Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • Why Study Philosophy? There Isn’t Much There. It’s in History, Science, Economy.

    If by philosophy we refer to fantasy literature as an extension of The Novel, Fictional histories, Mythology, Detective Stories, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, then the study of the SEP is equivalent to a world-of-warcraft or Game of Thrones wiki. It’s just entertainment. It’s no different from collecting any other kind of useless thing: bottle caps, beer cans, antique toys. If we are to make a list of existential problems that remain unsolved, and we eliminate those problems that are but word games that overload our meager minds, by proposing inarticulate deceptions masquerading as meaningful problems, then we are stuck with a small number of meaningful problems, and the vast literature of philosophy is a little other than attempt to create a religion by more elaborate deception than the original versions. Now, we could on the other hand, look at the catalog of philosophical positions as the evolution of (a) correspondence with reality, and (b) deceptions that seek to avoid it. Or the evolution of (a) true propositions, and (b) false propositions. And rather than empathize with the vast catalog of bad ideas we attempted to criticize and discover the motives of those thinkers and the methods of deceit that they employed, then that might be interesting. It might also be humiliating.

  • Why Study Philosophy? There Isn’t Much There. It’s in History, Science, Economy.

    If by philosophy we refer to fantasy literature as an extension of The Novel, Fictional histories, Mythology, Detective Stories, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, then the study of the SEP is equivalent to a world-of-warcraft or Game of Thrones wiki. It’s just entertainment. It’s no different from collecting any other kind of useless thing: bottle caps, beer cans, antique toys. If we are to make a list of existential problems that remain unsolved, and we eliminate those problems that are but word games that overload our meager minds, by proposing inarticulate deceptions masquerading as meaningful problems, then we are stuck with a small number of meaningful problems, and the vast literature of philosophy is a little other than attempt to create a religion by more elaborate deception than the original versions. Now, we could on the other hand, look at the catalog of philosophical positions as the evolution of (a) correspondence with reality, and (b) deceptions that seek to avoid it. Or the evolution of (a) true propositions, and (b) false propositions. And rather than empathize with the vast catalog of bad ideas we attempted to criticize and discover the motives of those thinkers and the methods of deceit that they employed, then that might be interesting. It might also be humiliating.

  • **Specialization Leads To Justification.**

    **Specialization Leads To Justification.**

    Source date (UTC): 2016-10-03 05:56:00 UTC

  • THE INTELLECTUAL CATASTROPHE OF SPECIALIZATION AND THE CURE FOR IT IN EDUCATION

    THE INTELLECTUAL CATASTROPHE OF SPECIALIZATION AND THE CURE FOR IT IN EDUCATION

    Outside of the top 5% in all disciplines:

    – Physicists are often ridiculous because either they don’t understand their own subject, or because they lack the philosophical training to know the difference between general rules of the discipline (dogma) and the epistemological necessity that these general rules provide a shortcut for.

    – Economists are often ridiculous because either they don’t understand the limits of mathematics, the limits of statistics, and the limits of human cognitive bias, but most importantly, the epistemology that places that their models, methods, explanatory and predictive power that seems to evade them – and is now being supplied by experimental psychology and cognitive science.

    – Philosophers are almost universally ridiculous becasue either they ignore what we have learned about epistemology from physics, economics, and cognitive science, or they do not understand the difference between meaning(map) and existence(territory), or because they are subject of dogmas (sets, internal consistency without external correspondence), but most importantly because they do not account for costs on the one hand and rely on a false intuitionistic definition of the good on the other.

    – Mathematicians are only slightly ridiculous since their field is the easiest to test, but they seem to ignore the fact that mathematics functions by removing properties from reality, but that all mathematics in application is bound by reality that it ignores. As such we see them confuse the reductio logic of mathematics with mathematical platonism. They confuse the determinism of all axiomatic declarations with mystery rather than the limits of human comprehension that mathematics assists us in extending through symbols and constant relations. They confuse the rate at which operations will produce members of a collection in any period of time, or over so many operations, with the size of the set itself which must always be bound by some limit. They confuse the name of a positional number with the name of a function upon positional numbers that produces a ratio. They seem to have lost sight of the fact that their discipline can either be treated as a science of measurement, or a logic disconnected from reality, or ideal fantasy no different from philosophical and literary adventurism. I could go on at length here with ease.

    THERE IS ONLY ONE FIELD: TRUTH (TESTIMONY)

    What differs is the instruments we require to inspect. We have invented both methods of inspection (and they’re reductio in almost all cases), and methods of measurement, and methods of decidability.

    WE INVESTIGATE:

    1 – Reason, Logic, Mathematics, (Reason)

    2 – Physics, Chemistry, Biology, (Existence)

    3 – Psychology, Sociology, Politics, History, Economy, Law (Cooperation)

    WE MEASURE

    1 – Categories, properties, and relations

    2 – Logic of comparisons and transformations

    3 – Empirical measurements of existential reality

    4 – Moral measurements of cooperation

    – WITH –

    5 – Operational language to articulate all of the above free of error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, and deceit.

    – AND –

    6 – Full Accounting, Limits, and Parsimony To protect Against Our cherry picking by error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, and deceit.

    THIS IS HOW WE MUST TEACH HUMANS IN MODERNITY

    1 – Strength, Fitness, Sport, Defense, War, Strategy

    2 – Mythology, Story, Biography, History, Essay, Diary, Criticism

    3 – Self, Friendship, Employment, Partnership, Marriage, Parenting, Managing, Commanding, Ruling

    4 – Property, Manners, Ethics, Morals, Natural Law, Evolutionary Strategies

    5 – Psychology, Sociology, Economics, Politics, Conflict(War/Crime)

    6 – Vocabulary, Grammar, Logic,Testimony(Truth), Rhetoric, Judgement

    7 – Reading, Writing, Programming, Strictly Constructed Law

    8 – Arithmetic, Accounting, Algebra, Geometry, Statistics, Calculus, (Mathematics of Mind/Cognition <–Note!)

    9 – Empiricism(observation and measurement), Physics, Chemistry, Biology, (Sentience <–Note!)

    10 – Monuments, Architecture, Arts, Decoration, Music, Plays, (the discipline of creativity: knowledge and free association.)

    This curriculum produces skills in all areas of life. If a student can make it through the first half of each, he or she will be adequately prepared for life in modernity.

    SORTITION

    Rolling three years in each class

    Boys and Girls In separate classes

    Children start by maturity level, not age, with delay preferable to early entry.

    Emphasis should be given to rate of maturity and individual needs so that boys with high testosterone and rapid maturity are given more exercise and those with less and lower more drills.

    IMHO Pass Fail, or % is all that is needed, since they will be exposed to the same information repeatedly. I don’t like ‘grades’. As far as I can tell most grades are a reflection of the relationship between the intelligence and maturity of an individual and the artificial standard of the industrial classroom.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-10-03 05:18:00 UTC

  • WHY STUDY PHILOSOPHY? WELL. DON’T. ( If by philosophy we refer to fantasy litera

    WHY STUDY PHILOSOPHY? WELL. DON’T.

    ( If by philosophy we refer to fantasy literature as an extension of The Novel, Fictional histories, Mythology, Detective Stories, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, then the study of the SEP is equivalent to a world-of-warcraft or Game of Thrones wiki. It’s just entertainment. It’s no different from collecting any other kind of useless thing: bottle caps, beer cans, antique toys. If we are to make a list of existential problems that remain unsolved, and we eliminate those problems that are but word games that overload our meager minds, by proposing inarticulate deceptions masquerading as meaningful problems, then we are stuck with a small number of meaningful problems, and the vast literature of philosophy is a little other than attempt to create a religion by more elaborate deception than the original versions. Now, we could on the other hand, look at the catalog of philosophical positions as the evolution of (a) correspondence with reality, and (b) deceptions that seek to avoid it. Or the evolution of (a) true propositions, and (b) false propositions. And rather than empathize with the vast catalog of bad ideas we attempted to criticize and discover the motives of those thinkers and the methods of deceit that they employed, then that might be interesting. It might also be humiliating. )

    Source date (UTC): 2016-10-03 02:24:00 UTC

  • (thought) I’m getting the feeling that all set based argument is just lying. I m

    (thought)

    I’m getting the feeling that all set based argument is just lying.

    I mean we can TEACH by transferring properties via sets. But you know, you gotta criticize that nonsense once you turn the lightbulb on, oyu gotta look around the room a bit and make sure you see what you think you see.

    You do that by sequences. Not just ORDERED SETS, but supply demand CURVES with LIMITS.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-10-02 05:23:00 UTC

  • THERE IS ONLY ONE PHILOSOPHY IF WE SPEAK THE TRUTH. THE REST IS IGNORANCE, ERROR

    THERE IS ONLY ONE PHILOSOPHY IF WE SPEAK THE TRUTH. THE REST IS IGNORANCE, ERROR, BIAS AND LIES

    (very important for anyone interested in philosophy)

    *(How should we teach Philosophy? Let me tell you.)*

    One can teach philosophy as historical LITERATURE(Errors, Lies and Failures). Or one can teach philosophy as the evolution of TRUTH TELLING (science).

    If you want to teach the history of TRUTH then you teach western philosophy – at least you teach a small subset of it. (A very small one).

    If you do teach truth then philosophy is equivalent to a STEM course SEQUENCE:

    1 – Philosophy (science of truthful speech)

    2 – Law (social/cooperative science)

    3 – Economics (organizational science)

    4 – Mathematics ( science of measurement )

    5 – Physical Science (physical sciences of the universe)

    6 – Technology (physical sciences in materials)

    7 – Engineering, (physical sciences in construction)

    If you want to teach literature, then teach moral literature.

    SEQUENCE:

    1 – Mythology, (Non-Conflationary Analogy)

    2 – Theology, (Authoritarian/Conflationary Analogy)

    —

    3 – Moral Literature, <<—- Almost All ‘Philosophy’

    4 – The Novel and Short Story, <<— Incl., Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Mystery, Etc.

    —

    5 – History, (description)

    6 – Biography,(description)

    —

    7 – Argument (coercion)

    7 – Essay (opinion)

    8 – Poetry and Verse. (expression)

    WE MAY DIVERSIFY LITERATURE BY CULTURE LIKE DIET, AND FESTIVALS.

    But truth bears no competition. Polylogism cannot exist. All such attempts are merely ignorance, error, bias and lies.

    THE WEST EXCEEDED THE REST THREE TIMES.

    In the Steppe.(horse, wheel, bronze, heroism (and technology))

    In the Ancient World (heroism, truth, reason, jury, natural law, commerce, and technology)

    In the Modern World. (heroism, truth, trust, reason, jury, natural law, commerce, accounting, common law, and technology )

    For these simple reasons: Truth not compromise, Analytic(non-conflationary), not conflationary, Competition(sovereignty), not Decision(rule).

    OTHERS MUST LEARN TRUTH. WE DO NOT NEED TO STUDY ERROR.

    LIMITS: SPEAKING IN SEQUENCES (SPECTRA)

    I follow a general rule that if I speak in ideal types (concepts) and I cannot position an argument or idea on a spectrum (define its limits) then I do not know what I am talking about, and will unknowingly engage in conflation and imprecision from which no deduction is possible, since each attempt merely amplifies errors of conflation. Yet this is precisely what men do, because most men do not seek to discover uncomfortable (expensive) truth (requiring adaptation) but to justify a utilitarian falsehood (limit costs of adaptation).

    PHILOSOPHY = CHOICE/PREFERENCE + DECIDABILITY/NECESSITY

    Any Philosophical Framework, no matter which argumentative method is used to construct it (myth, parable, rationalism, pseudoscience, law, or science) must supply the following in order to produce a change in state of the human mind:

    1 – Metaphysical value judgment as to man’s relation with reality (usually if not always unstated).

    2 – A set of Concepts, Properties, and Relations,

    3 – Values for those Concepts and Relations,

    4 – Decidability from those concepts, properties, relations, and values.

    And in that metaphysical value judgment, and by the means of arguing in favor of it, do we find the differences between civilizations, religions, and philosophies.

    METAPHYSICAL ASSUMPTIONS

    – The world is uncontrollable(or evil) and I must escape from it. (Mysticism/Judaism/Christianity/Islam = ‘Critique/gossip’ or ‘fantasy worlds’ or ‘utopias’)

    – The world is hostile and I can only control how I respond to it (Buddhism = Disengagement)

    – The world of man is chaos but we can create harmony, and I must learn to live in harmony with it (Confucianism = Historicism)

    – The world is vast and I can only control and be responsible for what I have the ability to control and be responsible for. (Stoicism = Natural Law)

    – The purpose of my existence is to alter the world for the better having existed in it. (Heroism = Technology)

    ASSUMPTIONS ARE EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES

    We are (genetically, behaviorally, materially) more or less desirable to others in our capacity as children, kin, mates, friends, allies, leaders, rulers. We call this our ‘class’: Genetic, Occupational, Economic, Social. All of which overlap except for the outliers.

    .

    STRATEGIES ARE GOOD(LIBERATING) AND BAD(IMPRISONING), NOT MERELY DIFFERENCES IN PREFERENCES

    So some strategies will lead you into dysgenia, ignorance, decline, poverty and illness (ISLAM). And some strategies will lead you into slow evolution (Confucius), and some strategies will provide you with eugenics and rapid evolution (Western Aristocratic Egalitarianism “Aryanism”, Middle-Class Rule of Law, Working Class Stoicism, Underclass Christianity.)

    WESTERN PHILOSOPHY (HEROISM, LAW[natural empirical], TECHNOLOGY[science], REFLECTS CLASSES

    (just as Confucius vs Lao Tzu, just as Brahmins vs the Underclasses) Westerners do not engage in institutional conflation. We separate mythic literature(heroism), religion(sanctity), festival/celebration/sport, education, law, science. And we either produce a subset of each for each class, or we emphasize one or another in each class. In other words, we produce conceptual products for various markets (upper, professional, middle, working, lower, under). And because none has any real power via conflation of argument or institution, this market remains: a competition between philosophies (methods of decidability).

    WESTERNERS USE DECONFLATED INSTITUTIONS AND ARGUMENTS: SPECIALIZATION NOT UNIFORMITY

    This ‘deconflated market’ model is profoundly important when comparing the west to other ‘conflationary monopoly’ civilizations and cultures.

    THIS PROVIDES SPECIALIZATION IN EACH TYPE OF ARGUMENT, INSTITUTION

    It allows us to specialize in each without sacrificing each out of pragmatic necessity given the diverse abilities of each class (or rather lack of abilities of each class).

    THE PROBLEM IS THAT WE HAVE NOT (UNTIL NOW) HAD A UNIVERSAL COMMENSURABLE LANGUAGE ACROSS INSTITUTIONS AND ARGUMENT TYPES.

    While we have had MONEY to make commensurable good and services across all specializations

    While we have had NATURAL LAW to make conflict commensurable across all specializations.

    While we have had MATHEMATICS to make everything we measure commensurable across all specializations.

    While we have had NATURAL SCIENCE to

    We have NOT had a MORAL LANGUAGE OF COOPERATION across all those specializations.

    PHILOSOPHY IS LARGELY PRACTICED AS A MIDDLE CLASS AND UPPER MIDDLE-CLASS METHOD OF INFLUENCING THE RULING CLASS (STATUS QUO).

    Religion is largely practiced as a lower class means of resisting the ruling class (status quo). Religion coerces man by resistance.

    Credit and Trade are practiced as a means of rule by the economic class within the limits fo the religious and legal classes. Finance, Industry, Entrepreneurship, Calculative, Managerial, administrative specialize in organization of production

    Law is largely practiced as a means of administrative rule by the ruling class, by employing the professional class, just as war is practiced as a means of territorial rule by the ruling class by employing the working, and underclasses. Law coerces man by force.

    Science, technology, engineering, craftsmanship, and labor specialize in transformation (coercing the universe rather than coercing man).

    Women specialize in the organization of reproduction, care, and caretaking. They need no ‘religion’ except to confirm the intuitions that they are born with. Festivals, Philosophy, Soldiery are for men. And Religion, Feasts, and caretaking are for women. Not that we cannot preclude one or the other. But this explains the kind of information system (philosophy) we are attracted to: one that justifies our genetic predispositions.

    SO PHILOSOPHERS FAILED IN THE 20TH CENTURY

    1 – Philosophers tried to make the discipline a SPECIALTY rather than a language of commensurability. (The continued investigation into Truth, since all the other specializations had broken off into sciences,)

    2 – Philosophers tried to create a second set of lies, this time with pseudorationalism, and pseudoscience (the cosmopolitans:Boaz, Marx, Freud, Cantor, Adorno; Rand/Rothbard; and the Puritans: French, and American literary Postmodernists; And the secular Christians Rawls-and-too-many-others-to-list. )

    3 – Philosophers failed to solve the problem of the social sciences (cooperation) and instead used a multitude of deceptions and obscurantisms in order to justify authoritarianism(non-cooperation). This exposes most philosophers as theologians in secular rhetorical garb.

    PHILOSOPHERS EITHER ENGAGE IN THE INVESTIGATION OF TRUTH, THE ARTICULATION OF POSSIBILITY, OR THE CREATION OF A FICTION, OR THE CREATION OF DECEIT.

    Philosophers have a very poor record in history. Despite so many, it is largely those who struggle to discover empiricism and its offspring ‘testimony’ that have contributed to man. The rationalists are almost universally reducible to excuse makers, and those who attempt to create a rational literature with which to replace biblical literature of mysticism.

    Many people who enjoy philosophy are far closer to recreational readers of science fiction and fantasy with which to escape the effort of truth seeking in reality, than inquisitors into truth from which we may construct solutions. We can discover which of these a person is: recreational literature, seeker of a particular solution, or investigator of truth with very few questions and very little difficulty.

    Whenever we do not argue in favor of truth we merely deprive Man of the knowledge he needs to invent institutions of cooperation that assist us in cooperating in the real world.

    We can use the truth to identify possibilities, or we can deny the truth and create possibilities that require lies (religions) incompatible with reality.

    We can create deceptions with which to destroy truth or obscure it.

    It is quite easy in retrospect to determine which philosophers have done so.

    PHILOSOPHERS AS PROFITEERS ON THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

    In other words, philosophers sought a market into which to sell their ideas for profit or coercion, not truth, regardless of profit or coercion.

    ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY?

    1) Investigate and Prosecute Falsehoods And Their Advocates

    2) Incorporate the findings of the sciences such that discover superior truths to those we use today.

    3) Discover new possibilities having incorporated the findings of the sciences.

    4) Articulate metaphysical representations, Reorganize Concepts, Properties, and Relations, Re-weight Values, and provide new criteria of Decidability.

    IS THERE A SPACE FOR LIARS?

    No. There is a space for parables. But liars, particularly philosophical liars, should be prosecuted like any other liar that creates a hazard in the commons. Most philosophers function akin to tiger traps baited with words and are completely unaccountable for the tragedy and death that they have caused.

    I am a philosopher. As such, a prosecutor. Anything that survives prosecution, and which I am willing to warranty with my life, is worthy of publication into the commons. If either of those conditions fails, then I should be punished for it.

    Why should philosophers have greater permissiveness than the manufacturers of ladders, and the brewers of coffee, or the makers of drugs?

    They shouldn’t. Because arguably, philosophers and theologians ship the worst product that causes the most harm of any product man has made.

    (I know. Everyone wants to play philosopher at everyone else’s expense just like they want to free-ride on everyone else in every other capacity in life. But speech produces consequences. And while we may always say truthful speech produces consequences that we must bear the cost of, there is no reason we must bear the cost of false speech. Especially given how much of it there is, and how expensive it has been for western civilization.)

    THE MOST IMPORTANT SEQUENCE

    – Testimony(what can I see not infer)

    – Vocabulary

    – Grammar

    – Logic(reason) and Measurement(math)

    – Natural Law

    – Micro Economics (incentives)

    – Strict Construction

    – Rhetoric (argument)

    -Cheers

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/1262749110415707/permalink/1304648022892482/

    Source date (UTC): 2016-10-02 04:54:00 UTC

  • People Will Find Truth Unappealing Or Unconvincing

    Well lets take that criticism further: due to dunning kreuger 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 lanague (analogy to experience) that is within the ability of an individual to experience. We do not limit truths to that which teh 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 percieve. 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.

  • People Will Find Truth Unappealing Or Unconvincing

    Well lets take that criticism further: due to dunning kreuger 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 lanague (analogy to experience) that is within the ability of an individual to experience. We do not limit truths to that which teh 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 percieve. 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.

  • Decidability And Morality

    While explanatory power is useful – it isn’t necessarily a test of truth. Whereas testimonial decidability does serve as a test of truth. We tend to confuse platonic truth (that arrangement of ideas we might possess if we possessed more information than we currently do) where our model is infinitely intertemporal(extends into the future regardless of problem set, with decidable truth, where our model is a problem we seek to solve with the knowledge available, with analytic truth, where we possess all possible knowledge because our model is axiomatic. But this is a confusion of the information present at different points of the present

    The problem for these philosophers of empty verbalism, is that once a theory provides perfect decidability, it’s true by all possible measures. So natural law is ‘true’ even if you don’t like it. Now if you don’t like it, then I (we) can certainly understand why – you lose all opportunity for parasitism. Now you might make claims that reciprocal insurance in which you or others become beneficiaries isn’t parasitism. But then we would have to distinguish between accident and choice. And in that analysis, there are very few acts of god other than catastrophic illness and natural disasters that are not your choice. Even those are largely avoidable if you haven’t chosen poorly. This is why so many people prefer to hang on pseudo-moral arguments, and pseudo-moral religious arguments: in order to preserve their parasitism. When instead, they could simply offer to be better people in exchange for that which they seek> And that is the real issue, isn’t it? Self-discipline is a high cost and one that many of us seek to avoid paying by making false moral and religious claims in order to obtain benefits by acts of deception using appeals to our signals of status and self-worth, charity, and altruism.. Whereas the moral folk, who build good families, object to the vast difference in payments of self-discipline that they contribute to the commons, as well as the material payments they make to those who fail to exercise that discipline. Why? Because they pay double. whereas they would gladly pay money in return for behavior.