Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • ARE SOME MEN ABOVE THE LAW? ‘CAUSE IT’S HARD TO KNOW THE TERMS OF THE IMPLIED CO

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-c-nussbaum/why-some-men-are-above-the-law_b_8992754.html?utm_hp_ref=yahoo&ir=YahooWHY ARE SOME MEN ABOVE THE LAW? ‘CAUSE IT’S HARD TO KNOW THE TERMS OF THE IMPLIED CONTRACT BETWEEN ASYMMETRICALLY INFORMED PARTIES.

    (i.e. women want us to make the world safe for their impulses.)

    Hmmmm….. Not sure I agree. Surprisingly for me also.

    There is an enormous asymmetry of knowledge and experience between a man of the world at 40, and a naive (ignorant) college girl.

    I do not read Martha’s post any differently than the same young woman attempting to drive an exotic super car, and damaging it, and herself in the consequent accident. She assumed too much of herself in both circumstances. She should have had less confidence and more skepticism, and made more inquiries, and engaged incremental training of herself.

    The ethical question is not whether she disapprove of the experience. But why she was so ignorant, and why he was wiling to have sex with her, and why she expected him to have sex on her (naive) terms?

    From his perspective (and any man who has a lot of female attention), ‘rough sex’ is pretty commonplace – and often desirable, and often rewarded. (Thanks to the internet era, we have data now, so it’s not a matter of subjective opinion. It is what it is. Women prefer the inner gorilla to the outer gentleman, and more intelligent people tend to be worse at sex. )

    So it begs the question: why do we teach equality and subjective prediction of normative behavior, rather than asymmetry?

    As far as I can tell the postwar era was an intellectual, cultural, political, and economic, catastrophe – an experiment with a new postmodern mysticism.

    Effete (naive) subjective projections of norms to the contrary.

    Why do we lie? Why have we created a century of lies?

    Men are super-predators that have spent at least ten thousand years in self pacification through war, ritual, religion, politics, economics, law, sport, norms, the family, farming, mutual cooperation, and daily fighting. Why do we tell ourselves and others that man does anything other than act in his rational self interest given the options at his disposal?

    Women have had too little time to redevelop institutions and wisdom of controlling their impulses now that they are free of the hearth, home, and paternal and maternal protections.

    The law accounts for this by punishing people of similar experiences, and being skeptical of asymmetric experiences. As such **avoid asymmetric experiences** in all walks of life. Risks are fun but costly in all walks of life. A woman has a genetic bias to experiment with alphas but her youthful ignorance does not know how to manage them.

    We do not make the world better by making it safe for idiots to act in ignorance and impulsiveness. We make it better when we educate and avoid risks we do not understand the consequences of.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-c-nussbaum/why-some-men-are-above-the-law_b_8992754.html?

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-19 05:30:00 UTC

  • Q&A: WHO INFLUENCED YOU? Who influenced you? Um. Have you seen my reading list?

    Q&A: WHO INFLUENCED YOU?

    Who influenced you? Um. Have you seen my reading list? Science influenced me. If I have to name a few philosophers it would be Hayek and Popper because they are the thinkers who attempted to restate social science as the study of information – and only partly succeeded.

    Otherwise I am influenced intellectually by science and scientists. Sentimentally by ‘hard’ Science Fiction, which I consider the reformation of mythology for use in modernity. Educationally by my study of fine art probably frames my reference more than any other. Recreationally by my study of history. Environmentally by germanic intellectual and cultural influences dominant in the early twentieth century. Genetically as an anglo conservative son of puritans, and catholic mother’s conservative idealism.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-19 04:35:00 UTC

  • WORKING WITH A FOOT IN BOTH WORLDS: PHILOSOPHY AND BUSINESS I always feel like w

    WORKING WITH A FOOT IN BOTH WORLDS: PHILOSOPHY AND BUSINESS

    I always feel like working in both worlds – analytic philosophy and business – has been a liability in some respects, and an asset in others.

    To some degree people discount both because you’re not limiting yourself to one or the other – although it certainly worked for most of the better thinkers in history to do both.

    So my career consists of people in business telling me I belong in a university, and people in academia telling me I am an entrepreneur. Frankly I belong right where I am – doing both. ‘Cause that is what makes me happy.

    But if I am remembered at all, it will be for my philosophy – not for the ten or so businesses I have built so far; each one of which was an experiment in social science.

    Although after Propertarianism and Testimonialism it is more likely that I will be thought of as a philosopher first, and an entrepreneur second. I suspect it will help my entrepreneurial efforts, despite its controversy.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-19 02:24:00 UTC

  • PLAYING BADMINTON WITH GREG SWAN 🙂 (I have no idea who this guy is. But why he

    PLAYING BADMINTON WITH GREG SWAN 🙂

    (I have no idea who this guy is. But why he wants to take shots at me is beyond me.)

    Greg.

    I suppose it’s fine if you pretend you’re witticisms are more than the philosophical equivalent of dick and fart jokes. I mean, I find dick and fart jokes humorous also. I find meaning and analogy helpful. I find ridicule entertaining. But they are the political equivalent of jacking off because you can’t get laid, and not voting because you have no chance, versus having sex, and rewriting the constitution because with both women and ideas you have won.

    So, you don’t seem to understand. I agree that stupid people need an intuitionistic analogist like you. In a division of perception, cognition, knowledge, and advocacy, I accept that stupid people need your work and smart people need my work. I just didn’t understand why you choose to attack my work for smart people when I didn’t attack your work for stupid people. Or why you don’t grasp that the world needs ideas for stupid people as as well as smart people – and always has. We need stupid people to storm the gates as canon fodder, or at least to tend the luggage. We need smart people to act as officers and to rule. We need a division of cognition and labor for serving the distribution of people who are stupid as well as smart.

    After all. We are largely saying the same things. Except you’re distributing meaning, understanding, tools of shaming, and self satisfaction as an escapist self defense for the disenfranchised – and I’m distributing social science for the next generation of rule of law, that can be imposed by force.

    But thank you for your repeat references, since all publicity is good publicity. 😉

    (The Kim Jong Il piece is awesome by the way.)

    – Cheers 🙂

    ( PS: The opposite of “tl;dr”, or “too long; didn’t read”, is “ts;sr”, or “too stupid, stopped reading.” The difference is, stupid people type the former, and smart people don’t bother typing the latter. )

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-19 02:20:00 UTC

  • COSTS OF TRUTH

    http://www.propertarianism.com/en_US/2015/07/27/the-costs-of-truth/THE COSTS OF TRUTH

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-19 01:43:00 UTC

  • Is Keynsian Economics Better For America Than Austrian Economics?

    THIS IS THE MOST ACCURATE FRAMING OF THE ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE TO US.

    1 – Austrian economics seeks to eliminate asymmetries of knowledge so that people can cooperate voluntarily under the optimum possible conditions.  So as a movement, Austrian economics was a social science.  In other words, they want to improve our information.

    2 – American (Chicago) economics seeks to identify rule of law, so that economics can be constructed as a formula under rule of law – eliminating discretionary toying with the economy, just as rule of law eliminates discretionary toying with the polity.  In other words, they want to manipulate information as little as possible.


    3 – Saltwater (New York/California) economics seeks to identify the maximum disinformation that the government can insert into the economy with which to farm taxes, consume, and redistribute them, while preserving the incentive to keep working and risking capital (the hamster wheel), and to create sufficient knowledge of how to use disinformation that policy makers have full discretion.


    https://www.quora.com/Is-Keynsian-economics-better-for-America-than-Austrian-economics

  • Is The United States A Rogue State?

    The problem with american policy is that it’s policy is utopian. 

    1. The postwar consensus was that states needed to focus internally on capitalism and human rights, and stay within their borders, so that we don’t have another civil war. Unfortunately americans promote democracy AND consumer capitalism instead of consumer capitalism regardless of political order.
    2. Democracy is a bad idea. Its not a cause of prosperity. It is a luxury good – a conspicuous consumption for wealthy societies, and creates chaos and suffering elsewhere.
    3. American postwar policy says ‘choose the government you want”.  what we don’t say is “but if you choose badly we will send you back to the stone age”.  Unfortunately, human instinct is parasitic: people choose badly.  Why? no enlightenment, no chivalry, no high trust, no prohibition on cousin marriage, and unfortunately, a full standard deviation in lower median IQ.
    4. People are not oppressed so much as parasites that need domestication.
    5. The west is better off than the rest not because of our virtues, but because for one thousand years we hung 1/2 to 1% of the underclass every year, controlled access to farm land, delayed childbirth, prohibited cousin marriage, and starved the rest.  SO most of the west is decendent from the middle class.  The rest of the world hasn’t done this (other than china and Japan) and so they are disproporionately impuslive, aggressive, and of lower intelligence than westerners.
    6. Europe failed in its colonial efforts to national detriments.  We have colonized Europe to its detriment.  Ottoman colonies are the source of world conflict.  The germans were probably right in the first world war, and we should have stayed out of it.  We tend to be wrong a lot. Other than the war on communism – we tend to be wrong a lot.

      Is that uncomfortable? It’s true.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-the-United-States-a-Rogue-State

  • Is Donald Trump Doing A Good Job At Bringing Conservatives And Liberals Together?

    The country has been engaging in ‘the big sort’ for decades now. 
    The Republican party represents whites and married women.
    The Democratic party represents non-whites and unmarried women.

    All economics and politics are merely demographic: Race, Culture, Class, Age, and maritial status.   We blither a lot about politics under the assumption that people change. They don’t. 

    https://www.quora.com/Is-Donald-Trump-doing-a-good-job-at-bringing-Conservatives-and-Liberals-together

  • Does China Actually Care About North Korea?

    China cares about damaging american power, maintaining the power of the party so that they can prevent the fragmentation of the Chinese (Han) Empire, and restoring her position as ‘center of the world’, in order to gain economic, political and military advantage.


    North Korea helps and hurts this strategy.

    https://www.quora.com/Does-China-actually-care-about-North-Korea

  • Would The Poor Have Better Standards Of Living In A Perfect Free Market Economy?

    A perfect free market economy is no more possible than a perfectly managed economy.   That is because people at a material disadvantage use collective bargaining (the government) to gain advantage.

    https://www.quora.com/Would-the-poor-have-better-standards-of-living-in-a-perfect-free-market-economy