Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE ON PHILOSOPHY It turns out that I’m not alone in

    THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE ON PHILOSOPHY

    It turns out that I’m not alone in this thought: computer science, which is operational (algorithmic) and constructivist(computable), has been replacing and will replace mathematics as the primary method of argument, and classical mathematics as well as Cantorian sets, will remain ‘verbal toolkits’ for the purpose of approximation (lower precision) which allow human minds to think in approximations (deductions) which can later be operationalized. That approach is what intuitionist mathematics recommends for example: discover necessary axioms then prove them.

    Does the operational constraint (algorithmic and computable) in computer science explain why philosophical thought leadership at least on the right and libertarian spectra is coming out of the computer science wing? Is that why austrian economics makes such sense to computer scientists? Or is it merely the skew in IQ distributions as talent follows money, leading to the saturation of technology with smart folk? Or is it a combination of both?

    Programming is pretty much like logic: an art of clear communication that can be conducted many ways. But databases are a bit more like philosophy of science: they must be constructed to correspond with reality. And both programming and databases force you to account for whether information is present for the purpose of making a choice – which is the problem of decidability (sufficiency of information presence) in all fields. Decidability is a serious problem as we create general rules with lower information density. We desperately want to create general rules in which the information is present for deduction. Because this limits the effort of cognition to something we can manage with our feeble minds.

    I learned physics first, computer science second, austrian economics third, and contemporary keynesian economics last. Austrian principles are intuitively constructionist (consisting of a sequence of human actions). And the ethics of voluntary transfer (the requirement that transfers are constructed of voluntary exchanges) are an operationalist’s method of testing each original/primitive/minimum activity (exchange) as ‘computable’ (decidable).

    I suppose that I have the luxury of a century of computing that Mises didn’t have, and the luxury of cognitive science and experimental psychology that Rothbard and Hoppe didn’t have. And I suppose as an operationalist (scientist) I have a higher demand for truth than did Mises, Rothbard or Hoppe. And as a software developer, I have learned that the human mind is an undisciplined creature and it is very difficult to demonstrate that we know what we claim to when we are forced to. Writing advanced software is terribly humbling. Engineering is terribly humbling. If only economics and law were as humbling as software and engineering. But teachers, lawyers and economists (at least those who recommend policy) are insulated from the failure of their models. Whereas in computer science and engineering, large sums of money can be lost, business opportunities lost, and people can die, and there is no one else to blame.

    So I don’t know if what I’ve done is all that smart – we stand on the shoulders of giants – but it was pretty hard to get to this point: where all of philosophy, all of the logics, and all fields, are reducible to a single problem of constructing theories (general rules) consisting of arbitrary precision of some sort or other (including or excluding properties of reality), while preserving the sufficiency of information for use in deduction (the confidence that our general rules allow us to conduct comparisons).

    In any event, it appears that far from being merely engineering, that the practice of software development, particularly in those cases where we deal with human machine interactions, is not subordinate to mathematics precisely because (now that over the past decade we have produced algorithmic equivalents) it is operational and therefore provable.

    And those of us working in ethics, myself in particular, can make use of this insight: that you cannot make a truth claim unless you can operationally construct the argument.

    That austrian economics is ‘correct’ in that it’s operationally moral.

    That praxeology failed because it is a fallacy as mises and rothbard defined it in pseudoscientific and false philosophical terms. Even if we give Kantian arguments some childish validity, we can say that they are useful only by analogy, not by construction and operation.

    Whereas, we can provide a superior explanation of economics, of the logic of cooperation, of the logic of human choice, and the necessity of human acquisition, by the simple acknowledgment of the necessit of property for incentives and economic calculation, the necessary morality of voluntary transfer and exchange, and the empirical analysis of emergent economic phenomenon, from which, like intuitionist mathematics, we explain as rational human actions.

    Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 06:25:00 UTC

  • ELI ON THE VIRTUE OF VIOLENCE AND NECESSITY OF AGGRESSION —“What I think I can

    ELI ON THE VIRTUE OF VIOLENCE AND NECESSITY OF AGGRESSION

    —“What I think I can enforce – and benefit from enforcing – is a prohibition against negative sum aggression (involuntary transfers) and a mandate for positive sum aggression (the suppression of free-riding.)

    Even private property is a form of aggression. Fencing off unowned land, formerly free for use by all, and announcing that – henceforth – trespass will be punished by violence, is inherently an aggressive act. Property is a social construct. Using violence to uphold a social construct is aggression.

    This is not an argument against private property, this is an argument for aggression.”— Eli Harman

    Aggression and violence are value neutral. The only question that matters is whether one is constructing property rights – the prohibition on free riding – such that we have the incentive and ability to develop a division of knowledge and labor. That division of labor compresses time, and increases productivity, such that through constant competition we can cooperate for the purpose of constantly decreasing prices – costs to us.

    Aggression and violence in the construction of property rights is not only a virtue it is arguably the highest most productive virtue than man can pursue.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 15:07:00 UTC

  • Curt Doolittle shared a post

    Curt Doolittle shared a post.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 15:01:00 UTC

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS: MOMMY TRAINING AND MORE American women need classes in ba

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS: MOMMY TRAINING AND MORE

    American women need classes in baby care and child rearing. (Really. hospitals often require it.). And pretty often in cooking. But here in Kiev, where it seems like every woman in her twenties that I know, if not teens, has a small child, they have this novel way of training: they help each other, and they help other women in their families. Sort of ‘hands on training’. Same for cooking. I mean, all the girls can cook, and they don’t think of it as a chore. It’s like breathing.

    Kids get LOTS of attention. So they aren’t trying to get attention all the time. It seems that slavic children (and adults) appear to be less aggressive and impulsive. Which isn’t true of Georgians and other black haired tribes to the south and east. I need to get some data on it. Because I’m skeptical that it’s something else. But it seems pretty much the case.

    Mysticism, or, I don’t know what to call it, but all the orthodox countries have it, and russians more so: this strange fatalism or belief ‘things work out this way’ as if they never heard of catallactic and self organizing processes. Or in the Russian case: the fear of not knowing something requires ignorance be replaced by confidence in pseudoscience. (I wonder how crazy this culture was before the communists just wiped out church mysticism.).

    I dunno. But you know, if you have to live a lifestyle, the whole extended family thing is pretty awesome. And I think it is MUCH BETTER FOR MEN than the ANF which statistically, in a migratory industrial population, leaves you old, lonely, poor, and increasingly suicidal.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 15:00:00 UTC

  • EVERY DISCIPLINE CAME CLOSE, BUT NONE SOLVED IT : TRUTH —“Truth is replaced by

    EVERY DISCIPLINE CAME CLOSE, BUT NONE SOLVED IT : TRUTH

    —“Truth is replaced by (algorithmic) proof as a primitive notion, and

    Existence requires constructibility.”—

    It’s interesting (telling?) that Bridgman did his work on Operationalism (in psychology, where I first came across it, it’s “Operationism”), because he understood that the only reason that Physics had not discovered Einstein’s relativity earlier, and the profession had spent years on fallacies, was because they didn’t practice operationalism: articulating (constructions) of all their ideas so that when they extended an abstract idea, they revisited all its underlying assumptions.

    Now, Operationalism is practiced in Psychology as a matter of course, and in as much of physical science as is possible without unnecessary constraint. But the problem remains extant in most disciplines where it has been addressed somehow or other by the mathematicians including Brouwer on in Intuitionist Mathematics, and from Poincare on in Constructivist Mathematics, and the logicians through Kripke and Goedel, and much less intelligently, Mises in Economics, and with less success in law, from the antebellum period through the present on Textualism, Originalism, and Strict Constructionism. And the concept is completely missing from ethics.

    Which is strange because **operationalism is an ethical not logical constraint** on our thinking. We cannot make honest truth claims without it, but that does not constrain us from making approximate deductions – explorations. Exploration is approximate by definition.

    So, I am once again at the realization that the failure of the greeks to solve the problem of free riding, property rights and voluntary exchange, and therefore ethics is the cause of so much of our intellectual failure over the centuries. The answer was sort of sitting there in law but no one seems to have really done much with it.

    And so uniting all the logics and all the branches of philosophy into a single contiguous, consistent system has been impossible. But it’s not impossible..

    It was just sitting there. I dunno. At this point it looks obvious. But that’s because I ran into the ‘economic calculation’ argument, and property rights. And when I did, everything else slowly fell into place. Because they are necessary rather than preferential statements. I think they may be the most important insight into logic that has ever occurred.

    I just don’t understand why it took us so long. Maybe we had to cook individualism sufficiently? I don’t know yet. That seems like the answer.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 14:45:00 UTC

  • I miss my guys. 🙁 (Sniffle)

    I miss my guys. 🙁 (Sniffle)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 12:58:00 UTC

  • CONCEPT(NAME) = FUNCTION({OPERATIONS}); A change in the concept requires change

    CONCEPT(NAME) = FUNCTION({OPERATIONS});

    A change in the concept requires change in the operations.

    —-“[any given] concept is synonymous with a corresponding set of operations. If the concept is physical, as of length, the operations are actual physical operations, namely, those by which length is measured; or if the concept is mental, as of mathematical continuity, the operations are mental operations, namely those by which we determine whether a given aggregate of magnitudes is continuous.”—

    A concept describes a function whose contents are algorithmic: a series of operations – a series of actions.

    That does not prohibit us from expressing fantasies as operations.

    HOwever, it does require that we discriminate between fantasies, pretentions and demonstrable operations.

    The square root of two is not a number – it cannot be. It is a function – it must be a function. As are all names of entities other than the natural numbers.

    The same applies for “JUSTICE”.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 12:15:00 UTC

  • Dear God. Thank you for smart, strong, stubborn, women. Otherwise life would jus

    Dear God. Thank you for smart, strong, stubborn, women. Otherwise life would just not be all that interesting. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 10:26:00 UTC

  • PROPERTY EVOLVED AS A MEANS OF SUPPRESSING FREE RIDING FIRST. (worth repeating)

    PROPERTY EVOLVED AS A MEANS OF SUPPRESSING FREE RIDING FIRST.

    (worth repeating)

    Well, I think the scarcity-as-primary cause of the evolution of property is probably false, and should be replaced by the prohibition on free riding:

    (a) Property evolved for preventing free riding during cooperation (along with mating – we dont’ know which was first – cooperation or pairing off, but it looks like cooperation was first.)

    (b) Language evolved to control mating (pairing off conditional monogamy – mates as property)

    (c) Property matured to facilitate the retention of goods and tools.

    (d) Property matured to facilitate capture of livestock.

    (e) Property matured to facilitate inheritance in families

    (f) Property matured to facilitate the division of labor.

    (g) Property evolved as a means of forming cooperative networks and positive expression of legal rules.

    As far as I can tell, it is the prevention of free riding needed to maintain incentives to produce that was the source of the evolution of property.

    As far as I can tell, it is probably more accurate to say that scarcity forced retention of redistribution within family and tribe, it did not cause the evolution of property.

    The hard problem that only Northern Europeans have solved, is to suppress redistribution in the tribe and family.

    I don’t think this is a meaningful revision of libertarian theory. It’s a correction. But the order of development doesn’t change the importance of property rights for the purpose of incentives, calculation, and dispute resolution.

    But it does reinforce my argument that the purpose of property is the prevention of free riding necessary for cooperation. So that property evolved a positive expression of the negative prohibition. Not as a good in itself in response to scarcity.

    In fact, I am pretty confident that the scarcity argument is a CROSS-GROUP problem not an in-group problem. (Again, this is why ghetto ethics were a failure – wrong problem. In group evolved prior to out-group.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 09:58:00 UTC

  • OPERATIONALISM UNDER PROPERTARIANISM RENDERS POSTMODERNIST, CRITIQUE, AND KANTIA

    OPERATIONALISM UNDER PROPERTARIANISM RENDERS POSTMODERNIST, CRITIQUE, AND KANTIAN ARGUMENTS IMPOSSIBLE.

    LAUNDERING: Laundering actions and individuals via aggregation into symbols, objects and entities

    LOADING: Loading with emotional or moral sentiments

    FRAMING: Framing by selection of causes and properties

    OVERLOADING: Overloading by production of a multitude of

    CRITIQUE: Using all of the above to defend a straw man by attacking with overloading, framing, loading and laundering. An elaborate means of distraction from a hidden agenda.

    POSTMODERNISM: an attempt to conflate fact and value, such that value distorts fact.

    KANTIAN: an attempt to justify moral authority independent of experience.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 09:49:00 UTC