Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • The General Challenge of Improving Demonstrated Intelligence Is In Making Fewer Errors.

    —“General knowledge, scientific knowledge, and testimonial truth will pretty much reduce any error you might accumulate through normal human cognitive bias. And, from what I can see, the general challenge of improving demonstrated intelligence is not getting smarter, it is making fewer errors. I know engineers who are not particularly smart, but they demonstrate the intelligence that they do have very well, because engineering-thinking is pretty scientific and practical. I see this in doctors as well as engineers. Whether they’re exceptional or not matters less. Their entire profession is built upon the scientific principle of doing no harm. So they may fewer errors. Too bad economists and politicians don’t do the same.”—

  • Improve Us Rather than Criticize Others

    [W]ell, you know, I consider myself a serious philosopher who engages in tongue-in-cheek sarcasm and humor, ideological inflammation, and macho nonsense now and then for entertainment purposes – and often to signal that I do not live in an ivory tower. But I definitely don’t do conspiracy theory, and I try to avoid ridicule, since they are evidences of intellectual weakness that I don’t want to demonstrate. Basically I want to know how we get better, not how others fail.

  • Improve Us Rather than Criticize Others

    [W]ell, you know, I consider myself a serious philosopher who engages in tongue-in-cheek sarcasm and humor, ideological inflammation, and macho nonsense now and then for entertainment purposes – and often to signal that I do not live in an ivory tower. But I definitely don’t do conspiracy theory, and I try to avoid ridicule, since they are evidences of intellectual weakness that I don’t want to demonstrate. Basically I want to know how we get better, not how others fail.

  • Use of the Word ‘Natural’ in Economics

    (re: Tyler Cowen/ Scott Sumner / Econlib ) (important idea )

    —“Economic activity consists of interactions between people, and it’s not ever independent of human influence, and so it’s never “natural”.—

    [O]ne can however, increase the truth content of human relations, or one can decrease the truth content of human relations. One can increase the truth content of human relations in times of shock. One can decrease the truth content of human relations in order to accelerate consumption. So human relationships are in a natural state any time we improve institutions that improve information by reducing informational asymmetry, or distributing information that was previously unavailable (prices, interests rates, money supply, etc). Human relations are in an unnatural state when we insert disinformation in order to fool people into acting other than they would in the natural state. For this reason it is perhaps more accurate to distinguish not between natural and artificial, but truth and deception, morality and immorality. The most accurate model of the social sciences, like the physical sciences is information. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Use of the Word ‘Natural’ in Economics

    (re: Tyler Cowen/ Scott Sumner / Econlib ) (important idea )

    —“Economic activity consists of interactions between people, and it’s not ever independent of human influence, and so it’s never “natural”.—

    [O]ne can however, increase the truth content of human relations, or one can decrease the truth content of human relations. One can increase the truth content of human relations in times of shock. One can decrease the truth content of human relations in order to accelerate consumption. So human relationships are in a natural state any time we improve institutions that improve information by reducing informational asymmetry, or distributing information that was previously unavailable (prices, interests rates, money supply, etc). Human relations are in an unnatural state when we insert disinformation in order to fool people into acting other than they would in the natural state. For this reason it is perhaps more accurate to distinguish not between natural and artificial, but truth and deception, morality and immorality. The most accurate model of the social sciences, like the physical sciences is information. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Bankers Rarely Know They’re Work is Immoral

    (worth repeating) [W]ell to be honest, they don’t even know that themselves. I think a better test is the evidence of the volume of insider trading in the stock market, and the manipulation of the market by large houses in order to bait and trap retail investors on momentum plays. Other immoralities are anti-consumer nonsense like penalties for cell phone usage, entrapment into contracts one cannot afford, baiting people into mortgages they can’t manage, the multitude of investment and insurance schemes, and the entirety of the democratic political process which is a race-to-corruption. Most if not all but a few bankers are too ignorant (and from too low in their class rankings) to have any idea what they are really doing. I don’t think most politicians know that they are corrupt.

  • Bankers Rarely Know They’re Work is Immoral

    (worth repeating) [W]ell to be honest, they don’t even know that themselves. I think a better test is the evidence of the volume of insider trading in the stock market, and the manipulation of the market by large houses in order to bait and trap retail investors on momentum plays. Other immoralities are anti-consumer nonsense like penalties for cell phone usage, entrapment into contracts one cannot afford, baiting people into mortgages they can’t manage, the multitude of investment and insurance schemes, and the entirety of the democratic political process which is a race-to-corruption. Most if not all but a few bankers are too ignorant (and from too low in their class rankings) to have any idea what they are really doing. I don’t think most politicians know that they are corrupt.

  • Why I Am Not Good at Arithmetic, Multiplication, Division, and Chess.

    [I] have a lot of friends who are good at chess, and I do think chess is a pretty good determinant of intelligence, and perhaps a better determinant of academic and career success. I was in a chess club through seventh or eighth grade, and really never got that good until the first machines came out because they played perfectly – too perfectly. But as an illustration, There are three reasons I am not very good at it: (a) Puzzles vs Problems ethic: I have a problem with puzzles as wasted effort, when I should be working on problems. Just as I have a problem going from books to problems, rather than from problems to books. So in effect I see playing games that require more than casual attention (cards), as an immoral waste of my time. (Which a certain girlfriend in college beat into me through insults as well.) So I cant make myself spend times on such things without feeling like I’m letting the time run out on my lifespan. (b) Working (short term) memory – one of the reasons I became interested in IQ is the understanding of both the myopia of my autistic thinking and what I began to understand was a problem for me in arithmetic calculation despite my abilities in mathematical reasoning. I work on certain categories of problems partly because I seemed to have a fairly weak working memory compared to other students. I have trouble adding and multiplying, or working with a lot of states: like origami requires. I have no problem reasoning. I can detect truth content pre-cognitively, and I can define spectra – lines of causality. I cannot however juggle many independent and as I see it – unrelated – states of things. (c) Limited lateral thinking. (which I suppose I could overcome with practice) but not only do I have trouble with humor – which depends upon it, with cunning in a game of chess (i tend to play aggressively with every move and am too concerned with optimum moves and can be baited by them), but I tend not to find ‘shortcuts’ so much as ‘truths’. Basically ‘if its in motion in time’ I intuit it. If it exists in states I don’t. Everything consists of flights of arrows. This tells me a lot really, because again, I see the world as a division of cognitive labor, with all these variations in smart people producing different ‘sensors’ that detect different ‘bits’ of reality, and our voluntary cooperation and trade as the information system by which we different sensors share that information. Man is a gloriously fascinating creature. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Why I Am Not Good at Arithmetic, Multiplication, Division, and Chess.

    [I] have a lot of friends who are good at chess, and I do think chess is a pretty good determinant of intelligence, and perhaps a better determinant of academic and career success. I was in a chess club through seventh or eighth grade, and really never got that good until the first machines came out because they played perfectly – too perfectly. But as an illustration, There are three reasons I am not very good at it: (a) Puzzles vs Problems ethic: I have a problem with puzzles as wasted effort, when I should be working on problems. Just as I have a problem going from books to problems, rather than from problems to books. So in effect I see playing games that require more than casual attention (cards), as an immoral waste of my time. (Which a certain girlfriend in college beat into me through insults as well.) So I cant make myself spend times on such things without feeling like I’m letting the time run out on my lifespan. (b) Working (short term) memory – one of the reasons I became interested in IQ is the understanding of both the myopia of my autistic thinking and what I began to understand was a problem for me in arithmetic calculation despite my abilities in mathematical reasoning. I work on certain categories of problems partly because I seemed to have a fairly weak working memory compared to other students. I have trouble adding and multiplying, or working with a lot of states: like origami requires. I have no problem reasoning. I can detect truth content pre-cognitively, and I can define spectra – lines of causality. I cannot however juggle many independent and as I see it – unrelated – states of things. (c) Limited lateral thinking. (which I suppose I could overcome with practice) but not only do I have trouble with humor – which depends upon it, with cunning in a game of chess (i tend to play aggressively with every move and am too concerned with optimum moves and can be baited by them), but I tend not to find ‘shortcuts’ so much as ‘truths’. Basically ‘if its in motion in time’ I intuit it. If it exists in states I don’t. Everything consists of flights of arrows. This tells me a lot really, because again, I see the world as a division of cognitive labor, with all these variations in smart people producing different ‘sensors’ that detect different ‘bits’ of reality, and our voluntary cooperation and trade as the information system by which we different sensors share that information. Man is a gloriously fascinating creature. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Yes We Can – Purge All Lies From This Earth

    —We can purge all forms of lies from this earth. And in doing so, transform man into gods. For what is a god but a wielder of truth? And what is a devil, but a wielder of error, bias, wishful thinking, and deceit?—

    (worth repeating)