Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • SETS AND NONSENSE : THE PERCEPTION OF INFINITE SEMANTICALLY MEANINGFUL SETS IS A

    SETS AND NONSENSE : THE PERCEPTION OF INFINITE SEMANTICALLY MEANINGFUL SETS IS A COGNITIVE BIAS

    I have been working with computers for a long time.

    Computers are very good with sets of things and teaching you how to work with them. Relational databases are even better at teaching you the algebra of sets than programming languages. Compilers are very good at teaching you about semantics.

    And trying to write games that have some semblance of intelligence not immediately deducible as trivial dumb patterns. Or writing software that can produce reasonably articulate legal arguments from limited data. Or trying to represent semantic clouds of related terms teaches you something very basic about language:

    That there are actually very few sentences that are not nonsense compared to the number of sentences that are sensible.

    If one accumulates knowledge from many different disciplines, it becomes rapidly apparent that the number of concepts shared by these domains is limited and that the perception of vast knowledge is an illusory artifact of disciplinary methodological loading – most of which is erroneous and caused by ignorance of these greater patterns, or various forms of social and normative loading, or the natural brevity that emerges in any population over time. Worse, no small part of current language consists of loading meant to signal social position or create priestly mysticism to preserve status cues.

    One of our cognitive biases is to assume when we discover something new,

    Mystical statements were not false if they achieved the purpose of getting non-kin to treat each other as kin.

    They may have been allegorical but they were not false. They produced the desired outcome of uniting disunited people by getting them to extend kin-trust to non-kin.

    The externality produced by that allegory was pretty dangerous it turned out. But until trade became pervasive, the need to extend trust in order to trade and operate a division of labor was insufficient to produce the level of trust that religion did.

    We did not become enlightened because we wanted to, but because trade required that we did. And morality could be enforced by trade and credit rather than religion which threatens ostracization and death, and law which threatens punishment. Instead the ability to consume, compete for status and mates or feel the pressure of degrading status made very granular control of moral behavior possible – for nearly everyone, at very low cost, and producing a virtuous cycle of declining prices.

    While we might create very vast and highly loaded languages, the fact of the matter, is that all language is allegory to experience. There is little or nothing that cannot be expressed with a thousand words. The primary challenge is that complexity using that limited vocabulary overwhelms short term memory. So loading using complex words. Like symbols or measurements, allows us to stuff ideas into short term memory and create faster “meaning” in each other’s minds, in the three second window of our processing cycle for those who are already familiar with the topic.

    In this sense, while we use complex words with heavy loading for brevity and status signaling, the concepts that we can convey require analogy to experience, and analogy to experience requires few words.

    Where am I going with this?

    The number if meaningful sentences is fairly small. The number if meaningful narratives has been known to be small for some time.

    The need to restate narratives in the current context is high.

    But the number of theories active at any time is quite small. With the illusion of large numbers a cognitive bias, and most theories merely justifications for preferences masquerading as theories.

    There just aren’t that many theories. And thats in no small part because we are very good at killing theories.

    We are super predators after all.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-04 11:02:00 UTC

  • LIBERTY IS LIKE SEX. IT’S ALWAYS GOOD. SOME SEX IS BETTER THAN OTHER SEX, BUT IF

    LIBERTY IS LIKE SEX. IT’S ALWAYS GOOD. SOME SEX IS BETTER THAN OTHER SEX, BUT IF ITS SEX IT’S GOOD. SAME GOES FOR LIBERTY.

    (cross posted)

    Hoppe’s argument is only accessible to X% of people. And that X% is very small. Molyneux’s argument is accessible to far more. Rand’s even more because its in novel form. Not everyone can climb all the way to ratio-scientific argument. And not everyone needs to. I’d argue that Molyneux tried and can’t. his book is … well, terrible. I can also argue as others have that there are plenty of holes in Hoppe’s criticism of others, if not holes in the brilliant solution he gave us. So anyone who advances liberty is good enough for me. If someone wants to argue that some statement is true or false then that’s a question for us to answer. And I’ll take all comers. And I’m pretty sure that there aren’t’ any I can’t defeat. But that’s different from saying that any argument in favor of liberty that also advances liberty (it isn’t so flawed that it produces negative results) is ‘good’.

    There are arguments against liberty. Arguments for liberty that cause people to reject liberty. Arguments for liberty that are weak or flawed that cause people to desire liberty. Arguments that are strong that cause people to desire liberty.

    And the natural differences in our intelligence and means of understanding require a diversity of arguments in favor of libertarianism, whether they are sentimental, analogical, moral, historical, empirical, and ratio-scientific. WIth the first item in that list requiring nothing but passion, and the last requiring mastery of multiple domains.

    Liberty is like sex. It’s always good. Some sex is better than other sex. But if its sex it’s good. Same goes for liberty.

    Voluntary exchange applying to sex as well. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-04 07:16:00 UTC

  • IDENTITY: FROM ENGLISH TO BRITISH TO AMERICAN TO DISASPORIC – TO EXTINCT. (Re-Po

    http://www.propertarianism.com/2012/01/13/changes-in-identity/CHANGING IDENTITY: FROM ENGLISH TO BRITISH TO AMERICAN TO DISASPORIC – TO EXTINCT.

    (Re-Post)

    I made an unfortunate choice of terms when I started working on this theme. The idea I was trying to communicate was that the corporeal states that we have made with our extended family – our ‘race’ of the English people, have become the instrument of our extermination as a nation, a culture, a tradition, a people, a collection of tribes, and an extended family.

    We are subjects of various corporations. We are property. Farm animals. But we are no longer a people in the sense that we have the fortress of a nation state that we use to advance the interests of our extended family.

    Instead we are prisoners of the monstrous empires our family created. Those empires have become, as all empires must, corporations – organizations of financial rather than genetic interest. And that set of corporations is slowly forcing our extinction as a people in order to perpetuate the interests of the employees of the corporation itself.

    At the time I used the term ‘englishman’, the loading of which I didn’t really understand. I meant that I wanted to return to my rights as an Englishman, in the ancient sense of the word. Meaning: personal sovereignty: meaning property rights to myself and my possessions.

    And by sovereignty, I mean that I don’t want to be a farm animal. I am willing to sacrifice for my family. For my extended family. For my tribe. For my people. For my culture. That is always in my interest.

    But I am not wiling to be farmed for the benefit of a corporation at the expense of my genetic and cultural heritage.

    This is nothing more than killing off a herd to feed another herd.

    Nothing more.

    The state is the instrument of our extermination. What is the difference between a Death Camp and the American or British Governments except the time frame that they use to cause our extinction?

    There isn’t any.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-04 05:53:00 UTC

  • LAW DEGREE STILL PAYS – EVEN IF IT ISN”T WHAT IT WAS, ITS STILL WORTH IT

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2250585A LAW DEGREE STILL PAYS – EVEN IF IT ISN”T WHAT IT WAS, ITS STILL WORTH IT

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-04 05:29:00 UTC

  • DOES AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN DO TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AND REMAIN FEMININE (IN ANY OC

    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2013/07/on-being-an-attractive-woman-and-being-taken-seriously-in-philosophy.htmlWHAT DOES AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN DO TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AND REMAIN FEMININE (IN ANY OCCUPATION) WITHOUT DRESSING ‘DOWN’ or DOWDY?

    Other commenters left very strange advice, to what common people on the street would consider a very strange question. 🙂

    Confusing separate issues:

    1) The rather strange idea that you’re different from any other woman. The fact is, you’re MORE DESIRABLE so you’re going to attract more attention, and more ENTHUSIASTIC attention.

    2) Femininity is attractive to males and that won’t stop – if it does, extinction is a possible consequence. 🙂

    3) The rather strange idea that you want to SIGNAL femininity to yourself, or to others, but not produce an equivalent RESPONSE.

    4) The rather strange idea that the problem is something in society rather than in your understanding and behavior – a strangeness that is pretty common in the feminist movement.

    5) What do you SIGNAL to males, in ADDITION to your physical attraction, femininity, and intelligence? Does that include ACCESSIBILITY? AVAILABILITY?

    6) How do all the other capable and beautiful and feminine women in the world handle this issue? Do they complain about the fact that if they SIGNAL desirability that they produce the appropriate ACTION in the population?

    As an practitioner of economic philosophy, incentives are what we deal with (in addition to prices.) And any micro-economist or behavioral economist would say this: you want X,Y,and Z benefits without paying A,B,and C, costs. In your case, it’s likely that you want to attract attention, including the heightened self image that comes from attracting attention, but you don’t want to pay the cost of rejecting the unwanted attention. (In the extreme interpretation, ethically, this means that you’re a thief, or fraud, so to speak. 🙂

    And it isn’t necessary (and it’s probably counter-productive) to ask this question of successful women in business (there are plenty). Or politics (the entertainment industry for unattractive people.) Instead, there are ready research subjects everywhere. If you were to go to high end restaurants and clubs in any major city, on the west coast, but more so in Europe, and certainly in eastern Europe, and ask the attractive female waitresses and bartenders how they deal with SIGNALING femininity, desirability, without signaling accessibility or availability, they’ll tell you – the same craft that women have used since the dawn of time. It’s how you interact with others. You do not need to dress dowdy. You might consider wearing a rock of an engagement ring – fake stone included. You do have to learn how to live as a human being in a world that is unfortunately peopled by human beings. And the honest thing to do in any social circumstance is not to advertise something then say it’s not for sale – so to speak. Or to wish that the world was not peopled by a pair of genders that have competing reproductive strategies because of asymmetry of costs and desires.

    But then, trying to commit micro thefts – get discounts as we call it in economics – is as natural a human behavior as being attracted to more fit genes. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-04 04:48:00 UTC

  • ON THE SHALLOWNESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT On Maverick Philosopher (blog) Bill

    ON THE SHALLOWNESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT

    On Maverick Philosopher (blog) Bill Vallicella argues that Philosophical problems are deep by listing the common philosophical questions: “What is (the nature of) X? What is knowledge? What is consciousness? What is the self? What is free will? What is causation? What are properties? What is motion? Time? Existence?” And then he goes on to describe how these questions are ‘deep’ and complex.

    However, notice that the are all stated as ‘is’ questions: metaphysical questions made nonsensical by the magical word ‘is’. Yet, if these questions were asked in operational, scientific, language, they would be stated as “when we use the term knowledge, what examples do we refer to, and what do they have in common?” Or “When we use the term ‘time’, what experience do we refer to?” Or “given that we experience something we call the passage of time, what causes us to possess this experience.”

    Nothing ‘is’. We experience things that we manufacture independent of the physical world. We experience things directly. We experience things through the narrative of others – in many forms. We experience things through instrumentation and measurement. Experiences are changes in state of physical sensations, and of the physical sensation of changes in memory.

    Properties are patterns that increase or decrease inclusion in a concept. A concept is a set of related patterns. EAch of which is a set of related patterns – all of which is represented by sets of physical neural relations. And all of which are created through one of the experiences above. And as such our concepts are limited to those things which we can reduce to some complex set of experiences.

    All of the phenomenon Vallicella lists are trivial concepts before science and impossible concepts before philosophy, because the instrumentation available to the physical sciences is greater than our ability to perceive our inner workings without science.

    The interesting question of consciousness, (Having had many episodes of losing consciousness and regaining it myself) is that it slowly emerges from complex layers of stimuli. But what is obvious to the person experiencing it, is that the part we call ‘me’ seems to coalesce, but once it does, and we are ‘aware’ of the passage of internal time, it ‘feels’ consistent with ‘the experience of being me’ prior to the availability of either external sensations, or memories. The ‘me’ personality feels emotionally consistent regardless of state. (At least in me it does. And that ‘me’ sense has been the same since childhood.) Then as memory starts to come back, we become the complex creatures that we are, because of our memories. Until we are able to process information around us in physical reality.

    This tells us most of what is useful. (And it probably explains why psychedelic drugs appear to help people with psychological disorders obtained from behavior (experiences), but not disorders obtained from physical defects (say, schizophrenia). That’s because the ‘i’ can be separated from the experience of a traumatic memory, long enough to objectively correct the emotional relationships caused by the memory (or memories).

    That diversion aside, the problem plaguing philosophy is the same one that has plagued it since Kant: the desire to find something mystical there, that does not exist, most of the time, by the artful use of language to construct paradoxical puzzles that are computationally difficult for humans to solve because they are framed as problems with a solution, but in fact are nothing more than arbitrary artifacts of imprecise language that remains from our mystical past – largely religious dialog.

    The cure for most philosophical puzzles is the use of operational language.

    Like most puzzles, philosophy’s metaphysical questions consist largely of parlor games created by very bright people who may or may not have been aware of what it was that they were doing. Infinite sets, and all that derives from them included.

    Philosophy is, at least today, useful in understanding the evolution of human thought – primarily so that we do not repeat past errors – and for assisting us in interpreting the findings of the physical and economic sciences.

    That’s it. Science and Economics Won.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-03 17:07:00 UTC

  • AND PROPERTY ARE SYNONYMS – LOVE IS AN INCENTIVE, NOT A NECESSARY REQUIREMENT –

    http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7337MARRIAGE AND PROPERTY ARE SYNONYMS – LOVE IS AN INCENTIVE, NOT A NECESSARY REQUIREMENT – ROMANTIC NOTIONS TO THE CONTRARY

    The are only two things that distinguish marriage from any other arbitrary relationship for the purpose of securing affection, sex, companionship, love, care-taking, cost-reduction-of-cohabitatin, and a division of labor in child rearing.

    1) PROPERTY: When you marry, you form a corporation with shared assets, and a two person board of directors, from which the state must divide assets upon the disbanding of the corporation. Prior to the institution of private property, you could just marry and un-marry by saying so in public. In fact, the western Celts practiced serial marriage this way until the 19th century, and the European jews until the middle ages. In most primitives societies, women were literally property, but in Europe the church granted women property rights back in the 1200’s. So the need to resolve property disputes increased as the complexity and amount of property increased, and the productivity of individuals, and therefore their ability to obtain and use property increased.

    2) KINSHIP: We have evolved laws to avoid conflict by stating that the other shareholder has certain powers (of attorney) to act as Voluntary Kin in periods of duress, and it that takes precedence over other involuntary Kinship ties: blood relatives. In this sense when we marry we sell ourselves to the corporation as an asset.

    THE STATE AS MONOPOLY

    The state is the arbiter of property disputes – that’s what a state is: a territorial monopoly on the use of violence; and in particular for the use of violence in the resolution of disputes. The moment that you enter into a marriage that produces common property, you force the state into your marriage because only the state can resolve conflicts over property.

    Anyone can form a corporation. A ship captain, a priest, or certain state officials. The formation’s not a state matter. It’s just an exchange like any other exchange. But the state must break it. And if the state must break it then it must of necessity develop criteria for doing so in order to apply a decision that meets the standard of consistent “law” rather than arbitrary judicial decision.

    However, there is no reason that the state must be the arbiter or such disputes. There is no reason churches cannot perform divorces, in which the assets divisions have the force of law. Unfortunately this wold produce two canons of law, and leave the state responsible for resolving appeals, so it would simply result in the state centralizing decision making power again.

    THE OPTION TO MAINTAIN PRIVATE PROPERTY

    However, an easier solution is that if when we marry we do NOT create a corporation and place ourselves and all our assets into it, but instead, maintain each individual’s property separately, and specifically state ownership percentages on anything else that is split now or future, then the only legal issue is the power of attorney to act as one another in financial matters, and to act as primary kin in the event one is incapacitated.

    HISTORY

    The civic and political problem is only that our laws developed as monopolies under control of the state – and even then, largely because the church did not perform divorces and the state wished to intercede in the civil space in order to advance the interests of the feminist political movement on the one hand, and react to the reality that women were becoming active in the work force, earning income, and acquiring real property in sufficient numbers that they required legal peerage to protect them from abuse by rent-seeking males.

    So there is no reason that we must have a monopoly of marriage terms. And there is only one reason that the state should be involved in dissolutions: common property. That is, property of the corporation called the marriage being distributed to various parties in the event of a disbandment of the corporation.

    CRITERIA FOR THREE TYPES OF MARRIAGE

    Further, there is no reason marriages cannot consist of multiple forms, regardless of who makes them.

    1) Corporate Property and Power of Kin

    2) Several property and Power of Kin

    3) Corporate Property without power of kin

    Several Property without power of kin is the normal state of human beings. So that’s the definition of not being married. But one can be in a state of marriage as long as one has either the power of kin (genetic assets) or power of common property (material assets).

    ITS ALL ABOUT PROPERTY

    Love and romance have nothing to do with marriage. You may get married BECAUSE of love and romance and all the other factors. But marriage is a change in control of property – including the self – by authorizing non-kin to act as Kin, and to either pool property or not.

    That it is hard to see the binding power of a marriage having any meaning whatsoever without the pooling of assets is enough of a logical constraint that we can define marriage as a property institution, and nothing more.

    That fact may be painful to admit to ourselves. But marriage is a contract over of property rights, with one of the assets being each other. It is, and always will be. ‘Cause nothing else makes much sense. ‘Cause nothing else enforces fidelity like the loss property.

    Humbling. I know.

    ->Comment in response to this post at Talking Philosophy:

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-03 05:07:00 UTC

  • IF PROACTIVE VIOLENCE IS THE SOURCE, CAUSE, AND PERPETUATION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS

    IF PROACTIVE VIOLENCE IS THE SOURCE, CAUSE, AND PERPETUATION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS

    Then what does that say about violence?

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 17:22:00 UTC

  • THE SPECTRA OF MORAL PERSUASIONS: OBSERVATIONAL vs EXPERIENTIAL (sketch) Compare

    THE SPECTRA OF MORAL PERSUASIONS: OBSERVATIONAL vs EXPERIENTIAL

    (sketch)

    Compare the rational (observational) deception spectrum:

    :>IGNORANCE->AWARENESS->FACTS->SYMPATHY(observational)->CONSEQUENTIALIST CALCULATION(outcomes)->FRAUD{…}->PROPAGANDA->DOCTRINE->(VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive for inclusion in opportunity)->(INVOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive against exclusion from opportunity])->(ORGANIZATIONAL CONQUEST)>|:

    with the emotional (experiential) deception spectrum:

    :|>IGNORANCE->AWARENESS->NARRATIVE->SYMPATHY(experiential)->EMPATHY->LOADING->FRAMING->PROPAGANDA->DOCTRINE->(VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive for inclusion in opportunity)->(INVOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive against exclusion from opportunity])->(ORGANIZATIONAL CONQUEST)>|:

    And we get:

    >IGNORANCE->AWARENESS->…

    followed by the choice between:

    Rational Deception: …FACTS->SYMPATHY(observational)->CONSEQUENTIALIST CALCULATION(outcomes)->FRAUD{…}->…

    and/or:

    Emotional Deception: …NARRATIVE->SYMPATHY(experiential)->EMPATHY->LOADING->FRAMING->…

    Culminating in:

    ….PROPAGANDA->DOCTRINE->(VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive for inclusion in opportunity)->(INVOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive against exclusion from opportunity])->(ORGANIZATIONAL CONQUEST)>|:

    THOUGHTS

    It’s no wonder we resort to everything other than voluntary, fully informed, warrantied exchange to obtain what we want, whenever possible. There are simply so many options available for us to use to obtain what we want by deception. 🙂

    While it’s possible to persuade (coerce) people using the three means of coercion: argument, violence, and exchange; It’s not really possible to demonstrate that the use of violence is a deceptive means of coercion. Its immoral, certainly, in the sense that it’s involuntary. But it’s not a form of deception.

    Violence is the most honest human expression possible. There is no lack of clarity about it. No room for misinterpretation. No attempt at cost-savings or cooperation. Violence is as honest as you can get. But honesty isn’t in itself a good. It’s only a good in the context of cooperation. Using violence isn’t cooperation. It’s the opposite. It’s abandoning effort at cooperation.

    Propertarianism: Morality reconstructed.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 13:40:00 UTC

  • THERE IS NO REASON THAT VIRTUE, RULE AND CONSEQUENTIALIST ETHICS CAN’T CONTAIN T

    THERE IS NO REASON THAT VIRTUE, RULE AND CONSEQUENTIALIST ETHICS CAN’T CONTAIN THE SAME INFORMATION, AND PRODUCE THE SAME RESULTS

    In fact, that’s probably the only measure of any ethical statement.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 04:07:00 UTC