Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • MORE ON WRITING THEORY : AN ARGUMENT IS A THEORY AND WRITING IT IS A TEST I gues

    MORE ON WRITING THEORY : AN ARGUMENT IS A THEORY AND WRITING IT IS A TEST

    I guess, I should put it this way: I don’t assume I know anything. Anything at all. I just construct arguments to see how well I can make them. They’re like recipes. I bake a hundred variations of the cake. Maybe one of them rises enough to be worthy of frosting. When I run out of ways to write a recipe and the recipe produces a cake all the time, I consider it the best recipe I can make for a cake.

    1) Write to learn what you do not know. (observe and record)

    2) Write to test what you know. (conduct experiments)

    3) Write what you know you know. (articulate hypothesis)

    4) Publish what you have written (subject it to testing by peer review)

    That’s about it. That’s science. I don’t assume I know anything except that which is false. And libraries are largely populated by that which is false. The problem is determining what’s left over that still might be true. 🙂

    If each book held one idea, I’m pretty sure that a library of 1500 books (per both Murray and Adler) would accomplish the task.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-25 11:51:00 UTC

  • A MAN’S WORK IS NEVER DONE God likes to torture me. That’s what it is. I’ve had

    A MAN’S WORK IS NEVER DONE

    God likes to torture me. That’s what it is.

    I’ve had a few weeks, while we move from one technology framework to another, to work on the book a bit (and spam my friends on FB with my progress).

    And of course, just as I get very close to being able to write one of the most difficult chapters, I get a crisis in business that steals my attention.

    Next week we’ll estimate the last scope of work before we’re feature complete – about four months worth we think. And after that’s done, I’ll be drafted into involuntary programming (they only give me the back-end stuff you know – accounting and that kind of thing.) And so my time will be constrained again for a while.

    I want to be done by September.

    And it looks tough at this point.

    And that frustrates the heck out of me.

    A man’s work is never done (either).

    🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-25 11:46:00 UTC

  • SARCASTIC INVITATION TO COMMENT “Please use the comments to demonstrate your own

    SARCASTIC INVITATION TO COMMENT

    “Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.”

    Where do people come up with this? 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-25 07:01:00 UTC

  • REMEDIAL ENGLISH IN COLLEGE “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and G

    REMEDIAL ENGLISH IN COLLEGE

    “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.” – Joe Sobran

    DATA

    % of population with 4 year degree :

    in 1910: 2.7%

    in 2010: 31%

    Every 15 points is one standard deviation in IQ.

    You need 115 points to COMPREHEND college material.

    That means 15% of the population can actually obtain an education, and that all other eduction is remedial, dumbed down to the non empirical, or wasted, and not in fact college education level material.

    If we educate 50% of the population with some level of college, that means that we are wasting education on 35% of the population who should, as in the GERMAN MODEL GET APPRENTICESHIPS where they can learn by observation and imitation rather than abstraction and inference. Even at this, it appears, that all universities do is sort us by IQ, and improve departmental selection of slave labor for graduate programs – and we learn very little there.

    IQ IS NOT ENVIRONMENTAL, ITS GENETIC, AND IT’S MEANINGFUL IN LIFE. Aside from impulsivity and physical symmetry is the most important genetic attribute, and all that you can teach your kids is good manners, and how to not do anything terribly stupid.

    QUOTE

    “There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college — enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104” – Murray

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-25 07:01:00 UTC

  • The last generation of libertarians have David Gordon. I’m envious. But, we have

    The last generation of libertarians have David Gordon. I’m envious. But, we have Skye Stewart. And that’s a pretty good thing it turns out. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-25 05:13:00 UTC

  • Janet Yellen Selected As New Fed Chair (2013-14): Would Larry Summers Be A Good Choice For The Next Chairman Of The Federal Reserve?

    (This is an ideological question.  And a loaded question. But I will try to do it justice anyway.)

    Summers is a ‘status quo’ economist with personal relationship with both the president and prominent wall street Democrats.  He is unobjectionable to conservatives since he has said impolitic but true things at times that they agree with. The consensus is that he will not put the country at risk or in painfully controversial debate.

    So he is a capable, mainstream, status-quo economist, with personal relationships with important and powerful people that is politically acceptable to the other side.   And, as such, he will not add volatility to the markets or the political sector, and that is probably a good thing for the people making the decision.

    If you were a mainstream economist facing the possibility of the euro shock, and having a deep understanding of the possibly permanent condition of the US economy, then I would suspect that you would argue that the Fed should take independent action to stimulate the economy even further and to encourage congress to spend like crazy.   But Larry Summers won’t do that.

    If you were a partisan left wing economist like you would be torn since you’d rather have the spending. If you were a democratic leader you want to make sure you keep the white house so you probably want someone who doesn’t create trouble.

    This is probably a fairly accurate answer to the question.

    https://www.quora.com/Janet-Yellen-Selected-as-New-Fed-Chair-2013-14-Would-Larry-Summers-be-a-good-choice-for-the-next-Chairman-of-the-Federal-Reserve

  • Who Are The Most Influential Economists Alive?

    INFLUENTIAL TO WHOM?

    • Economists influence each other.
    • Economists influence other academics.
    • Economists influence policy makers.
    • Economists influence members of the financial system
    • Economists influence business and industry leaders
    • Economists influence the interested public.

    The group of economists who influence each group varies considerably.  In fact those who influence each other are very different from those who influence policy and society. 

    Unfortunately, the economists who write for newspapers are the most influential outside of academia.  Within academia, influence is largely determined by citations, as someone else in this thread has stated.

    THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE
    Which economists are the most influential?
    Contains opinions by economists themselves.

    https://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-most-influential-economists-alive

  • What Does It Feel Like To Be Intelligent Enough To Understand How Dumb One Often Is?

    Well, it makes you feel like you’re profoundly stupid actually. And to feel horrified about how much more stupid everyone else is.  But to live in AWE of how we manage to work together using habits, norms, traditions, myths, narratives, writing, property rights, money, prices, accounting, contracts, law, measurements, and the scientific method.  That’s actually as close to magic as I think we’ve come.

    As for the problem of competency, the Dunning-Kreuger graph says it all. 

    • While people vary little in their perception of competence or incompetence, about all competence is actually held by only 20-25% of people.

    This statistic correlates with two other interesting rules of thumb:

    • The Pareto observation that 20% of the population owns 80% of the property. The reason being that they’re the only ones competent to make use of it. 
    • The IQ distribution that suggests that the minimum intelligence necessary to do anything meaningful is what we currently consider 106 or so.  That no more than 10% of the population can actually understand a liberal arts education.




    https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-intelligent-enough-to-understand-how-dumb-one-often-is

  • Who Are The Most Influential Economists Alive?

    INFLUENTIAL TO WHOM?

    • Economists influence each other.
    • Economists influence other academics.
    • Economists influence policy makers.
    • Economists influence members of the financial system
    • Economists influence business and industry leaders
    • Economists influence the interested public.

    The group of economists who influence each group varies considerably.  In fact those who influence each other are very different from those who influence policy and society. 

    Unfortunately, the economists who write for newspapers are the most influential outside of academia.  Within academia, influence is largely determined by citations, as someone else in this thread has stated.

    THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE
    Which economists are the most influential?
    Contains opinions by economists themselves.

    https://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-most-influential-economists-alive

  • What Does It Feel Like To Be Intelligent Enough To Understand How Dumb One Often Is?

    Well, it makes you feel like you’re profoundly stupid actually. And to feel horrified about how much more stupid everyone else is.  But to live in AWE of how we manage to work together using habits, norms, traditions, myths, narratives, writing, property rights, money, prices, accounting, contracts, law, measurements, and the scientific method.  That’s actually as close to magic as I think we’ve come.

    As for the problem of competency, the Dunning-Kreuger graph says it all. 

    • While people vary little in their perception of competence or incompetence, about all competence is actually held by only 20-25% of people.

    This statistic correlates with two other interesting rules of thumb:

    • The Pareto observation that 20% of the population owns 80% of the property. The reason being that they’re the only ones competent to make use of it. 
    • The IQ distribution that suggests that the minimum intelligence necessary to do anything meaningful is what we currently consider 106 or so.  That no more than 10% of the population can actually understand a liberal arts education.




    https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-intelligent-enough-to-understand-how-dumb-one-often-is