Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • Types of Promise(Warranty)

    Unless one starts with a definition of truth these are fairly meaningless words. More desperate attempts to apply axiomatic or theoretic rules to loaded, framed, colloquial speech without the awareness that colloquial speech evolved to tolerate laziness, obscure ignorance, convey moral promise, and as such is neither axiomatic or theoretic but merely “meaningful”: conveying associations not necessary relations that are open to deduction. Types of Commitment ( promise, warranty ):

    • Understanding: I can also find a relationship between that description and my experience. ( warranty of sympathy )
    • Belief: I intuit so given my experience but I cannot warranty I have tested it. But I warranty that I speak honestly, even if I err.(moral warranty)
    • Rational: I can find no contradiction for within my experience, and warranty that I have tried. ( warranty of diligence without cost of testing )
    • Empirical: I find it to be correspondent with observations (measurements) that warrant against errors in observation ( warranty of diligence and bearing the cost of testing )
    • Scientific: despite my efforts, I find it is correspondent and I cannot find a reason that it is false so it remains a truth candidate. ( warranty of diligence and investing in expanding testing )
    • Testimonial: I have conducted tests of identity, internal consistency, empirical consistency, existential possibility, objective morality, full accounting, parsimony and limits and as such it is very likely for the question at hand that this statement will survive all scrutiny and only increase in parsimony. ( warranty of total testing )
    The only existentially possible truth is promissory. The only existential truth we can warranty is testimonial. One does not justify a truth one demonstrates a warranty of the degree of his diligence. Thus endeth the lesson. šŸ˜‰. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine.

  • No Place for the Ineffable?

    –“So the ineffable has no place?”–Ramsey I find ineffability to be an exceptional excuse fo preserving obscurantism and deceit. There is nothing inexplicable. There are things we merely are too ignorant to explain. As far as I know any human experience is conveyable by one means or another. The causal explanation of that experience is NOT THE SAME as the experience itself. But that does not mean that the causal explanation is not necessary and sufficient for the explanation of the experience. A recipe is necessary for a cake, but eating a cake is necessary for the experience of eating it. We may eat a cake without knowing how to make it by the recipe. But we cannot claim that the recipe for creating the experience of the cake is unknowable. —“Surely not, but reverse-engineering every experience in an empirical manner is questionable to say the least, it will always be found wanting by most people.”— Man is part of the universe and subject to the same constructions. There is nothing mysterious about it. The most serious problem we face is that the search system (system 1) and the action system (moving body parts) is insulated from our introspection. But that does not mean that we cannot use other tools and technology to perceive what occurs in our minds and bodies just as we use tools to observe what occurs in micro, and macro space outside of human scale. Our emotions are reactions to change in state of inventory (Property) thus informing us to act to acquire and defend inventory (property). There is nothing more to know I think. Or rather, psychology seems to be telling us only that we possess a lot of cognitive biasses to compel us to act optimistically in a hostile world where in we are largely ignorant. Lets take that criticism further: due to dunning Kruger effect, just as any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic even to the scientist, any sufficiently advanced form of reasoning appears to be deception or conspiracy to those of limited ability. Or more generalized, we are all limited in our abilities. And we all want concepts reduced to terms which we can grasp within our abilities. That means that fundamental truths must be articulated in a different language for about every 15 points of IQ (standard deviation) and in life, this is exactly what we see. So any sufficiently advanced concept will be impossible to voluntarily accept into one’s framework unless it is converted into language (analogy to experience) that is within the ability of an individual to experience. We do not limit truths to that which the common man can experience. We seek to create tools by which the common man can experience it given his limited abilities to experience that which he cannot directly perceive. I have said all along that I am not sure I am capable of reducing my language to that of the common man, and I have struggled very hard to reduce it to digestible form for the uncommon man. But there are others who will happily take this technology and transform it for their subordinate groups. I am pretty confident that propertarianism is revolutionary on the scale of Hume and Darwin. And while both those men are better authors than I am, if Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Einstein and Heidegger can be reduced from abstraction to policy then certainly propertarianism and testimonialism can be. After all. in the end, the principles are simple: 1) We constitute a division of perception and cognition as well as labor, and it is through voluntary cooperation that we make use of the specialized perception of each. 2) The law of non-imposition is sufficient for the rational decidability of all conflicts among men. This law can be incrementally discovered as we incrementally evolve our knowledge and deceit, productivity and parasitism, private property and commons, cooperation and conflict. 3) We domesticated man by the centralization of rents, and then further domesticate man by the suppression of centralized rents both of which are accomplished by the opposing arts of competition in the market, and juridical defense via common law, under natural law, insured by reciprocal warranty, where that warranty is provided by the promise of violence. 4) there are three methods of coercion which we can use for ill or good in the creation or disorder or order. and men learn to specialize in them, and we develop class hierarchies in each: violence, remuneration, and gossip. These three groups roughly battle for political control and it is this constant conflict that assists us in adaptation to different circumstances. Liberty and truth keep us flexible enough to adapt to any circumstance using the specializations of any of those three classes. Ergo they are not a hierarchy but competitors. 5) We could not mandate truth because as we developed greater knowledge the means of deceit (pseudoscience and pseudorationalism) exceeded our ability to defeat them with the common law. But today we CAN know how to defeat them by demanding the same warranties of due diligence in public speech in the market for information that we demand of goods and services in the market for consumption and commons. Testimonialism gives us sufficient criteria for putting into the common natural law, the method by which we must speak truthfully in order to prevent harm(imposition of costs) by externality. Now does everyone need to understand all these things and their consequences? No. They need instruction in grammar, rhetoric, and testimony: the art of warrantying that one does no harm when speaking in public. This does not mean we cannot err. It means only that we must provide due diligence to intellectual products just as we provide due diligence for goods and services rendered. Since we did much of this in the past when our science and public speech was limited largely to direct interpersonal experience, there is no reason we cannot teach one to do the same to indirect, impersonal experience of cooperation in the broader market. This is all entirely possible. Whether liars, parasites, and rent seekers will like the fact that they can no longer speak without due diligence is something else. People do not need to agree to truth. It just is. People do not need to agree to common or natural law, it just is. Only under democracy do we care about majority opinion. Liberty is constructed by elites who refuse to tolerate the alternatives. So we must merely not tolerate the alternatives.

  • No Place for the Ineffable?

    –“So the ineffable has no place?”–Ramsey I find ineffability to be an exceptional excuse fo preserving obscurantism and deceit. There is nothing inexplicable. There are things we merely are too ignorant to explain. As far as I know any human experience is conveyable by one means or another. The causal explanation of that experience is NOT THE SAME as the experience itself. But that does not mean that the causal explanation is not necessary and sufficient for the explanation of the experience. A recipe is necessary for a cake, but eating a cake is necessary for the experience of eating it. We may eat a cake without knowing how to make it by the recipe. But we cannot claim that the recipe for creating the experience of the cake is unknowable. —“Surely not, but reverse-engineering every experience in an empirical manner is questionable to say the least, it will always be found wanting by most people.”— Man is part of the universe and subject to the same constructions. There is nothing mysterious about it. The most serious problem we face is that the search system (system 1) and the action system (moving body parts) is insulated from our introspection. But that does not mean that we cannot use other tools and technology to perceive what occurs in our minds and bodies just as we use tools to observe what occurs in micro, and macro space outside of human scale. Our emotions are reactions to change in state of inventory (Property) thus informing us to act to acquire and defend inventory (property). There is nothing more to know I think. Or rather, psychology seems to be telling us only that we possess a lot of cognitive biasses to compel us to act optimistically in a hostile world where in we are largely ignorant. Lets take that criticism further: due to dunning Kruger effect, just as any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic even to the scientist, any sufficiently advanced form of reasoning appears to be deception or conspiracy to those of limited ability. Or more generalized, we are all limited in our abilities. And we all want concepts reduced to terms which we can grasp within our abilities. That means that fundamental truths must be articulated in a different language for about every 15 points of IQ (standard deviation) and in life, this is exactly what we see. So any sufficiently advanced concept will be impossible to voluntarily accept into one’s framework unless it is converted into language (analogy to experience) that is within the ability of an individual to experience. We do not limit truths to that which the common man can experience. We seek to create tools by which the common man can experience it given his limited abilities to experience that which he cannot directly perceive. I have said all along that I am not sure I am capable of reducing my language to that of the common man, and I have struggled very hard to reduce it to digestible form for the uncommon man. But there are others who will happily take this technology and transform it for their subordinate groups. I am pretty confident that propertarianism is revolutionary on the scale of Hume and Darwin. And while both those men are better authors than I am, if Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Einstein and Heidegger can be reduced from abstraction to policy then certainly propertarianism and testimonialism can be. After all. in the end, the principles are simple: 1) We constitute a division of perception and cognition as well as labor, and it is through voluntary cooperation that we make use of the specialized perception of each. 2) The law of non-imposition is sufficient for the rational decidability of all conflicts among men. This law can be incrementally discovered as we incrementally evolve our knowledge and deceit, productivity and parasitism, private property and commons, cooperation and conflict. 3) We domesticated man by the centralization of rents, and then further domesticate man by the suppression of centralized rents both of which are accomplished by the opposing arts of competition in the market, and juridical defense via common law, under natural law, insured by reciprocal warranty, where that warranty is provided by the promise of violence. 4) there are three methods of coercion which we can use for ill or good in the creation or disorder or order. and men learn to specialize in them, and we develop class hierarchies in each: violence, remuneration, and gossip. These three groups roughly battle for political control and it is this constant conflict that assists us in adaptation to different circumstances. Liberty and truth keep us flexible enough to adapt to any circumstance using the specializations of any of those three classes. Ergo they are not a hierarchy but competitors. 5) We could not mandate truth because as we developed greater knowledge the means of deceit (pseudoscience and pseudorationalism) exceeded our ability to defeat them with the common law. But today we CAN know how to defeat them by demanding the same warranties of due diligence in public speech in the market for information that we demand of goods and services in the market for consumption and commons. Testimonialism gives us sufficient criteria for putting into the common natural law, the method by which we must speak truthfully in order to prevent harm(imposition of costs) by externality. Now does everyone need to understand all these things and their consequences? No. They need instruction in grammar, rhetoric, and testimony: the art of warrantying that one does no harm when speaking in public. This does not mean we cannot err. It means only that we must provide due diligence to intellectual products just as we provide due diligence for goods and services rendered. Since we did much of this in the past when our science and public speech was limited largely to direct interpersonal experience, there is no reason we cannot teach one to do the same to indirect, impersonal experience of cooperation in the broader market. This is all entirely possible. Whether liars, parasites, and rent seekers will like the fact that they can no longer speak without due diligence is something else. People do not need to agree to truth. It just is. People do not need to agree to common or natural law, it just is. Only under democracy do we care about majority opinion. Liberty is constructed by elites who refuse to tolerate the alternatives. So we must merely not tolerate the alternatives.

  • The Ony Authority Is Totality Of Consequence

      ***There is no authority but totality of consequence*** Forever ignorant, forever ill-informed, forever limited by reason, we have increasingly general rules to rely upon when we must make the dozens if not hundreds of decisions we make daily. To make those decisions, we rely upon those methods of decision making we call manners, ethics, morals, traditions, history, natural laws, and formulae, consist entirely of theories that have survived over time, through a multitude of uses. Infrequently in human history, these theories change along with the great shifts in our geography, economy, technology, and knowledge and cause changes to manners, ethics, morals, traditions, our interpretation of and value of historical examples, and the set of formulae that we use most frequently. And we demonstrate those changes by altering our family structure, property allocations, and means of commons production: the structure of reproduction, the structure of production of goods and services, and the structure of production of commons. We can, from this history, given enough ‘shifts’ to compare with each other, derive basic rules of human cooperation that remain unchanged regardless of the weights and values and decision criteria we use in each era. These general rules are what we refer to as “natural law”. And that Natural Law is reducible to this principle: In any given structure of reproduction, production, and production of commons, all normative manners, ethics, morals, traditions, histories, myths, and institutions will adapt such that we produce the least imposition of costs upon one another’s expended efforts -parasitism- necessary to preserve that structure of reproduction, production, and production of commons. We seem, in each era, to produce some variation between Nash and Pareto optimums to until all possible rents at all possible levels are consumed. This maximization of rents (efficiency) creates both efficiency and fragility. And then when the necessary shocks arrive to trade routes, disease, climate, populations, war, immigration, conversion, the society cannot be reordered under the existing system of production and rents. This is why small nations are superior to large: they experiment small, and they fail small, and are subject to constant competition that forces early failure. This is the secret to western civilization. Because we cooperate better than other peoples by the near total suppression of free riding, and the inescapability of contract, we can create networks instead of hierarchies, and remain flexible at the cost of constant competition which gainst us constant adaptation. The USA will fail, just as Europe will fail – and we must make them fail. Because scale merely misleads us with visible efficiencies at the cost of invisible fragilities by maximizing rents along with maximizing redistribution. This is the law of nature. This is the law of man. Thus endeth the lesson. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • The Ony Authority Is Totality Of Consequence

      ***There is no authority but totality of consequence*** Forever ignorant, forever ill-informed, forever limited by reason, we have increasingly general rules to rely upon when we must make the dozens if not hundreds of decisions we make daily. To make those decisions, we rely upon those methods of decision making we call manners, ethics, morals, traditions, history, natural laws, and formulae, consist entirely of theories that have survived over time, through a multitude of uses. Infrequently in human history, these theories change along with the great shifts in our geography, economy, technology, and knowledge and cause changes to manners, ethics, morals, traditions, our interpretation of and value of historical examples, and the set of formulae that we use most frequently. And we demonstrate those changes by altering our family structure, property allocations, and means of commons production: the structure of reproduction, the structure of production of goods and services, and the structure of production of commons. We can, from this history, given enough ‘shifts’ to compare with each other, derive basic rules of human cooperation that remain unchanged regardless of the weights and values and decision criteria we use in each era. These general rules are what we refer to as “natural law”. And that Natural Law is reducible to this principle: In any given structure of reproduction, production, and production of commons, all normative manners, ethics, morals, traditions, histories, myths, and institutions will adapt such that we produce the least imposition of costs upon one another’s expended efforts -parasitism- necessary to preserve that structure of reproduction, production, and production of commons. We seem, in each era, to produce some variation between Nash and Pareto optimums to until all possible rents at all possible levels are consumed. This maximization of rents (efficiency) creates both efficiency and fragility. And then when the necessary shocks arrive to trade routes, disease, climate, populations, war, immigration, conversion, the society cannot be reordered under the existing system of production and rents. This is why small nations are superior to large: they experiment small, and they fail small, and are subject to constant competition that forces early failure. This is the secret to western civilization. Because we cooperate better than other peoples by the near total suppression of free riding, and the inescapability of contract, we can create networks instead of hierarchies, and remain flexible at the cost of constant competition which gainst us constant adaptation. The USA will fail, just as Europe will fail – and we must make them fail. Because scale merely misleads us with visible efficiencies at the cost of invisible fragilities by maximizing rents along with maximizing redistribution. This is the law of nature. This is the law of man. Thus endeth the lesson. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • The Revolution is Here

    • Metaphysics of Correspondence with Action – Realism, Naturalism, Complete
    • Scientific Realism (Testimonial Realism), Defeating the Red Queen.
    • Testimonial Truth – Complete Warranty of Due Diligence
    • Propertarianism – Ethics of Property in Toto: non-imposition of costs.
    • Nomocracy – Rule of Law, Universal Standing, Universal Application
    • Market Government – Post Monopoly Production of Commons, Market for Production, Market for Reproduction,
    • Transcendent Aesthetics – Bounty: the True, the Excellent, The Beautiful, The Transcendent

  • Even Testimonialism Will Not Herald The End Of History

    In lower trust countries people justify their various forms of lying just as we high trust people justify the externalities caused by our combination of linguistic conveniences, methodological habits, variations in morality and ethics, and of course political correctness That does not mean that just as we live considerably better than all these lower trust societies, that we world not yet again live better than we do now if we spoke more truthfully than we do now.

    The reasons are not terribly hard to understand. And in simple terms the people you associate with are more important in determining your prosperity and safety than your own abilities. So just as the Flynn effect is the product of reducing the bottom and saturating everyone else in scientific general rules, we can likewise expect the same increase by saturating everyone in testimonial speech and reducing the bottom. We are not yet at the end of history. There is a long way to go. And perhaps the reson we seem stalled in physics is because we aren’t producing enough patterns in our own behavior to deduce the construction of the rest of the universe.

  • Even Testimonialism Will Not Herald The End Of History

    In lower trust countries people justify their various forms of lying just as we high trust people justify the externalities caused by our combination of linguistic conveniences, methodological habits, variations in morality and ethics, and of course political correctness That does not mean that just as we live considerably better than all these lower trust societies, that we world not yet again live better than we do now if we spoke more truthfully than we do now.

    The reasons are not terribly hard to understand. And in simple terms the people you associate with are more important in determining your prosperity and safety than your own abilities. So just as the Flynn effect is the product of reducing the bottom and saturating everyone else in scientific general rules, we can likewise expect the same increase by saturating everyone in testimonial speech and reducing the bottom. We are not yet at the end of history. There is a long way to go. And perhaps the reson we seem stalled in physics is because we aren’t producing enough patterns in our own behavior to deduce the construction of the rest of the universe.

  • Truth is a Subtractive Process. It’s Opportunity that’s Additive.

    TRUTH IS SUBTRACTIVE (CRITICAL) NOT ADDITIVE (JUSTIFICATIONARY) We evolved as pot-makers and clay sculptors: constructing what we can with our hands. But the universe beyond our touch is discovered by the hammer and chisel, steadily carving the masterpiece of truth from the stone. Truth is subtractive. What remains after we pull away error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, pseudoscience and deceit, is what remains for us to wonder at the truth of it all.

    Humans can evolve into the gods we seek. That is our only purpose. To carve away our ignorance, and save ourselves and the universe from our shared ends – as gods.

  • Truth is a Subtractive Process. It’s Opportunity that’s Additive.

    TRUTH IS SUBTRACTIVE (CRITICAL) NOT ADDITIVE (JUSTIFICATIONARY) We evolved as pot-makers and clay sculptors: constructing what we can with our hands. But the universe beyond our touch is discovered by the hammer and chisel, steadily carving the masterpiece of truth from the stone. Truth is subtractive. What remains after we pull away error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, pseudoscience and deceit, is what remains for us to wonder at the truth of it all.

    Humans can evolve into the gods we seek. That is our only purpose. To carve away our ignorance, and save ourselves and the universe from our shared ends – as gods.