Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • PRAXEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION I don’t think philosophical pro

    PRAXEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION

    I don’t think philosophical problems are all that difficult. Any philosophical problem that is terribly difficult, is only difficult if you’re trying to justify a falsehood. 🙂 Praxeological analysis makes it VERY hard to justify a falsehood. As such, if you can’t describe something as human action, either you don’t understand it, or you’re trying to justify a falsehood. Most falsehoods are just attempts at theft by some sort of justification or deception. Otherwise we wouldn’t bother.

    Occam’s razor and all that… 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 08:50:00 UTC

  • FUZZY LANGUAGE: ‘RIGHTS’ (Contrary to Searle’s nonsense. More in line with Benth

    FUZZY LANGUAGE: ‘RIGHTS’

    (Contrary to Searle’s nonsense. More in line with Bentham’s nonsense. Minor improvement to Hoppe. )

    You DEMAND contractual RIGHTS in EXCHANGE for entering into a CONTRACT with others for some specific terms – and in the libertarian bias we demand absolute private property rights, and the right of first possession by transformation and homesteading.

    Other people agree to NONE, SOME or ALL of those demands, in exchange for their specific terms. Non-aggressing on some terms, and preserving the opportunity to aggress on others.

    One cannot ‘have rights’ without the presence of others to grant them in exchange.

    i ) One can suggest the world will be better for all if we grant each other certain rights.

    ii ) One can ‘demand rights’ in order for cooperation instead of conflict.

    iii ) One can ‘need and require necessary’ rights from others in order to survive.

    But without the consent of others, one cannot ‘have or possess’ them.

    The majority of the world cultures and subcultures evolved an allocation of each’s portfolio of property rights between the private and the commons on one axis, and between a) normative (habits, manners, ethics and morals), b) real (land, built capital, portable property, and c) artificial (intellectual property, limited monopoly privileges) on the other axis.

    Those DEMANDS do you very little good without the ability to enforce your demands. In the case of private property, the coalition of statists is powerful enough to deny you demands, and force you to adhere to THEIR definition of property rights.

    Might doesn’t make best.

    Might doesn’t make right.

    Might makes whatever property rights you have.

    So you must possess the might to institute the property rights you desire.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 08:32:00 UTC

  • NOTES ON THE LIBERTARIAN REFORMATION 1) Our generation’s challenge is not social

    NOTES ON THE LIBERTARIAN REFORMATION

    1) Our generation’s challenge is not socialism, it’s the state religion of anti-scientific, contra-rational postmodernism. (The religion of progressivism.) The dogma, literature, and ideological bias of the libertarian movement is a generation behind.

    2) Government per se, is not a ‘bad’. What’s ‘bad’ are the corporeal state, monopoly, bureaucracy, majority rule, and legislative law. When we fail to make this distinction we are in fact, ‘wrong’. A government that consists of a monopolistically articulated set of property rights and the terms of dispute resolution, operating under the common law, and a group of people whose purpose is to facilitate investments in the commons by voluntary contract, but who cannot make legislative law, is in fact, a government. It may not be necessary government among people with homogenous preferences and beliefs. But it is somewhere between necessary and beneficial government for people with heterogeneous preferences and beliefs. It is however, not a bad government.

    3) Property is unnatural to man. Tribal human settlement is matrilineal, egalitarian, malthusian and poor. Mate selection is determined by sexual favors within the group, and raiding, capturing and killing for women outside the group whenever there was a shortage of women.

    4) Property rights and paternalism were an innovation made possible by the domestication of animals and the ability of males to accumulate wealth outside of the matrilineal order. Property rather than sexual favors was such an advantage that it inverted the relationship between the sexes and determined mate selection. (The feminists are correct.)

    5) Property rights were created by a minority who granted equality of property rights to one another in exchange for service in warfare. The source of property rights is the organized application of violence to create those property rights. Because property rights are the desire of the minority. However, property rights created such an increase in prosperity and consumption that others sought to join the ranks of property owners.

    6) The redistributive state that was voted into power by women, has reversed the innovation of private property and in concert with feminists, is eroding the nuclear family, and the male ability to collect property. The institutions of marriage, nuclear family, and private property cannot survive when a democratic majority can deprive men of private property rights, and their ability to control mating and reproduction.

    7 ) Rothbardian Libertarian ethics are ‘insufficient’. The high trust society forbids involuntary transfers by externality and asymmetry of information, and enforces this demand with a requirement for warranty. The ethics of the high trust society forbid all involuntary transfers except through competition in the market.

    8 ) Rothbardian ethics are wrong (and bad): The market incentives alone are not high enough to overcome corruption, and create the high trust society without additional moral prohibitions: norms are a commons. They are property. Conservatives are right.

    9 ) Libertarians do not exist in sufficient numbers. And it is not possible to enfranchise the conservatives (classical liberals) with Rothbardian ‘ghetto’ ethics. Without conservatives, who have a broader set of moral biases, the libertarian bias is morally objectionable to too large a population, and libertarians are too small in number to accumulate and hold the power necessary to determine property rights in a geography. It’s important to understand that rothbardian ethics are ‘wrong’ because they are insufficient.

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

  • THE INCENTIVES OF SCIENTISTS Economics would argue that people follow incentives

    THE INCENTIVES OF SCIENTISTS

    Economics would argue that people follow incentives.

    The incentives of scientists are to prosecute your idea regardless of its merit.

    Science does not progress because scientists are self aware, or because they employ rational criticism and judgement. (Although I think this criticism applies to the 80% at the bottom more so than the 20% at the top.)

    Science advances because either another’s career advance is obtained by discrediting an existing idea, or because its author dies and can no longer defend it from criticism.

    For these reasons, “understanding” is overrated unless incentives exist to enforce that understanding.

    Since it is not in anyones interest to be critically rational it is very hard to imagine they will be.

    Philosophers are primarily cops, critics and articulators of what we do but do not understand – and rarely inventors. And we function as critics of scientists, since it is in our interests to obtain status by criticizing scientists.

    But it is patently irrational to expect scientists alone to demontrate behaviors counter to their incentives.

    And we are supposed to be the rational ones after all.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 07:28:00 UTC

  • DOMINANCE IN THE FACE OF IGNORANCE – REASON IS DISCOUNTED BY TIME 1) Dominance i

    DOMINANCE IN THE FACE OF IGNORANCE – REASON IS DISCOUNTED BY TIME

    1) Dominance is both useful and necessary in the face of ignorance. Nurture is extremely slow and expensive. A parent is not sacrificing when nurturing as he or she is perpetuating his or her genes. Everyone else pays a cost. They are sacrificing something else that they could do in order to nurture. So they are selective with their investments. And most of us make small bets on many different options in the hope that we find a few investments worth making.

    2) It is helpful to possess 6 or 7 points of IQ difference in communication (1/2 standard deviation). It is valuable to possess as much as 15 points, in order to translate complex concepts into digestible form (one standard deviation). But at 30 points (two standard deviations) we are effectively different species, and communication begins to be impossible on anything other than sensory grounds. Compassion is possible across the gulf, but argument is not.

    3) Since demonstrated intelligence consists of four basic properties 1) g, (an aggregate), 2) short term memory, 3) general knowledge, and 4) biases and wants, and because general knowledge conveys patterns that IQ alone could not identify on its own, accumulating vast knowledge will compensate considerably for (g) – (the Flynn effect of scientific knowledge for example.) The only way to accumulate this knowledge given our pervasive ignorance is through skeptical empiricism (science), or what this group refers to as critical rationalism (which is a weak term compared to skeptical empiricism, and why Taleb is an improvement on, via expansion, Popper and Kuhn.)

    4) It is a work of ‘fraud’ to claim that it is a moral obligation for anyone to invest time in anyone else without compensation in exchange. It’s just a another form of theft. Only with exchange do we know we have not wasted our time and the world’s resources. And only with voluntary exchange do we know that no one is stealing from another. Only with exchange do we know we are not contributing to ill manners. In debate we exchange our efforts in the hope that we will learn, the same way boxers practice fighting in the ring, fencers on the pisté, or orators on the stage. And that is compensation enough – it is a cheap price of entry for the richest competition man has yet made outside of war.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 07:24:00 UTC

  • THE LONG TERM IMPACT OF DYSGENIC REPRODUCTION ON ECONOMICS AND NORMS UNDER DEMOC

    THE LONG TERM IMPACT OF DYSGENIC REPRODUCTION ON ECONOMICS AND NORMS UNDER DEMOCRACY

    (Work in progress.)

    If under manorialism, the breeding rate of the underclass is suppressed while the middle class increases, and under consumer capitalism, and redistributive socialism, the middle class suppresses its reproduction while the lower class increases its reproduction, in the aggregate we should see declines in middle class traits and increases in lower class traits.

    The social classes under consumer capitalism sort even more effectively than under agrarianism due to the flexibility of labor and movement.

    The social class distribution is highly correlated.with IQ. The beneficial distribution of british IQ for example is limited to the british middle class and there is very little rotation in and out of that class. Given that intelligence regresses toward the mean, in-class reproduction must be in place.

    While the flynn effect appears to produce a demonstrated improvement in test taking because of the universal environmental presence of scientific knowledge, it also appears that northern europeans should have been on par with askenazim only 150 years ago, but due to a return to unconstrained breeding, and highly constrained breeding in the middle and upper middle classes under consumer capitalism and social democracy, that we are in fact, in the aggregate, six or so points “dumber”. Which is approaching one half of a standard deviation in intelligence: 7.5 points. This fact correlates with the reproductive rates of the classes. Which is why Flynn has been investigating it and writing about it.

    Now the reasons that I care are:

    1) Corruption increases rapidly aggregate IQ declines. So does mysticism.

    2) It appears that it requires an IQ of about 105 to articulate ideas or repair a machine.

    3) Any norms in any society are dependent upon the distribution of ability to adopt them. Rationalism cannot exist or function as a norm if there are insufficient numbers of people capable of rationalism.

    4) Under the “Pareto rule if thumb”, 1% of people create all the marginal value and 19% propagate that idea, and that 20% controls 80% of the property and resources in the society. As such the distribution of ability of that group must stay above 105 in order to maintain the high trust society, which is the source of the western economic advantage in risk taking.

    5) it appears that the benefit of industrialization has been equilibrated – been fully utilized. It appears that vast numbers if people mist subsist on service jobs. It appears that while aggregate human intelligence was wasted on the farm and enabled by industrialization, that the 105, and perhaps 110 levels are downward limits to calculative ability, and all jobs in society of value require calculation “that which we cannot sense without measurements and formulae as a proxy”.

    6) People demonstrate that they overwhelmingly prefer to reproduce, associate and work in homogenous groups by race, class and culture – except at the margins. Further, these groups maintain their own identities, mythologies and signaling economies, such that in group status signals are discounted cost in relation to out-group status signals. And the vote that way. As competing blocks seeking status. (Rents). Furthermore the distribution if ability in these groups means that reproductive rates under consumer capitalism, social status, economic productivity, and opportunity will increase in friction.

    7) for these reasons, diversity decreases trust and increases the scope of the state under democracy. (Unlike under parliamentary nationalist monarchy. )

    In other words we aren’t insulated by our sentience from evolutionary biology. And the net result is indeed “dysgenic”, conflict inducing, and a threat to the goal of a positive egalitarian society.

    The only evidence we have suggests that small homogenous states in grat variety will allow us to produce through cultural competition what political cooperation will actually prevent.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 07:21:00 UTC

  • INCREASE IN FEMALE INFIDELITY? 😉

    http://theweek.com/article/index/246421/do-better-jobs-lead-more-wives-to-cheat40% INCREASE IN FEMALE INFIDELITY?

    😉

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-07 15:40:00 UTC

  • THEY DONT MAKE THEM LIKE THEY USED TO “A 98-year-old beggar, a grandfather from

    THEY DONT MAKE THEM LIKE THEY USED TO

    “A 98-year-old beggar, a grandfather from the Bulgarian village of Dobri Bail, shown here wearing homespun clothes and old leather shoes, is often found standing at the Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky in Sofia. Every day he gets up early and runs 10 kilometers from his village to the capital of Bail. In 2010, during the filming of a documentary about the cathedral, a Bulgarian TV journalist made shocking discovery in the archives of the Church – the most generous private donation that the Cathedral had ever received – was 40,000 euros from an old beggar – the grandfather from Dobri Bali.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-07 14:08:00 UTC

  • WORLD EVENTS ARE LUMPY. Planning is so much easier when we think the universe is

    WORLD EVENTS ARE LUMPY.

    Planning is so much easier when we think the universe is even and predictable. But we tend to confuse our desire for and search for regularity, with the fact that the universe, and the human actions within that universe, are unpredictable, lumpy and our lives fragile.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-07 11:04:00 UTC

  • LIBERTARIANISM: SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL. 1) “Do not confuse absence of volatility wit

    LIBERTARIANISM: SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL.

    1) “Do not confuse absence of volatility with absence of risk.”

    2) “Avoid optimization; learn to love redundancy. … Redundancy (in terms of having savings and cash under the mattress) is the opposite of debt. … Overspecialization also is not a great idea.”

    3) “What is fragile should break early, while it’s still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail.” …. “Compensate complexity with simplicity.”

    4) “No socialization of losses and privatization of gains”…..”No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.”

    5) “[Build] an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller firms, a richer ecology, no speculative leverage — a world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks, and in which companies are born and die every day without making the news.”

    LIBERTARIANISM IS LOVE OF THE SMALL: ITS JUST MATH.

    (All quotes from Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-07 11:02:00 UTC