Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • SHORT COURSE IN PROPERTARIAN REASONING (introduction to propertarianism) Note: t

    http://www.propertarianism.com/ideas/the-propertarian-methodology/A SHORT COURSE IN PROPERTARIAN REASONING

    (introduction to propertarianism)

    Note: this is a sketch of propertarian reasoning I’ve put together to satisfy some of your requests. If you follow me you will recognize the technique as the application of the scientific method and amoral economic language to questions of social science.

    PRINCIPLES

    1) Everyone acts to acquire. Life is an expensive means of defeating entropy. Acting improves acquisition – at additional cost. Memory improves acquisition – at additional cost. reason improves acquisition – at additional cost. cooperation improves acquisition – at additional cost.

    2) We act in furtherance of our reproductive strategy.

    3) Male and Female reproductive strategies are in conflict. The female seeks to breed impulsively where it benefits her lineage, and then force the cost of her offspring on the tribe, and to further her offspring regardless of merit. The male seeks to breed impulsively wherever it does not harm his lineage, and to create a tribe capable of resisting conquest by other males – and as such males act meritocratic-ally. Men are political and divided into kin and non-kin – the universe is male. For women, men are marginally indifferent herdsmen of women. Women live in a world of women, and both men and the universe are alien.

    4) Humans compete for status because status provides discounts on opportunities to acquire – especially mates and allies in cooperation. We can identify at least three horizontal axis of class division: biological (reproductive desirability), social (status desirability), economic (wealth desirability) – as well as their undesirable opposites.

    5) There exist only three means of coercing other humans to cooperate with on one means or end vs cooperate with others on different means or ends. These three means of coercion can be used to construct three vertical axis of class specialization: coercion by force(conservatism/masculine), coercion by gossip(progressivism/feminine), coercion by remuneration (libertarianism / neutral masculine). Human elites are formed by those who specialize in one or more of these means of coercion. (gossip: public intellectuals and priests. force: military and political. exchange: voluntary organizations, including the voluntary organization of production.

    6) Language is purely justificationary negotiation in furtherance of our acquisition by these three means. ergo: All ‘belief’ is justification to the self and others in furtherance of acquisition. It is meaningless. Statements of justification only provide us with information necessary to deduce what it is that we wish to acquire.

    7) Cooperation is a disproportionately more productive means of acquisition than individual production.

    8) We seek discounts in our acquisitions. Some of these discounts are productive and moral and encourage cooperation, and some of them are unproductive and immoral, discourage cooperation, and invite retaliation.

    9) The only moral acquisition is one in which one either homesteads something new, or obtains it by productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, where external transfers are limited to the same criteria.

    10) Aristotle’s ‘golden mean’ is an inarticulate primitive expression of the supply-demand curve. All human acquisition takes place within the pressures of supply and demand. As such all explanations of human action must be produced using supply and demand curves: the golden mean.

    11) All human considerations and consequent actions take place in high causal density, choices determined by means of opportunity costs, and any analysis requires we show the choices that an individual or group is considering. (Full Accounting).

    12) We cooperate and coerce in large numbers, as classes with common reproductive interests to using narratives at every scale. Science and moral law are the only means of resolving conflicts between these narratives. Propertarian analysis provides means of amoral analysis, argument and decidability between these loaded, framed, and obscured arguments.

    13) Groups evolve evolutionary strategies and supporting narratives. While none of these strategies by any given group is fully moral, it is still true that we can compare strategies as more and less objectively moral. We can measure the differences in objective morality by the degree of suppression of free riding in that given society.

    14) In all political matters ultimate decidability is provided by a bias to suicidal, proletarian and dysgenic, or competitive, aristocratic and eugenic reproduction. The myth of equality (the christian mythos) was let loose by the middle class takeover of the aristocratic governments, and the eventual enfranchisement of women whose reproductive strategy under industrial production is dysgenic – reversing 7,000 years of indo european genetic pacification (eugneic evolution). This is a very unpleasant and impolitic topic. But it is where we find decidability.

    LIST OF PROPERTY-EN-TOTO: THAT WHICH WE ACT TO AQUIRE (DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY)

    http://www.propertarianism.com/demonstrated-property/

    THE SIMPLE METHOD: INCENTIVES AS ACQUSITION

    1) take any circumstance in which someone is attempting to persuade someone else.

    2) identify the reproductive strategy of the speaker (largely by gender, class, and coercive technique.)

    3) identify the property-en-toto that the speaker is attempting to acquire.

    4) determine if his or her method is advocating a moral transfer(productive) or an immoral transfer (parasitism).

    5) Determine which discounts (thefts) he or she is attempting to engage in, or which premiums (payments) he or she is offering in exchange.

    6) State the user’s request in amoral propertarian terms free of loading, framing, or overloading. In other words, make a purely logical argument free of sentimental loading.

    ADVANCED: AN EXAMPLE OF EMPLOYING THE PROPERTARIAN METHOD ON ADVANCED CONCEPTS

    http://www.propertarianism.com/ideas/the-propertarian-methodology/

    This example addresses the term ‘evil’ in propertarian terms, and provides an example of how highly loaded terms from antiquity can be converted into scientific (propertarian) terms.

    TERMINOLOGY

    Demonstrated Property / Property en Toto

    Exchange / Transfer / Voluntary Transfer / Involuntary Transfer

    Parasitism / Free Riding / Imposed Costs

    Productive / Unproductive

    Fully Informed / Asymmetric Information

    Warrantied / Un-warrantied

    Discount / Premium

    Coercion / Influence

    Voluntary Organization of Production

    Incremental Suppression of free riding

    Truth / Truthfulness / Honesty

    Moral / Amoral / Immoral

    Morality / Cooperation / Retaliation

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-24 06:49:00 UTC

  • JUSTIFICATIONISM VS TESTIMONIALISM Moral Permission vs Prohibition on Falsehoods

    JUSTIFICATIONISM VS TESTIMONIALISM

    Moral Permission vs Prohibition on Falsehoods.

    Justification is a normative and Positive activity

    —“One way of explaining the theory of justification is to say that a justified belief is one that we are “within our rights” in holding. The rights in question are neither political nor moral, however, but intellectual.

    In some way, each of us is responsible for what we believe. Beliefs are not typically formed completely at random, and thus we have an intellectual responsibility, or obligation, to try to believe what is true and to avoid believing what is false. An intellectually responsible act is within one’s intellectual rights in believing something; performing it, one is justified in one’s belief.

    Thus, justification is a normative notion. The standard definition is that a concept is normative if it is a concept regarding or depending on the norms, or obligations and permissions (very broadly construed), involved in human conduct. It is generally accepted that the concept of justification is normative, because it is defined as a concept regarding the norms of belief.”—

    Testimonialism (“Complete” Critical Rationalism) Is a Descriptive and Negative Activity.

    Instead of justifying why we have the right to believe something, we warranty that we have done due diligence against error, bias, wishful thinking, and deception.

    Through history we have asked people to warranty their honest, but not their truthfulness. This is becuase we did not know until very recently if not the past few years, how to warranty our speech as truthful. Now that we do, we can. Just as we incrementally suppressed violence, theft, fraud, conspiracy, rent seeking, and various other forms of parasitism, why cannot we now increase the cost upon individuals to refrain from damage to the informational commons?

    This places a higher burden on members of a debate to refrain from engaging in fallacies, and holds people materially acceptable for doing so.

    Thus we have free truthful speech, but not free deceitful, wishful, biased, or erroneous speech.

    Just as we may use air, water, land, roads, parks and public buildings, we must take care not to damage it for others. We may not damage information either. Information is a commons. Why is it that we do not place the burden of truthfulness on those who would wish to make use of it?

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-20 13:34:00 UTC

  • LIARS AND PROXY LIARS: TESTIMONIALISM IS THE CURE QUESTION: Mustn’t one knowingl

    LIARS AND PROXY LIARS: TESTIMONIALISM IS THE CURE

    QUESTION: Mustn’t one knowingly lie to be labelled a liar?

    ANSWER: Yes under justification, and No under Criticism.

    Liars? Like the Frankfurt school lies. Like women lie. It is hard to know if they know better, or just follow the commands of their genetic puppeteer, just as the idiocy of christian suicidal altruism is hard to determine if one is a puppet, a habituator of the lies of predecessors, or a liar in one’s self.

    So by your question you would not punish a man for lying for having failed to perform due diligence on his statements, whereas I would.

    A proxy liar is still a liar.

    Failure to perform due diligence allows one to propagate lies. Requiring due diligence prevents the propagation of lies.

    One can teach people supposed truths. Or one can teach people how to launder falsehoods.

    A critical rationalist can not hold the former position with intellectual consistency.

    (In other words, the Brits in the LA movement are arguing an intellectual contradiction.)

    (So forgiving lying by proxy is also an expansion of postmodernism.)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-20 09:02:00 UTC

  • NO MISES IS NOT A HERO I love him but he was wrong. He conflates definitions wit

    NO MISES IS NOT A HERO

    I love him but he was wrong. He conflates definitions with demonstrated behavior and this is an example of why he was ostracized for his dogmatic verbalisms.

    His method of investigation, which he calls Austrian but is arguably Ukrainian instead, is reducible to the study of the means of improving the institutions that facilitate the voluntary organization of production by eliminating all possible frictions to economic velocity.

    Whereas the mainstream is reducible to the maximum consumption that can be generated by interfering with the voluntary organization of production without producing the disincentives that would increase frictions sufficiently to produce results counter to the ambition.

    When the differences between misesian and mainstream are one of morality and externality, not definition.

    Mises engaged in fallacies throughout his work. He makes consistent mistakes in the application of aprioristic logic of axiomatic systems to the proximal logic of theoretical systems.

    He discovered operationalism in economics just as Brouwer discovered it in math, and Bridgman in physics, and popper in philosophy.

    But none of them managed to put their efforts together into an innovation in the scientific method and the formal uniting of philosophy and science into a single discipline; and finally retiring moral discourse just as moral discourse retired religious discourse.

    This is perhaps one of the greatest failures of the twentieth century.

    Mises was a little right. But his dogmatism ended both his career and his potential to solve the problem not just if economics but if the social sciences.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-17 09:11:00 UTC

  • INFORMATION changes STATE, and DATA does not. Data (observation), Information (h

    INFORMATION changes STATE, and DATA does not.

    Data (observation), Information (hypothesis), knowledge (theory), wisdom(law)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-15 08:11:00 UTC

  • “Some people will never learn anything, … because they understand everything t

    —“Some people will never learn anything, … because they understand everything too soon.”—Alexander Pope

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-11 09:59:00 UTC

  • THE DANGER OF A LITTLE LEARNING —“A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drin

    THE DANGER OF A LITTLE LEARNING

    —“A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”— Alexander Pope.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-11 09:38:00 UTC

  • KANT’S MONOPOLISM VS PROPERTARIANISM MARKET-“ISM” Kant wasn’t quite right. Prope

    KANT’S MONOPOLISM VS PROPERTARIANISM MARKET-“ISM”

    Kant wasn’t quite right. Propertarianism explains why. It’s not that we fail to perceive the world accurately. We do. In fact, we perceive all of it that we can act upon – which makes evolutionary sense really. Instead, it’s that we VALUE our perceptions differently. As a monotheist and monopolist, Kant did not understand the division of perception, cognition, knowledge and labor, nor did he understand it’s cause and value. He did not (as 20th century philosophers did not) understand the moral blindness caused by this difference in values. Nor the difference in moral biases as reproductive strategy. Nor did he understand that just as in the market, the information from voluntary exchanges accumulates in prices, that through cooperation across the moral spectrum we gain information necessary for the choice of construction and maintenance of commons. I despise Kant for giving the world a replacement for biblical authority. But thankfully we are no longer bound by the fallacies of monotheism, christianity, monopoly government, nor economic ignorance. And we can now construct governments as a market for commons suitable for complexity and scale beyond our perception, rather than as a monopoly producer of commons limited by our perceptions.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-09 05:45:00 UTC

  • The discipline of thinking is a lot like professional sports: the very few peopl

    The discipline of thinking is a lot like professional sports: the very few people at the margins make all the difference. But you gotta have a team to work with and spectators to make it possible.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-06 06:19:00 UTC

  • Yes, name calling is not an argument, it’s the the avoidance of an argument, by

    Yes, name calling is not an argument, it’s the the avoidance of an argument, by someone who lacks one. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-01 00:07:05 UTC

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