Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • MATCHSTICKS Philosophy is too much like giving children matches to play with. An

    MATCHSTICKS

    Philosophy is too much like giving children matches to play with. And as Durant said, there are really no answers there. History is the only evidence of the nature of man, and the answers to our political nature are there. Philosophy is, at best, just a tool that helps us reduce our ever-present tendency to err. It is more often a tool by which we increase our errors. At its worst, it is a tool for self deception, or the deception of others.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-27 09:02:00 UTC

  • BURNING OBSCURANT AND PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY ON THE PYRE OF DECEPTION Most of my at

    BURNING OBSCURANT AND PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY ON THE PYRE OF DECEPTION

    Most of my attacks on a priorism are tests to see if the delta in utility between ratio-empirical and ‘Real’, and aprioristic-deductive and platonic, is sufficient to compel a change in method, but I am clearly dealing with very habituated people, and not giving them enough of a breadcrumb trail. And worse, I’m leading them into a dark and unfamiliar conceptual forest where they don’t want to follow. What do moral men do, when moral intuition fails them? They can’t do much until they learn enough new tools with which to restate their emotional intuitions in different terms now that the old terms are invalidated.

    Even the best people, who tend to be technologists, conflate general rule, theory, and axiom, into a single utilitarian category. Yet again demonstrating the difference between knowledge of use and knowledge of construction.

    I suppose I will just keep attacking a priorism as incomplete, and utilitarian, but now also as immoral obscurantism, and part of the continental-kantian and cosmopolitan-hermeneutic forms of deception. Part of the revolt against ratio-scientific.

    Although since I’ve already outed Rothbardian ethics as parasitic, and stated that Misesian praxeology was an error, I suppose that adding that a priorism (or any kantian construct) is immoral obscurantism, and part of the continental-cosmopolitan attack on human reason so loathed by Rand is just a continuation of my criticisms.

    So libertarianism as constructed, prior to its ratio-scientific expression in Propertarianism, is:

    a) parasitic

    b) insufficient for the production of a voluntary polity.

    c) argumentatively obscurant and immoral

    d) fails the test of its claims (deducibility of the scope of economics)

    e) inferior to ratio-scientific method for the accumulation of general rules of human behavior.

    But with Propertarianism, all of these faults are corrected.

    Of course people being as simple as they are, and even the best philosophers fairly weak, it’s probably lost that my attack on a priorism is an attempt to delegitimize on the right and libertarian spectrum, the same as I delegitimize on left-postmodern and socialist programs.

    I can’t kill off the obscurantist deceptions of the left without killing off the same techniques on the libertarian corner of the political spectrum. No matter what corner of the political spectrum one advocates, the prohibition on obscurantism that invalidates the arguments of the others, invalidates one’s own as well.

    All I have to do with the right is to give them a rational language. Most of what they believe is right in the first place. They just don’t have the ability to talk about it in rational terms – and perhaps once I focus there, I’ll be equally frustrated by their lack of intellectualism and mindless dependence on moral intuition. And perhaps at that point I will have to fight the battle against religion. But I think that religion cohabitates with propertarianism as comfortably as does capitalism.

    BUT LIBERTARIANS DON’T GET A FREE PASS. I’m burning continental philosophy, cosmopolitan philosophy, psychological philosophy (classical liberal), and marxist-socialist-postmodern philosophy on the same pyre. And it is a bonfire unlike any before it.

    The Ratio-scientific form of argument under Propertarianism (moral realism) is all that remains. Because it is the only moral form of discourse on ethics itself. Everything else is deception, fraud or worse.

    Burn, baby, burn.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-27 08:49:00 UTC

  • SOME OF THE “FIRST PROBLEMS” OF PHILOSOPHY 1) THE FIRST PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY “W

    SOME OF THE “FIRST PROBLEMS” OF PHILOSOPHY

    1) THE FIRST PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY

    “Why do we not commit suicide?”

    2) THE FIRST PROBLEM OF POLITICS

    “Why should I not kill you and take your stuff?”

    3) THE FIRST PROBLEM OF COOPERATION

    “How can we prevent free riding?”

    4) THE FIRST PROBLEM OF DIVISION OF LABOR

    “How do we determine who controls which resource?”

    5) THE FIRST PROBLEM OF FAMILY STRUCTURE

    “How do we organize reproduction, child rearing and inheritance in the current means of production?”

    6) THE FIRST PROBLEM OF INTER-FAMILIAL COOPERATION (community)

    “Why should a woman be free to bear children that they cannot support, and place the burden for them upon others without their consent?”

    7) THE FIRST PROBLEM OF INTER-COMMUNITY COOPERATION (economy)

    “what is are the universal moral rules we must observe to successfully cooperate with all other groups?”

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-13 09:30:00 UTC

  • create theories. run tests. analyze the results. revise theories. doesn’t matter

    create theories. run tests. analyze the results. revise theories.

    doesn’t matter if its science, business or politics. it’s all the same.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-11 12:47:00 UTC

  • If you want to get rid of mysticism and pseudosciences like freudianism, marxism

    If you want to get rid of mysticism and pseudosciences like freudianism, marxism, scientific socialism, Postmodernism, then you also have to get rid of Continental Philosophy, Cosmopolitan Philosophy, Rights theory, Austrian Economics and Praxeology.

    And if you do that you will also by consequence get rid of mathematical and logical platonism, and the much of cheap mathematical physics.

    That is the price of honest politics.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-11 09:31:00 UTC

  • GOOD ECONOMICS AND BAD ECONOMICS / GOOD PHILOSOPHY AND BAD PHILOSOPHY I love Hop

    GOOD ECONOMICS AND BAD ECONOMICS / GOOD PHILOSOPHY AND BAD PHILOSOPHY

    I love Hoppe’s speech on good and bad economics. And regardless of my criticism of deductivism (a priorism) when economics is in fact, entirely empirical (not positivist, but empirical), I agree with him that economics doesn’t have ‘flavors’ but instead either makes true, internally consistent, and externally correspondent statements, or it does not. Worse, bad economics create bad behavior and bad economic conditions.

    Now, philosophy is the same. While the discipline of philosophy attracts people who prefer many different FLAVORS of philosophy, the fact is that philosophy is either GOOD or it is BAD. In the sense that it is either TRUE and correspondent with reality, and encourages us to act in correspondence with reality, or it is FALSE and does not encourage us to act in correspondence with reality.

    Now since philosophy consists of suites of statements, it’s possible for some philosophies to, as sets produce mixed goods and bads. But it is also possible for philosophies to produce net bads, and net goods.

    In the end analysis, we will settle on one optimum philosophy. And that philosophy will be ‘the way’ (constructivism, intuitionism) which we now refer to as ‘the scientific method’.

    Not that it has much to do with science. It just arose from the discipline of science.

    There is good philosophy (Philosophical Constructivist Realism, and Moral Propertarian Realism) and there is bad philosophy: everything else.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-03 08:33:00 UTC

  • THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN ACTION IS PURELY EMPIRICAL The logic of human action is not

    THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN ACTION IS PURELY EMPIRICAL

    The logic of human action is not deductive. The logic of human action, including the discipline of economics, is entirely empirical. Empirical meaning ‘observable’.

    The canons of science require that we use instrumentation and logic to reduce that which we cannot sense to analogy to experience; that we test what we cannot perceive for internal consistency and external correspondence.

    But, we can test the rationality of incentives directly by pure perception. Our perception of voluntary exchange, involuntary exchange, and the satisfaction of wants is in itself the most reductive form of perception: we can both sense the rationality of incentives in relation to any change in state, and we can test the rationality of the incentives of others as well – because human incentives are marginally indifferent – at least outside of taste. Even then we can distinguish between rational tastes and non.

    As such, the logic of human action is constructed from, as all knowledge of truth is, empirical observation.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-03 05:19:00 UTC

  • HOPPE IS WRONG ON POPPER – AND THIS IS WHY. I suspect that at this point Popper

    HOPPE IS WRONG ON POPPER – AND THIS IS WHY.

    I suspect that at this point Popper would suggest that all our attempts at social engineering have failed. And that we should constrain our ambitions to improving the institutions that facilitate economic calculation.

    While Hans attacks Popper for his piecemeal social engineering, the fact of the matter is, that Popper’s philosophical work is the closest to that of Propertarianism yet stated in the Germanic languages.

    I don’t criticize Hans for his imperfections: (a) that private property rights are logically sufficient for the suppression of demand for the state, and (b) that argumentation is not causal, (c) that praxeological statements are a-prioristically deductive, rather than sympathetically testable. Instead, I focus on what he got RIGHT – the incentives of monarchs vs rentiers, and the structure of non-monopolistic formal institutions

    I think we can forgive popper his open door to experimentation, and take from him what we can: that GiVEN THE FRAILTY OF OUR KNOWLEDGE, COERCIVE GOVERNMENT IS NEVER MORAL and never can be.

    Popper’s prohibition on truth claims is a moral one. And given that Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe are all WRONG in the interpretation of truth claims of Praxeology, and the structure of economic science, we’ve simply proven that not only is Popper RIGHT, but Popper has told us how to correct praxeology. Or at least that is how i was able to understand how to correct praxeology.

    Unfortunately, other than Hans it’s not possible to find many libertarians smart enough to have this level of discussion with. And I suspect he won’t appreciate it much. 🙂

    I need to get hans off of this argument. He’s wrong. Plain and simple. Popper is an asset not a liability. The prohibition on piecemeal engineering is one that POPPER gave us, NOT Mises.

    We can never claim to know enough to forcibly use other’s money for theoretical ends. The content in our myths, habits and traditions is also more dense than our understanding of those myths, habits and traditions. We may know how to USE those traditions. But like any complex technology we may not have knowledge of their CONSTRUCTION. And we certainly cannot observe the totality of their externalities – any more than we can observe the totality of the externality of prices.

    That’s Popper’s gift to us. That was Hayek’s gift to us. Hayek and Popper were closer to the answer than Mises – who, by applying Weber and Poincare, correctly understood economic calculation, but failed to grasp that economic science was not a-prioristic, but entirely empirical. He confused our ability to sympathetically test any human action for rational incentives, with the ability to deduce anything meaningful from the necessity for rational action.

    Curt Doolittle

    Propertarianism

    Rescuing liberty from the ethics of the ghetto, one paragraph at a time.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-02 16:53:00 UTC

  • GEEK ERA *STUDY* OF A WORK – HUNTING FOR NECESSARY ARGUMENTS. Reading is differe

    GEEK ERA *STUDY* OF A WORK – HUNTING FOR NECESSARY ARGUMENTS.

    Reading is different from studying. Studying means to me, not understanding the author’s arguments so much as understanding what his various arguments could imply.

    0) I read the TOC and random paragraphs in the interesting chapters.

    1) If it’s worth reading in depth, I read it once – really, just to understand the author’s theory.

    2) I convert it to text – usually from pdf to text file. A couple chapters at a time. I can almost always find it on line. If I can’t then I literally scan it a chapter at a time by hand.

    3) I edit the text file so that it’s suitable for spoken works.

    4) I convert it to computer generated speech.

    5) I listen to it, usually three or four times. Sometimes more.

    I ‘study’ the work until I can’t find a single idea in there left to benefit from.

    The truth is, that most authors’ theories can be deduced from the TOC and the book jacket. Just as most books are really better stated as a ‘paper’ than a book. They’re simple.

    A lot of work is predicated upon theories that are nonsensical. And I simply can’t put up with reading them. Others are biased (Fukuyama’s) but I can see through the bias. Some are simply wrong, or failed attempts as pseudoscience (Mises praxeology and Rothbard’s ethics), some are obscurantist pseudo-scientific masks for ignorance (Freud), some obscurantist and fraudulent (Heidegger), some mystical (religion), and as such, I consider most of them ‘evil’ and I just ignore them.

    History tends to be a little less victim of stupidity than philosophy. And as Durant said, the answers to questions of man are in history, not in philosophy. There are no answers there.

    Very few works are substantial enough (like Hayek’s) to actually STUDY. Some works are just so large (histories) that I find I have to listen to them a few times before I’ve exhausted the possibilities that the author has made possible.

    I guess one of the things that helps us study others is that, we write to understand and communicate to others our understanding. Books are experiments. I know some people seem to have much higher reading comprehension to me, because they’re trying to understand the author’s point of view. And I sort of don’t work that way. Instead, I simply am looking for theories. For arguments. Not justifications. But NECESSARY arguments.

    NECESSARY is very different from JUSTIFICATIONARY.

    And if you HUNT for NECESSARY arguments you will find very few of them. And when you do, it’s like finding buried treasure.

    There are very few necessary arguments.

    And fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange is one of them.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-01 12:47:00 UTC

  • I guess I’ve sort of turned critical rationalism on it’s head, and stated that s

    I guess I’ve sort of turned critical rationalism on it’s head, and stated that science is a more SIMPLE theoretical system that addresses but a subset of the requirements for theory, and that by extending the scientific method to the social sciences (morality) we make obvious that the scientific method is simply ‘the epistemic method’ and that it’s the only one available to us.

    Cool. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-01 09:45:00 UTC