Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • Opinion on Tucker? Missing the Boat.

    (from elsewhere)

    —“What’s your current opinion of Jeffrey Tucker?”—Johannesson

    [T]ucker is a decent fellow seeking income by popularizing libertinism. As a writer he is articulate. As a marketer of ideas he is quite good. As an editor he is even better. As a theorist he is as weak as the rest. As an entrepreneur he conflates his advocacy of his over-investment in his passion with the demands of the market: something no libertarian should fail to recognize. Ideology must satisfy market demand just as any other product. Like the MI he failed to see the dramatic sea change from hopeful and rebellious classical liberals combined with a few social misfits, to alt-right classical liberals and many socially con-formative. And by missing that shift, and holding onto prior intellectual investments, he has missed his opportunity to generate revenue by continuing WITH the stream, rather than now struggling against it. The world has moved on. The Alt-right owns the momentum because it attacks the lies and pseudoscience of the postmoderns head-on, rather than continuing the won-battle against socialism. The Libertine generation is over. Libertines cannot hold territory against invaders wishing to impose alternative normative and institutional ambitions. No one gets a free ride on liberty. The only means of obtaining liberty is the violent suppression of those who would take it from us. Alt-right is the only possible form of liberty, and therefore the only direction of libertarian investment. It is what it is. Adapt or perish. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Opinion on Tucker? Missing the Boat.

    (from elsewhere)

    —“What’s your current opinion of Jeffrey Tucker?”—Johannesson

    [T]ucker is a decent fellow seeking income by popularizing libertinism. As a writer he is articulate. As a marketer of ideas he is quite good. As an editor he is even better. As a theorist he is as weak as the rest. As an entrepreneur he conflates his advocacy of his over-investment in his passion with the demands of the market: something no libertarian should fail to recognize. Ideology must satisfy market demand just as any other product. Like the MI he failed to see the dramatic sea change from hopeful and rebellious classical liberals combined with a few social misfits, to alt-right classical liberals and many socially con-formative. And by missing that shift, and holding onto prior intellectual investments, he has missed his opportunity to generate revenue by continuing WITH the stream, rather than now struggling against it. The world has moved on. The Alt-right owns the momentum because it attacks the lies and pseudoscience of the postmoderns head-on, rather than continuing the won-battle against socialism. The Libertine generation is over. Libertines cannot hold territory against invaders wishing to impose alternative normative and institutional ambitions. No one gets a free ride on liberty. The only means of obtaining liberty is the violent suppression of those who would take it from us. Alt-right is the only possible form of liberty, and therefore the only direction of libertarian investment. It is what it is. Adapt or perish. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Mises Gets Credit – for both his insights and his failings.

    —“Curt Doolittle and Chris Cathcart — I am not sure I get your point that [Mises] will never get credit … he already does!”—Peter Boettke

    [W]ell, we all agree that he gets credit for stating that socialism was impossible. The question is whether he did so using justification from axiom, or by analysis of available information, available operations, and rational incentives. I don’t think anyone argues that his insight was correct. What I argue is that he, like Freud, Boaz, Cantor, Marx, (Mises), the Frankfurt School and Rothbard, demonstrated the pervasive Cosmopolitan error of creating an authoritarian pseudoscience in justification of his priors, rather than engaging in science for the specific purpose of eliminating error, bias and priors, wishful thinking and deceit from one’s theories. All knowledge is theoretical because outside of trivialities and tautologies, no premises are certain. Einstein demonstrated that if we cannot count on a concept such as length or time, that no premise is informationally complete enough to deduce necessary consequences. An axiom is a declarative construction – an analogy to reality, and is informationally complete. But no non trivial statement about reality is informationally complete. It cannot be. (hence critical rationalism and critical preference). Science is not justificationary, it is critical: we do not prove something is true, we see if it survives criticism. And the only test of existentially of any hypothesis is operational construction. As such praxeological analysis tests whether a statement CAN be true. So we cannot deduce all of economics from first premises (particularly the incomplete sentence “man acts”). We can observe (empirically) the unobservable, and then construct the observation out of rational actions to test if it is a truth candidate. But we cannot deduce all candidate operations from first principles – demonstrably so. As such correctly positioning Mises in intellectual history as the another failure of the 20th century thinkers to complete the evolution of the scientific method from moral and justificationary to objective and critical. This demonstrates that mises was, like Brouwer and Bridgman and Popper, attempting to eliminate the evolution of 19th and 20th century pseudoscience that Hayek warned us was the advent of a new form of mysticism. Unfortunately, Bridgman and Brouwer did not understand Popper, Hayek could’t put the fields together because he started with psychology rather than ‘calculability’ and ‘computability’. Mises correctly understood calculation but not computability, nor the relation between computably and subjective human incentives. Mises missed the boat by trying to create an pseudoscience or authoritarian logic to suppress pseudoscientific innumeracy in economics. What none of them realized – Popper included – is that the scientific method is a MORAL WARRANTY of due diligence in the elimination of error, bias, wishful thinking and deceit. And that what each of them had done was attempt to prevent the emergent pseudoscience of the Cosmopolitans and Postmodernists that for all intents and purposes functions as the second ‘christianization’ of Europe, this time, by pseudoscientific rather than mystical means. And that mises had incorrectly conflated logical necessity with adherence to the necessary morality of voluntary cooperation. This is a very profound insight into intellectual history. If I wanted to reform Mises I could. But that isn’t necessary. The world has moved on. Instead, the problem we face in our generation is not socialism, but postmodernism and lingering Cosmopolitan pseudoscience and innumeracy in the social sciences. We face pervasive mysticism, pseudoscience, innumeracy, propagandizing, and outright lying in politics and daily life after more than a century of diluting our education in grammar, rhetoric, logic, history and morality. Undermining Rothbardian fallacies is just as important as undermining socialist, postmodern, democratic secular humanist, and neo-conservatism. And unfortunately to undermine Rothbardian fallacies requires we undermine the fallacies that Rothbard depends upon in his arguments. And to some degree that means doing greater criticism of Mises than we might like. A philosopher’s followers can ruin his legacy. His did. There is Precious little Austrian in Mises to start with. He is from Lviv Ukraine, and a Cosmopolitan author in genetics, culture, and method of argument. He is not a scientist. He is attempting to write scriptural law. And he makes consistent errors of conflating law, hermeneutic interpretation in the construction of his insight: it’s not moral or true if it’s not constructible out of rational human actions, and it’s not calculable, moral, and true for human beings to attempt rational planning in the face of state-manufactured deceit. There is very little difference between postmodern propagandism and monetary manipulation. They are both disinformation campaigns designed to alter public behavior to state rather than individual, family, group and tribal ends. So it is not that state interference in the economy cannot be studied in the discipline of economics. It is that doing so studies disinformation, whereas the study of fully informed voluntary cooperation free of error, bias, wishful thinking and deception is the study of moral economics. In retrospect it’s not complicated. So while I partly agree with you, the damage done by his fallacies to the progress of liberty, and their amplification by rothbard/HHH/MI, have been far more harmful than good. LR at MI tried to use Alinsky’s model of creating propaganda and community. But this battle was above the heads of these people. Whether well intentioned or not. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Mises Gets Credit – for both his insights and his failings.

    —“Curt Doolittle and Chris Cathcart — I am not sure I get your point that [Mises] will never get credit … he already does!”—Peter Boettke

    [W]ell, we all agree that he gets credit for stating that socialism was impossible. The question is whether he did so using justification from axiom, or by analysis of available information, available operations, and rational incentives. I don’t think anyone argues that his insight was correct. What I argue is that he, like Freud, Boaz, Cantor, Marx, (Mises), the Frankfurt School and Rothbard, demonstrated the pervasive Cosmopolitan error of creating an authoritarian pseudoscience in justification of his priors, rather than engaging in science for the specific purpose of eliminating error, bias and priors, wishful thinking and deceit from one’s theories. All knowledge is theoretical because outside of trivialities and tautologies, no premises are certain. Einstein demonstrated that if we cannot count on a concept such as length or time, that no premise is informationally complete enough to deduce necessary consequences. An axiom is a declarative construction – an analogy to reality, and is informationally complete. But no non trivial statement about reality is informationally complete. It cannot be. (hence critical rationalism and critical preference). Science is not justificationary, it is critical: we do not prove something is true, we see if it survives criticism. And the only test of existentially of any hypothesis is operational construction. As such praxeological analysis tests whether a statement CAN be true. So we cannot deduce all of economics from first premises (particularly the incomplete sentence “man acts”). We can observe (empirically) the unobservable, and then construct the observation out of rational actions to test if it is a truth candidate. But we cannot deduce all candidate operations from first principles – demonstrably so. As such correctly positioning Mises in intellectual history as the another failure of the 20th century thinkers to complete the evolution of the scientific method from moral and justificationary to objective and critical. This demonstrates that mises was, like Brouwer and Bridgman and Popper, attempting to eliminate the evolution of 19th and 20th century pseudoscience that Hayek warned us was the advent of a new form of mysticism. Unfortunately, Bridgman and Brouwer did not understand Popper, Hayek could’t put the fields together because he started with psychology rather than ‘calculability’ and ‘computability’. Mises correctly understood calculation but not computability, nor the relation between computably and subjective human incentives. Mises missed the boat by trying to create an pseudoscience or authoritarian logic to suppress pseudoscientific innumeracy in economics. What none of them realized – Popper included – is that the scientific method is a MORAL WARRANTY of due diligence in the elimination of error, bias, wishful thinking and deceit. And that what each of them had done was attempt to prevent the emergent pseudoscience of the Cosmopolitans and Postmodernists that for all intents and purposes functions as the second ‘christianization’ of Europe, this time, by pseudoscientific rather than mystical means. And that mises had incorrectly conflated logical necessity with adherence to the necessary morality of voluntary cooperation. This is a very profound insight into intellectual history. If I wanted to reform Mises I could. But that isn’t necessary. The world has moved on. Instead, the problem we face in our generation is not socialism, but postmodernism and lingering Cosmopolitan pseudoscience and innumeracy in the social sciences. We face pervasive mysticism, pseudoscience, innumeracy, propagandizing, and outright lying in politics and daily life after more than a century of diluting our education in grammar, rhetoric, logic, history and morality. Undermining Rothbardian fallacies is just as important as undermining socialist, postmodern, democratic secular humanist, and neo-conservatism. And unfortunately to undermine Rothbardian fallacies requires we undermine the fallacies that Rothbard depends upon in his arguments. And to some degree that means doing greater criticism of Mises than we might like. A philosopher’s followers can ruin his legacy. His did. There is Precious little Austrian in Mises to start with. He is from Lviv Ukraine, and a Cosmopolitan author in genetics, culture, and method of argument. He is not a scientist. He is attempting to write scriptural law. And he makes consistent errors of conflating law, hermeneutic interpretation in the construction of his insight: it’s not moral or true if it’s not constructible out of rational human actions, and it’s not calculable, moral, and true for human beings to attempt rational planning in the face of state-manufactured deceit. There is very little difference between postmodern propagandism and monetary manipulation. They are both disinformation campaigns designed to alter public behavior to state rather than individual, family, group and tribal ends. So it is not that state interference in the economy cannot be studied in the discipline of economics. It is that doing so studies disinformation, whereas the study of fully informed voluntary cooperation free of error, bias, wishful thinking and deception is the study of moral economics. In retrospect it’s not complicated. So while I partly agree with you, the damage done by his fallacies to the progress of liberty, and their amplification by rothbard/HHH/MI, have been far more harmful than good. LR at MI tried to use Alinsky’s model of creating propaganda and community. But this battle was above the heads of these people. Whether well intentioned or not. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • No, Mises is Not a Hero. (Not that he wasn’t pretty good)

    [I] love him but he was wrong. He conflates definitions with demonstrated behavior and this is an example of why he was ostracized for his dogmatic verbalisms. His method of investigation, which he calls Austrian but is arguably Ukrainian instead, is reducible to the study of the means of improving the institutions that facilitate the voluntary organization of production by eliminating all possible frictions to economic velocity. Whereas the mainstream is reducible to the maximum consumption that can be generated by interfering with the voluntary organization of production without producing the disincentives that would increase frictions sufficiently to produce results counter to the ambition. When the differences between misesian and mainstream are one of morality and externality, not definition. Mises engaged in fallacies throughout his work. He makes consistent mistakes in the application of aprioristic logic of axiomatic systems to the proximal logic of theoretical systems. He discovered operationalism in economics just as Brouwer discovered it in math, and Bridgman in physics, and popper in philosophy. But none of them managed to put their efforts together into an innovation in the scientific method and the formal uniting of philosophy and science into a single discipline; and finally retiring moral discourse just as moral discourse retired religious discourse. This is perhaps one of the greatest failures of the twentieth century. Mises was a little right. But his dogmatism ended both his career and his potential to solve the problem not just if economics but if the social sciences.

  • No, Mises is Not a Hero. (Not that he wasn’t pretty good)

    [I] love him but he was wrong. He conflates definitions with demonstrated behavior and this is an example of why he was ostracized for his dogmatic verbalisms. His method of investigation, which he calls Austrian but is arguably Ukrainian instead, is reducible to the study of the means of improving the institutions that facilitate the voluntary organization of production by eliminating all possible frictions to economic velocity. Whereas the mainstream is reducible to the maximum consumption that can be generated by interfering with the voluntary organization of production without producing the disincentives that would increase frictions sufficiently to produce results counter to the ambition. When the differences between misesian and mainstream are one of morality and externality, not definition. Mises engaged in fallacies throughout his work. He makes consistent mistakes in the application of aprioristic logic of axiomatic systems to the proximal logic of theoretical systems. He discovered operationalism in economics just as Brouwer discovered it in math, and Bridgman in physics, and popper in philosophy. But none of them managed to put their efforts together into an innovation in the scientific method and the formal uniting of philosophy and science into a single discipline; and finally retiring moral discourse just as moral discourse retired religious discourse. This is perhaps one of the greatest failures of the twentieth century. Mises was a little right. But his dogmatism ended both his career and his potential to solve the problem not just if economics but if the social sciences.

  • Unpleasant Truth: Hiring a Female CEO is a Negative Indicator

    [T]he primary reason that women and minorities are put into power because they lack the ability to alter the status quo through the construction of stress-bearing loyalties. Boards hire them as weak placeholders – a strategy of delay an wait. The assignment of a woman to a leadership position in a troubled company is an admission by the board that they cannot come to consensus on a strategy, or that they have exhausted available strategies, and that further investment in the firm will perform negatively. They are aware that a woman and minorities will be willing to take the position due to the status perk of obtaining a rare executive position even while winding a company down, while men will not find status in such an effort, but failure. They are also aware of the positive PR that such appointments generate, and the negative that white male appointments generate under duress: in other words, the media will criticize a white male on his abilities, and laud the progressive appointment of a woman or minority in the hope that he or she succeeds. So the company is buying resistance to criticism by the press. Women and minorities will readily walk off the glass cliff because they are desperate for status from other women and minorities for having obtained a rare position. Men of equal ability will evaluate taking such a position as career ending and avoid it. Women having held such a status position can hold that status even after their failure. Men having failed will carry the stigma of failure, not the status of having obtained a rare position. So the long term consequences of an executive position in a declining company vary by gender and race. The glass ceiling exists because women are less loyal to their faction under stress than men of equal abilities. Meaning that men view women as less trustworthy. So, men view women (subconsciously) as untrustworthy under duress, if not weak allies at all times, and thereby untrustworthy in general. Conversely, this weakness means that the status quo will not be upset, and further confusion created if a woman or minority is appointed. Lastly, any professional c-level executive is very well aware prior to taking a position, of the prospects for the company. These things may seem complex to non-professionals, but in general it’s a matter of talent, alliances, incentives, assets, debt and time. I’ve been writing and talking about this topic for two decades now. Outside of obvious industries selling consumer products to women, boards choose women execs as an admission of failure. (Xerox, HP, Yahoo…) Even Meg Whitman was a placeholder for the two founders. Truth hurts. Science is uncomfortable. But it is what it is. We are unequal. And that’s a good thing. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Unpleasant Truth: Hiring a Female CEO is a Negative Indicator

    [T]he primary reason that women and minorities are put into power because they lack the ability to alter the status quo through the construction of stress-bearing loyalties. Boards hire them as weak placeholders – a strategy of delay an wait. The assignment of a woman to a leadership position in a troubled company is an admission by the board that they cannot come to consensus on a strategy, or that they have exhausted available strategies, and that further investment in the firm will perform negatively. They are aware that a woman and minorities will be willing to take the position due to the status perk of obtaining a rare executive position even while winding a company down, while men will not find status in such an effort, but failure. They are also aware of the positive PR that such appointments generate, and the negative that white male appointments generate under duress: in other words, the media will criticize a white male on his abilities, and laud the progressive appointment of a woman or minority in the hope that he or she succeeds. So the company is buying resistance to criticism by the press. Women and minorities will readily walk off the glass cliff because they are desperate for status from other women and minorities for having obtained a rare position. Men of equal ability will evaluate taking such a position as career ending and avoid it. Women having held such a status position can hold that status even after their failure. Men having failed will carry the stigma of failure, not the status of having obtained a rare position. So the long term consequences of an executive position in a declining company vary by gender and race. The glass ceiling exists because women are less loyal to their faction under stress than men of equal abilities. Meaning that men view women as less trustworthy. So, men view women (subconsciously) as untrustworthy under duress, if not weak allies at all times, and thereby untrustworthy in general. Conversely, this weakness means that the status quo will not be upset, and further confusion created if a woman or minority is appointed. Lastly, any professional c-level executive is very well aware prior to taking a position, of the prospects for the company. These things may seem complex to non-professionals, but in general it’s a matter of talent, alliances, incentives, assets, debt and time. I’ve been writing and talking about this topic for two decades now. Outside of obvious industries selling consumer products to women, boards choose women execs as an admission of failure. (Xerox, HP, Yahoo…) Even Meg Whitman was a placeholder for the two founders. Truth hurts. Science is uncomfortable. But it is what it is. We are unequal. And that’s a good thing. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Politicians Are and Unnecessary Evil

    [W]e no longer need politicians and representatives, and no longer need democratic assent to pass something, and to divide a budget equally, and to vote with money where it is required. In fact, all politicians do is to create hazards. So given that distance no longer impacts ability to cooperate and communicate in real time; and given that concentration of politicians in one place merely creates a perfect environment for lobbying and corruption; and given that running for office produces nothing but negative externalities exacerbating corruption; it seems much wiser to let anyone post proposals (contracts), to reject any proposal of involuntary transfer(propertarianism), to hold debates in public over them with the best public intellectuals contributing to the discourse; to require truthful speech in such deliberation (testimonialism), and to select a jury by lot from each house to spend those budgets, and enter into those contracts. Politicians are an unnecessary evil in a world of instantaneous communication.

  • Politicians Are and Unnecessary Evil

    [W]e no longer need politicians and representatives, and no longer need democratic assent to pass something, and to divide a budget equally, and to vote with money where it is required. In fact, all politicians do is to create hazards. So given that distance no longer impacts ability to cooperate and communicate in real time; and given that concentration of politicians in one place merely creates a perfect environment for lobbying and corruption; and given that running for office produces nothing but negative externalities exacerbating corruption; it seems much wiser to let anyone post proposals (contracts), to reject any proposal of involuntary transfer(propertarianism), to hold debates in public over them with the best public intellectuals contributing to the discourse; to require truthful speech in such deliberation (testimonialism), and to select a jury by lot from each house to spend those budgets, and enter into those contracts. Politicians are an unnecessary evil in a world of instantaneous communication.