(From Pew Research.) If Republicans skew male, and Democrats skew female, and men accumulate more economic and political knowledge than women, and women have fewer and less diverse friends than men, then isn’t the fact that Republicans are better informed and more open minded than Democrats simply an artifact of the distribution of men and women between the parties? The classical liberal system was designed to create separate houses for different classes of males. It has not survived the addition of females to the electorate. We should not have eliminated the class division of houses, we should have added to it. Then we could compromise rather than conduct ideological warfare, class warfare, and gender warfare. And the results of these polls would be obvious.
Author: Curt Doolittle
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THE VIRTUE OF SIMPLE RULES Simple rules compensate for the diversity of human in
THE VIRTUE OF SIMPLE RULES
Simple rules compensate for the diversity of human intellectual ability, and the variance in knowledge and experience between the ignorance of youth and the wisdom of old age.
Do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (The golden rules two sides of a coin. They produce different results – you have to adhere to both of them.)
Speak the truth even if it leads to harm.
Keep your promises even if it causes you losses.
Adhere to manners, ethics and morals even if they make no sense.
Take no other person’s words personally – they are a self description of the speaker.
Save one fifth of everything you make.
Read at least one book every two weeks.
Sample every bit of life that you can – we get only one chance at it.
Master a craft, it is how you become valuable to others.
Master an additional new craft every seven years.
Become a skilled and patient lover.
Keep a dog. It will teach you loyalty and love.
If you choose to marry, choose well, and late in life. Marrying young, romantically and poorly is the most expensive error we all make.
There is only one law, and that is property: a prohibition in the involuntary transfer of property by violence, fraud, theft of indirection.
We are all different. Political equality is achieved not through majority violence, but through exchanges between groups facilitated by institutions. Institutions that compensate for the inter-temporal differences in our productivity, because the incorrectly named division of labor is instead, a division of knowledge and labor in time: we function on different time frames. The future is kaleidic. And we build that future as a division of knowledge and labor and time — not because we agree upon it. But because it is what is possible for us to achieve despite our inability to agree.
Anything else is not high mindedness, but brutal theft under the mythology of communal government.
Source date (UTC): 2012-04-23 10:54:00 UTC
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MUCH TROUBLE CAN I GET INTO WITH THIS POSTING? 🙂 (I BET IT’S A LOT.) If Republi
http://times247.com/articles/pew-republicans-better-informed-more-empatheticHOW MUCH TROUBLE CAN I GET INTO WITH THIS POSTING? 🙂 (I BET IT’S A LOT.)
If Republicans skew male, and Democrats skew female, and men accumulate more economic and political knowledge than women, and women have fewer and less diverse friends than men, then isn’t the fact that Republicans are better informed and more open minded than Democrats simply an artifact of the distribution of men and women between the parties?
The classical liberal system was designed to create separate houses for different classes of males. It has not survived the addition of females to the electorate. We should not have eliminated the class division of houses, we should have added to it. Then we could compromise rather than conduct ideological warfare, class warfare, and gender warfare.
And the results of these polls would be obvious.
Source date (UTC): 2012-04-23 10:07:00 UTC
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Obama doesn’t need help hurting himself. He does fine on his own
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/22/olbermann-almost-deliberate-gas-price-hikes-are-to-hurt-obama/Um. Obama doesn’t need help hurting himself. He does fine on his own.
Source date (UTC): 2012-04-23 04:16:00 UTC
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Ozimek Suggests The Future Will Include More Time In Front Of The Television. 🙂
http://modeledbehavior.com/2012/04/21/the-future-is-not-what-you-want/Adam Ozimek Suggests The Future Will Include More Time In Front Of The Television. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2012-04-21 20:43:00 UTC
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Why Does The Left Alliance Of Economists Fail? (Krugman, DeLong, Yglasias, Thoma, Smith)
Why does wall street resist QE for example? Wall Street staff are in the business of planning and policy interferes with their plans, both by uncertainty and by impact. Like any specialization with a defined methodology and therefore a limited scope of understanding, Wall Street’s opinion is irrelevant (as @Richard Williamson says above) as their opinions are too unsophisticated to have meaning. WS is a mob not a hierarchy. WS is only material in how they REACT to change. How they react to change in the short term will be negative — to anything that interferes with their existing plans. Where ‘plans’ in this case are vague heuristic assumptions. But because they have the highest liquidity and most flexible liquidity of any industry in the market, their cost for changing plans is lower than the cost of changing plans for anyone else in the market. So, the problem with advancing QE/Spending policy is not wall street. It is politics, of which WS is just one constituency. And the problem of politics is the failure of the four groups of ECONOMIC IDEOLOGISTS to compose an economic program that PREVENTS INVOLUNTARY TRANSFERS between groups and instead BORROWS FROM AND REWARDS GROUPS. Where groups profit from different temporal positions on the human production cycle, and where that production cycle manifests itself as time preference. Your assumption is instead, that it will ‘trickle through’ the economy, making you no different from any one of the OTHER groups of economic ideologists who want to rewards to ‘trickle up’ or ‘trickle down’ or ‘trickle out from the entrepreneurial middle’. ‘Trickling’ produces all sorts of involuntary transfers, of status, of risk, of opportunity, and of wealth. We are not children, we do not have to play one note. we can compose a chord of solutions. The fantasy of the egalitarian community of common interest, for some reason, blinds left-economists and moderates alike to the inequality of function and therefore inequality of methods and incentives that different functional groups have in the economy,and by consequence the incentives of the political groups that represent them. As Kahneman argues, people fight MUCH harder to prevent involuntary transfers than they do for their own reward. This behavior MANDATES that the four major schools, each of whom represent four groups, who represent four periodicities of human planning, conduct processes of voluntary exchange between the groups rather than attempt to support one ‘team’ winning. For this reason I find the left’s position somewhat humorously hypocritical: a pot calling a kettle black. The methodology and incentives of WS are narrow and self serving, and the methodology of Keyensians is narrow and self serving. I will be proven right in time — certainly more right than the Keynesians. I look at that group the way they look at wall street: myopic because of methodologically enforced ignorance, all of which is preceded by a cognitive bias, a cognitive bias which is the product of biology not wisdom. As is evidenced by their failure to grasp the principles of human cooperation that are common sense to conservatives. The conservatives are offering compromises, and have been doing so consistently (DOE and HUD). And you don’t want to pay those compromises, so they fit and fuss over creating a distraction to avoid the fact that they just want what they want regardless of the costs to others. DEAR PROGRESSIVE ECONOMISTS. THE PROBLEM IS YOU, NOT WALL STREET, BUT YOU. THE PROBLEM IS YOU. You’re supposed to be smart. Try to be. Otherwise, if possessed of this knowledge you are just another person seeking involuntary transfers from others under the pretense that outcomes are kaliedic. But they are only kaliedic because of your ignorance. Ignorance others do not possess. In that event, you are either just another fool or just another thief. The question is whether you want to refrain from being both, and become a statesman instead. We need some. Heck, one would do. Cheers
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AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, IRAN I am perfectly fine with wandering around the world and
AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, IRAN
I am perfectly fine with wandering around the world and punishing people and governments for not controlling the actions of their citizens. If you make the mistake of establishing a state, you by definition are responsible for your people’s actions.
But you can’t teach the illiterate superstitious tribal inbreeding peasantry to adopt democratic government. It’s antithetical to them. Might as well try to train apes to play chess. And it’s just as likely to succeed.
But as other have said, it certainly feeds the military contractors, even if the soldiers don’t think it’s something that they should be doing. The purpose of soldiers is to kill people and blow stuff up.
Manufacturing civilization can’t be outsourced to a foreign contractor. It’s a purely domestic production process. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2012-04-21 13:12:00 UTC
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DOES THE LEFT ALLIANCE FAIL TO ACHIEVE THEIR POLICY GOALS?
http://www.capitalismv3.com/2012/04/21/why-does-the-left-alliance-of-economists-fail-krugman-delong-yglasias-thoma-smith/WHY DOES THE LEFT ALLIANCE FAIL TO ACHIEVE THEIR POLICY GOALS?
Source date (UTC): 2012-04-21 09:47:00 UTC
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The Village Voice Calls Me A Conservative (Right) And A Racist (Wrong).
I supposed I should know better, but the Village voice is attacking me, and every other ‘right wing blogger’ for defending John Derbyshire.
Curt Doolittle … allowed as how “racism is just plain stupidity.” Nonetheless he explained that “African Americans FACTUALLY demonstrate African American distributions of IQ are FACTUALLY almost a full standard deviation lower than that of their white counterparts,” and that “whites used to be racist but the wars ended their comfort with self confidence. Blacks are racist at the bottom.”
Doolittle also noted that black people are disproportionately represented in crime statistics. He did not consider their disproportionate representation in poverty statistics to be connected — that sort of thinking, we suppose, would conflict with the Austrian Libertarian tradition — but suggested that “aberrant behavior among minorities” in the U.S. is “tolerated under the principle of diversity and freedom of self expression.” — The Village Voice
To which I replied:
Thank you for quoting me on this issue. I was pretty reluctant to write about it. It strikes me as odd that if I write something on fashion or gender relations, or racism, that it gets a lot of attention — my most popular article was when I stated that tattoos had gone out of style in the middle class. But if I write something meaningful about political theory you can hear crickets. So, I guess this kind of thing goes with the territory.
But I have a few nits with your quote:
1) Racism is just plain stupid. One cannot judge an individual by the properties of his class. Although one can judge a class by the properties of its individuals.
2) Denying that we in the states have a racial issue is not stupid. It’s obvious, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I’lll avoid the detail of why we have a greater problem with race than our English and Canadian counterparts, but the fact that we do, is indicative of the problem. They can enforce behavioral norms, and our society has forbidden such pressure to conformity as the French impose.
3) Denying that poverty is a symptom is not stupid either. You imply that I do not seem to appreciate this issue. Acknowledging that the reason for poverty is not racism but IQ is not stupid either. It’s just what it is. Acknowledging that the distribution of IQ varies among groups isn’t stupid either.
5) I’m not advocating racism – that is an emotional construct. I”m saying that the suite of policy solutions that seek to solve the problem through educational commingling, and treating racial groups as homogenous in ability is simply HARMFUL to those at the bottom, 40% of whom are black. Even the genders are not homogenous. If we look at the data we should not start boys in school for a year after we start girls, and perhaps two years. That’s just one aspect of the Finnish model. Instead, those troubled demographics need special attention. I’m appealing for special attention — ie: schools designed to teach something other than middle class whites and asians. I can forgive you for not knowing my broader political position, and leaping to the conclusion you did. I’m just not sure I want to let the error go unanswered. And a look at the complexion of my family, which is a rainbow, should be enough to convince anyone of my personal disposition.
6) Derbyshire was fired for speaking the truth in order to draw attention to the problem. I”m not sure I think his argument is particularly useful. I am sure I don’t agree with his reasons or his solutions. But he was speaking the truth. If you are one of the deniers that thinks human IQ distributions are environmental rather than genetic, then you can get together with climate deniers and have a celebration. But the matter is settled in the data. It’s settled in the profession. And the dirty secret of the Human Genome project: we now know why. Social classes are genetically determined too. And capitalism’s fast meritocratic rotation makes these differences rapidly visible.
So lets move beyond name calling and solve this problem. We can solve it by throwing welfare money at it, or do what we’re doing and continue to see little progress, or we can understand that a very different school system is needed with far more support for a demographic that needs special care in order to fit successfully into society. Because what we’re doing isn’t working.
The race and class warfare prevents us from “Getting To Denmark” and building an egalitarian society. I don’t believe that society can be created with a 300M+ population like it can in a 5M population if we have to rely on a government where consensus of belief is needed and where the winner takes all. And reorganizing our political institutions to accomodate for our impossibly complex diversity of opinion, desire, visions AND abilities, is what I work on full time.
I don’t expect thanks for it. On the other hand, I have many faults, but I don’t think the one you’re attributing to me is one of them. 🙂
Thanks
Curt Doolittle
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Mises On Determinism: An Agnostic.
His argument is that the human mind must determine action or the human creature cannot survive as an acting animal, And the human mind therefore is incapable of seeing the universe as anything other than a sequence of causes. It is a criticism of the tendency of the human mind to err.
Quote: “It is impossible, … for the human mind to think of any event as uncaused. The concepts of chance and contingency, if properly analyzed, do not refer ultimately to the course of events in the universe. They refer to human knowledge, prevision, and action. They have a praxeological, not an ontological connotation.”
[callout]The universe cannot observe itself, predict it’s own movements, and construct a plan by which it may alter events. It consists of constant categories. The categories used by human beings are limited only by their desired actions, and their desired actions, in collective permutation, are less limited than those of the physical universe.[/callout]
In other words, any notion of determinism is an artifact of the human mind. He goes on to give examples of how different fields err. He summarizes by saying we just don’t know whether it is or not, and that we may be prevented from understanding whether it is or not, simply because we cannot conceive of it otherwise. He’s agnostic. He’s not a determinist. He says we just don’t know, and in all the examples that we have tried so far, none of them survive critical analysis. He argues that the use of numerical aggregates and statistics only reinforce that issue. I can see how someone would not understand his argument if they didn’t read it carefully. But his first paragraph makes the entire argument:
Quote “Whatever the true nature of the universe and of reality may be, man can learn about it only what the logical structure of his mind makes comprehensible to him. Reason, the sole instrument of human science and philosophy, does not convey absolute knowledge and final wisdom. It is vain to speculate about ultimate things. What appears to man’s inquiry as an ultimate given, defying further analysis and reduction to something more fundamental, may or may not appear such to a more perfect intellect. We do not know.”
He’s an agnostic, not a determinist: “WE DO NOT KNOW.” And any illusion that we can know is a byproduct of the structure of the human mind. Therefore by occam’s razor, it’s more likely that we’re simply WRONG whenever we have deterministic ideas. So Mises was not a determinist. Since his time, we have learned enough, that it is possible to defeat the argument to physical determinism in human action, if not the physical world. What arguments to Determinism that remain, are artifacts of religious mysticism and the structure of our minds. 1) Causality Exists 2) Determinism doesn’t. (Unless there is a god who determines everything.)
“RE: “Like “Existence”, “Causation” is, as Gian-Carlo Rota might have said, a folie. There is only direction of entropy as measured by gradients of correlation. It is one of those dirty secrets of philosophy of science.” – A Critic
This view of causality is only true in the abstract, special case of relations in the physical universe which exist independently of human action. When instead, we consider that category of relations which are the result of human action, and where such action requires information necessary to plan, and where such information is of necessity a generalization of the complexity of the physical universe, and as such where a loss of information is necessitated by such acts of generalization, and where such a loss of information is necessary in order to compose an action which will alter the existing course of events using a process of heuristic calculation, where that calculation is made with fragmentary information, and where actions are limited to the possible scope of human actions. Then by necessity causation consists of a set of actions that are observable, and categorically definable both individually, and in the aggregate, by observation of those actions. Actions which produce patterns of outcome which are distinguishable from the entropic limitations of the physical universe. A physical universe to which calculation and aggregation are impossible concepts. The universe cannot observe itself, predict it’s own movements, and construct a plan by which it may alter events. It consists of constant categories. The categories used by human beings are limited only by their desired actions, and their desired actions, in collective permutation, are less limited than those of the physical universe. Anyway, I think I might understand the suggestion that mises was a causal determinist at this point as saying: a) State t1 is the product of prior states tn{..}. b) each state in tn{} is the product of human naming and identity. BUT c) this is not to say that tn{} is complete. d) this is not to say that tn+1 must occur, only that tn+1 can be described by tn+1{…} In this sense, human action is not deterministic, it is however causally determinable. If the question of determinism is metaphysical, then: a) Mises has made no statements to metaphysical determinism, only that humans think in deterministic terms and are incapable of doing otherwise. This is a statement about human beings, not the physical universe. b) If instead of a metaphysical question, it is a question of praxeological action, then all human actions have causes, moreover, all actions are rational (in the broader sense of the term). c) causality is separate from determinacy. That all events have enumerable causes is separate and distinct from the assertion that all causes produce fixed ends. In this sense, the term causal (praxeological) determinism can have meaning separate from Fatalism, Predeterminism, or Predictability, as well as causal (metaphysical) determinism. Mises may have ben a praxeological determinist but not a metaphysical determinist. Clear as mud I’m sure. 🙂