Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • MISES: “HUMAN OPERATIONALISM”, “NOT HUMAN ACTION” He was that close. I have more

    MISES: “HUMAN OPERATIONALISM”, “NOT HUMAN ACTION”

    He was that close.

    I have more important things to do with my life, but if I had the time I could rewrite his tome Human Action as Human Operationalism, and instantly reform the debate from one between science and pseudoscience in which he has been outcast, to one that unified all fields, and restored his position in intellectual history.

    Damn. He was SO CLOSE. So close. It’s taken me years. And in retrospect it’s tragic. Terribly tragic. He *almost* reformed economics and saved us from a century of destructive Keynesian policy.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-16 04:34:00 UTC

  • MISES: “HUMAN OPERATIONALISM”, “NOT HUMAN ACTION” He was that close. I have more

    MISES: “HUMAN OPERATIONALISM”, “NOT HUMAN ACTION”

    He was that close.

    I have more important things to do with my life, but if I had the time I could rewrite his tome Human Action as Human Operationalism, and instantly reform the debate from one between science and pseudoscience in which he has been outcast, to one that unified all fields, and restored his position in intellectual history.

    Damn. He was SO CLOSE. So close. It’s taken me years. And in retrospect it’s tragic. Terribly tragic. He *almost* reformed economics and saved us from a century of destructive Keynesian policy.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-16 04:33:00 UTC

  • I’M SORRY THAT MY INQUIRY INTO TRUTH ISN’T THAT INTERESTING. 🙂 (the importance

    I’M SORRY THAT MY INQUIRY INTO TRUTH ISN’T THAT INTERESTING. 🙂

    (the importance of the work)

    I realize that I have spent a lot of time over the past twelve months on Truth. And that this appears (falsely) to be a rat-hole, that is not as interesting as attacking the argumentative follies of the political extremes.

    But I am working at an institutional solution to the restoration of truth telling and suppressing the problem of intentional deception and ignorance, and acting as a vector for deception and ignorance. This hasn’t been done before. It’s hard work.

    The degree to which we justify our investment in ‘meaning’ and justify our reproductive (moral) biases was something that I wasn’t prepared for. Nor was the level of sophistication that can be accomplished by using ‘meaning’ as a means of manufacturing ignorance.

    A rationalist says “but it’s useful for understanding” (a justification). A mathematician says “but it works” (a justification). A logician says “but it largely works” (a justification). A lawyer says “but we have tradition” (a justification). A politician says “The people will not understand that” (a justification). An economist says “We try only to solve this problem, not that one” (a justification). A physicist says “that’s unscientific”, without understanding what the ethics of science demand of him, and why (a justification).

    All of these justifications (fallacies) manufacture ignorance. All of them impede truth. They provide incentive to continue to justify what we know, rather than reform what we know. Over time they calcify by the mere accumulation of the cost of learning an alternative: transaction costs and conformity costs.

    I think this specializing at justification is the underlying reason that civilizations calcify and fail.

    But even if that problem is farther out than the one we face today, prohibiting deception in economics, politics(government) and law, so that the people who speak the truth may prosper, dragging humanity along with them, is still the central problem that I face.

    And to institutionally expand prohibition on immoral action (negative externalities) thereby increasing transaction (and conformity) costs[1], on an activity that is currently assumed to be harmless (free of negative externality), and expanding that prohibition by law, requires that we have some criteria sufficient to test statements for due diligence against the production of that externality – even if the cost of producing that common (the truth) requires all of us pay costs in both material, intellectual, and of forgone opportunities.

    ***That sufficiency consists of due diligence and warranty, where the form of due diligence was discovered by scientists, and while inarticulately expressed, requires not just internal consistency, external consistency and the 20th century innovation: the requirement for falsification, but the 21st century innovation: the requirements for operational definitions as proof of existential possibility and the requirement for moral constraint: free of imposed costs that we call negative externalities – stated positively as a requirement for productive, diligent(truthfully stated), fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of all negative externality under the same recursive criterion.***

    So that is why I must solve the problem of truth, uniting law, morality, philosophy, science and economics into a single system of thought: the art of truth telling, the means of due diligence, and the provision of warranty to our testimony to the jury of our peers.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Lviv Ukraine

    —–

    [1] Technically speaking a transaction costs (material), opportunity costs(consequences), forgone opportunity costs (norms) and conformity costs(psychological and behavioral costs), are categorized differently – however, I tend to suggest that emphasis on the form of cost is a means of imposing value judgements on what are merely ‘costs’. As such I tend to use ‘transaction cost’ similar to ‘information’: that which is necessary to change state, regardless of whether the cost is material(physical property), physical(body, action and time), or mental(psychological).

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-16 04:09:00 UTC

  • i don’t feel well, but today, i made sort of accidental progress on the use of m

    i don’t feel well, but today, i made sort of accidental progress on the use of meaning, analogy and conflation as sources of ignorance. if it weren’t for all these well intentioned folks trying to justify meaning and allegory, despite their scientific bias, i wouldn’t get anywhere given the literature.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-15 17:03:00 UTC

  • THE LIMITS OF REASON VS THE POWER OF OVERLOADING How do we measure the limits of

    THE LIMITS OF REASON VS THE POWER OF OVERLOADING

    How do we measure the limits of reason that can be exceeded by overloading?

    Is it possible to create a normative (habituated) method of thinking that prohibits overloading?

    Is a requirement for operational definitions enough to prevent overloading? I have been working under the assumption that it is. But the more I study the use of deceit by overloading, the less sure I am.

    How do I develop a test of overloading?

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-12 13:34:00 UTC

  • JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN NORMATIVE CONTRACT VS WARRANTY IN EXPLO

    JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN NORMATIVE CONTRACT VS WARRANTY IN EXPLORATION INDEPENDENT OF NORMS

    First, what do we mean by “knowledge”, and of those things we mean, what is merely allegory, and what is necessity?

    Little of the universe is absent regular patterns. However, some are very noisy and difficult to find. Some are very subtle and hard to find. Some are either too large or too small to observe without relying upon instruments, and others must be deduced using logical instruments. We call these regular patterns ‘information’.

    Humans can modify the real world in a variety of ways, leaving information behind. We can do this as simply leaving evidence of passage through a forces or field, or in archeological evidence. We can do this intentionally with cave paintings and writing. And we can do it with our architecture, monuments and earth works. We can do this by the memories that we transfer between generations through repetition of experience, advice and story.

    A computer must run a program to create the experience we see before us when using it. Information must mix with memories, to create the experience we call ‘knowing’.

    Knowledge is reconstructed from information by mixing with existing memories, just as meaning is transferred by the use of analogies to transfer properties. So information exists without a knowing subject. And that information may be very good, or very bad at producing the experience of knowledge in a subject.

    But in colloquial language we seem to have an intellectual bias that wants to separate untrue knowledge from true, or at least tested, knowledge thereby conflating QUALITY of knowledge and EXISTENCE of knowledge. We can forgive philosophers this common error, since they are concerned most often with the persuasive quality (truth) of propositions.

    And if we look carefully at the discussion of ‘knowledge’ we find philosophers conflating (a)existence/awareness, (b) risk/willingness to act, (c) truth content.

    And moreover, truth content consists of two additional properties: (c.i) persuasive power assuming an honest participant, and (c.ii) parsimonious correspondence with reality (what we mean by ‘true’).

    The reason that discussion of knowledge is problematic is that this term is a sort of catch-all for these separate properties. And so like many concepts, argument is a problem of conflating properties, each of which exists on a separate spectrum.

    “Knowing” could mean ‘awareness gained through experience’, or ‘given what we know from experience, I am willing to act upon it’, or knowing could mean ‘through experience we believe this is true’.

    So I think that the only POSSIBLE meaning of the category ‘knowledge’ is ‘awareness of a regular pattern that allows us to predict something, even if it is only to predict in the sense of identifying something as part of a category – the most simple prediction possible.

    And then we have the persuasive power of knowledge in convincing the self or others, first to state something is possible, then second to state something is worthy of action (risk).

    For example, no one ‘knows’ how to build a computer (or a cheeseburger for that matter) in the sense that they possess knowledge of construction of the constituent parts. So some knowledge can never be centralized except as a hierarchy of abstractions – trust in one another’s claim to actionable knowledge.

    For these reasons (the number of causal axis in the category we call knowledge), I think we cannot improve upon casting knowledge as:

    (a) awareness (existence) of a regular pattern combining information and memory to create an experience, which we then also remember.

    (b) all knowledge is theoretical, and open to revision (no premises are certain)

    where theoretical propositions contain both:

    (d) truth content(parsimonious correspondence with reality).

    (c) persuasive power (sufficiency) in an honest discourse(risk reduction/reward increase),

    JUSTIFICATOIN VERSUS CRITICISM = CONTRACT VS TRUTH

    So I my problem is that ‘justified true belief’ is not false under the test of risk, but is not meaningful under the test of analytic truth. In this sense, it depends upon which thing we are talking about: willingness to act (justified true belief), willingness of others to insure actions (contractual justified true belief), and analytic truth (parsimonious correspondence with reality).

    If a man gives witness in testimony and later on we find a video of the events, and it turns out that he is wrong, but that it is easy to understand how he was mistaken, we do not consider his testimony false. We only warranty what rational man is capable of warranting.

    In science we warranty that we have done due diligence: we have criticized our own arguments. We testify that we have done due diligence – we have criticized our own position.

    In this sense both justified true belief is necessary for contractual propositions, while critical rationalism (warranty) is the only epistemological possibility we can rely upon.

    The fact that argument evolved out of law (debate in the polis) probably explains the origin of conflation of contractual justification according to the norms of the polity, with the pursuit of analytic truth in epistemological exploration.

    The fact that most human action is contractual, and very little of our lives epistemic, explains the persistence of both the contractual (justificationary),and epistemic (critical scientific) as method, and the conflation of the term knowledge as a general term covering both contractual and epistemic uses.

    Norms guide most human actions. Norms are habituated and therefore reduced to intuitions to function. The norms are contractual (justificationary – so that we avoid blame). Science by contrast, produces not actions but testimony. The problem is inverted. In science all we produce is testimony regardless of normative rules. In normative relations we produce actions that we justify as according to the normative rules of society.

    So we testify that we were justified according to norms in contractual relations, and we testify that our statements are free of norms, imaginary, error, bias, habituated deception and outright deception, in science.

    This is why science is a luxury good: it’s terribly expensive, and scientific testimony is terribly expensive. Justification allows us to use scientifically tested or evolutionarily tested general rules in real world actions – contractual relations.

    And must. We cannot create general rules out of justificationary testimony, only out of critical testimony. For this reason, both justificationary and critical testimony will persist forever. While our warranties must be given by critical means, our testimony is forever justificationary. (I think that is fairly profound).

    As far as I know, albeit in brief, this is the most accurate statement of our extant understanding of the question of knowledge, and why it has been so troublesome a concept.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-10 16:10:00 UTC

  • “CURT CAN YOU COMMENT ON THIS ISSUE, AND TIE IT TO THE INFORMATIONAL COMMONS?” (

    http://mic.com/articles/107926/one-tweet-perfectly-sums-up-the-big-problem-with-how-we-talk-about-terrorismQ: “CURT CAN YOU COMMENT ON THIS ISSUE, AND TIE IT TO THE INFORMATIONAL COMMONS?”

    (long)(important)

    The questioner also asked me to be brief. (I am not good at brevity, I am good at precision, lol) So I will try to make a list of bullet points in an effort to be brief..

    PART I – CONFLATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF DECEPTION

    1) Terrorism is truthfully (honestly) defined as an act of out-group members against in-group members). Rebellion is truthfully (honestly) an act of in-group members against in-group members. Conflating them is dishonest. Conflation is a postmodern rhetorical deception learned from Marxist critique.

    2) The reason that the Cathedral: Academy, media and state have adopted the deceptive strategy of conflating terrorism and rebellion is to attempt to legitimize through postmodern repetition the Cathedral Complex: legitimize the Academy, media and state. And to delegitimize rebellion by labeling it terrorism and thereby conflating it with out-group activity.

    3) Bombing the ATF, Crashing a plane into the IRS building, bombing the NAACP, are all acts of rebellion by internal members. The purpose of rebellion is to change policies by state members when institutional means fail. Rebellion is internal politics by other means.

    4) The various islamist bombings are not acts of rebellion, but they are acts of warfare, by the only military means possible. Terrorism is extremely inexpensive warfare by out-group members against in-group members. That is why small group and poor groups rely upon terrorism: it is inexpensive. States sponsor rebellion(internal violence) and terrorism(out group violence) as discounted means of warfare. States also you proxy wars (financing conflicts with third parties.) These are all forms of warfare: the use of violence to conduct politics by other means.

    5) The purpose of warfare, terrorism and rebellion is to change policy. All forms of political violence harms citizens, infrastructure and politicians. It is dishonest to state that terrorism is for the purpose of changing policy, when changing policy is the purpose of all warfare, whether it is inexpensive warfare (terrorism) or expensive (state sponsored, organized, mechanized warfare). The purpose of war, terrorism, and rebellion is to change policy.

    As Klausewitz said, “War is just politics by other means”.

    PART II – MEDIA

    6) Media is a product that evolved as a means to sell advertising. The purpose of news is to sell product. That product need only be as ‘true’ as it does not harm their ability to sell advertising by associating advertisers with news stories. To sell that news, so that they can sell advertising, they must get your attention. The psychology of attention is a well understood phenomenon. I will not cover it here except to say that the reader must feel righteous – confirmed in his beliefs. During monopoly period, television access was centralized, but during the current period we get our information from television channels that tailor to our moral biases, and we select internet news sources, and information from friends and associates

    7) The media is not warrantied product – we do not warranty it for truth the way that CPA’s must warrant their work for due diligence. Lawyers must warrant their work for due diligence. Witnesses in court must warrant their testimony for diligence. Companies must warrant their products and services for due diligence. Even scientists must warrant their publications for due diligence. But journalism, political speech of public intellectuals, and propaganda are in the category of the few products that is not warranted to be the subject of due diligence, nor are media required to pay restitution for the damages that they cause when they fail due diligence. In our past, we held people accountable for libel, slander and defamation, but allowed dissent as a means of limiting the bad behavior of the government.

    It is quite possible that ‘free speech’ rather than ‘truthful speech’ was a catastrophic mistake in legal history. Truthful speech that causes good, truthful speech that causes harm, and untruthful speech that deceives or causes harm are very different things. There is no reason why we cannot demand that public speech, particularly public speech that is sold as a product in the market, is not warrantied like all other products and services in the market are warrantied by due diligence, and that the manufacturers and distributors of that product are not liable for damages and restitution in the case that they sell defective product.

    8) Propaganda is intentionally defective product, delivered with intent to persuade by deception using rhetorical deceptions including: conflation, loading, framing, overloading, obscurantism, straw-men, and outright lying, for the purpose of obtaining power. The general argument has been that we are all smart enough to dismiss propaganda, but history says that this isn’t true. The various pseudoscientific movements, from marxist ‘scientific socialism’, to Freudian Psychology, to Keynesian economics, the Anthropology of Franz Boas, to the outright fabrications of the Frankfurt School, to the postmodern philosophers, to today’s political correctness, all make use of constant repetition of false statements consisting of various forms of fallacious argument: conflation, loading, framing, obscurantism, straw men, and marxist ‘Critique’ to stimulate our intuitions, and generate confirmation bias, via normative awareness, rather than rational persuasion by truthful means. In other words, its a very complex and innovative form of deception by suggestion, rather than persuasion by reason.

    Propaganda is not warrantied either. If it was, there wouldn’t be any of it. And there is a difference between placebo products,( light therapy,most vitamins) that make you feel better purely psychologically, and products that cause you harm, or justify theft. Most political propaganda seeks to encourage of justifies theft – why not? If you cannot compete in the market, then competing using deception in order to collect rents is often easier. In fact, if we study the evolution of businesses, the most effective strategy is to become large enough that you can seek various rents through limited monopolies. (I can’t link to research on this from my location but it’s available.)

    PART III – THE INFORMATIONAL COMMONS

    10) The Informational Commons”. We treat parks as a commons, we treat the earth, land, and air as a commons, we treat roads, sidewalks, public buildings, and radio spectrum as commons – and most of us treat our traditions myths and rituals as commons, as well as our manners, ethics and morals. We now treat healthcare as a commons. We treat many things as commons. Meaning that we consider ourselves shareholders in some asset that none of us permit one another to consume or destroy but many of us can use as long as we do it no harm, and therefore harm other shareholders.

    The common asset that we regulate most is the market for goods and services. Because we are more dependent upon the market for our health, wealth, and well being than we are upon any other infrastructure. And because it is very easy to lie cheat and steal in that market. We created standard weights and measures, law, contract, guarantee, interest, banking, money, finance, interest. We created minimum warranties. We require truth in labeling. (Although we lose that one all the time and many labels are still deceptive: MSG and various forms of sugar are in everything and both of them are probably equal to Orwell’s ‘Soma’.)

    Aren’t we as dependent upon the informational commons as we are upon the market, norms, roads, air, land and sea?

    So if we can require warranty of all other products in our commons, why can we not require warranty of information distributed in our commons? Why do we need regulators instead of the common law? If we are all shareholders in the commons, why can we not individually or in groups, take individuals, organizations, politicians, and the government bureaucracy to court for damage to that commons.

    The reason is that if truth was required, and if insurance was required, of all products services, and information distributed via the commons for the purpose of profiting my trade, or by political rents and privileges, then it would be very hard for the Cathedral Complex: Academy, Media, and State to sell falsehoods and propaganda.

    Why for example does the Academy not get paid as a percentage of your earnings, rather than selling you education that does not pay off? What would happen if that were the case? That the academy was paid 10% of your 30 year earnings? How would what they teach you change? What if you could sue a university for giving you a bad service?

    Why for example, aren’t public intellectuals required to warranty that their speech is truthful: internally consistent, externally correspondent, existentially possible, free from encouraging theft and fraud, and at least responsibly falsified?

    Why for example, aren’t politicians required to demonstrate strict construction in law, from the initial requirement for property rights and voluntary exchange? Why aren’t laws written as contracts, with expiration dates? Why can we make one law (contract) but the consequent government can break it, and use the money for whatever arbitrary purposes that they wish? Why is it that all money from all taxes is not raised to meet a fixed sum, for a fixed purposes, and finished at the completion of that time?

    Why is it legal for academy, media and state to lie, and pollute our informational commons?

    Isn’t it just legalized fraud?

    PART IV – SCIENCE IS THE LANGUAGE OF TRUTHFUL SPEECH, NOT A METHOD

    We can never know we speak the truth, we can only know that we speak truthfully. And we can only do that if we ourselves apply due diligence to our own thoughts and utterances.

    Scientists do this by what we call the scientific method. But that method is not a method at all. It is a warranty that they have been diligent in their testimony about their observations and theories.

    1) Internally consistent (that it is logical). This warranty requires tests of reason, logic and mathematics.

    2) Externally correspondent (that it corresponds to reality) This warranty requires that we demonstrate that the actions we take, or the measurements we make, or both, correspond to what we say they do.

    3) Operationally Defined (that what we say exists does, and is possible). In science this means that every step in a process is listed, and its measurements captured, so that we know whether real changes in reality are recorded or our imagination of reality is recorded. In economics, politics , accounting, and law, operational definitions require that each transaction (movement) is transparent, audit-able, and open to human perception).

    4) Objectively Moral (that each transfer is rational and voluntary). Under This is particular to law and to economics, where in law, something cannot be legal if it cannot be agreed to, and it cannot be ‘true’ economics if deception is required. This is the complaint about Keyensian ‘dishonest’ economics, both in Monetary/Credit policy, and in Fiscal (Spending) policy: that manipulation of prices of money and credit, constitute ‘lies’ used to motivate business, industry and consumer to spend, and that instead the purpose of economic policy should be to assist us in cooperating truthfully, and voluntarily. The ‘dishonest’ economists are unfortunately, the current mainstream economists, and the ‘honest’ economists are marginalized.

    5) Falsified (even if the above are all true, that we have tried to disprove our theory, our action, by testing if it is possibly erroneous by either of the previous four methods. This gets away from the problem of confirmation bias.

    Truthful speech requires that we testify to having performed due diligence by giving all five warranties on our speech. This is why science has been so productive. This is also why reason, rationalism, and philosophy have been so successfully employed in lying, deception, power accumulation, and theft: philosophers, academics public intellectuals, politicians, propagandists, and media personnel have learned not as the greeks asked us – to tell the truth. But how to lie. And they have become masters of it.

    CLOSING

    It is a very simple problem to fix really: information as a commons, universal standing, warranty of truthful speech, and restitution for damages.

    There is no reason we cannot cooperate truthfully in speech, just as we do in the market.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-10 12:37:00 UTC

  • You can’t use a philosophical model unless you can reduce it to a moral intuitio

    You can’t use a philosophical model unless you can reduce it to a moral intuition. It’s too expensive to rely upon reason.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-09 06:40:00 UTC

  • Information is the correct metaphor. I am not certain we can improve upon our cu

    Information is the correct metaphor. I am not certain we can improve upon our current understanding of knowledge as information – meaning necessary to change state – and I am not certain that we can improve upon what is currently called the scientific method – except that if we introduce costs and objective morality into the set of warranties, it would serve as the universal method for warrantied theories. I am more concerned now that we have largely managed to eliminate bias and error, that we eliminate bias, deception, fraud and theft from theories – at which point all human knowledge can be judged by the same means regardless of discipline.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-07 09:30:00 UTC

  • A THEORY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JUSTIFICATION, CRITICISM AND MORALITY If em

    A THEORY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JUSTIFICATION, CRITICISM AND MORALITY

    If empiricists are correct, and that all memories are the product of observations (both internal and external), and that intuition serves as a search engine(which cognitive scientists seem to agree at present), and imagination a hypothetical engine(again a search engine), then all mental content originates with reality, all knowledge as theory, and the function of thinking, reasoning, and science are to criticize imaginary intuitions, hypotheses to see if they can take the standing of theories (which is analogous to belief), and law (which is analogous to norm, ritual, or sacred tenet).

    The difference between justificationary and critical points of view buried unconsciously in our language, is that feeling, belief, knowledge and truth describe a justificationary epistemology, and intuition, hypothesis, theory and law describe a critical epistemology.

    I would add that I believe (hypothesize) justificationary epistemology is necessary in highly interdependent small polities where most reproduction and production functions as a commons in which all members are shareholders; and therefore the use of most property, is as common property, and so even normative rules (the normative commons) must be justified to others. Whereas under an advanced economy, we are individual actors, and need not justify to others how we make use of resources – only that we do no harm to them. Under both Justification and Criticism we must warranty our words and deeds. Just as we do in all of life.

    This is probably the correct interpretation of why we evolved from systems of beliefs (justifications within a commons) to systems of theories (criticisms under individual property rights) – we must claim knowledge is ethically and morally obtained and practiced. But what constitutes moral action changes as property is increasingly privatized. We move from needing permission to use property, to not. But in the process, we increasingly privatize responsibility for our actions as well.

    It appears that all justification and criticism are merely the conditions of warranty under different structures of property. And that we have increasingly applied our cooperative methodology to those areas of the world where cooperation is no longer involved.

    In other words, it was necessary to privatize property to gain the normative permission to seek the truth. Having privatized it, we have now obtained a condition where we see that the only truth possible is critical. And having abandoned morality from the pursuit of truth, it appears I am unconsciously, unknowingly, and unwittingly, reinserting it into the search for truth as a constraint upon the externalities produced by our search, in an effort to constrain people who would take advantage of the justificationary system for criminal, unethical, and immoral purposes to which it has been put for the past century and a half.

    More to come as I drill into this further.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-07 03:29:00 UTC