Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

  • The Evolution of Cooperation

    1) Acquisitiveness: To survive and reproduce, humans must acquire and inventory many categories of resources, and evolved to demonstrate constant acquisitiveness of those resources. 2) Property: The scope of those things they act upon, or choose not to act upon, in anticipation of obtaining as inventory (a store of value), constitute their demonstrated definition of property-en-toto.* (See Butler Schaeffer) “That which and organism defends.” 3) Value: Human emotions evolved to reflect changes in state of property-en-toto.* As such nearly all emotions can be expressed in terms of reactions to property. (imposed costs here, pre-moral, but also pre-cooperation, and only defense and retaliation, not cooperation) 4) Non-Conflict: That which humans act to obtain without imposition upon in-group members they evolved to intuit as their property, and demonstrate this intuition by defense of their inventory, and by their punishment of transgressors. 5) Cooperative Production: That which humans act in concert with one another to produce. (Important take-away is that the purpose of cooperation is material and reproductive production.) 6) Moral (cooperative) Intuitions(instincts): Moral intuitions reflect prohibitions on free riding by members with whom one cooperates in production and reproduction. (This is where free riding enters.) 7) Distribution of Intuitions by Reproductive Strategy: Moral intuitions vary in intensity to suit one’s reproductive strategy. This intensity and distribution of moral intuition varies between males and females, as well as between classes and between groups. 8) Variation By Family Structure: Moral rules reflect prohibitions on free riding given the structure of the family in relation to the necessary and available structure of production. 9) Resolution of Disputes: Property rights were developed in law as the positive enumeration in contractual form, of those moral rules which any polity (corporation) agrees to enforce with the promise of violence for the purpose of restitution or punishment. Conversely, any possible property rights not expressed, the community (corporation) is unwilling to adjudicate, restore or punish, or has not yet discovered the need to construct. 10) Instrumentation: Property rights are necessary for the instrumental measurement of moral prohibitions because of the unobservability of changes in human emotional states, and our inability to determine truth from falsehood. And as such we require an observable proxy for evidence of changes in state. 11) Family: As a general rule, as the division of knowledge and labor increases, so must the atomicity of property rights, and as a consequence, the size of the family must decline {Consanguineous, Punaluan, Pairing (Serial Marriage), Hetaeristic, Traditional, Stem, Nuclear, Absolute Nuclear}. 12) Transaction Costs: As the division of labor increases, relationships increase in distance from kin, increase in anonymity, decrease common interest, and the incentive to seize opportunities rather than adhere to agreements increases. This decrease creates the problem of trust, which increases costs of insuring any agreement is fulfilled, and decreases the overall number of possible agreements and the number of participants in any structure of production. 13) Trust (ethics in production): As a general rule, for the size of the family to decrease, and division of labor to increase in multi-part *complexity* then trust must increase, and trust can only increase with expansion of property rights to include prohibitions on unethical actions. Mere ostracization, boycotting and reputation are insufficient to preserve agreements (contracts). 14) Moral Competition (ethics in political production): (morals property rights, cheating) As a general rule, the scope of moral prohibitions expressed as property rights, must increase to limit demand for authority. 15) Demand for Authority: As a general rule, if a delay in the production of property rights evolves, then demand for authority will fill the vacuum with some form of authority to either suppress retaliation (conflict) or to prevent circumstances leading to conflict, or both.

  • (Second Draft) — PART I — MAN — 1) Acquisitiveness: To survive and reproduce,

    (Second Draft)

    — PART I — MAN —

    1) Acquisitiveness: To survive and reproduce, humans must acquire and inventory many categories of resources, and evolved to demonstrate constant acquisitiveness of those resources.

    2) Property: The scope of those things they act upon, or choose not to act upon, in anticipation of obtaining as inventory (a store of value), constitute their demonstrated definition of property-en-toto.* (See Butler Schaeffer) “That which and organism defends.”

    3) Value: Human emotions evolved to reflect changes in state of property-en-toto.* As such nearly all emotions can be expressed in terms of reactions to property. (imposed costs here, pre-moral, but also pre-cooperation, and only defense and retaliation, not cooperation)

    4) Non-Conflict: That which humans act to obtain without imposition upon in-group members they evolved to intuit as their property, and demonstrate this intuition by defense of their inventory, and by their punishment of transgressors.

    5) Cooperative Production: That which humans act in concert with one another to produce. (Important take-away is that the purpose of cooperation is material and reproductive production.)

    6) Moral (cooperative) Intuitions(instincts): Moral intuitions reflect prohibitions on free riding by members with whom one cooperates in production and reproduction. (This is where free riding enters.)

    7) Distribution of Intuitions by Reproductive Strategy: Moral intuitions vary in intensity to suit one’s reproductive strategy. This intensity and distribution of moral intuition varies between males and females, as well as between classes and between groups.

    8) Variation By Family Structure: Moral rules reflect prohibitions on free riding given the structure of the family in relation to the necessary and available structure of production.

    9) Resolution of Disputes: Property rights were developed in law as the positive enumeration in contractual form, of those moral rules which any polity (corporation) agrees to enforce with the promise of violence for the purpose of restitution or punishment. Conversely, any possible property rights not expressed, the community (corporation) is unwilling to adjudicate, restore or punish, or has not yet discovered the need to construct.

    10) Instrumentation: Property rights are necessary for the instrumental measurement of moral prohibitions because of the unobservability of changes in human emotional states, and our inability to determine truth from falsehood. And as such we require an observable proxy for evidence of changes in state.

    11) Family: As a general rule, as the division of knowledge and labor increases, so must the atomicity of property rights, and as a consequence, the size of the family must decline {Consanguineous, Punaluan, Pairing (Serial Marriage), Hetaeristic, Traditional, Stem, Nuclear, Absolute Nuclear}.

    12) Transaction Costs: As the division of labor increases, relationships increase in distance from kin, increase in anonymity, decrease common interest, and the incentive to seize opportunities rather than adhere to agreements increases. This decrease creates the problem of trust, which increases costs of insuring any agreement is fulfilled, and decreases the overall number of possible agreements and the number of participants in any structure of production.

    13) Trust (ethics in production): As a general rule, for the size of the family to decrease, and division of labor to increase in multi-part *complexity* then trust must increase, and trust can only increase with expansion of property rights to include prohibitions on unethical actions. Mere ostracization, boycotting and reputation are insufficient to preserve agreements (contracts).

    14) Moral Competition (ethics in political production): (morals property rights, cheating) As a general rule, the scope of moral prohibitions expressed as property rights, must increase to limit demand for authority.

    15) Demand for Authority: As a general rule, if a delay in the production of property rights evolves, then demand for authority will fill the vacuum with some form of authority to either suppress retaliation (conflict) or to prevent circumstances leading to conflict, or both.

    — PART II– PRODUCTION OF COMMONS (Including the market as a commons)

    1) Competition (Market): ……………

    2) Competition (Commons): ………..

    3) Free Riding on Commons: ……….

    4) Prohibition On Privatizing/Socializing Commons …. (necessity) ……….

    5) Calculability. Commensurability of Property Rights (as a weight and measure)

    (…………)

    999) Monuments. The production of monuments (burials, temples, churches, parks)

    — PART III — CENTRALIZATION AND ELIMINATION OF RENTS

    1) Governments, particularly empires (of which states, cities, and local polities, are merely a smaller class), in an effort to first create a standard “weight and measure” in the practice of law, so that disputes can be rationally adjudicated, imposed uniform rules (property rights) on sub groups, for all subgroups under their management. And secondly, they centralize rent seeking. As such we trade local and pervasive transaction costs for infrequent but expensive centralized costs.

    Whether empire, state, polity, tribe, family or class, the same problem is faced between all cooperating groups: without individualized property rights, neither the construction of contracts, nor rational adjudication is not possible. Without individualized property rights, rents cannot be circumvented (or centralized). Without individualized property rights, individual incentives are not possible. Without individualized property rights production cannot be planned. Without rational adjudication of differences, the ability to circumvent rents, the possibility of individual incentives, and the capacity to plan, transaction costs exceed the ability of people to construct the voluntary organization of production, even if they wished to.

    2) Commands: Governments then expanded the law as a standard of weights and measures, to include commands, distorting the voluntary structure of production, and therefore not only uniform only uniform weights and measures. Thereby conflating the imposition of standards of law, with the creation of commands holding the status of law – commands that were only law by analogy.

    3) Centralized Rents: Governments, by homogenizing law, centralized law (and command), and by centralizing law (and command), centralized rent-seeking (and later, as a monopoly, increased it.) Note: Centralization often forced tribal leaders and family elders out of rent seeking and power, and into production, thus lowering transaction costs for production and trade at the expense of increasing overall costs of the parasitic bureaucracy.

    21) Aristocracy sought to prevent centralization (of rents) in favor of competing jurisdictions that focus owners on creation, and adapt quickly. Bureaucracy sought to centralize a homogenous jurisdiction that focus administrators to seek rents, and to provide certainty (stability) in rents – expanding rents to the maximum tolerable.

    22) Professionalization of military under aristocracy

    22) Extension of franchise to bankers, producers, traders from land holders.

    22) Scale: Increased demand for commons

    23) Management: Problem of managing commons

    24) Extension of weights and measures (min-empires – local state conquest)

    — PART IV —

    1) Libertarians: (classical liberals), seek to purge rent seeking, from the central system, and return to aristocracy

    2) Libertines: (cosmopolitans) seek to restore unethical and immoral action – and non-conflict (non-cooperation) rather than moral and therefore productive cooperation.)

    3) Socialists: (………….)

    4) Liberty: ……….(liberty as tariff , slavey, right to local law and custom, libertarianism as standard weight and measure) – not free riding however.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-27 14:44:00 UTC

  • 1) Acquisitiveness: To survive and reproduce, humans must acquire and inventory

    1) Acquisitiveness: To survive and reproduce, humans must acquire and inventory many categories of resources, and evolved to demonstrate constant acquisitiveness of those resources.

    3) Property: The scope of those things they act upon, or choose not to act upon, in anticipation of obtaining property, constitute their demonstrated definition of property-en-toto.* (See Butler Schaeffer)

    4) Value: Human emotions evolved to reflect changes in state of property-en-toto.* As such nearly all emotions can be expressed in terms of reactions to property. (imposed costs here, pre-moral, but also pre-cooperation, and only defense and retaliation, not cooperation)

    2) Non-Conflict: That which humans act to obtain without imposition upon in-group members they evolved to intuit as their property, and demonstrate this intuition by defense of their inventory, and punishment of transgressors.

    5) Cooperative Production: That which humans act in concert with one another to produce

    5) Moral (cooperative) Intuitions(instincts): Moral intuitions reflect prohibitions on free riding by members with whom one cooperates in production and reproduction. (This is where free riding enters.)

    6) Distribution of Intuitions by Reproductive Strategy: Moral intuitions vary in intensity to suit one’s reproductive strategy. This intensity and distribution of moral intuition varies between males and females, as well as between classes and between groups.

    7) Variation By Family Structure: Moral rules reflect prohibitions on free riding given the structure of the family in relation to the necessary and available structure of production.

    8) Resolution of Disputes: Property rights were developed in law as the positive enumeration in contractual form, of those moral rules which any polity (corporation) agrees to enforce with the promise of violence for the purpose of restitution or punishment. Conversely, any possible property rights not expressed, the community (corporation) is unwilling to adjudicate, restore or punish, or has not yet discovered the need to construct.

    9) Instrumentation: Property rights are necessary for the instrumental measurement of moral prohibitions because of the unobservability of changes in human emotional states, and our inability to determine truth from falsehood. And as such we require an observable proxy for evidence of changes in state.

    10) Family: As a general rule, as the division of knowledge and labor increases, so must the atomicity of property rights, and as a consequence, the size of the family must decline {Consanguineous, Punaluan, Pairing (Serial Marriage), Hetaeristic, Traditional, Stem, Nuclear, Absolute Nuclear}.

    11) Trust: As a general rule, for the size of the family to decrease, trust must increase, and trust can only increase with expansion of property rights to include prohibitions on unethical actions.

    11) Moral Competition: As a general rule, the scope of moral prohibitions expressed as property rights, must increase to limit demand for authority.

    12) Demand for Authority: As a general rule, if a delay in the production of property rights evolves, then demand for authority will fill the vacuum with authority to either suppress retaliation (conflict) or to prevent circumstances leading to conflict, or both.

    13) Governments, particularly empires (of which states are merely a smaller class), in an effort to first create a standard “weight and measure” in the practice of law, imposed uniform codes on sub groups, for all subgroups under their management, and second, to centralize rent seeking.

    14) Governments then expanded the law to include commands, not uniform standards. Thereby conflating the imposition of standards of law, with the creation of commands holding the status of law – commands that were only law by analogy.

    15) Governments, by homogenizing law, centralized law (and command), and by centralizing law (and command), centralized rent-seeking (and increased it.) Note: this often forced tribal leaders and family elders out of rent seeking and power, and into production, thus lowering transaction costs for production and trade at the expense of increasing overall costs of the parasitic bureaucracy.

    (….Add: free riding and commons…)

    16) Aristocracy sought to prevent centralization in favor of competing jurisdictions that adapt quickly. Bureaucracy sought to centralize a homogenous jurisdiction that provided certainty (stability).

    17) Libertarians (classical liberals), seek to purge rent seeking, from the central system, and return to aristocracy

    18) Libertines (cosmopolitans) seek to restore unethical and immoral action – and non-conflict (non-cooperation) rather than moral and therefore productive cooperation.)

    19) Liberty: ……….(liberty as tariff , slavey, right to local law and custom, libertarianism as standard weight and measure) – not free riding however.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-26 15:32:00 UTC

  • (Aspie question: Anyone else have the problem that you can spell words just fine

    (Aspie question: Anyone else have the problem that you can spell words just fine, but can’t actually SEE misspellings on the page, even if you stare at them? I can read a whole page almost at once, but I’ve nearly lost the ability to find word jumbles or misspellings.)


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-24 08:20:00 UTC

  • SUSCEPTIBILITY DUE TO TRUST NOT STUPIDITY I don’t mean to call Rothbardians stup

    SUSCEPTIBILITY DUE TO TRUST NOT STUPIDITY

    I don’t mean to call Rothbardians stupid and immoral per-se. It’s easy to be misled by pseudo-rationalism and pseudo-science. It’s easy to be misled by half-truths. It’s easy to be misled by words that sound moral but which produce immoral actions.

    I don’t mean to call Misesians stupid per se. It is easy for average and above average minds, to be misled by pseudo-rationalism and pseudo-science when it is articulated with that great a level of detail. That’s the purpose of loading (emotions), framing (selective inclusion and exclusion of properties), and overloading (great detail, and repetition).

    But the susceptibility of those minds capable of managing economic thought, which requires consideration of more dimensions that other forms of thought, demonstrates why so many are susceptible to the other forms of cosmopolitan deception via loading, framing and overloading: leftism in general, and neo-conservatism.

    They manipulate our moral intuitions. We are the most moral people. We are most subject to pseudoscientific excitement of our moral intuitions. Whatever moral bias you adhere to, the cosmopolitans have a pseudoscientific and immoral argument to excite you: leftism, libertarianism, or neo-conservatism. And high trust europeans are readily susceptible to these false moral arguments.

    Just as our scientists and philosophers have been subject to such pseudoscience in the form of abstract truth (Popperian truth as well), psychology, sociology cantorian sets, platonic truth, mathematical platonism, and modeling.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-21 09:42:00 UTC

  • Women are wonderful but they come and go. Men are loyal and remain. We must take

    Women are wonderful but they come and go.

    Men are loyal and remain.

    We must take better care of one another.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-19 20:43:00 UTC

  • WEAPONIZED GOSSIP (Profound) We humans are capable of three means of influence,

    WEAPONIZED GOSSIP

    (Profound)

    We humans are capable of three means of influence, persuasion, and coercion.

    1) Violence or the threat of it.

    2) Remuneration or the threat of deprivation if it.

    3) Ostracization or the threat of it.

    I’d originally taken the idea from Johnson, who referred to ostracization as morality.

    But with our advances in genetic, cognitive, behavioral, and anthropological knowledge it has become clear to me that the means of influence is gossip. That our gossip accuses others of moral violation. And that moral violation drives ostracization. And that ostracization drives up opportunity costs and transaction costs.

    Gossip evolved as a means of rallying betas to kill, punish, or control alphas. And therefore return reproductive control to females.

    Once you approach political speech as gossip for the purpose of reproductive control, you rapidly come to the conclusion why it is morally loaded and why it is rarely rational or scientific.

    You also will understand why the culture of critique was successful in the 20th century.

    Its weaponized gossip.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-19 08:31:00 UTC

  • I am not sure that I understand what has happened but Fashion just changed in re

    I am not sure that I understand what has happened but Fashion just changed in response to status signals worldwide.

    I can see it in the economy – which drives fashion. I can see it in fashion this fall. I can feel my own taste shift. I can feel what my intuition is rejecting. I can see designers are confused as well.

    It feels like a search for a less flamboyant conservatism. And thats harder than the experimentalism thats been universal for so long.

    I sensed german influence was ascendant, and that new york had lost touch, but not that Californian influence was in decline. It is partly generational as well as economic as the boomers and their hedonistic proletarianism wane in influence.

    I wish I had contacts at the fashion editorial level.

    This will drive me nuts until I figure it out.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-16 10:31:00 UTC

  • ADVICE TO THE YOUNG (WOMEN): CHOOSING DEGREES FOR LIFETIME HAPPINESS Don’t pay c

    ADVICE TO THE YOUNG (WOMEN): CHOOSING DEGREES FOR LIFETIME HAPPINESS

    Don’t pay college tuition for trade school education. Get a major in something that is the maximum extent of your abilities, and then minor in or take basic courses in your trade.

    In this case I’m referring to a young relative of mine that I love who is too smart for the career she has targeted. I would suggest that if you are a woman and can handle the nursing curriculum then whether or not you choose to be a nurse you can always downgrade if you can’t hack the program. If you do hack it, the entire healthcare field is open to you. Furthermore you can get an advanced degree such as Nurse Practitioner, and and within this generation, nurses will approach doctor salaries. NP is a great career for a smart woman who wants to participate in care-taking fields.

    I will also put out that when you are a young woman you are probably very ignorant about the world, and certainly too ignorant of the world to know in high school what career you should follow. And to make matters worse, you also have raging hormones in your body making you extremely sensitive to care-taking stimuli. By the time you are in your late twenties to mid thirties these hormones will decline in influence and you will care very much more that you are working with people who think about the world the way that you do, and are interesting than you will about care taking of yet another of the same problems that you have seen a thousand times. You can let your hormonal influences in youth determine your mid and late life circumstances, but if you do you will end up as one of the many unsatisfied people in the world who dreams of being what else she could have been.

    In general if you want to have the most fulfilling life, you should always try to operate at the limits of your ability, and associate with people at that same limit. You will constantly make each other better. If you associate with people who have 95-105 IQ’s they are ‘normal’, but if you associate with people 105-115, it’s a very different world you will live in. For example, in the medical field, doctors are usually above 125, and often much higher, while almost all workers in medical administration and service are below 100. If you want to know why doctors act the way they do it’s because it’s very frustrating to talk to people more than 15 points different from you. You don’t see it usually in your education system, but as you mature, you rapidly understand that at 15 points is a standard deviation, and that our social classes (if not our economic classes) are structured by IQ, and that it is much more rewarding for you to work with the people at the top of your spectrum rather than with people below it.

    Next, in the same vein, when you are young, and female (with lower dominance than males) the idea of managing people is harder to imagine than doing a job that does not require a lot of collaboration. But if you are smart, then the only rewarding job as you mature is that which requires a lot of collaboration. If you are smart enough that bad customer service, organizational disorder and inefficiency bother you, and wise enough to understand that people must do things differently because they are each equipped differently, then it is wise to look at careers with management responsibility.

    If you don’t like what this says to you then I am sorry for you – because life will teach you this lesson even if you do not want to learn it. Associate with the best people you can. That means the people who constantly challenge you to improve yourself. You will make them better and they will make you better.

    The opposite is also true. If you associate with people less able than you are, in a career that is less challenging than you are capable of, you will be both socially and occupationally bored, and constantly frustrated by what you see as pervasive incompetence and error. And you will rapidly find yourself a prisoner of that little world in which you have walled yourself.

    Money is not everything. Once you make over 60K, happiness does not improve – you just buy more expensive houses, cars, clothes, and ‘stuff’. But this is a misleading statistic. Because once you make over say, 90K, the quality of people you associate with on a daily basis increases dramatically. Fulfillment in life comes from your family, your friends, but the people you spend the most time with are those at your work. So just as you would be careful with friends, careful selecting a mate, it is wise to be careful selecting a line of work where you are with people who fulfill you rather than frustrate you.

    If you are smart – smart enough to graduate in the upper 10 or 20% of your class, make sure that you are not consigning yourself to your parent’s social class, and the kinds of careers that are easily understood among your family, friends and associates. If you live in NYC or SF you are more aware of the many careers available. If you live in a small town somewhere rural you are not. It helps to read help wanted advertisements in big cities if you want to understand the world. Employment offers are the map of the world as it is. Whatever people tell you is largely mythology.

    So my advice to everyone at every level of ability is to shoot for the most complex degree in one of the most complex fields with the greatest quantitative demands that you can handle. And to consider trade school your last option. You can always switch from harder degree to less hard degree. But if you work hard you will not. But if you are going to pay that much money for an education, do not pay for trade school expecting a college education. It’s a recipe for debt and an unsatisfying life.

    Affections.

    Curt


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 10:47:00 UTC

  • American in-group dating bias is up about 25% or more this year, (or conversely,

    American in-group dating bias is up about 25% or more this year, (or conversely, out-group dating is down) and the spread continues to expand. The exception being Asian women for both white and asian men, and white men in general. The numbers are distorted believe it or not by lower dislike of blacks by whites than dislike of blacks by asians and latinos. I’m getting most of this second and so I haven’t seen the data. And what I suspect, is that the numbers are being driven largely by increases in Latino and Asian populations on the west coast, both of which demonstrate more stratification in mating preferences than whites. But net of the data trend is that we overwhelmingly mate in-group.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 07:34:00 UTC