QUESTION: “Hello Curt. What’s your stance on IP especially taking Kinsella’s arguments into account?” (Derogatory reference to Kinsella’s personality edited out. – Ed.) ANSWER: [I]n the abstract I agree with the principle that easily accessible licenses for limited monopolies are not beneficial for consumers. However, that rational argument may or may not mean much in practice. 1) IP does appear to rapidly affect business willingness to invest. So, just like property rights exclude people from commons to facilitate the willingness to take risks, IP excludes people from opportunities in order to facilitate the willingness of individuals to take risks. So empirically speaking and rationally speaking, these are trade-off questions not matters of truth and falsehood. 2) Humans don’t like free riding and we intuitively dislike direct copying – seeing it as a case of free riding. I think the question is limited to whether you’re fooling someone or not (trademarking). So as long as you’re not violating a trademark, which is a question of ‘weights and measures’, (fraud), then I think it’s hard to argue against copying anything at all. The test is pretty empirically simple – if you can glance at something for two seconds and tell the original from the copy, then it’s not a trademark violation. If you can then it is. It’s a pretty simple test. We have proven it over and over again. 3) For licensed monopolies, I think it is entirely moral to appeal to the ‘people’ asking for a limited monopoly to produce a good that the market cannot reliably produce. This tends kind of thing tends to be limited to very specific goods (health and medicine) or expensive original research in physical sciences, or high risk investments with high benefit to the commons (transportation and infrastructure). All that occurs is that private investment takes risk and reward, with some lottery bonus from the commons, that if they succeed they will recover their costs free of predation from others. Again, this is a purely pragmatic thing. And as long as such things are put out to ‘bid’, so that whomever wins gets the benefit, then I think it’s just a rational choice to get individuals do off book research and development on behalf of the commons in exchange for winning a lottery if they succeed. However I see these licenses as exceptions on the same level as laws, not grants to be easily obtained without serious discretion. 4) My problem with the rothbardian (ghetto) ethic is that it’s advocating free riding on the work of others, and NOT a matter of competition if you did not conduct the research yourself. Competition is not free riding, since you are doing a better job of voluntarily organizing production and satisfying customers. However, benefitting from someone else’s research and development and capturing the rewards for it is simply free riding. Again, I see the Rothbardian ethic as simply an obscurantist set of arguments meant to justify parasitism rather than enforcing the fundamental requirement for rational cooperation: that we all contribute to production without parasitism upon others. Humans punish cheaters. The only way to increase the velocity of production and trade is to increase trust, and the way to increase trust is to suppress all free riding so that every individual is forced to participate in production, rather than engage in parasitism. Rothbardianism is simply a complex, overloaded, obscurant argument meant to justify ghetto parasitism. It is irrational to choose a stateless polity with low trust and persistent retribution over a stateful polity with low trust and high suppression of retribution. This is why people demand the state: to suppress immoral and unethical people such as rothbardians, so that a high trust society can develop. An anarchic or private polity will only be possible to form under a high trust society that prohibits all free riding with the exception of kin. Curt Doolittle PS: I’m sure this will generate nonsense but I’m pretty sure my argument is rock solid. Just how it is. Rothbardians need to get over it.
Author: Curt Doolittle
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Science Vs Belief – Institutions Of Law Vs Religions And Cults
[Y]eah…. I don’t make “should” or “belief” arguments. Sorry. If you wanna make people believe something, start a religion or cult like Rothbard did. If you want to create a stateless, private or anarchic polity, then you have to eliminate rational demand for the services provided by the state. To do that requires a high trust society. And the evidence is universally in my favor that it does. So the burden on the lunatic fringe, is to demonstrate that people will rationally join a low trust polity in the absence of strong central authority that suppresses retribution for unethical, immoral and conspiratorial actions. Because human beings demonstrate that they will commit acts of violence in retribution for unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions, just like they will for criminal actions. Just how it is.
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Science Vs Belief – Institutions Of Law Vs Religions And Cults
[Y]eah…. I don’t make “should” or “belief” arguments. Sorry. If you wanna make people believe something, start a religion or cult like Rothbard did. If you want to create a stateless, private or anarchic polity, then you have to eliminate rational demand for the services provided by the state. To do that requires a high trust society. And the evidence is universally in my favor that it does. So the burden on the lunatic fringe, is to demonstrate that people will rationally join a low trust polity in the absence of strong central authority that suppresses retribution for unethical, immoral and conspiratorial actions. Because human beings demonstrate that they will commit acts of violence in retribution for unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions, just like they will for criminal actions. Just how it is.
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Wow. FML. 😉
Wow. FML. 😉
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-27 15:53:00 UTC
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(PRIVATE ON TRUTH AND TESTIMONY) Archive for reference. Hmmm…. number of rando
(PRIVATE ON TRUTH AND TESTIMONY) Archive for reference.
Hmmm…. number of random thoughts on this paper….
1) The mechanism that serves to help us identify similarities is not rational, but intuitive – pre-rational (System 1) that performs searches of our memories. The mechanism that we use to deduce the reason for the similarities we have intuited, is rational (System 2). Critical observations from System 2, once committed to memory, then add to System 1.
I can’t think of anything that doesn’t follow the process of System 2 instructing(loading) System 1 “searches for patterns.” But the operation of System 1 (intuition) is invisible to us. Largely I believe, we verbally justify the instruction of intuition as the application of reason – but that is impossible as far as I know.
2) Once we have constructed a theory through this combination of intuition(searching) and direction (reason), we then start to try to confirm this theory and falsify it. I think the major difference between individual behavior comes from whether we search for refutations, or confirmations, and how exhaustively (depth+breadth search) we attempt to refute it.
3) Now, it’s possible to state those two paragraphs above (1+2) in language that is more precise, albeit using a lot more terminology, but as far as I know, that is what actually occurs when we hypothesize and test.
4) In the spectrum deduction (sufficient information), induction (insufficient information), and abduction(sparse information), only deductions can be claimed to be true. That does not mean that we cannot guess – only that we cannot claim that our guesses are true. Long division works by the process of organized guessing. Repeating sequences are proof that the information is not present to produce an information without the arbitrary decision of choosing a limit to the precision of the decimal expansion. So the information to conduct division in the absence of contextual precision still faces the problem of sufficient determination of truth. This problem is also true of all statements about the dimensions of circles. But it is not true of the properties of rectangles. Without context we possess insufficient information to make a deduction without the arbitrary introduction of human choice to limit precision.
5) —“We have just seen that universal statements cannot be justified or confirmed by observation-statements.”—
Isn’t this just a verbalism? When we communicate we reduce reality to a set of selected symbols (words) that reduce the information content to communicable and useful form that humans can make use of. We make expressions in a context, just as we make measurements in a context. We can never make universal statements that are non-tautological for this reason. Non-tautological, True statements REQUIRE the absence of information. No? Deductive (tautological) answers are proofs. Truth requires testimony that the work done exhausts the standards of demonstration available to us. Ultimate truth is never attainable any more than an infinite limit is attainable. At the point the ultimate truth, or limit is reached, we achieve the construction of a tautology, not a testimony to the exhaustive proof of one’s statements given currently available knowledge.
More in a bit.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-27 06:25:00 UTC
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SCIENCE VS BELIEF – INSTITUTIONS OF LAW VS RELIGIONS AND CULTS Yeah…. I don’t
SCIENCE VS BELIEF – INSTITUTIONS OF LAW VS RELIGIONS AND CULTS
Yeah…. I don’t make “should” or “belief” arguments. Sorry. If you wanna make people believe something, start a religion or cult like Rothbard did. If you want to create a stateless, private or anarchic polity, then you have to eliminate rational demand for the services provided by the state. To do that requires a high trust society. And the evidence is universally in my favor that it does. So the burden on the lunatic fringe, is to demonstrate that people will rationally join a low trust polity in the absence of strong central authority that suppresses retribution for unethical, immoral and conspiratorial actions. Because human beings demonstrate that they will commit acts of violence in retribution for unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions, just like they will for criminal actions.
Just how it is. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-27 05:50:00 UTC
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“WHAT IS YOUR STANCE ON IP?” QUESTION: “Hello Curt. What’s your stance on IP esp
“WHAT IS YOUR STANCE ON IP?”
QUESTION: “Hello Curt. What’s your stance on IP especially taking Kinsella’s arguments into account?” (Derogatory reference to Kinsella’s personality edited out. – Ed.) 🙂
ANSWER:
(Sorry, this ended up in my “Other” email for some reason. If you ‘friend’ me then I will get your emails. I didn’t see this one.)
In the abstract I agree with the principle that easily accessible licenses for limited monopolies are not beneficial for consumers. However, that rational argument may or may not mean much in practice.
1) IP does appear to rapidly affect business willingness to invest. So, just like property rights exclude people from commons to facilitate the willingness to take risks, IP excludes people from opportunities in order to facilitate the willingness of individuals to take risks. So empirically speaking and rationally speaking, these are trade-off questions not matters of truth and falsehood.
2) Humans don’t like free riding and we intuitively dislike direct copying – seeing it as a case of free riding. I think the question is limited to whether you’re fooling someone or not (trademarking). So as long as you’re not violating a trademark, which is a question of ‘weights and measures’, (fraud), then I think it’s hard to argue against copying anything at all. The test is pretty empirically simple – if you can glance at something for two seconds and tell the original from the copy, then it’s not a trademark violation. If you can then it is. It’s a pretty simple test. We have proven it over and over again.
3) For licensed monopolies, I think it is entirely moral to appeal to the ‘people’ asking for a limited monopoly to produce a good that the market cannot reliably produce. This tends kind of thing tends to be limited to very specific goods (health and medicine) or expensive original research in physical sciences, or high risk investments with high benefit to the commons (transportation and infrastructure). All that occurs is that private investment takes risk and reward, with some lottery bonus from the commons, that if they succeed they will recover their costs free of predation from others. Again, this is a purely pragmatic thing. And as long as such things are put out to ‘bid’, so that whomever wins gets the benefit, then I think it’s just a rational choice to get individuals do off book research and development on behalf of the commons in exchange for winning a lottery if they succeed.
However I see these licenses as exceptions on the same level as laws, not grants to be easily obtained without serious discretion.
4) My problem with the rothbardian (ghetto) ethic is that it’s advocating free riding on the work of others, and NOT a matter of competition if you did not conduct the research yourself. Competition is not free riding, since you are doing a better job of voluntarily organizing production and satisfying customers. However, benefitting from someone else’s research and development and capturing the rewards for it is simply free riding.
Again, I see the Rothbardian ethic as simply an obscurantist set of arguments meant to justify parasitism rather than enforcing the fundamental requirement for rational cooperation: that we all contribute to production without parasitism upon others.
Humans punish cheaters. The only way to increase the velocity of production and trade is to increase trust, and the way to increase trust is to suppress all free riding so that every individual is forced to participate in production, rather than engage in parasitism.
Rothbardianism is simply a complex, overloaded, obscurant argument meant to justify ghetto parasitism. It is irrational to choose a stateless polity with low trust and persistent retribution over a stateful polity with low trust and high suppression of retribution. This is why people demand the state: to suppress immoral and unethical people such as rothbardians, so that a high trust society can develop.
An anarchic or private polity will only be possible to form under a high trust society that prohibits all free riding with the exception of kin.
Curt Doolittle
PS: I’m sure this will generate nonsense but I’m pretty sure my argument is rock solid. Just how it is. Rothbardians need to get over it.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-27 05:34:00 UTC
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Untitled
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-college-major-and-gender-ratio/
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-27 01:45:00 UTC
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It All Begins With Warfare
THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK: IT ALL BEGINS WITH WAR [I] really want the history of economics to hold the social science’s intellectual high ground. But the fact of the matter is, that after consuming most of intellectual history, in hundreds of books, the most important book on social science that I have ever read remains The History of Warfare by Keegan. It is a work of insight, depth and scholarship that none of the religious, social, political or economic historians have come close to matching. We live our warfare first. That is the foundation of our civilizations. Everything else rests upon it – and more importantly, everything else depends upon it. Our ability to deny others control over geography, determines our ability to construct institutions, which determines our ability to accumulate capital. All property is constructed after all, from the ability to deny others use of that which we claim a monopoly of control over. All prosperity depends upon the formation of property rights. And all property rights depend on the organized application of violence.
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It All Begins With Warfare
THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK: IT ALL BEGINS WITH WAR [I] really want the history of economics to hold the social science’s intellectual high ground. But the fact of the matter is, that after consuming most of intellectual history, in hundreds of books, the most important book on social science that I have ever read remains The History of Warfare by Keegan. It is a work of insight, depth and scholarship that none of the religious, social, political or economic historians have come close to matching. We live our warfare first. That is the foundation of our civilizations. Everything else rests upon it – and more importantly, everything else depends upon it. Our ability to deny others control over geography, determines our ability to construct institutions, which determines our ability to accumulate capital. All property is constructed after all, from the ability to deny others use of that which we claim a monopoly of control over. All prosperity depends upon the formation of property rights. And all property rights depend on the organized application of violence.