Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • Pinker’s Criticism Of Taleb Is Taleb’s Doing But…

    Taleb is right, Pinker is wrong, but Taleb makes his arguments to general principles rather than operational explanations. This is why we must have empiricism AND operationalism in scientific assertions. This is why people like Taleb must work top down (empirically) and others like me must work bottom up (operationally). And why opportunities to do both, like Darwin’s, are the product of novel data collection at much larger (logarithmic?) scale. I suspect that because of our status differences Taleb and I could not work together on this, and no one will see our different missions as the same as that of Hayek (long run law) and Mises (medium run finance), or that Taleb and I are working on the same problem that Poincaré, Mises, Hayek, Popper, Brouwer, and Bridgman failed to solve: how to we separate science from pseudoscience, once we are talking about stochastic systems at very great scale? What happened when teh industrial revolution hit, and we needed to move from operational accounting to correlative statistics, yet could not bridge the technological gap of testing our statistical statements like we do our theoretical statements. Especially when there is profound incentive to use financialization to accumulate risk and spend down capital precisely because at such scale operations are imperceptible to us. We boil the frog. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Pinker’s Criticism Of Taleb Is Taleb’s Doing But…

    Taleb is right, Pinker is wrong, but Taleb makes his arguments to general principles rather than operational explanations. This is why we must have empiricism AND operationalism in scientific assertions. This is why people like Taleb must work top down (empirically) and others like me must work bottom up (operationally). And why opportunities to do both, like Darwin’s, are the product of novel data collection at much larger (logarithmic?) scale. I suspect that because of our status differences Taleb and I could not work together on this, and no one will see our different missions as the same as that of Hayek (long run law) and Mises (medium run finance), or that Taleb and I are working on the same problem that Poincaré, Mises, Hayek, Popper, Brouwer, and Bridgman failed to solve: how to we separate science from pseudoscience, once we are talking about stochastic systems at very great scale? What happened when teh industrial revolution hit, and we needed to move from operational accounting to correlative statistics, yet could not bridge the technological gap of testing our statistical statements like we do our theoretical statements. Especially when there is profound incentive to use financialization to accumulate risk and spend down capital precisely because at such scale operations are imperceptible to us. We boil the frog. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Q&a: Curt: What’s Your Criticism Of Kant?

    —Curt, Thanks for doing this. I would appreciate it if you could expand upon your criticism of Kant and what exactly he got wrong (and what he got right if anything). What is the problem with Critique of Pure Reason?— I think anyone can read wikipedia and understand the philosophical criticisms of Kant. I think most of us understand that there are problems of internal consistency, and of obscurantism, that allow him to reason from vague generalizations to specifics, and then to claim that a priori and a posteriori are different classes of knowledge rahter than the apriori is but a special case of the universal epistemological sequence we mistakenly call empiricism but is reducible to the sequence: free association, question, hypothesis, theory, law. Secondly, He did this in order to sew doubt. (which was Rand’s criticism). He wanted to sew doubt in order to attack empiricism. Thirdly, He was seeking a way to preserve germanic christianity in rational post-mystical terms as a means of AVOIDING the challenge posed by empiricism – and the vast literary nonsense that constittutes german (continental) philosophy is evidence of the damage he has done. And the use of his work by generations of pseudoscientists that followed him (Marx and Freud, Mises and Rothbard, The Frankfurt School, the posmodernists, and just about every other miscreant group of pseudo intellectuals) each took his verbal obscurantism as a method of overloading, suggestino, and deceit, to new heights, producing in the end, what we call, political correctness (outright lying), and the total destruction of social science under an ocean of postmodern pseudorational and pseudoscientific analogistic babble. So is his categorical imperative incorrect? No. But he is the inventor of pseudorationalism as a substitute for mysticism. As such it is his TECHNIQUE that is nothing but an enormous justificationary network designed to preserve church, monarchy, and state, order using pseudo-rational rather than mystical speech, out of fear that individual sovereignty and empirical analysis would threaten that order. Kant was a very bright man who created the rhetorical equivalent of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction. And while the authors of the bomb rependted, and so have their followers, kant and his followers revel in the ongoing damage he has done. If you read the European Right, the reason they fail is they are stuck in kant’s restatement of christianity – still servants of nonsense, appealing to emotion using the pretense of reason, rather than appealing to reason regardless of emotional response. Because that’s what science means: cleansed of error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute

  • Q&a: Curt: What’s Your Criticism Of Kant?

    —Curt, Thanks for doing this. I would appreciate it if you could expand upon your criticism of Kant and what exactly he got wrong (and what he got right if anything). What is the problem with Critique of Pure Reason?— I think anyone can read wikipedia and understand the philosophical criticisms of Kant. I think most of us understand that there are problems of internal consistency, and of obscurantism, that allow him to reason from vague generalizations to specifics, and then to claim that a priori and a posteriori are different classes of knowledge rahter than the apriori is but a special case of the universal epistemological sequence we mistakenly call empiricism but is reducible to the sequence: free association, question, hypothesis, theory, law. Secondly, He did this in order to sew doubt. (which was Rand’s criticism). He wanted to sew doubt in order to attack empiricism. Thirdly, He was seeking a way to preserve germanic christianity in rational post-mystical terms as a means of AVOIDING the challenge posed by empiricism – and the vast literary nonsense that constittutes german (continental) philosophy is evidence of the damage he has done. And the use of his work by generations of pseudoscientists that followed him (Marx and Freud, Mises and Rothbard, The Frankfurt School, the posmodernists, and just about every other miscreant group of pseudo intellectuals) each took his verbal obscurantism as a method of overloading, suggestino, and deceit, to new heights, producing in the end, what we call, political correctness (outright lying), and the total destruction of social science under an ocean of postmodern pseudorational and pseudoscientific analogistic babble. So is his categorical imperative incorrect? No. But he is the inventor of pseudorationalism as a substitute for mysticism. As such it is his TECHNIQUE that is nothing but an enormous justificationary network designed to preserve church, monarchy, and state, order using pseudo-rational rather than mystical speech, out of fear that individual sovereignty and empirical analysis would threaten that order. Kant was a very bright man who created the rhetorical equivalent of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction. And while the authors of the bomb rependted, and so have their followers, kant and his followers revel in the ongoing damage he has done. If you read the European Right, the reason they fail is they are stuck in kant’s restatement of christianity – still servants of nonsense, appealing to emotion using the pretense of reason, rather than appealing to reason regardless of emotional response. Because that’s what science means: cleansed of error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute

  • Q&A: Two Questions: Operationalism, And Nick Land.

    First, I don’t use the term ‘verifiable’ because that implies the fallacy of justificationism. For a general rule to exist and be non-false, we attempt to demonstrate determinism ( regularity, consistency ) of that general rule in every *dimension*: categorical consistency,
    internal consistency,
    external consistency,
    moral consistency,
    scope consistency(limits, full accounting, and parsimony). So in testing consistency (regularity, determinism), we ask the language is operationally descriptive and the process and results repeatable. We demonstrate regularity under some number of conditions. When we use operational language we demonstrate that we have restricted ourselves to existentially possible statements, and therefore constructed a ‘proof’ (test) of existential possibility. Now, a proof is not synonymous with a truth. It is merely evidence of possibility. Whereas if we cannot construct an operational proof, either the claim is false, or we do not know enough to claim it may be true. TWO: NICK LAND I am an analytic philosopher(science/proofs), and Nick is a Continental(meaning/literature) philosopher. I can probably translate any of his statements from literary to analytic if I work at it. But Nick’s writing verges on poetry, and while we probably agree on a lot, our frames are from two different worlds, and I am highly critical of the continental method in general. It is too hard to truth test continental statements and so I would prefer we spoke in literary analogy as do novelists, documentary, proof construction as I do, or empirical analysis as most scientists do. And I don’t find the conflation of these various technologies to be very helpful. Interestingly if you look at my work (anglo American legal empirical), Hoppe’s work (german Kantian rational), Moldbug’s work (Jewish critique), and Nick’s work (continental literary), you see that each of argues using our cultural frames of communication and argument. I think that’s the interesting takeaway. That it’s just more evidence of my argument that each enlightenment culture tried to take its internal normative and institutional models and to propose them as universals, by more honest or more dishonest means. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute

  • Q&A: Two Questions: Operationalism, And Nick Land.

    First, I don’t use the term ‘verifiable’ because that implies the fallacy of justificationism. For a general rule to exist and be non-false, we attempt to demonstrate determinism ( regularity, consistency ) of that general rule in every *dimension*: categorical consistency,
    internal consistency,
    external consistency,
    moral consistency,
    scope consistency(limits, full accounting, and parsimony). So in testing consistency (regularity, determinism), we ask the language is operationally descriptive and the process and results repeatable. We demonstrate regularity under some number of conditions. When we use operational language we demonstrate that we have restricted ourselves to existentially possible statements, and therefore constructed a ‘proof’ (test) of existential possibility. Now, a proof is not synonymous with a truth. It is merely evidence of possibility. Whereas if we cannot construct an operational proof, either the claim is false, or we do not know enough to claim it may be true. TWO: NICK LAND I am an analytic philosopher(science/proofs), and Nick is a Continental(meaning/literature) philosopher. I can probably translate any of his statements from literary to analytic if I work at it. But Nick’s writing verges on poetry, and while we probably agree on a lot, our frames are from two different worlds, and I am highly critical of the continental method in general. It is too hard to truth test continental statements and so I would prefer we spoke in literary analogy as do novelists, documentary, proof construction as I do, or empirical analysis as most scientists do. And I don’t find the conflation of these various technologies to be very helpful. Interestingly if you look at my work (anglo American legal empirical), Hoppe’s work (german Kantian rational), Moldbug’s work (Jewish critique), and Nick’s work (continental literary), you see that each of argues using our cultural frames of communication and argument. I think that’s the interesting takeaway. That it’s just more evidence of my argument that each enlightenment culture tried to take its internal normative and institutional models and to propose them as universals, by more honest or more dishonest means. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute

  • Testimionialism will be as revolutionary for mankind as empiricism – and likely

    Testimionialism will be as revolutionary for mankind as empiricism – and likely more so. http://propertarianism.wordpress.com

    Source date (UTC): 2016-09-19 09:46:56 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/777806169813487616

  • Philosophers and Feeling vs Scientists and Reporting

    Aug 25, 2016 11:31am Philosophers place greater weight upon FEELING, and the cognitive scientists place greater weight on REPORTING, which tells us nothing about TRUTH but a great deal about the instrumentation available to SUBJECTIVE introspective and OBJECTIVE empirical testing. My experience is that while in retrospect the initial stage of awareness is arguably ‘me’ or ‘i’, while in that state any such ‘experience’ (feeling) other than ‘satisfaction/dissatisfaction’, ‘urgency/calm’, ‘dominant/submissive stance’ does not seem to exist. So one can ‘feel’ first, but not understand, and the one can understand but not report upon, and finally one can feel, understand, and report upon. Interestingly, analyzing feelings can change them(association), and reporting upon feelings can change them(signaling) – sometimes falsely. (Which obvious in retrospect) Curt Doolittle

  • Philosophers and Feeling vs Scientists and Reporting

    Aug 25, 2016 11:31am Philosophers place greater weight upon FEELING, and the cognitive scientists place greater weight on REPORTING, which tells us nothing about TRUTH but a great deal about the instrumentation available to SUBJECTIVE introspective and OBJECTIVE empirical testing. My experience is that while in retrospect the initial stage of awareness is arguably ‘me’ or ‘i’, while in that state any such ‘experience’ (feeling) other than ‘satisfaction/dissatisfaction’, ‘urgency/calm’, ‘dominant/submissive stance’ does not seem to exist. So one can ‘feel’ first, but not understand, and the one can understand but not report upon, and finally one can feel, understand, and report upon. Interestingly, analyzing feelings can change them(association), and reporting upon feelings can change them(signaling) – sometimes falsely. (Which obvious in retrospect) Curt Doolittle

  • Philosophy(choice) vs Logic(decidability)

    —“CURT, YOUR CRITICISM OF PHILOSOPHY IS AN INTERESTING PHILOSOPHY”— Irony appreciated. Even if it’s just a play on words. The question is not whether it’s a personal philosophy (means of PREFERENTIAL or UTILITARIAN choice) but whether its a method of universal DECIDABILITY independent of preferences and utility. (truth). In other words, is it a “Law” of nature, as in a “Natural Law”. Propositions need only be reciprocally decidable . If they are decidable, then the question is why one would attempt to demonstrate that they are not? As in law, which is the origin of western philosophy, not until late conflated with religion, decidability is provided by (a) deception and (b) involuntary transfer. As far as I can tell, this is the purpose of most UNDECIDABLE philosophy, like religious law before it: fraud. Which is not what I expected when I started working on these issues. The philosophers are often circumventing costs, and transfers, and claiming that they’re pursuing truth. What I find, is that they are all too often, engaged in fraud. So instead of testing for truth, I first test for theft. This is the difference between the philosophical search for AGREEMENT and the legal search for theft. Ergo, It is law that is our western philosophy(prohibition, decidability, criticism) and everything else is religion (aspiration, negotiation, justification). The west didn’t conflate truth, law, politics, and religion. We have always preserved competition as means of ongoing calculation, and thereby avoided stagnation. But Egyptian-Judeo-Christian-Muslim totalitarianism did the opposite. They created authority (monopoly) by conflating different disciplines with different purposes. This is why Egypt froze, jews contributed nothing until they were forced by Europeans into the enlightenment, Muslims appear to have taken credit but not developed anything, and certainly, as soon as the common people adopted it, were insulated, and why the west stagnated for a thousand years, albeit under constant onslaught of the commercial Mediterranean by Muslim pirates and war. Seek first fraud, not agreement. Our civic cult is law. We are prosecutors. Curt Doolittle The Cult of Non-Submission The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute