Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • TESTIMONIALISM (COMPLETED CRITICAL RATIONALISM) (second draft) (full cycle) (sti

    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).”

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-27 06:56:00 UTC

  • Q&A: Does your methodology work backwards from a presumption? (Sigh. Critique is Everywhere.)

    A Question From Benjamin Uraminski

    Curt, your underlying methodology seems to work backward from a presupposed solution, similar to an algebra problem. In this instance, it having already been decided upon that everything is inherently sexual so that the missing variables which reinforce the preconceived notion appear obvious to one who holds those beliefs.

    I notice this particular Freudian-esque and neo-Darwinist methodology, that everything is inherently sexual, a lot in the modernist thought patterns.

    To draw another analogy: how is this inherently different than the methodology of a paranoid, believing that everyone is out to get him, interpreting the facts his sense-perceptions supply to him, to reinforce the preconceived notion that, everyone is, in fact, out to get him?

    [W]ell, Ben, I am going to assume that you’re asking a serious question. 🙂 Even if you fall into psychologizing (authoritarianism, ridicule, gossip, ad hominem) rather than criticizing the argument itself.

    Either the argument possess explanatory power, and survives criticism or it Doesn’t. In the case of both Testimonialism and Propertarianism that is going to be very hard. And to criticize aristocratic egalitarianism will require only that you justify deceit and favor dysgenic reproduction. Which is a preference, I admit.

    As for ‘working backward’ the answer is that I started with the very real problem of cooperation (See Axelrod et al), and constructed Propertarianism from rational incentives in in the face of opportunity costs. And like a good analytic I used every available bit of scientific evidence I could find to criticize it. When I understood that Haidt had pretty much identified the causes, and that I could map them to conflicts over the allocation of property rights, then it wasn’t difficult to use the work in his bibliography to develop the rest of Propertarianism: I expressed moral statements in the AMORAL language of economics.

    As for psychology, the reason it seems like psychology is that it replaces authoritarian psychologizing(pseudoscientific) with a much more sophisticated and nuanced means of describing human thoughts as incentives rather than experiences. So to some degree (by accident) I do think that Propertarianism and Testimonialism fully replace authoritarian/totalitarian/equalitarian psychology, by extending economics (observations of demonstrated preference) to include the first principles of economics: incentives to cooperate. And in doing so I explain demonstrated political preferences in voting as a division of moral perception knowledge and labor. This is pretty profound really. And one of the best tests of it, is that the explanatory power appears to unite all fields of inquiry under a very simple set of premises starting with the need to acquire.

    As for your analogy to Algebra, the differences is that numbers cannot make layer upon layer of intertemporally perishable normative contracts any more than hydrogen and oxygen can choose not to bond, where people can. As such we can exchange what appear to be violations of those first principles if in the aggregate we benefit.

    As for methodology, which methodology are you talking about?
    Testimonial truth?
    Propertarianism?
    Aristocratic Egalitarianism?

    I am pretty sure Testimonialism will survive as the definition of truth proper from which all others are derived. That’s probably one of the most important insights into truth in the past century. It completes Critical Rationalism / Critical Preference.

    To defeat Propertarianism would require some very substantial and what appears unlikely changes to the history of man’s development. (as we say, the framework of social science is evolutionary biology).

    To defeat aristocratic egalitarianism is a matter of preference, although I argue that if one built a high trust truthful polity, that they would all evolve into aristocratic egalitarian polities over time.

    So these arguments are defeat-able, but they’re defeat-able on fairly sophisticated grounds.

    But then again, Marx built an enormous edifice on a lie (dialectical materialism) and a falsehood (labor theory of value). So maybe I made similar mistakes.

    But like Marx, those mistakes will require ratio-scientific arguments not pseudoscientific (psychological gossip and shaming).

    (Sorry for throwing the tease in there but I couldn’t resist.)

  • Q&A: Does your methodology work backwards from a presumption? (Sigh. Critique is Everywhere.)

    A Question From Benjamin Uraminski

    Curt, your underlying methodology seems to work backward from a presupposed solution, similar to an algebra problem. In this instance, it having already been decided upon that everything is inherently sexual so that the missing variables which reinforce the preconceived notion appear obvious to one who holds those beliefs.

    I notice this particular Freudian-esque and neo-Darwinist methodology, that everything is inherently sexual, a lot in the modernist thought patterns.

    To draw another analogy: how is this inherently different than the methodology of a paranoid, believing that everyone is out to get him, interpreting the facts his sense-perceptions supply to him, to reinforce the preconceived notion that, everyone is, in fact, out to get him?

    [W]ell, Ben, I am going to assume that you’re asking a serious question. 🙂 Even if you fall into psychologizing (authoritarianism, ridicule, gossip, ad hominem) rather than criticizing the argument itself.

    Either the argument possess explanatory power, and survives criticism or it Doesn’t. In the case of both Testimonialism and Propertarianism that is going to be very hard. And to criticize aristocratic egalitarianism will require only that you justify deceit and favor dysgenic reproduction. Which is a preference, I admit.

    As for ‘working backward’ the answer is that I started with the very real problem of cooperation (See Axelrod et al), and constructed Propertarianism from rational incentives in in the face of opportunity costs. And like a good analytic I used every available bit of scientific evidence I could find to criticize it. When I understood that Haidt had pretty much identified the causes, and that I could map them to conflicts over the allocation of property rights, then it wasn’t difficult to use the work in his bibliography to develop the rest of Propertarianism: I expressed moral statements in the AMORAL language of economics.

    As for psychology, the reason it seems like psychology is that it replaces authoritarian psychologizing(pseudoscientific) with a much more sophisticated and nuanced means of describing human thoughts as incentives rather than experiences. So to some degree (by accident) I do think that Propertarianism and Testimonialism fully replace authoritarian/totalitarian/equalitarian psychology, by extending economics (observations of demonstrated preference) to include the first principles of economics: incentives to cooperate. And in doing so I explain demonstrated political preferences in voting as a division of moral perception knowledge and labor. This is pretty profound really. And one of the best tests of it, is that the explanatory power appears to unite all fields of inquiry under a very simple set of premises starting with the need to acquire.

    As for your analogy to Algebra, the differences is that numbers cannot make layer upon layer of intertemporally perishable normative contracts any more than hydrogen and oxygen can choose not to bond, where people can. As such we can exchange what appear to be violations of those first principles if in the aggregate we benefit.

    As for methodology, which methodology are you talking about?
    Testimonial truth?
    Propertarianism?
    Aristocratic Egalitarianism?

    I am pretty sure Testimonialism will survive as the definition of truth proper from which all others are derived. That’s probably one of the most important insights into truth in the past century. It completes Critical Rationalism / Critical Preference.

    To defeat Propertarianism would require some very substantial and what appears unlikely changes to the history of man’s development. (as we say, the framework of social science is evolutionary biology).

    To defeat aristocratic egalitarianism is a matter of preference, although I argue that if one built a high trust truthful polity, that they would all evolve into aristocratic egalitarian polities over time.

    So these arguments are defeat-able, but they’re defeat-able on fairly sophisticated grounds.

    But then again, Marx built an enormous edifice on a lie (dialectical materialism) and a falsehood (labor theory of value). So maybe I made similar mistakes.

    But like Marx, those mistakes will require ratio-scientific arguments not pseudoscientific (psychological gossip and shaming).

    (Sorry for throwing the tease in there but I couldn’t resist.)

  • Science And Philosophy: 2500 Years Of Intellectual History Condensed Into 125 Words.

    [T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which philosophical science, the social sciences, and 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 requires the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another 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).”

    (I suppose a lot of philosophers could read that paragraph and weep – that it took us 2500 years to state it.)

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine.

  • Science And Philosophy: 2500 Years Of Intellectual History Condensed Into 125 Words.

    [T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which philosophical science, the social sciences, and 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 requires the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another 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).”

    (I suppose a lot of philosophers could read that paragraph and weep – that it took us 2500 years to state it.)

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine.

  • ART IS VERY CRITICIZABLE, AND LIKE MORALITY IT”S OBJECTIVELY BETTER OR WORSE (wo

    ART IS VERY CRITICIZABLE, AND LIKE MORALITY IT”S OBJECTIVELY BETTER OR WORSE

    (worth repeating)

    As for art theory it’s pretty simple stuff. You can read every significant tome on it in a month. I am honestly not sure that Rand’s book isn’t one of the best really, in retrospect.

    – Craftsmanship (skill in use of materials)

    – Design (aesthetics – skill in associative pre-cognitive patterns)

    – Content (meaning – skill in associative cognitive patterns)

    All art can be criticized on these three criteria. And in simplest terms, in all three dimensions:

    – Novel is better (innovation)

    – Parsimony is better (clarity)

    – More information is better (richness or density)

    – Monumental (level of public/social/political value)

    – Durable (the persistence of the work as a reference is better)

    – Uniqueness (the symbol that captures an excellence of a time and place)

    We tend to see these criteria as as ‘excellence’.

    Using these criteria, all:

    – Craft

    – Design

    – Art

    Can be compared and contrasted if not quantitatively(cardinally) at least qualitatively(ordinary).

    You would think not, but opinion in art coalesces just as do theories in science. While one might have one taste or another, it is very hard to study the whole of art history and not come to about the same conclusion as have all the others: These are clearly better and these are clearly not as good. But I PREFER these over the objectively better ones as they suit my taste.

    I hope this helps.

    If you try it, sort of by stack ranking any set of art pieces by the criteria above it will rapidly become clear to you that art criticism and scientific criticism are extremely similar endeavors.

    This fucks with the mind of sentimental people who desperately want an internal intuitionistic truth to appeal to – but it’s sad for them. I’m sorry.

    Art is just as open to criticism as any other work of man. There is just a lot of marginal indifference withing each strata of work.

    It’s very obvious after a while that the communists and socialists and feminists and postmodernists attacked art just as they attacked truth.

    ‘Cause they desperately wanna lie.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-25 13:35:00 UTC

  • THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IS A MORAL PHILOSOPHY —I suppose it would really annoy H

    THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IS A MORAL PHILOSOPHY

    —I suppose it would really annoy Hawking to have it demonstrated that the scientific method is only a moral philosophy: a set of criticisms that allow you to warranty that your theories are free of existential impossibility, limitlessness, error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, deception, and (objective) immorality (in the domain of the social sciences).—

    (The first person who gave me that idea was Ken Hopf. Too bad he is stuck in 1930.)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-25 08:52:00 UTC

  • THE DEFINITION OF “OFFENDED” —“Offended does not mean harmed, it means warned.

    THE DEFINITION OF “OFFENDED”

    —“Offended does not mean harmed, it means warned.”— Robyn Harte-Bunting

    To offend is to warn. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-25 01:15:00 UTC

  • PSEUDOSCIENCE:—“The failure to warranty that you have sufficiently laundered e

    PSEUDOSCIENCE:—“The failure to warranty that you have sufficiently laundered error, imagination, bias, wishful thinking and deception from your theories (statements), leaving only existential information, free of projection, as truth candidates.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-24 11:53:00 UTC

  • WHAT DOES PHILOSOPHY “BOIL DOWN TO”? >>Bogdan Kolesnyk So philosophy boils down

    WHAT DOES PHILOSOPHY “BOIL DOWN TO”?

    >>Bogdan Kolesnyk

    So philosophy boils down to pragmatism?

    >>Max Andronichuk

    Curt Doolittle I thought this could be a topic you might get sucked into smile

    >>Curt Doolittle

    Thanks Max Andronichuk

    Lets see if I can do this justice:

    Nassim and I are working on the same problem from different directions. But out of the current generation of intellectuals we are the only two who have identified the central problem. I don’t know the proper way to frame it for everyone’s understanding, but he is trying either to determine roughly what information is necessary to justify an argument, or to state that the amount of information necessary to justify any argument is unknowable (or at least, that it is either very vast, or very expensive). I sort of see him as trying to prevent fraudulent use of innumeracy. What I would like to see (and I think what Mandelbrot was trying with his later work, is to find empirical measurements of this limit from our best empirical evidence of human decisions: economics, stock markets, and finance.

    I am trying the same thing, but I have approached it differently, because I stumbled upon the failure of the Operational Revolution in a similar way to how Nassim did. I was modeling AI decisions for tanks in the 80’s as part of game design, and he was modeling decision trees for risk in the 80s. But I think what’s important about Mandelbrot’s analysis, Nassim’s analysis, and mine, is that we all were subject to Minsky’s observation: that computers teach you to think in existential operations, using a particular grammar that insulated from the errors common in philosophy that unfortunately worked their way into mathematics, and now into physics.

    So our generation of thinkers understands that there is a significant problem in intellectual history that much of the 20th and now 21st century (despite Hayek’s warning) has stumbled into what Hayek called ‘mysticism’, what Poincare, Brouwer and Bridgman called pejoratively ‘philosophy’, but what most of us today would call ‘pseudoscience’ in various disciplines: philosophy, economics, social science, the physical sciences, and mathematics.

    Or what I would call ‘the failure to warranty that you have sufficiently laundered error, imagination, bias, wishful thinking and deception from your theories (statements), leaving only existential information, free of projection, as truth candidates.

    We can fix this problem in both philosophy and science once we grasp that practice of what we call science is nothing more than the moral discipline of laundering error, imagination, bias, wishful thinking, and deception from your statements, by various forms of testing (criticism).

    If we understand then, that science, once the set of moral warranties that constitute science is complete, is identical to ethics, then philosophy and science are for all intents and purposes identical systems of thought. (I will cover why philosophy and science couldn’t merge earlier in another post at another time.)

    But then we need to show how we can complete science, which consists of these criticisms:

    …(a) Identity and/or ‘Naming’ (comparable, calculable)

    …(b) Internal Consistency (logical)

    …(c) Externally correspondent (empirical)

    …(d) Parsimony (limits, or imprecisely: falsifiability)

    by adding these criticisms:

    …(e) Operational Descriptions (tests of existential possibility)

    …(f) Full Accounting (tests against selection bias) (freedom from information loss)

    …(g) Morality (tests that any statement is objectively moral);

    Where:

    Full Accounting refers to what economists refer to as opportunity costs: the full inter-temporal consequences – which in ethics, economics and politics is much more complex than the physical sciences.

    And where:

    Objective morality refers to the involuntary imposition of costs. Or stated positively, as the requirement for productive, fully informed, voluntary transfer, free of negative externality of the same criteria.

    SO THE QUESTION OF WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY REDUCIBLE TO:

    It is reducible to truth-telling (science), whereby we produce truth candidates that survive criticism as a means of defeating error, imaginary content, bias, wishful thinking, justification (justificationary rationalism), and deception.

    Conversely: If it isn’t reducible to truth telling, then you have a serious problem on your hands. smile emoticon

    (That should melt your brains for a few months.)

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    >>>Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    I am working on bias-variance where we see that it is OK to miss the truth if it lowers the error rate.

    >>>Curt Doolittle

    I will flip this from the justificationary phrasing that Nassim is using, to “It is ok to miss truth if you warranty that you have performed due diligence against negative externalities.” This is “SKIN IN THE GAME”.

    >>>Curt Doolittle

    “SKIN IN THE GAME”

    An individual performs a demonstrated preference for a theory prior to action, where as an observation functions as a demonstrated preference post-action.

    In other words, there is no test of an individuals hypothesis, even to himself, without demonstrated preference. Statements are meaningless. The only way we know if someone has made a statement that has passed his own cognitive biases is if he demonstrates a preference by placing skin in the game.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-24 10:08:00 UTC