—“First gen were clinical rubbish. Second gen static factor identification was great but.. who cares? static factors can’t be changed by therapy. Third gen looked promising but is very quickly falling out of favor. … Actually, actuarial models are used in forensic psychology and they rely on nomothetic data. Area under the curve distributions are used to determine and understanding of relative risk in a particular group of similar offenders. The problem is that it is impossible to break it down to the individual level. … Current risk assessment models are actually pretty good, what is more important honestly is providing the therapy required through a mode of learning congruent with the offender. … Psychologizing is rubbish, absolutely. Hell, enough data from neuroscience shows us that we are not even aware of our feelings or emotional states or reasons, so trying to theorise how a person acted or felt is crap.”—
Well done. Thank you.
And I want to point out that you are talking about behavioral therapy (training), and criminal behavior. Both of which are ACTIONS (existentially demonstrable). In other words, they are empirically testable and demonstrable against tests of property violations, or pose risk of property violations, that individuals, the commons(the public), and the state as insurer of last resort, must be willing to bear in order to leave the rather dangerous superpredator ‘human’ wandering the streets.
This is an example of why I am such an advocate of economics and law, that are both DEMONSTRABLY EXISTENTIAL (empirical) , and such a critic of the academic pseudosciences, and the frames (descriptive and causal narratives) that are derivations. If for no other reason than the “island 120’s” and the “Island 120 wanna-be’s” (excuse the convenient use of the vernacular pejorative), use this pseudoscientific nonsense in justification, argument, criticism, and ridicule, to defend priors, intuitions, and all else that is nothing more than animal instinct justified by the contemporary equivalent of abrahamic religious prose. And which we have struggled in all disciplines, (including the law) to extricate and separate truth, good, and preference, from false, bad, and the not-preferred, so that we resolve our conflicts by reciprocal means (property in fact) rather than irreciprocal means (preferences for one another’s different reproductive strategies expressed in religious, moral, legal, scientific *FICTIONS*, that themselves evolved to deceive the limits of human reason through suggestion and overloading.
And it’s why I want to unite law and psychology, sociology, ethics, morality, and politics – reason and cooperation – into a single empirical language of natural law, so that the disciplines that claim to describe individual, and collective behavior, do not conflate, explicitly and methodologically, or inexplicitly and narratively, the pretense of preference or norm, with the existence of rational individual self interest in pursuit of our different reproductive strategies. Nor to say that emotions are causal rather than descriptive of what the (analogistically) ‘reptilian’, ‘mammalian’, and ‘human’ intuitions of perceive as existing or possible changes in resources (potential property) or property (investments) necessary for consumption, reproduction, life, and cooperation that produces consumption, reproduction, and life.
Emotions are nothing other than descriptions of changes or anticipated changes in state. The brain seeks to provide successes which provide calories or potential calories. The brain is just another physical function of the physical body (although it constitutes the greatest cost in the body especially once we consider that the spinal column and most of the nerves are merely extensions of the brain). The body is but an extension of the physical universe, and the whole is bound by the same laws. The only difference is that reason lets us increase the time we have to capture vastly larger calories necessary for such a vastly more costly system. Sol like any other function of the physical world, we can easily use the study of incentives to obtain interests, that reduce physical, intellectual, social, and emotional costs, and provide narrative commensurability with all other sciences – thus preventing by competition across all disciplines, a market for the continuous competition against lies and deceits, and biases, that specialized disciplinary languages in the pseudoscience and religion evolved to create (yes really).
The narrative fiction that emotions themselves are the information system, rather than information about the information we are percieving, is a decidedly feminine one, a more primitive one, and both an admission of personal lack of agency, and the justification of one’s feelings and the demonization of others feelings, as nothing other than a means (as is the female gossip strategy) to cause deceptions, frauds, and threats by emotionally coercive means (fear of ostracization). Females needed this strategy to increase or reduce the cost of access to sex, care, cooperation, and food subsidy. Females benefit from the continuous preservations of the rate returns through the continuous criticism (shit-testing in gutter vernacular). Males needed physical threats that increased or decreased access to cooperation which as a byproduct would grant them access to sex and consumption.
The variation between individual behaviors is explicable extremely simply, by the in utero development of the compartmentalization or integration of regions above the corpus, and corresponding neural density and interconnectivity, combined with variations in the sensitivity to the five reward systems, and the five reward systems, correspond to the five stage of the prey drive. the big 5/6, adding intelligence (IQ), making the collection 6/7 with stereotypical male and female reproductive biases.
We can provide a commensurable universal language of testimonial speech whether in court or out, that provides a grammar and semantics that prevents the fictionalisms, of pseudohistory(myth/religion), pseudo rationalism (logics, philosophy, reason) and pseudoscience (magic, technology, occult) from use in not only courts of law, not only public speech, and not only market speech, and not only interpersonal speech, but over time, habituates the mind as thoroughly as empiricism has, to increasingly truthful speech – the returns of which will vastly exceed the returns of the e mpirical and darwinian and technical revolutions.
The gains of physical sciences were profound, but they have been low hanging fruit. The gains of natural law of torts, and empirical testimony over property have been greater – yes, look at the evidence. The gains that are yet to be had by the further suppression of ignorance, error, bias, and deceit through the many grammars of fictionalisms, are possible for us to achieve, just as it was possible to escape magic in the ancient world, and abrahamic monotheistic religions, in the modern.
All we need do is extend the involuntary warranty of due diligence on products and services brought to market to information brought to market.
Or in more simple terms, because we failed to complete the enlightenment in the social sciences that we completed in the physical sciences,and as consequence, we failed to extend the law to cover a competed enlightenment in the social sciences, the 20th century was, and remains in the 21st, one of the industrialization of lying equivalent to the eastern roman empires’ ending of prohibition on christianity,(an early abrahamic fictionalism), which was more than a trivial contribution to the abrahamic dark ages that destroyed the civilizations of the ancient world forever, sent humanity into ignorance and superstition once again, and from which only THE WESTERN LAW OF TORT’s empiricism dragged us kicking and screaming out of that ignorance 1000 years later. And at the present we are still trying to drag the world out of abrahamic fictionalism in the pseudoscientific form of marxism-socialism, in the pseudo rational form we cal postmodernism-political correctness, and in the pseudo-mythological form conflated with pseudolaw, we call islam.
There is only one moral science and that is reciprocity and tort is its discipline.
There is only one scientific language, and testimonial science is its discipline.
There is only one non-false public religion, and that is ancestor remembrance, feast, and festival, both individual, communal, national, and universal.
There is only one personal religion (discipline) and that is mindfulness.
There is only one non-false means of obtaining mindfulness and that is stoicism-epicureanism, (mental ritual) or(and) repetitive physical ritual – running, marching, or walking at pace in groups being the most obvious, but singing, or chanting, or storytelling working nearly as well, depending upon content.
Everything else is just a series of convenient pseudoscientific deceits we have generated over the past 10,000 years, in various fictional narratives for the purpose of persuading super predators with very different abilities to cooperate in larger numbers, against the vicissitudes of our impulses, our communities, and nature.
The universe is very simple. All of it. It’s the libraries both written and unwritten are full of fictions and deceits that obscure it’s simplicity.
And I can think of no more heroic mission, with no greater returns for mankind, than eradicating those fictions and deceits just as we have eradicated both our ignorance, and the enduring efforts of immoral men and women, to commit crimes by which they can prey upon others, through justified ignorance, justified bias, wishful-thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism, privatization of commons and socialization of losses, conspiracy, theft, immigration, overproduction, conversion, conquest, war, ethnocide and genocide.
And we rae not special as moderns. All we have done is incrementally shift the from violence to theft, from theft to fraud, from fraud to conspiracy, from conspiracy to the privatization and socialization of losses, to economic warfare, to information warfare, to population warfare.
But there is no action among all those listed above, or any combination that is not decidable by the single test of reciprocity: productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of imposition upon the investments of others by externality.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine