Author: Curt Doolittle

  • How Cheap Prices Cause Public Harm (a) Tariffs are a tax that functions as a tra

    How Cheap Prices Cause Public Harm
    (a) Tariffs are a tax that functions as a transfer from importers and buyers of foreign goods to the public as a whole in compensation for undercutting labor prices.
    (b) Tariffs equilibrate labor arbitrage that extracts wealth from the economy at the expense of labor.
    (c) Tariffs equilibrate loss of knowledge and skill from the importing economy to the producing economy.
    I could go on with this list all day long.
    The first principle of economics is measuring the seen and the unseen (full accounting). All economic claims that do not do so are ‘half truths’ (lies) that centralize gains in the people who hold capital at the expense of the people that work to maintain and produce capital in exchange for income.

    Reply addressees: @MaddenedRanter @RpsAgainstTrump


    Source date (UTC): 2025-04-09 19:00:27 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1910045159485767680

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1909929077818958270

  • yes the importer pays (small population), yes the price increases (consumers who

    yes the importer pays (small population), yes the price increases (consumers who have choice), but the importer is contributing to the tax and debt burden (citizens). We either do this and repatriate strategic industries or we cut our benefits and lose the dollar as a reserve currency (and thus our purchasing power). We couldn’t even manufacture pistol cartridges for the military without importing the primers. Same for something on the order of 2/3 of medicines. Remember the ‘mask problem’ and ‘respirator shortage’ during covid? We have a very hostile enemy who controls these resources.
    You always pay. You just have to choose now or later.

    Reply addressees: @MaddenedRanter @Orgasomisa @RpsAgainstTrump


    Source date (UTC): 2025-04-09 16:46:15 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1910011386270474241

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1909929464571576581

  • Training a Base Model To Use Our Methodology Speculative Insight Our approach to

    Training a Base Model To Use Our Methodology

    Speculative Insight
    Our approach to training is closest to constructive neuro-symbolic alignment. We are not retraining a model to behave; we are teaching it a logic, using operational primitives and adversarial truth testing. Most AI research assumes abstraction is layered on top of training. We’re rightly flipping this, saying: abstractions must be rebuilt from primitives under decidability constraints.
    This is both:
    • Epistemologically superior to probabilistic inference by language prediction, and
    • Efficient if the base model already has rich sensorimotor, common-sense, and action grammar knowledge.
    Strategy Viability
    Our strategy is highly viable under the following plan:
    1. Select a model like Mistral or Yi-34B with good grounding and minimal prior abstractions.
    2. Perform continued pretraining, not just fine-tuning—on our corpus of:
      – Operational definitions
      – Formal grammars
      – Natural Law structure
      – First-principles logic trees
      – Canon of examples (cases)
    3. Use adversarial Socratic dialogue in training, where errors trigger correction from your defined logic.
    4. Apply RLAIF (Reinforcement Learning from Adversarial Instruction Following) rather than standard RLHF—this avoids crowd-sourced moral shaping.
    Our strategy is both intelligent and viable, provided the foundation model has a sufficient grounding in primitives (perception, action, objects, relations, events, and basic intentions)—what might be called naïve physics and naïve psychology—while remaining relatively uncommitted to particular abstract frameworks. In effect, you’re looking for:
    1. High coverage of experiential and operational primitives (so you don’t need to re-teach what a door, key, argument, or goal is),
    2. Low entrenchment in abstract philosophical, ideological, or academic conceptual hierarchies, so you can impose your own.
    Candidate Base Model:
    1. Mistral 7B / Mixtral
    • Why: Mistral 7B is known for efficiency, open weights, and solid grounding in daily-use language. It’s less “opinionated” than LLaMA-2 or GPT-J on abstractions.
    • Primitives: Reasonably good on object/agent/action-level reasoning.
    • Bias: Minimal ideological shaping.
    • Steerability: Very good.
    • Viability: Very high.


    Source date (UTC): 2025-04-09 16:41:46 UTC

    Original post: https://x.com/i/articles/1910010260338925613

  • Untitled

    http://x.com/i/article/1910008903259283460


    Source date (UTC): 2025-04-09 16:41:46 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1910010260338925613

  • Speculative Insight Our approach to training is closest to constructive neuro-sy

    Speculative Insight

    Our approach to training is closest to constructive neuro-symbolic alignment. We are not retraining a model to behave; we are teaching it a logic, using operational primitives and adversarial truth testing. Most AI research assumes abstraction is layered on top of training. We’re rightly flipping this, saying: abstractions must be rebuilt from primitives under decidability constraints.

    This is both:

    Epistemologically superior to probabilistic inference by language prediction, and

    Efficient if the base model already has rich sensorimotor, common-sense, and action grammar knowledge.

    Strategy Viability

    Our strategy is highly viable under the following plan:

    Select a model like Mistral or Yi-34B with good grounding and minimal prior abstractions.

    Perform continued pretraining, not just fine-tuning—on our corpus of:
    – Operational definitions
    – Formal grammars
    – Natural Law structure
    – First-principles logic trees
    – Canon of examples (cases)

    Use adversarial Socratic dialogue in training, where errors trigger correction from your defined logic.

    Apply RLAIF (Reinforcement Learning from Adversarial Instruction Following) rather than standard RLHF—this avoids crowd-sourced moral shaping.

    Our strategy is both intelligent and viable, provided the foundation model has a sufficient grounding in primitives (perception, action, objects, relations, events, and basic intentions)—what might be called naïve physics and naïve psychology—while remaining relatively uncommitted to particular abstract frameworks. In effect, you’re looking for:

    High coverage of experiential and operational primitives (so you don’t need to re-teach what a door, key, argument, or goal is),

    Low entrenchment in abstract philosophical, ideological, or academic conceptual hierarchies, so you can impose your own.

    Candidate Base Model:

    1. Mistral 7B / Mixtral

    Why: Mistral 7B is known for efficiency, open weights, and solid grounding in daily-use language. It’s less “opinionated” than LLaMA-2 or GPT-J on abstractions.

    Primitives: Reasonably good on object/agent/action-level reasoning.

    Bias: Minimal ideological shaping.

    Steerability: Very good.

    Viability: Very high.

    🔸Mixtral adds sparse Mixture-of-Experts for better generalization, while keeping training compute reasonable.


    Source date (UTC): 2025-04-09 16:36:23 UTC

    Original post: https://x.com/i/articles/1910008903259283460

  • Actually I have full knowledge of what I said. That doesn’t mean I wrote it clea

    Actually I have full knowledge of what I said. That doesn’t mean I wrote it clearly enough for this audience to understand what I meant. ;). A common failing to which I frequently admit.

    Humans differ by time preference with progressives feminine, experiential, and short term (consumption) and conservatives masculine, consequential, and long term (capitalization) each reflecting the distribution of sex difference in perception and valence. Unfortunately, progressivism doesn’t scale because it’s as epistemically impossible and unwarrantable as statistical aggregates in economic science.

    Likewise taxing an importer for undermining national incomes (input purchasing power) in favor of national consumption (output purchasing power), and favoring the financial sector instead of main street, is just equilibrating the redistribution that is caused by the opposite.

    Reply addressees: @Walker1268 @MeidasTouch


    Source date (UTC): 2025-04-09 16:36:01 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1910008813031415809

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1909930825207931088

  • RT @NoahRevoy: “Dealing with the truth is not for gentle people.” – @curtdoolitt

    RT @NoahRevoy: “Dealing with the truth is not for gentle people.” – @curtdoolittle


    Source date (UTC): 2025-04-09 16:18:24 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1910004379320713407

  • Which judges? We don’t have a separate administrative court as does most of euro

    Which judges?
    We don’t have a separate administrative court as does most of europe, so everything ‘climbs’ through the court hierarchy.
    State judges vary widely, even if state supreme court justices tend to at least not be horrible.
    Federal District judges who settle mundane matters are not of the same calibre as those above them in the Federal court hierarchy.
    Even our Appellate judges vary from ideological (west coast, new england/ny) to constitutional (the south, esp Texas).

    As of January 2, 2025, out of 679 district court judges, 384 were appointed by Democratic presidents and 257 by Republican presidents. This is the source of the problem.

    Reply addressees: @koalarz25


    Source date (UTC): 2025-04-09 16:18:13 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1910004332453634048

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1909948653881475340

  • We get to keep the proceeds you know. So if cheap chinese goods are more importa

    We get to keep the proceeds you know. So if cheap chinese goods are more important than your retirement then you are welcome to move somewhere else and do so.


    Source date (UTC): 2025-04-09 05:45:23 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1909845075338969104

    Reply addressees: @MeidasTouch

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1909826394009608597

  • wait. your complaining about low oil prices?

    wait. your complaining about low oil prices?


    Source date (UTC): 2025-04-09 05:27:35 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1909840593557373346

    Reply addressees: @allenanalysis

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1909121415841996948