Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • KNEW THAT DATA WAS WRONG. I KNEW IT

    http://blog.american.com/2012/04/obamas-inequality-argument-just-utterly-collapsed/I KNEW THAT DATA WAS WRONG. I KNEW IT.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-17 04:39:00 UTC

  • VERSUS PROTESTANT ETHICS “The “Catholic” approach has extremely high moral stand

    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/04/catholic_versus.html#.T40iIE_Z7Ak.facebookCATHOLIC VERSUS PROTESTANT ETHICS

    “The “Catholic” approach has extremely high moral standards but enforces them loosely.

    The “Protestant” approach has moderate moral standards, but enforces them strictly.”

    IMHO: Protestant ethics are concerned with the actions and results needed to produce good works, catholic ethics are concerned with symbols and beliefs in order to create internal purity. Thats why all the entrepreneurs are protestant, and so many philosophers are catholic.

    Small things in large numbers have vast consequences.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-17 04:01:00 UTC

  • Why Do Ordinary People Vote Conservative?

    THE ANSWER IS SIMPLE – SORT OF.
    We have plenty of data on why people vote. In very, very, general terms:
    1 – They agree with the conservative economic program.
    2 – They agree with the conservative military program.
    3 – They agree with the liberals sympathy to the plight of minorities and the vulnerable, but not to the point of creating a welfare state.
    4 – They see the (urban) liberal assault on traditional culture as ‘haughty’ and insulting.

    So, when they add all this up, they end up on the side of the conservatives.

    Liberals are more subject to the false consensus bias than are conservatives, and tend to think everyone agrees with them.  Conservatives are more subject to threats that will destabilize society than liberals, and have a more pessimistic view of human nature.  The public agrees with that perception of human nature. Especially on crime, the economy, welfare and the military. So that’s where the ‘average’ conservative comes from if there is one.

    COMPOSITION OF THE ELECTORATE
    The majority (for now) of the country remains ‘leaning conservative’ by a large margin.  (Liberals are less that 20% of the electorate).  The USA is a very conservative country by international standards. It maintains it’s germanic protestant roots.  Religious belief is higher.  We have more violent crime -albiet it is largely race related — but less petty crime that other countries.

    PARTIES SERVE COALITIONS NOT ‘AVERAGES’
    Both parties are built out of coalitions. Sort of like hands of playing cards. And parties use them like playing cards.  Thats how they stay in power. To understand your question, requires really looking at that set of coalitions.  There are really no ‘average’ people in the sense that you mean it.  The level of scientific understanding that political marketers have of how people behave is disconcerting in its accuracy.

    THE EXTREME ENDS AND THE IMPORTANT MIDDLE
    Political speech is very extreme. The media represents extremes.  Each side of the spectrum is fully committed to their party.  There is a small group in the middle that is highly pragmatic, that is not committed either way, and who make up their minds who to vote for at the last minute.  That group determines everything in every election.  So, practically speaking, all the ‘talk’ we hear is really for the purpose of getting people’s attention so that the media can profit from advertising, and so that the ‘base’ of each party will provide monetary contributions to the candidates. 

    ADVERTISING BUYS THE ILLUSION OF CONSENSUS
    The middle tends to make its decision on popular consensus as they understand it. that consensus is produced very often by advertising and media. So the heated conversations exist largely to provide enough money so that the media can be saturated sufficiently to create the impression that there is a consensus, so that the middle will go with the consensus.

    ONCE IN POWER THE POLITICIANS FIND OUT HOW LITTLE POWER THEY HAVE.
    The bureaucracy, the practical demands of being the worlds’ policemen, and the problem of so many different coalitions, the influence of lobbyists, as well as the need to obtain reelection money, render much of government a system of entertainment more than anything else.

    I know it probably sounds absurd. But while oversimplified, that is a pretty accurate representation of what’s going on.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-do-ordinary-people-vote-conservative

  • ECONOMICS “IS HOW ECONOMICS SHOULD BE DONE” But then, assuming the state will co

    http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/aggregated-confusionAUSTRIAN ECONOMICS “IS HOW ECONOMICS SHOULD BE DONE”

    But then, assuming the state will continue to pursue opportunities to increase taxes and decrease unemployment, the austrian approach would put the state in the position of trying to affect change via industrial policy. Meaning, being in bed with industries and unions.

    Maybe that isn’t all bad. It’s certainly better than being in bed with the financial sector.

    But then the state will always be in bed with someone.

    It needs someone to F***.

    (Apologies if light guttural humor is over the top. It was just THERE and I had to take it.)

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-16 16:43:00 UTC

  • An Argument In Support Of Faith As A Limit On The State

    My question is whether the criticism of faith are purely political: whether faith is a means of limiting political influence – coercion. As much as it WAS an instrument of coercion in the past. It’s content has changed since the darwinian revolution. Other than one remaining dogmatic super-cult, most are a personal religion now that defines a natural law that limits the state, by defining a communal preference over the demands of the state. If economic secularism is wrong. Faith is ‘right’. In other words, reason is insufficient to test the the content of faith or secular statism. The only scientific answer is which religion: the democratic secular economic religion of the state, or the christian/buddhist/hindu religion of the community is ‘true’, rather than a tautology. Reason is the language of the state, of commerce and of science. All of which dissolve community, family, and tribe. From which we gain our comfort. Our ‘gravity’. A force of nature which is present in our genes. To the broader question that separates religion from ‘faith’. To the argument as to whether faith is rational, the only reason to have this discussion is to persuade someone for some material reason. Otherwise we are arguing taste. And taste is not material. It is purely subjective. So the only reason to argue about faith is either political or commercial gain. Faith is an insulation against the political trevails of the overactive, and self interested. Political claims via reason, are claims on the actions and property of others. They must be. That is all it is possible for them to be. Reason by definition cannot a ‘subjective taste’. An honest discourse would not be conducted over a person’s faith, but over the property of individuals, and what must be exchanged for it. Rather, than over how individuals believe something, so that they will transfer their time, effort, or property at no cost, or lower cost. Political pundits are most often beggars in fine robes of reason. Faith then, is a means of saying “I’m not interested”. I am not sure that given the durability of the religions and the temporal nature of states, and the current understanding that we have of the limits of collective decision making, that ‘faith’ isn’t demonstrably ‘right’ and much of our political and economic theory ‘wrong’. Even if secularism is constructed of rational argument, and faith is constructed of myth and analogy, those constructs are not material — only the result of their application is. This has been said simply two millennia: the state is responsible for temporal affairs (commerce and war) and the church (faith) is responsible for limiting the state from expanding beyond commerce and war into the preferred state of man. And the preferred state of man is demonstrably that state of community that is found in the commonality of values, and the rituals that insulate us from the alienation of commerce and violence, and connect us to the security of our family and tribe. Faith has no place in State, commerce and science and vice versa. I mean, I don’t know really, why gravity works either. I don’t have to. But I would be uncomfortable in a world without gravity — genetic evolution has guaranteed I depend upon it. Likewise, I don’t know really why the different faiths ‘work’. I just know that I do not want to live in a world where there is no equivalent. I might prefer the Germans had succeeded in abandoning christianity in favor of return to their pagan roots. I might prefer my bible was of history, and gods, our heroes. But that is a question of taste. Whether the outcome of a more mystical christianity, or a more heroic history is superior, I am not sure I can forecast.

  • TROUBLE WITH SERGEY BRIN’S COMMENTS ABOUT APPS *Please enlighten me.* I have a h

    TROUBLE WITH SERGEY BRIN’S COMMENTS ABOUT APPS

    *Please enlighten me.*

    I have a hard time taking Brin’s criticism of FB and Apple seriously. Google is an app. FB is an app. Apple is an app/hardware structure. Google makes its money from freely available information. FB and Apple, as well as some international sites, consist of closed content. Since advertising works on google and doesn’t work on FB and elsewhere, then I don’t understand what he’s complaining about. Google owns the commercial and intellectual sphere. Apple is trying to make sure porn and viruses don’t make it onto their platform, and FB is trying to make something, anything, that will make money over the long term by understanding consumers and their preferences in a way that Google seems unable to.

    Why this is bad just doesn’t make sense to me.

    Now, if you talk about the government’s threatening to hide information and communications from their people, then yes, I understand that. I understand that China should probably be isolated from the entire internet infrastructure so that we can as easily shut them out if we want to — and may need to since our military relies upon the internet now.

    But I don’t understand the concern with information that’s inaccesible in ‘apps’.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-16 14:47:00 UTC

  • By Dennet’s criteria, property, prices, and the state itself require faith. Any

    http://richarddawkins.net/articles/280FAITH?

    By Dennet’s criteria, property, prices, and the state itself require faith. Any time more than a few hundred people need to take independent action on a collective good, then need to have faith in each other. That faith comes from shared values. The mythical artifice that we wrap around that ‘faith’ is immaterial. Only that we share the myth. Even if that myth is the benevolence of the secular state.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-16 14:30:00 UTC

  • WORD BUDGETS: Writing vs Speaking, and the Male vs Female myth.

    I can’t quite tell if there is any data to support the commonly quoted difference between men and women’s speaking budgets. It’s one of those things that’s so commonly bandied about that you’d think you could easily find data on it. But you can’t. And what you can, is pretty specious. In fact, it looks pretty much ‘just plain wrong’ when I read it. But there is another explanation; it certainly does appear that men and women speak more in different **contexts**. One thing we know that helps us understand those contexts, is that men have more friends than women, but women have closer relationships than do men. Men tolerate greater diversity of value judgements in their friends. Women tolerate less diversity of value judgments in their friends. Or perhaps better stated, men and women view the source of loyalty that defines friendship as coming from different behaviors: cooperation in pursuit of opportunities for shared gain, versus care-taking which requires bearing costs on behalf of the other. For this reason fear of ostracization is lower in men, and higher in women. Add onto that the men not only feel more comfortable taking risks, but enjoy and seek taking them — albiet the level of risk varies substantially. But conversational risk is very low among men. We think it’s better to hear a bad idea than fail to hear all the ideas. Women are more cautious because they are more sensitive to variation in opinion. In my anecdotal experience, in business meetings and debates, men speak far more words than women. In social settings, and in personal conversations, women speak more words than men. Men seem to enjoy participating in competitive conversations. They even artificially create nonsense-conflicts just to have something to debate: they talk about sports teams, companies, politics, technologies, cars and tools etc. Each as a vehicle for debate. They prefer the abstract to the experiential, and a limited number of contextual changes. Women seem to prefer gradual subtle conversations across multiple contexts where they can build consensus and thoroughly understand one another’s viewpoints in the process. The result of these different preferences is more of a difference in velocity than anything else. Women tend to ‘get there’ using their conversational style just like men do, but more slowly. Like everything else, men are built for speed. The extraneous is removed by evolution. It certainly seems like most woman I’ve been in a relationship with has greater capacity for speech than I do — and I’m pretty talkative. But I suspect that it’s a difference in the content and circumstance not the number of words. I”m not the only man who thinks it’s odd that his mate must revisit her dreams in the morning, and her daily conversations at night. It’s common knowledge among men that we must learn that skill. But it’s good for a relationship when men learn how to feign interest in these things that we lack the emotional bandwidth to appreciate and comprehend. Listening is an exercise in providing what the other person needs, and what she needs is not comprehension and problem solving – it’s to ensure we’re committed to one another, and for her to organize her emotions by way of speaking them in the same way that men organize our ideas by visualizing them. Chatter after all, is negatively correlated with successful hunting. Communication during hunts and war is visual, not verbal. Besides, that female revisitation of emotions is why women help us with our emotional problems when we have them: they’re more experienced at dealing with them. Our compensation for lacking those tools, is that mechanical devices, consumer electronics, and politics are not opaque to our comprehension. But I’m not sure which gender gets the better deal. We forget that we all start out female, and that the template for human beings is female, and that males are highly specialized versions of females. Testosterone shuts all that ‘unnecessary’ emotional processing off for males in the womb so that we can worry about doing dangerous things and making tools, and inventing pretty much everything, without worrying about the needs of children or the danger that other women might ostracize us in a time of weakness, when we and our children need communal support to survive. Applying that word budget to writing: I”m writing about 8K words a day on average now, with an average low of 5K, an average high of 10K, and a max of 25K on rare occasions. I’m not sure what that means. I know that if I dont talk to people all day, I write more, and vice versa. I also know that if I am writing for a competitive argument I write more than if I write in the explanatory neutral voice. But I also need to chat more than does my spouse. We are the product of our genes. The universe is fascinating. Life is a miraculous luxury. And every breath of it is worth savoring.

  • Why Are Conservatives Happier?

    Because the reality of imperfect human nature doesn’t trouble them. They don’t want to change the impossible. The universe is not something they struggle with. It’s something to appreciate. They celebrate present goods over future fantasies. They struggle to improve their their family and career, not the lives of others. They break the problem of life into small pieces. Each family doing the yeoman’s labor of creating the smallest tribe possible:the family. And by creating a multitude of those successful small tribes, the greater tribe emerges from the sum of its parts, not the pursuit of an idealistic folly: an attempt to obtain universal homogenous belief in the pursuit of shared feelings, ideas, and goals. The progressive instead, runs on a squirrel cage, attempting to gain consensus from the multitude, never getting there, and feeling frustrated for having failed. Human nature is all but immutable. Our preferences are genetic. They are determined by the difference in mating strategy between the genders and the imprecision of the gender creation process caused by the difference in in-utero concentrations of hormones that enhance or diminish those gender-based emotional biases. Conservatives are happier because they are more successful at life itself. No human can be happy when he struggles against the universe. It is an exercise in perpetual frustration.

  • Advocates Are Most Often Beggars In The Fine Robes Of Reason

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/2012/04/16/an-argument-in-support-of-faith-as-a-limit-on-the-state/Political Advocates Are Most Often Beggars In The Fine Robes Of Reason.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-16 12:33:00 UTC