The Secrets of Propertarian (Scientific) Analysis:

  1. For any concept you refer to, construct lines of three or more points demonstrating limits not states. This is the most subtle and difficult part of the method since we tend to think in ideal types that invoke a particular experience and not the range of conditions and set of experiences that are invoked. Think in lines not states. Turn any idea into a spectrum. It’s not hard with practice.

  2. Analyze information movement – who possesses it, what it consists of, and when. (programming is great for teaching you how your assumptions of the knowledge of others is tragically flawed).

  3. Analyze incentives given the information individuals have at their disposal at any moment.

  4. Expect people to seek to acquire at all points in time, and to seize rents whenever possible, and wherever possible means whenever they won’t be caught.

  5. Expect Culture, Class, Gender, Race, Tribe, Family, and personal reproductive strategies to provide the dominant influence in decidability: whenever discretion is required these factors will influence the decision because the individual has no other means of decidability without propertarian ethics.

  6. When you write, do so operationally not analogically, experientially, or observationally: use the vectors, information, incentives, biases, and decisions of individuals. Never use the word ‘is’ since it means you do not understand what you are saying.

  7. Test for identity (non-conflationary identification of properties, methods and relations). Test for internal consistency of your argument. Test for external correspondence of your argument. Test for existential possiblity of each step in your argument (which is what propertarianism asks you to do by its nature). Test for Morality (that no involuntary transfers have occurrred, or if they have articulate them). Test for parsimony: that you have defined limits to all your assumptions and terms. Test for explanatory power. Attempt to falsify it: seek contradictory examples and ensure that your analysis (description) holds up.

Propertarian analysis should produce tests of existential possibility: a proof. A proof is not a truth. But it is the most likely means of constructing a truth candidate that we currently know of.

Curt Doolittle