TO: JORDAN AND HARRIS
Hello,
Given that no one seems to have provided the means of settling your debate, I thought that I would try to provide you with a language, an argument, and a judgement, that I’m confident will help provide that will help you.
If this was an easy problem it would not have troubled the two of you, and it would not have troubled thinkers for thousands of years, so given that this is one of the hard problems of philosophy I hope you will stick with me through a chain of reasoning.
My name is Curt Doolittle, from the Propertarian Institute, in Kiev, ukraine
I work in Natural Law – meaning the search for the laws of cooperation. And within natural law I work on testimony: deflationary, performative, promissory, warrantied, truth, such that we can improve cooperation.
Testimony is a very expensive, but very old form of truth, that western man has be building over thousands of years.
But we have a simple term for it…..
…it has been taught for thousands of years from our most ancient of western ancestors, through our most current soldiers: the discipline of “reporting”.
not Narrating (Describing),
not Explaining(Justifying),
not Narrating or Storytelling(Filling In),
not Thinking(Theorizing),
not Opining (Preferring),
not Imagining(Freely-Associating).
But Reporting (Testifying),
I’ll assume that at least some of us agree by now that the secret to western success in the bronze(early), iron(ancient), and steel (modern) ages was the result of our discovery of, and widespread use of Truth, meaning, reporting: giving testimony in operational, deflationary, terms.
And I assume it’s rather obvious that it’s the use of professional volunteer, profit-seeking warriors, formed from a disciplined, farmer militia, using institutionalized ‘reporting’ as well as ‘the oath’ that spread those disciplines across the society from the top down.
I assume we all understand that our common law developed out this military tradition.
I assume we probably understand that our reason and science evolved out of those military and legal traditions.
It may not be so obvious that westerners continued this deflationary tradition throughout our civilization from our formal and informal institutions, to our values, ideas, and speech.
WHY – COMPETITION OVER AUTHORITY? TERRITORY
(widely distributed production on the eurasian plain vs concentrated river valleys)
(more expensive trade on the the plain, less so in the foressts, less so on the rivers, and least in the seas.
(wealthier per capita in consumption but poorer in institutions)
WE DIVIDED IN TO RANKS
undomesticated animal man
slave, serf, freeman, citizen, burgher, clergy, nobility, aristocracy.
WE DIVIDED LANGUAGE BY RANKS
We used different languages:
german for common people, french for rule, and latin for thought.
WE DIVIDED RULE
We produced the full spectrum of coercive rule:
Rule by RELIGION using the promise of inclusion in a larger body of insurers and possible cooperators under the threat of exclusion from a lager body of insurers and cooperators.
Rule by LAW using the threat of loss, deprivation, punishment, or death in exchange for involuntary inclusion in a system of insurers, cooperators.
Rule by CREDIT using the promise of accumulated current consumption in exchange for future production.
WE KEPT RELIGIONS DIVIDED
Even today we remain polytheistic: religious, moral, legal, and scientific.
WE DIVIDED GOVERNMENT
Our model of government with a house for each class is deflationary. Our use of the nuclear family is deflationary. Our outbreeding is deflationary. Our civilization’s underlying objective and premise “Sovereignty” (which we mistakenly call individualism, and for which we mistakenly pursue liberty), is the most deflationary objective possible for any civilization: a distributed dictatorship of peers.
WE DIVIDED COMMUNICAION
We produced different methods of communication:
Occult, Theology, Mythology, Literature, Analogy, History, Testimony, Description, and today’s Operational Names.
WE DIVIDED ETHICS
We demonstrably have taught:
The ‘ethics’ of right and wrong by imitation, reward and punishment in the home – as a toddler.
The ethics of the Heroic (good) character – through empathic analogy in our childhood.
The ethics of the Virtuous Person: Virtue ethics – through empathy with an ideal and accomplished citizen – in our youth.
The ethics of the Rational Person: Rule Ethics (Deontological) in our adulthood.
The ethics of the Knowledgeable Person: Outcome Ethics (Teleological) in our maturity.
The ethics of the Scientific Person: Sovereignty: Empirically Discovered, jury-decided, judge-authored, …. *independent of our experience* regardless of our age, experience, gender, race, even species.
MENTAL DISCIPLINES
Across the world we have produced the spectrum of mental disciplines: physical rituals, stoicism, buddhism, and ‘prayer’. But stoicism was the one we evolved ….. it requires ‘reporting.
DECISION
We taught the entirely counter intuitive skills incrementally to those who could make use of them.
of reading,
of mathematics.
of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
of general rules of the universe – science
of specific rules of subsets of operations within the universe.
WE REMAINED DEFLATIONARY
Westerners produced works of religion, philosophy, literature, science and technology, law, and commerce ….. but never produced a bible – a law – that conflated law and philosophy, religion and literature. In fact, the west separated law of men, from laws of commerce, from laws of religion,
Westerners don’t engage in conflation and competing ideas are not a ‘conundrum’ for us. they are how we insure the truth. In addition we possess a low context high precision language. Even our language is deflationary. This constant competition forces us to develop trust. And it is the combination of trust and truth that provided us with such innovative velocity in the bronze, iron, and steel ages.
The west is the only deflationary civilization, and it is deflationary because our ancient history as sovereign, voluntary, warriors, dependent upon one another’s adherence to strategy, tactics, and formation by oath. Not soldiers, but warriors. Warriors who must pay for their own tools, and take home their share of ‘earnings’.
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? (OUR LITERATURE)
the search for methods of internally consistent decidability within a context.
WHAT IS TRUTH? (OUR LAW)
the search for methods of decidability regardless of context.
WHY IS LITERATURE NECESSARY?
Becuase we must possess ideas with which to identify opportunities.
WHY IS TRUTH NECESSARY?
Because we must possess means of deciding between conflicts.
WHY IS DEFLATIONARY TRUTH NECESSARY?
Because we are always deciding Across Contexts.
And truth provides decidabilty across all contexts.
WHY IS PROMISSORY TRUTH NECESSARY?
Because we evolved to negotiate and coerce not to testify – man is want of error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit.
WHY IS FULLY ACCOUNTED TRUTH NECESSARY?
Because the easiest means of conducting fraud is the absence of complete (symmetrical) information: informational reciprocity.
WHY IS TRUTHFULNESS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT IN THE CURRENT ERA?
The age of industrialization brought about The industrialization of lying.
WHY WE NEED BOTH….
DEFLATION (SCIENCE) FOR INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENT …. AND NARRATION (GENERALIZATION) FOR GRACEFUL FAILURE
Our methods of decision making must suit our abilities, and the knowledge that we possess, at the ages in which we must make decisions. So we produce parental rules, virtue ethics, rule ethics, and outcome ethics, and we use the MOST PRECISE set of rules we are able to wield with the information at our disposal.
Conversely, even if we are very skilled in some discipline, and can make use of outcome ethics because of that skill, our ability to decide must decline gracefully as we know less and less about the subject or the circumstance. We have no choice.
This is why we hold people of low ability accountable only for what they are able to bear accountability for, and do not grant the license beyond it. And conversely why we hold people of great ability accountable for far more, and need grant no license to them.
We have a century or more of very good data today, that shows that at about every standard deviation in ability we are capable of learning more independently, investigating more independently, inventing more independently, communicating more synthetically, and conceptualizing more creatively. Our occupations and their scarcity reflect this reality. Our costs of education reflect it.
Some of us must have simple rules, others parables with characters we can imitate, abstract virtues that we seek to demonstrate, empirical rules by which to calculate possibilities, and vast experience to determine the outliers and externalities that limit our calculations. And a very, very, small number of us reorder the properties, relations, operations, and transformations humans work with every day in all these forms, to adapt our entire body of decidability at all levels in response to new and advantageous knowledge.
We also need to communicate with one another across these same spectrum.
And while parsimonious language is extremely precise it requires a vast knowledge to employ it…………….. (context) …..
AGAINST DR PETERSON’S JUSTIFICATION OF CONFLATIONISM
Of the three western philosophical traditions: the religious and supernatural, the literary and ideal, and the historical and scientific, Dr Peterson practices the literary, holds an appreciation for the supernatural as literature, and makes use of the scientific and historical. But he also possesses the ability to synthesize the three and provide decidability across them by what appear to be outcome-ethics.
Dr Peterson’s knowledge is terribly expensive. The silver rule from which law is constructed is terribly inexpensive.
The literary tradition is rich, it’s experiential, and depending upon the complexity of the narrative structure: toddler, child, youth, teen, adult, or mature adult, we can teach high context low precision general rules in every range from Aesop to Dostoyevsky.
The biographical tradition is rich, experiential, and depending upon the subject, places a greater burden on the reader to posses some contextual knowledge in exchange for greater precision.
The historical tradition is almost unfathomably rich, places even greater burden on the reader to possess contextual knowledge in exchange for greater precision. (history, ethics, politics, economics, war)
The empirical tradition is unfathomably rich, places very great burden on the reader to possess contextual and domain specific knowledge in exchange for greater precision. (law, science, engineering)
So the literary tradition is intentionally synthetic and provides context at the expense of accuracy, while the empirical tradition intentionally analytic at the expense of context.
Given the abilities, knowledge, and age (experience) of individuals which do we need? Or do we need all of them? And how do we ensure that they degrade gracefully to retain sovereignty, reporting (testimony), and decidability in favor of that sovereignty and testimony?
AGAINST HARRIS’ CHERRYPICKING
( I think Harris’ use of argument is perhaps more troubling than Jordans for the simple reason that while he might criticize some rather obvious uses of literary license by Jordan, he consistently gives a free pass to those who claim they speak scientifically but speak incompletely. The great crimes of teh 21st century were committed by the use of pseudosciences, particularly in mathematical economics, which was used to violate western common and natural law and the institutions that we had built up over centuries. More on this later….) Sam gives people a free pass because it’s politically and economically expedient. I am not sure which is worse: speaking in obvious parables, or giving pseudoscience a pass.
EDUCATION
Education must provide both graceful extension of decidability during education, as well as graceful failure of decidability in practical life, while preserving the same underlying group evolutionary strategy: a small number of sovereign men, desirous to preserve that sovereignty, train into professional warriors using advanced technology, and mobilizing a disciplined militia, using maneuver, and willing to defeat enemies completely and empirically (not symbolically), can hold territory against much larger and wealthier competitors who lack technology, rapid tactical adaptivity, and the most important ingredient of all: sovereignty. (thinking independently).
So while I confer with Dr Peterson’s extreme concern for education of our young, instead of violating the central tenet of western civilization, why isn’t the correct answer that our norms, laws, and our ethics aren’t sufficiently prohibitive, and our institutions sufficiently strong enough, that we must indoctrinate people into false positives rather than merely teach the tools of constructing positives and prohibiting negatives in the western tradition (that was so successful in the past?)
Why can’t we teach children myth, literature, history, contract, science, and measurement WITHOUT conflation that undermines the very causal difference that created western civilization? Deflation.
Why don’t we teach children Logic, Grammar, Rhetoric, Natural Law, and physical law to analyze, and history, literature, and myth to imagine?
OUR RECENT HISTORY
If I haven’t convinced you then let’s look at the current challenge.
The anglo enlightenment evolved out of anglo law. It was empirical and practical. And we saw a continent of justifications for the use of the power of the musket to overthrow the martial aristocracy
The french via utopian literary moralism, (Rousseau)
The german via utopian justificationary rationalism (Kant)
The jewish by utopian reasoned mysticism (Mendelssohn)
By the 19th century, because of the failures of the french revolution, and what we had learned from the process of colonization, we had seen the development of:
The Anglo-German-Italian continuation of empiricism: Maxwell, Smith/Hume, Darwin, Menger, Durkhiem, Weber, Pareto, Spencer’s brush with operationalism, and Nietzsche’s restoration of ancient european aesthetics.
The French general decline.
The Russian (nihilistic) literary tradition.
The German attempt at a second scientific revolution including a cast of hundreds, and cultural revolution – cut short by the world wars.
The Jewish pseudoscientific counter-revolution against the second european scientific revolution, by Boaz, Marx, Freud, and the Fankfurt’s school’s invention of critique (loading framing, rallying and shaming).
The european and american underclass and feminist left extension of the Frankfurt school’s critique (shaming). The takeover of the academy newly funded by postwar common class students, followed by nearly universal student loans. The formation of a secular state religion predicated on an academy and press practicing Critique, and a state bureaucracy running wild post-cold-war under both Neoconservatives and Globalist left. And the displacement of the martial class and their ancient discipline of ‘reporting’ from almost all public walks of life.
OUR ANCIENT HISTORY
christianizatiion
OUR MOST ANCIENT HISTORY
the invention of religion as retaliation against european martial paternalism.
THE COSTS OF TRUTHFUL SPEECH
Civilization has been made possible by the use of institutionally organized violence to incrementally suppress all violations of reciprocity, leaving only various market for reciprocity.
Deflationary truth is our most expensive commons. We are the only people who evolved it the only people to pay the high cost of maintaining it, and because of it we dragged humanity kicking and screaming out of ignorance, superstition, tyranny, hard labor, poverty, starvation, disease.
SO no. there is no excuse for conflation. And there is nothing western about it. If you want to save western civilization we can only do the opposite.
That is to regulate the commodity we call information, such that we place upon each speaker a warranty of due diligence within his abilities, for any words that he places in the market for information, just as we have regulated those services, and those goods that we have entered into the market.
If we do this we will achieve in the current era, not only the destruction of the industry of lying, but we will reap benefits from that suppression of crimes of deceit greater than those that we reaped from empiricism.
By what right do you claim the right to lie?
A very simple law is the best teacher.
When you speak in the commons, report.
Keep all other damage that you do in private.
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-05 19:39:00 UTC