Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • HOW DO YOU FEEL WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO RUN A COMPANY THAT YOU BUILT, KILL THE COMPA

    HOW DO YOU FEEL WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO RUN A COMPANY THAT YOU BUILT, KILL THE COMPANY YOU BUILT?

    Like you lost a child.

    You know, most of my companies still either exist or were acquired by companies that still exist. I love best the ones that are still independent, even if they’re not very big.

    One of the virtues of leaving that company, was that it became clearer that the problem was the board. If investors divide your board, two things need to be true a) they need to understand your business, b) they need to be able to liquidate your business.

    If (a) or (b) is true, the company will degrade. If both are true it will die.

    </Diary Moment On>

    I love it when people are more knowledgeable than I am. I hate it when people assume that they are smarter than I am. The first is true almost all the time. the second false almost all of the time.

    </Diary Moment Off>

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-17 13:26:00 UTC

  • The other, less vainglorious argument, is that the public views expansion of tax

    The other, less vainglorious argument, is that the public views expansion of taxation and redistribution, whether between cultures in the USA, or between cultures in Europe, as having passed a tipping point, and that the politicians in both countries understand which is more dangerous to them.

    I think your argument is correct but irrelevant. I think my argument is also correct, and the one answer that is relevant.

    If you want democracy, you’re going to get democratic results. This is one of them.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-17 10:43:00 UTC

  • Did Machiavelli Write The Prince As A Satire?

    The Prince is the first example of the scientific study of politics.  While science starts with Aristotle, practical political science starts with Machiavelli.  To the point where, were it not for the illiterate we would probably call political scientists ‘Machiavellians’ – and some historians and philosophers have done so (Burnham for example.)

    Machiavelli wrote when trade was moving from the Mediterranean to the north atlantic. And Italy, which had been the center of trade for at least 1500 years was flung into internecine warfare in the struggles for power. The upheavals this caused were catastrophic and remain with Italy to this day.
     
    Machiavelli gave practical advice to leaders about how to govern by rational rather than ideological grounds. Our concept of morality today originated with the enlightenment. In Machiavelli’s time, morality was more closely connected with the church and the Prince is Machiavelli’s attempt to suggest to political leaders that practical morality in the interest of citizens is superior to ideological morality which may lead to worse consequences for citizens.  In this sense, Machiavelli starts the west’s long rise toward the enlightenment.

    As an administrator in the city service, he had been in charge of the city defenses, and had knowledge of the local government and war. But his work was also based on other works, most importantly Livy, and we usually recommend that people interested in the Machiavelli read the Discourses On Livy as well as The Prince in order to understand Machiavelli’s attempt to compare the past with the present and draw conclusions about what actions we must take.

    https://www.quora.com/Did-Machiavelli-write-The-Prince-as-a-satire

  • What Is The Libertarian Position On The Phoebus Cartel?

    The libertarian position is often misinterpreted.  We do not suggest that cartels will not form. Rather, that cartels are not sustainable.   Our position is that they aren’t sustainable, nor are monopolies, without government support.  If they are sustainable, then they’re probably market-efficient, and therefore not a cartel in practice -although its pretty difficult to imagine such a thing.

    The counter argument is that government interference can end cartels more quickly than the market.  Although this is both questionable and comes at a very high price: Phone service was a lot better Before the breakup of ATT, and the attack on MIcrosoft was an attack on the desire of a company to give us for free what others wanted money for.

    (One concern: I am not confident that the land problem has been solved however – or that it matters. But I think it is arguable that the problem of land cannot be solved without war  on one end of the spectrum and restricted reproduction on the other.)

    As others have noted, the Phoebus cartel did disappear quickly. So I assume that you were simply confused by the difference between whether cartels are possible or whether they’re sustainable.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-libertarian-position-on-the-Phoebus-cartel

  • Plato: What Are The Key Takeaways From The Republic?

    Plato, like Confucius (孔夫子), could not solve the problem of politics and resorted to trying to manufacture virtue in a factory, in order to justify totalitarianism. Western Civilization has suffered from him ever since.

    And if it were not for Aristotle correcting him, we might not have been able to recover from it.

    https://www.quora.com/Plato-What-are-the-key-takeaways-from-The-Republic

  • POWER OF WOMEN ELECTIONS ARE DETERMINED BY SINGLE WOMEN AND SINGLE MOTHERS POLIC

    http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/explaining-the-gender-gap-on-gun-control-20130412THE POWER OF WOMEN

    ELECTIONS ARE DETERMINED BY SINGLE WOMEN AND SINGLE MOTHERS

    POLICY IS DETERMINED BY WOMEN.

    Men are more evenly distributed on political issues.

    Women are more concentrated on political issues.

    Women vote more often and more consistently.

    Women are less likely to vote in favor of the family, but in favor of single women.

    Women are more likely to vote to involuntarily transfer wealth from married men to single women.

    There are no PEOPLE as a homogenous uniform polity. Increasingly it is WOMEN AGAINST MEN and the FAMILY in all walks of life.

    Just how it is.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-13 14:41:00 UTC

  • IS SOCIOLOGY LEFTIST PROPAGANDA MASQUERADING AS SCIENCE? (I love answering quest

    IS SOCIOLOGY LEFTIST PROPAGANDA MASQUERADING AS SCIENCE?

    (I love answering questions like this.)

    Others have described the phenomenon imprecisely. I will have to try do better until someone does better than I:

    1) Sociology relies on surveys which are almost always false, because of natural properties innate in human psychology and cognitive processes. Sociology relies upon experiments, the conditions of which have greater affect on the answers provided than the natural environment in which teh behavior would be demonstrated. So in effect, ANY TEST that you issue will bias towards collectivist results, even if people will ACT upon individual incentives in the actual circumstance. This is pretty obvious really.

    2) Economics instead, relies upon demonstrated actions independent of tests. This is why economics has become the primary social science: we measure demonstrated actions rather than what people state they would do.

    3) Behavioral psychology tries to reduce the problem of sociological testing by proving the indvalidity of social surveys and tests. The only valuable survey information appears to be voting records, which if detailed enough, like economic data, demonstrate what people actually do rather than what they say they will do in any given circumstance.

    4) Sociology seems to attract people who are disproportionately subject to various collectivist biases, and the related cognitive biases. (Google ‘Common economic errors’, ‘Common Cognitive Biases’, “Common Social Cognitive Biases’.) We must remember, that the farther down the IQ scale you are, the more you must rely on the opinions, thoughts, and interpretations of otherse for your information. Every 15 points of IQ is about one standard deviation. That means people cannot really talk to each other easily across 15 points of difference and cannot even grasp each other’s world views or contexts, or implied causal relations at 30 points. THe predominance of science is improving this by repeated exposure

    5) The output of these surveys and experiments produces biased and therefore false information and conclusions, but the people who conduct them have both a subconscious bias, a preferential interest, and a career interest, and a political interest in believing and promoting the false outputs. There is a market for this false information available in public intellectuals, politicians and organizers. This false information is used for political purposes, under the pretense of academic neutrality, and empirically supported truth – none of which are true either.

    The public cannot understand this, the teachers use it because teachers are from the bottom 15% of graduating classes in intelligence, self select for the nurture bias, which is the source of left wing moral specialization, and must try to form homogeneity of interests among pupils with diverse backgrounds, and require justification for their actions. This is conversely why they cannot teach history or art history any longer, because this would require value judgements that distributed status signals to different members of a group that they seek to treat as homogenous family in order to control the room.

    Statistically speaking, in any university department sociologists will have the lowest IQ distribution of any of the major disciplines, economists, mathematicians and medical doctors the highest distribution. (Michigan study).

    For these reasons, the discipline of sociology is in fact, an unscientific tool of propaganda created, maintained, and used by the lowest IQ distribution in academia as a means of attepting to justify the failed communist, socialist, and now postmodernist ideology that seeks to compete against the natural sorting of people opportuntiy, income and political power behind those groups, families, and individuals with demonstrated meritocratic superiority in the market for goods, services, and military defense.

    Harsh words.

    True words.

    The conservatives are correct.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-12 05:27:00 UTC

  • OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the so

    http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.e/ECONOMICS OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION

    QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the south?”

    Well, of course I don’t like to say the impolitic truth and then have to fend off the ignorant. Quora is peopled by the demographic that does not rely on data. We know this because almost all questions there can be answered easily with available data. But since all data of meaning requires knowledge of economics and statistics, and ignorance of economics and statistics is pervasive, this prohibits access to comprehension of that data, and prohibits resolution of questions of popular opinion and political doctrine.

    As such, it’s tedious to answer impolitic questions here. That is why few people do it.

    That said, I will do my best:

    FAMILY STRUCTURE

    1) Family structure and family economic structures determine poverty. The nuclear family is highly efficient economic structure. The two income nuclear family is the most efficient economic structure. For a male it is the smallest tribe he can be alpha in, and maintain access to a female as he declines in desirability For a woman she is the alpha female in her tribe of one, and has a monopoly claim on his production for the duration of her childrearing, despite her declining ‘desirability’ during this time. The nuclear family also places asset demands on the male, and therefore delays marriage and mating, both of which increase the skill level, work experience of the members.

    2) Redistribution undermines the family and increases poverty, partly because men in the lower classes are less desirable (and able) than women in the lower classes, because men are more widely distributed in feature and ability than are women, with more men at the very top (nobel prize winners) and more men at the bottom (persistently impulsive criminality). Our Y chromosome is where nature experiements, and our wider male distribution affects mating under monogamy, and less so under polygyny, because under polygyny, a smaller number of more desirable males can be shared amongst a larger number of marginally more desirable females.

    3) Racial groups are more or less ‘desirable’ as mates worldwide, not just in the states. This has largely to do, as best as any of us can tell, with a mating preference for females with thinner skin in contrast to mates with thicker skin as a signal that is different from the thicker skin of males. Since the only uniform scale of beauty across all cultures, other than symmetry, is quality of female skin clarity, this is the only selection preference necessary to explain racial preferences, other than the rate at which we appear to have exited Africa and begun the process of near-speciation (racial diversification), and the problem of access to vitamin D in the northern climes. This research is impolitic and the people who pursue it are ostracized from academia so it has moved to being conducted under a different guise, or now to china where such things are considered only logical. But the research is available. And it shows that fairer, thinner skin on females with finer features, is more desirable regardless of racial group.

    4) People mate almost entirely within race (<15%) and prefer to associate, work, and live within racial groups. With the consumer marketplace for goods the only shared environment. Extremes can run counter to this fact with crossing occurring at the lower and higher ends of desirability where each individual has better options in mates and often better access to social class by crossing racial boundaries.

    5) Even where racial admixture occurs, it places downward pressure on extra-group status and opportunity (desirability). In other words, racially mixed children maintain the lower of their racial preferences. Altough in black and hispanic communities and families children are still ranked in preference by skin color because it grants access to status both mating and social.

    ECONOMICS

    6) Impulsivity (the ability to resist impulses) varies between the races, with the east asians the least impulsive distribution, and the subsaharan african population the most impulsive. Impulsivity is a positive reproductive strategy unless external (climate) pressures punish survival. Impulsivity places a high penalty on learning ability which favors long periods of ‘frustration’ and concentration.

    7) Impulsivity affects both trustworthiness and creditworthiness. Nuclear families have higher more stable incomes, and are more creditworthy, as well as more economically efficient. As such high densities of nuclear families will produce higher wealth. Higher wealth will generate greater opportunity. Greater opportunity within a geography will increase demand for housing in that geography. Housing in that geography will increase in price. People who live in more impulsive, less efficient groups will of course, be unable to gain access to that geography and its opportunities.

    8) For these reasons (Which I assume I should use graphs to illustrate) the reason that poverty and single motherhood are so prevalent in the south is that 74% of black mothers, and a high percentage of hispanic mothers are unmarried. And they live in close communities reliant on support from extended family members, with populations too high to integrate into more successful communities. White single motherhood is on the increase in the lower classes, and teh USA, Ireland and New Zealand, where the postmodernist and feminist movements have been most successful, have the highest rates of single motherhood among whites, and the countries of southern europe who remain familially integral the lowest: Italy, Greece, Spain and Luxembourg.

    TRUST AND OPPORTUNITY

    All humans are faced with opportunities for both cooperation and conflict at all times. We must choose how to apply our limited time effort and resources to a limited number of opportunities.

    All opportunities other than exchanges of commodities purely on price, consist of a network of cost and benefit tradeoffs. All cost and benefit tradeoff’s are simple.

    We trade (cooperate) on all sorts of terms, but economic status, social status, values, language, culture(mythology, habits) are significant terms. Every variation in every property that is not identical in interest is a negative.

    Status signals (status and reputation) have higher value in-group than across groups. Therefore status pressure to encourage each of us to adhere to agreements is of higher value in-group.

    Therefore we trust and cooperate in-group at lower cost and risk than across group.

    This is why people break into racial, cultural, socioeconomic, educational, generational, occupational groups. Because it’s the lowest risk pool of people with the lowest cost of cooperation, even if it’s less productive it may also be the only pool available to you where you can find someone willing to pay the higher cost of cooperating with you across groups.

    Political discourse assumes we want to help each other and we do. The problem is the logic of that statement -it’s meaningless when we CAN help everyone, we must still choose the best return on our help. And we do. And that is how it is. Anything else is irrational.

    SOUTHERN RELIGIOSITY

    Race is the reason for ‘everything’ in the south, including religiosity. Although southern religiosity we must understand is a rebellion against the state, after the north conquered the south. Race is the reason for everything in america. People are born, live, reproduce, associate, work with, and speak to, people within their racial groups except where they participate in the marketplace together.

    RATES OF POVERTY BY RACE

    http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.e…

    RATES OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD BY RACE

    LINK: http://datacenter.kidscount.org/…

    There is no end of data on this subject.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-12 03:28:00 UTC

  • WHICH CULTURES ARE THE MOST FAMILIAL? Worst is the USA, Ireland was second (24.3

    WHICH CULTURES ARE THE MOST FAMILIAL?

    Worst is the USA, Ireland was second (24.3 percent), followed by New Zealand (23.7 percent). At the other end, Greece, Spain, Italy and Luxemborg had among the lowest percentages of children in single-parent homes.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-12 03:23:00 UTC

  • What Will Come After Democracy?

    Some of us have been working on this problem for a very long time. Ever since we realized that democracy (universal enfranchisement without demonstrated merit) was simply the slow road to totalitarianism.

    The arguments vary from increasing totalitarianism (most likely) to American dissolution (most beneficial) to direct monetary democracy( you vote your money to what you want without a corruptible middleman that we call a politician) to a market system where the government is merely constitutional and insurance companies are who we rely upon.  There are many different permutations.  However, most of us believe that the only possible venue will be totalitarianism and civil war, since it is impossible to get people to agree on a new system unless under threat of chaos.

    https://www.quora.com/What-will-come-after-democracy