MEASUREMENTS RENDER COMMENSURABILITY 1) Numbers render countable objects commensurable 2) Measurements render relations commensurable 3) Physics renders physical causes commensurable. 4) Money renders goods and services commensurable 5) Property renders cooperation (ethics, morals, politics) commensurable 6) Reason renders words and concepts commensurable.
Category: Epistemology and Method
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Is The Utility of Truthfulness Worth The Cost?
IS THE UTILITY OF TRUTHFULNESS WORTH THE COST? I was too optimistic. Enthralled by my discovery. Desperate to provide my people with a language of self defense. People had used the supernatural frame for more than 1500 years, and the supernormal frame before that. Look at what it took to overthrow the church’s lies. It took the restoration of commercial civilization, so that we could sufficiently practice law that once again our contractualism dominated the thought of the classes that possessed any semblance of literacy and agency; and then it took the restoration of greek knowledge, the restoration of greek heroic literature, the restoration of mathematics, and its use on the heavens (scale) to falsify supernaturalism, and a tidal wave of discoveries from descartes’ rediscovery that the universe was open to our comprehension via instruments both physical and logical through darwin, watson, and crick. And there are still those who deny Darwin, advance or follow conspiracy theory, informational pseudoscience, social pseudoscience, physical pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, supernaturalism, and the (nihilistic) occult and (optimistic) new age. And our academy, our public intellectuals, and our politicians are as guilty of pseudo-everything as the most vociferous proletarian adamant about the virtues of communism. People can’t imagine a world where people speak truthfully because that is the norm, and the grammar of truthful speech is the norm, any more than they could imagine a world free of supernaturalism, any more than they could imagine a world free of shamanism. But we converted from a world of supernaturalism to a world of reason. Even if we were subsequently converted to pseudoscience. We still make use of supernatural context, ratio-moral contexts, pseudoscientific contexts, and rarely, scientific contexts. It’s not that a people need to be particularly intelligent in order to prosper, to defeat the dark forces of time, ignorance, and scarcity, and to transform the earth if not the universe into an eden. It’s that the formal, informal, informational, and normative institutions that supply the majority of *calculative* power (positive knowledge and negative reduction of ignorance) through the presence of *context*, and the removal of those who cannot use and therefore competitively survive (calculate) under that context that is the problem. Truth is disruptive. Because lies create opportunities for discounts and rents. And man excels and identifying and exploiting opportunities for rents. So, is it possible to require truthful speech via formal institutional means and from that requirement evolve contexts both informal, informational, and normative? Of course it is. It may not seem so to those who don’t practice the discipline every day but it’s rather obvious to me and those others that do use it. I mean, just as we improve tools to improve precision, and improve logical tools (math, programming, simulations, general theories and laws) we improve various institutional and normative contexts – admittedly at a long lag, and sometimes generations. (Meanwhile others improve upon statements of ignorance, error, bias, and deceit which we must also defeat). Is it desirable, preferable, utilitarian to demand truth? If it will defeat Semiticism (judaism, islam) If it will save your civilization? if it will save mankind? I think so. -
Is The Utility of Truthfulness Worth The Cost?
IS THE UTILITY OF TRUTHFULNESS WORTH THE COST? I was too optimistic. Enthralled by my discovery. Desperate to provide my people with a language of self defense. People had used the supernatural frame for more than 1500 years, and the supernormal frame before that. Look at what it took to overthrow the church’s lies. It took the restoration of commercial civilization, so that we could sufficiently practice law that once again our contractualism dominated the thought of the classes that possessed any semblance of literacy and agency; and then it took the restoration of greek knowledge, the restoration of greek heroic literature, the restoration of mathematics, and its use on the heavens (scale) to falsify supernaturalism, and a tidal wave of discoveries from descartes’ rediscovery that the universe was open to our comprehension via instruments both physical and logical through darwin, watson, and crick. And there are still those who deny Darwin, advance or follow conspiracy theory, informational pseudoscience, social pseudoscience, physical pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, supernaturalism, and the (nihilistic) occult and (optimistic) new age. And our academy, our public intellectuals, and our politicians are as guilty of pseudo-everything as the most vociferous proletarian adamant about the virtues of communism. People can’t imagine a world where people speak truthfully because that is the norm, and the grammar of truthful speech is the norm, any more than they could imagine a world free of supernaturalism, any more than they could imagine a world free of shamanism. But we converted from a world of supernaturalism to a world of reason. Even if we were subsequently converted to pseudoscience. We still make use of supernatural context, ratio-moral contexts, pseudoscientific contexts, and rarely, scientific contexts. It’s not that a people need to be particularly intelligent in order to prosper, to defeat the dark forces of time, ignorance, and scarcity, and to transform the earth if not the universe into an eden. It’s that the formal, informal, informational, and normative institutions that supply the majority of *calculative* power (positive knowledge and negative reduction of ignorance) through the presence of *context*, and the removal of those who cannot use and therefore competitively survive (calculate) under that context that is the problem. Truth is disruptive. Because lies create opportunities for discounts and rents. And man excels and identifying and exploiting opportunities for rents. So, is it possible to require truthful speech via formal institutional means and from that requirement evolve contexts both informal, informational, and normative? Of course it is. It may not seem so to those who don’t practice the discipline every day but it’s rather obvious to me and those others that do use it. I mean, just as we improve tools to improve precision, and improve logical tools (math, programming, simulations, general theories and laws) we improve various institutional and normative contexts – admittedly at a long lag, and sometimes generations. (Meanwhile others improve upon statements of ignorance, error, bias, and deceit which we must also defeat). Is it desirable, preferable, utilitarian to demand truth? If it will defeat Semiticism (judaism, islam) If it will save your civilization? if it will save mankind? I think so. -
Another Leap in Progress
Over the past week or so I’ve had another significant insight on language and measurement. This as simplified the epistemology significantly.
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Another Leap in Progress
Over the past week or so I’ve had another significant insight on language and measurement. This as simplified the epistemology significantly.
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Testimonial Grammar Defeats NPOV
What if I started a wiki that required Testimonial (Operational) Grammar? OMG. NPOV would be destroyed in the social sciences.
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Testimonial Grammar Defeats NPOV
What if I started a wiki that required Testimonial (Operational) Grammar? OMG. NPOV would be destroyed in the social sciences.
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It’s Not That Hard…
IT’S NOT THAT HARD. Nearly all my arguments are constructed by definitions, use of sequences to de-conflate those definitions, and fullaccounting of the fully chain of actions and consequences. I rarely have to resort to operational grammar except in those definitions. If you use full accounting you will skew to operational gammar out of necessity of simply trying to write cogent sentences. I cant keep track of all of you any longer. There are simply too many. But I do see property in toto, operational language and full accounting creeping into all sorts of your posts and comments. It’s infectious. It will change you forever – for the better.
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It’s Not That Hard…
IT’S NOT THAT HARD. Nearly all my arguments are constructed by definitions, use of sequences to de-conflate those definitions, and fullaccounting of the fully chain of actions and consequences. I rarely have to resort to operational grammar except in those definitions. If you use full accounting you will skew to operational gammar out of necessity of simply trying to write cogent sentences. I cant keep track of all of you any longer. There are simply too many. But I do see property in toto, operational language and full accounting creeping into all sorts of your posts and comments. It’s infectious. It will change you forever – for the better.
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Challenges in Teaching Propertarianism
When you are teaching people an advanced subject like testimonialism, acquisitionism, propertarianism, or market government, one of the most common pitfalls a professor must avoid, is anchoring the student and freezing his innovations, while at the same time, gently correcting errors so that he or she continues to advance, but does not become dependent upon you. This is extremely difficult. The second problem is getting them past their limits. They generally hit their limits when they surpass the use of the technology (subject) to justify prior dispositions, and instead must now abandon their intuitions and priors – and rely on the logic of the system exclusively without the ability to test against the intuitions provided by their priors
It’s at this point they generally freeze or fail, or grow frustrated, because they do not realize that they have been relying upon intuition, and merely learning a superior means of justifying their priors until now. Making the leap from using a logic to justify one’s priors, to the full dependence upon that logic despite it’s falsification of your priors is difficult – and more difficult the older you are (it certainly was hard for me). So some people progress fastest because they are simply learning how to justify priors, and can rely on testing propositions against memory and intuition. Others progress more slowly because they must constantly reform their intuitions and priors. The problem for the former is that they tend to have become used to ‘easy’ adoption of the technology and instead of incremental adjustment they must do all the work of self transition at once. This is why it is somewhat easier for us aspies because we actually tend to have few intuitionistic priors, and are more comfortable with fully rational or empirical statements independent upon reliance upon intuitions and priors. I can, by temperament, identify who will hit the wall, but not when – until I see it starting to occur. But it is almost impossible to break people through that wall. They must do it on their own. And in my experience, most of them fail. ( Unfortunately, some of them direct their frustration at me. This is understandable. It is however, unwarranted. ) So what can I learn from this? Well, it is one thing to look for participants to help me advance the work, and another to ask people learn a complete system. Luckily there are some people who are not bound by priors. Although very small in number. I can help people by completing the work rather than asking them to participate. This eliminates me as the axis, makes the courseware the axis. But in the end, truth is merciless to priors. And few people are sufficiently transcendent, and possess sufficient agency to abandon their priors – especially those who have invested so heavily in the argumentative justification of them.