Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • “This monotheistic passion for reduction to operations seems to lead to cul-de-s

    —“This monotheistic passion for reduction to operations seems to lead to cul-de-sacs.”— Bruce Caithness

    Bruce,

    1) Operationalism is an attempt at falsification. Just as in math, if we can construct a statement through operations then it is existentially possible. Just as in economics, if we can reduce an economic statement to a sequence of rationally executable decisions. Just as in science, if we can reduce a test to a repeatable sequence of operations, and if we can reduce our measures to those that are possible then the test is existentially possible, assuming determinism in the universe and therefore the constancy of that which we measure (without which no science ,and no theory, can be possible).

    If i conduct tests of identity, internal consistency, external correspondence, repeatability, full accounting, parsimony (limits), existential possibility, objective morality (voluntary transfer), then I have laundered imaginary content from my statements. This is what science consists in: identifying existential information and eliminating imaginary information.

    If I have performed the due diligence to launder by speech of imaginary information, then I speak as truthfully as is possible. I may indeed speak the most parsimonious testimony possible (the truth) or I may not – a matter of error at one end of the possibilities, or of imprecision at the other end.

    I can warranty that I have performed that due diligence by stating that I speak truthfully: I give testimony in public, as to the truthfulness of my speech.

    2) One can speak truthfully, and warranty that one speaks truthfully. If one speaks in e-prime (specifying means of existence), and in operational definitions (rather than experiences), it is extremely difficult to articulate an idea that still contains imaginary content.

    3) Rather than “leading to cul-de-sac’s” I suspect that this is the completion (or repair) of the critical rationalist research program and the most important invention in philosophy since the failure of that program.

    Just is what it is. I just did a good yeoman’s labor. But between explanatory power, and parsimony it’s a pretty powerful theoretical structure, and it’s pretty hard to defeat it.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-07-01 03:45:00 UTC

  • MAN CREATES TRUTH. TRUTH MUST BE SPOKEN. ALL ELSE IS JUST EXISTENCE. You see, th

    MAN CREATES TRUTH. TRUTH MUST BE SPOKEN. ALL ELSE IS JUST EXISTENCE.

    You see, the statement ‘full of truth’ is an existentially impossible statement. The universe exists. Truth must be stated. Error imagination, wishful thinking, bias and deception can be removed from our utterances. But our utterances can never ‘be full of truth’. Truth is constructed. It does not exist prior to its construction. Truth is a product of man’s action. Everything else is just existence.

    (Why did that take 2500 years?)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-07-01 03:06:00 UTC

  • Dear brain. I do not want to work on indeterminism vs determinism (free will) to

    Dear brain. I do not want to work on indeterminism vs determinism (free will) today. As much as you want me to write about it, the argument is quite simple: when we hypothesize, or intuit a response, the information is incomplete and as evidence shows, highly susceptible to error. So you can say that we exist in the universe, and that there are limits to our constructible concepts. But I would argue that those limits are produced by the limits of our ability to act, and as such any expansion of those limits is not meaningful for us. So the universe may be roughly deterministic at a macro level, and there may be a limited domain of cognition and action for man within that universe, but inside of those limits we have the free will necessary to act at the scale we are capable of acting within. And no other limit would be logical for an organism to evolve.

    But no matter how much you nag me, I am not in the mood to write about that subject. (yes, I know, you are stuck on it and want to get it out.) But I am much more interested in limits to perception and calculation. And even if you make me forget what I was going to write, I will remember it later, and write about it then. 🙂 So today, I am going to wrestle with explaining that to people. (If you will please just let me remember the example I was going to use… dammit…).

    Source date (UTC): 2015-07-01 00:30:00 UTC

  • Sorry: Propertarianism is an Amoral and Objective Language – And That Can Be Emotionally Unsatisfying.

    [I] know that you want to feel emotionally vindicated, and that you want to vent your frustrations when conducting an argument, but the fact of the matter is Propertarianism and Testimonialism are constructed amorally (( amoral adjective “not involving questions of right or wrong; without moral quality; neither moral nor immoral.” )) so that all moral propositions can be objectively described, and all moral questions are objectively decidable. Propertarianism(ethics) and Testimonialism (epistemology) let you construct and win arguments wherein the other party is using various means of deception in order to obscure their advocacy for thefts. So, assuming you’re right (and conservatives are usually right, even if argumentatively incompetent) then using Testimonialism and Propertarianism will allow you to win arguments. But unlike simple (cheap) quips, they are expensive arguments to construct and require that you have a bit of skill. And if that isn’t enough. Well. You don’t have reason to feel good, or to win.  We leave that to the liars and theives.

  • Sorry: Propertarianism is an Amoral and Objective Language – And That Can Be Emotionally Unsatisfying.

    [I] know that you want to feel emotionally vindicated, and that you want to vent your frustrations when conducting an argument, but the fact of the matter is Propertarianism and Testimonialism are constructed amorally (( amoral adjective “not involving questions of right or wrong; without moral quality; neither moral nor immoral.” )) so that all moral propositions can be objectively described, and all moral questions are objectively decidable. Propertarianism(ethics) and Testimonialism (epistemology) let you construct and win arguments wherein the other party is using various means of deception in order to obscure their advocacy for thefts. So, assuming you’re right (and conservatives are usually right, even if argumentatively incompetent) then using Testimonialism and Propertarianism will allow you to win arguments. But unlike simple (cheap) quips, they are expensive arguments to construct and require that you have a bit of skill. And if that isn’t enough. Well. You don’t have reason to feel good, or to win.  We leave that to the liars and theives.

  • Testimonialism (Completed Critical Rationalism)

    (second draft) (full cycle) (still needs third section) [W]e both perceive, and remember stimuli, and construct and remember relations from that stimuli, and construct and remember layers upon layers of those relations.

    The acts of planning, calculating, hypothesizing, searching, freely-associating, daydreaming, dreaming, and subconscious association attempt to imagine relations between the entire spectrum of memories we can store. Once some (useful?) association is made (found) we must criticize it: determine if it withstands the scrutiny of other relations. We determine if our imaginary relations survive (are truth candidates) by the act of testing those imagined relations to see if they fail or not – and therefore are worthy of our investment or not. We constantly compare the usefulness of the imagined relation with the cost of that imagined relation. The return on those relations determines how excited we ‘feel’ about those relations and the energy expenditure we can risk in pursuit of those relations. Returns can be both subjective and objective. Return can vary from mere satisfaction of curiosity, to personal gain, to a novel invention, to the total transformation of the world of man. As the complexity of relations increases, the means by which we test our imagined relations increases. While we are sometimes able to test our imagined relations by means of introspection, at some point we lack sufficient information to perform such tests, and must resort to both more structured methods of testing, and restore to gaining additional information to see if the imagined relation survives criticism. We perform this expansion of criticism until our estimation of the combination of risk,cost and reward favors conducting the final experiment of acting, rather than conducting either further criticism, or abandoning it as providing insufficient return. [T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which (a)philosophical science, (b)the social sciences, and (c)the physical sciences, use to launder existential impossibility, limitlessness, error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, deception, and (objective) immorality (in the domain of the social sciences) from our testimony (speech). This laundering is achieved by a set of methodological criticisms addressing increasing levels of complexity of which philosophical science consists of the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another a subset of those criticisms. Those criticisms consist of tests of: Identity, Internal Consistency, External Correspondence, Existential Possibility (Operationalism), Full Accounting (against selection bias), Parsimony (limits), and voluntary transfer (objective morality).”

  • Testimonialism (Completed Critical Rationalism)

    (second draft) (full cycle) (still needs third section) [W]e both perceive, and remember stimuli, and construct and remember relations from that stimuli, and construct and remember layers upon layers of those relations.

    The acts of planning, calculating, hypothesizing, searching, freely-associating, daydreaming, dreaming, and subconscious association attempt to imagine relations between the entire spectrum of memories we can store. Once some (useful?) association is made (found) we must criticize it: determine if it withstands the scrutiny of other relations. We determine if our imaginary relations survive (are truth candidates) by the act of testing those imagined relations to see if they fail or not – and therefore are worthy of our investment or not. We constantly compare the usefulness of the imagined relation with the cost of that imagined relation. The return on those relations determines how excited we ‘feel’ about those relations and the energy expenditure we can risk in pursuit of those relations. Returns can be both subjective and objective. Return can vary from mere satisfaction of curiosity, to personal gain, to a novel invention, to the total transformation of the world of man. As the complexity of relations increases, the means by which we test our imagined relations increases. While we are sometimes able to test our imagined relations by means of introspection, at some point we lack sufficient information to perform such tests, and must resort to both more structured methods of testing, and restore to gaining additional information to see if the imagined relation survives criticism. We perform this expansion of criticism until our estimation of the combination of risk,cost and reward favors conducting the final experiment of acting, rather than conducting either further criticism, or abandoning it as providing insufficient return. [T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which (a)philosophical science, (b)the social sciences, and (c)the physical sciences, use to launder existential impossibility, limitlessness, error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, deception, and (objective) immorality (in the domain of the social sciences) from our testimony (speech). This laundering is achieved by a set of methodological criticisms addressing increasing levels of complexity of which philosophical science consists of the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another a subset of those criticisms. Those criticisms consist of tests of: Identity, Internal Consistency, External Correspondence, Existential Possibility (Operationalism), Full Accounting (against selection bias), Parsimony (limits), and voluntary transfer (objective morality).”

  • Saturate The Environment with Truthfulness and People Will Act Truthfully

    (By: Curt Doolittle, Johannes Meixner and Andy Curzon) [W]e learn actions by doing. But we learn metaphysics by observation: our most effective learning-by-doing comes from recognizing patterns and habits of others in the environment. Things we take for granted as static, rather than open to our modification.

    So I tend to see something like programming as a skill that must be learned by doing. Some people are incapable no matter how many times they try to do something. Some people must do something many, many times. Others must do things a few times. Others just once or twice. Some of us can master concepts purely by imagining doing them a few times, and some of us by imagining the art of imagining doing them instantly. (We are very RARE.) We know that this progression roughy mirrors standard deviations of IQ around a ‘human minimum’ of around 106 (the start of Smart Fraction abilities: verbal articulation of ideas). And that makes sense when you realize that verbalizing complex ideas is in itself, the art of imagining operations in sequence. WHERE DOES THIS LEAD? – Saturate the environment with truth and people will act truthfully. – Saturate the environment with error the people will act erroneously. – Saturate the environment with deception and the people will act deceptively. – Saturate the environment with violence, and people will act violently. Because that is what it means to adapt to the environment.. – Education was the first means of public broadcasting. – Reading was the next, but it was voluntary. – Radio was next and could be done without effort. – Television was next and it was a serotonin-producing drug, that made saturation effortless. – Today the curious can see confirmation and alliance in almost any alternate reality that they can imagine. In Advanced countries people live in their isolation chambers, listening to echoes. Saturation is the best teaching. But how do we ensure people are saturated by truths rather than falsehoods? We make untruthful speech a crime when placed into the commons. Deprive the environment of negativity, and people will not act negatively. And within one or two generations we will saturate people with truth. And as such we: – Saturate the environment with truth and people will act truthfully. – Saturate the environment with trust and people will act trustworthily. – Saturate the environment with confidence and people will act confidently. – Saturate the environment with certainty and people will act certainly. – Saturate the environment with assurance, and people will act assuredly. – Saturate the environment with anything, and people will act likewise. So you see…. “after all, we’re all alike.” Education need not be interpersonal if it is environmental. The Propertarian Institute The Philosophy of Aristocracy Kiev, Ukraine.

  • Saturate The Environment with Truthfulness and People Will Act Truthfully

    (By: Curt Doolittle, Johannes Meixner and Andy Curzon) [W]e learn actions by doing. But we learn metaphysics by observation: our most effective learning-by-doing comes from recognizing patterns and habits of others in the environment. Things we take for granted as static, rather than open to our modification.

    So I tend to see something like programming as a skill that must be learned by doing. Some people are incapable no matter how many times they try to do something. Some people must do something many, many times. Others must do things a few times. Others just once or twice. Some of us can master concepts purely by imagining doing them a few times, and some of us by imagining the art of imagining doing them instantly. (We are very RARE.) We know that this progression roughy mirrors standard deviations of IQ around a ‘human minimum’ of around 106 (the start of Smart Fraction abilities: verbal articulation of ideas). And that makes sense when you realize that verbalizing complex ideas is in itself, the art of imagining operations in sequence. WHERE DOES THIS LEAD? – Saturate the environment with truth and people will act truthfully. – Saturate the environment with error the people will act erroneously. – Saturate the environment with deception and the people will act deceptively. – Saturate the environment with violence, and people will act violently. Because that is what it means to adapt to the environment.. – Education was the first means of public broadcasting. – Reading was the next, but it was voluntary. – Radio was next and could be done without effort. – Television was next and it was a serotonin-producing drug, that made saturation effortless. – Today the curious can see confirmation and alliance in almost any alternate reality that they can imagine. In Advanced countries people live in their isolation chambers, listening to echoes. Saturation is the best teaching. But how do we ensure people are saturated by truths rather than falsehoods? We make untruthful speech a crime when placed into the commons. Deprive the environment of negativity, and people will not act negatively. And within one or two generations we will saturate people with truth. And as such we: – Saturate the environment with truth and people will act truthfully. – Saturate the environment with trust and people will act trustworthily. – Saturate the environment with confidence and people will act confidently. – Saturate the environment with certainty and people will act certainly. – Saturate the environment with assurance, and people will act assuredly. – Saturate the environment with anything, and people will act likewise. So you see…. “after all, we’re all alike.” Education need not be interpersonal if it is environmental. The Propertarian Institute The Philosophy of Aristocracy Kiev, Ukraine.

  • A Short Course on Propertarianism’s Testimonial Truth

    (promoted to post) (very good outline) [T]he Truth – as in the most parsimonious description we can possibly make – we cannot know, even if we speak it. Truthfulness on the other hand, we can know.
    LIMITS: TRUTHFUL ENOUGH FOR THE CONSEQUENCES http://www.propertarianism.com/…/…/21/a-hierarchy-of-truths/ DEFINITIONS OF TRUTHFULNESS http://www.propertarianism.com/2015/05/29/definitions-truth/ DUE DILIGENCE NECESSARY FOR THE WARRANTY OF TRUTHFULNESS http://www.propertarianism.com/…/due-diligence-necessary-f…/ THE END OF HISTORY IS NOT DEMOCRACY BUT THE TRUTHFUL CIVILIZATION http://www.propertarianism.com/…/the-end-of-history-the-tr…/ FUKUYAMA DIDN”T UNDERSTAND http://www.propertarianism.com/…/13/fukuyama-didnt-underst…/ SCIENCE IS A MORAL DISCIPLINE IN WHICH WE WARRANTY THE TRUTHFULNESS OF OUR SPEECH. http://www.propertarianism.com/…/science-is-a-moral-discip…/ If scientists can warranty the truthfulness of their work, there is no reason the rest of us cannot do so. PHILOSOPHY MORALITY LAW AND SCIENCE CAN BE (AND SHOULD BE) IDENTICAL PROPOSITIONS http://www.propertarianism.com/…/philosophy-morality-scien…/ WE DISCOVERED TRUTH TELLING – WE DISCOVERED TRUTH. http://www.propertarianism.com/…/we-discovered-truth-telli…/ CULTURAL VARIANTS OF TRUTH http://www.propertarianism.com/…/cultural-variants-of-trut…/ THE CURE FOR PROPAGANDA AND THE RESTORATION OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION http://www.propertarianism.com/…/the-cure-for-propaganda-a…/ ITS EXPENSIVE, YES. THE COST OF ELMINATING PSEUDOSCIENCE IN ECONOMICS https://propertarianinstitute.com/2015/06/04/the-cost-of-eliminating-pseudoscience-in-economics/ WE JUST LEARN WHAT WORKS: TRUTH IN DEFENSE OF THE COMMONS http://www.propertarianism.com/…/we-never-know-anything-we…/ THE ONLY MEANS OF ELIMINATING THE STATE AND CONSTRUCTING LIBERTY http://www.propertarianism.com/…/the-only-means-of-elimina…/ LIBERTY IS LIKE TRUTH: THERE IS ALWAYS MORE OF IT TO BE FOUND http://www.propertarianism.com/…/…/14/liberty-is-like-truth/ SEE ALSO My Criticism Of David Miller Is A Very Limited One http://www.propertarianism.com/2015/04/06/my-criticism-of-david-miller-is-a-very-limited-one/ Reforming Libertarian Ethics http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/02/15/reforming-libertarian-ethics/ Curt Doolittle Testimonialism and Propertarianism The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine