—“All improvement in cooperation comes from parallel increases in informational quality++ and theft/fraud/conspiracy suppression–.”—
Something I posted on twitter in response to this question.
Man is a rational actor. He acts in his rational self-interest at all times, choosing immoral and moral actions by intuitive cost vs benefit; and we can find no exceptions other than kin selection – and arguably that is also in one’s self-interest.
For this reason we do not make the world a better place, but instead, we create institutions that raise the cost of unhelpful behaviors, and reduce the cost of helpful behaviors.
Some of the methods we use to suppress immoral behaviors are obvious (law, restitution, punishment), and some are not (the conversion of property from material goods to partial-title) because they make theft more difficult.
Others are difficult to admit to: that the differences between wealthier and poorer societies is generally explained by the relative sizes of the upper and lower genetic classes, meaning that no amount of effort will help some countries prosper because there are just too many people at the bottom to incentivize with the inventiveness and productivity at the top, using organization provided by the middle.
So while a one-child policy is necessary in Africa, the Muslim world, and south america it cannot be implemented without the equivalent of the Red Army or the Revolutionary Guard. Which India’s weakness – even literacy has been a problem.
So we cannot eliminate a tendency as much as eliminate generations with those tendencies, and provide institutions that preserve positive and suppress negative tendencies.
Man evolves locally and fast. But we must help man do so just as we did under agrarianism – which was not a kind process to those who could not transition to it. They are largely gone. Just as the various other incarnations of man are gone. And we eliminated them from the planet, while walking on foot, over a comparatively small number of millennia.
If we look back over the past century, most of the harm was done by the communist movement, the facist movement to resist it, and the capitalist movement to eradicate it. The communist movement promised utopian results to backward nations that had not transitioned through the enlightenment. Just as Islam is a utopian movement promising utopian results to backward nations, and using the same strategy as communism except distributed on moral and religoius grounds using weaponized reproduction rather than distributed on economic and political grounds using direct rebellion – a slower path to the same ends: changing the order to one suitable to the underclasses and less suitable to the middle and upper classes.
The pseudoscientific communist economic movement(Marx) was accompanied by the pseudoscientific social science movement (boaz) and the pseudoscientific psychological movement (freud), and less harmflly the pseudoscientific mathematical moveent( Cantor). And then when by the pseudoscientific cultural movvement (the frankfurt school).
So my prescription for improvement for mankind is that we can continue the suppression of new methods of theft and fraud by defending the informational commons the same way we defend the air, land, and water from pollution, our physical commons, infrastructure and monuments from physical damage, and our rule of law, govenrment from damage, and our religions and traditions from damage: By outlawing pseudoscience.
We could not outlaw pseudoscience until very recently because we have only begun to understand truth at scale in the 20th century.
But now that we know, we can force upon people a warranty of due diligence in speech inserted into the commons the same way we force a warranty of due diligenc upon people who provide goods and services.
Those due diligences are (Painfully Briefly):
1 – categorical consistency (identity and non conflation)
2 – internal consistency (logical)
3 – external correspondence (empirical consistency)
4 – existential possibility (operational language)
5 – ethical consistency (consisting of fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary transfer, limited to externalities of the same.)
6 – scope consistency (defining limits, full accounting, and parsimony)
We have many such other requirements in the law, and we use these requirements with academics when publishing. And there is no reason we do not demand these same warranties of political speech, which is far more consequential than academic speech.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
KIev, Ukraine