maintain the high trust (militia) polity. A Sovereignty requires Militia, Militia requires trust, trust requires truth, and truth produces all the amazing consequences we attribute to western civlization: under economic adversity we innovate faster than the rest.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine.