DEMONSTRATED BEHAVIOR NOT IMAGINATION OR WORDS
—“Of the many things I learned from Gary, a single powerful lesson stands out: the value of revealed preference in judging one’s actions. Declared priorities are easily betrayed by actual behavior.”—
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-13 07:39:00 UTC
MAN MUST ACT?
Well, sure, but to act one must PLAN at least one step: envision an alternative and choose it. If that is not the case, one cannot claim to have acted. So action is a two sided coin: we must both plan and act, or acting has no meaning. Man must act, sure, but to act he must perceive and plan (choose) action. Even non sentient beings can react, but only a creature that can forecast the future can ‘act’. Like the golden vs the silver rule, or like liberty and property, both planning and acting are necessary for the consideration of either. As such I don’t find it very useful to rely on the requirement that man MUST act, without also taking into consideration that man must plan in order to act. All plans are theories and all actions are tests. This is an immutable property of reality. It is this relationship between planning (theories) and acting (testing) that leads us all the way to the scientific method, as complexity of that which we seek to act upon exceeds our perceptions. So while action and testimony must be reduced to personal perception, where we are capable of making judgements, we must rely upon empiricism and instrumentalist to reduce that which we cannot sense, perceive, and judge. And we must use operations to test internal consistency and external correspondence where possible. Only if we can reduce operations to the perceptible can we possibly make judgments, and only then can we say we possess the knowledge necessary to levy a truth claim.
(sketch) (something of that order)
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-11 04:27:00 UTC
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/opinion/thomas-edsall-how-much-do-our-genes-influence-our-political-beliefs.html?ref=opinion&_r=2&referrerOUR POLITICAL PREFERENCES ARE GENETIC – YOU DON”T CONVINCE ANYONE.
As I’ve been arguing, since it is impossible to change political preferences, all political debate is wasted. People vote morally. our moral differences reflect our evolutionary strategies. It’s our genes talking to us. And we talk on behalf of our genes. As such all we can do is cooperate on means, not ends. A Democratic government is, unlike the market, a monopoly an a dictatorship. The solution is to allow people to construct exchanges, not to use majority rule. Since that is only a partial solution, the remainder of the problem is only solved by devolving the central government into states or city-states that allow us all to live as we desire, and to have the market reward and punish us for living as we desire.
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-10 16:54:00 UTC
CONSENSUS, INTENT, TABOO AND SACRED VS INCENTIVES AND INSTITUTIONS : ANOTHER INEQUALITY
(very good piece)
We humans are usually much happier once we figure out that “consensus and intent” are possible only for small groups, and beyond that scale we must construct protocols (processes) and incentives (information) via institutions (formal institutions) such that it is unnecessary for individuals to constantly exist in conflict between incentives for self interest and the goals of the organization and the polity.
There are certain “taboos and sacredness” that it is possible to instill pedagogically. But the more rational and educated the human the less taboos can be used to restrain him from making exceptions that he can justify by his reason. The lower the intelligence of individuals, the more they rely upon intuition, upon the information that they obtain from others, and upon intuitions of ‘sacred and taboo’. So the more educated the populace, the more complex the division of knowledge and labor, the more necessary are incentives and institutions and the lower value there is to “consensus, intent, sacredness and taboo”.
We require formal institutions. The pricing system is our most important formal information system. It tells us everything we need to know about our condition related to that of others, and tells us what we we should be doing to serve others whether we want to do it, or can do it, or not. It is our most important information system. Morality and ethics captured in the law prohibits a spectrum of “free riding” (the violation of the contract for logical participation in cooperation) from the criminal, to the ethical, to the conspiratorial, to the moral. We are left to our own devices to prevent conquest. Army, Religion and Credit are our most common defenses.
The failure of the sentimental, lesser mind, is not to grasp this basic spectrum whereby humans are materially unequal in their abilities an there frames of reference, and therefore in their means of action. The lower you are on the scale, the more consensus, intent, taboo, and sacred, and the more you depend upon others for knowledge necessary for action. The higher you are on the scale the more you depend on reason, incentives, justification, institutions and abstract information to make your decisions independently of those who rely upon their peers.
This pattern means that the exceptional people are always trying to outwit the less, and therefore, invent new economic means which those below them adopt and later benefit from. We tend to think only in terms of technology and consumption, and not behavior as technology. But rational innovations can easily be adopted by repetition and habituation and from that we develop the sacred and the taboo.
As such the rational and scientific solution to the problem of creating commons is, as the british did, privatization of administration of the commons so that institutions and rules and incentives can suffice where consensus, intent, taboo and sacred cannot.
The enlightenment error is everywhere. We are not equal. We are not similar, and that is why we form a division of knowledge and labor. We cannot ask each other to operate by the same consensus, intent, taboo and sacredness. Because we unequally make use of peers versus non-peer, abstract, information.
The conservatives say this in moral language that is so arational it is impossible to disassemble. But they have made sacred this set of ideas. And that is how they function.
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-10 03:00:00 UTC
—“Surely you understand how individualists might view your little eugenics project as pretty unworkable, fucked and backwards, don’t you”— [I] don’t have a eugenics project, I make the argument that at some point in your chain of reasoning you must have a means of making judgements between one set of preferences and another, and that the progressive preference is dysgenic. To warn against dysgenia is very different from conducting eugenia. I do not see the political reason for redistributing from the middle class to the lower class if this constructs dysgenia that inhibits the formation of the high trust society which is necessary for the standard of living that allows for redistribution. In other words, i’m making an argument against a logical fallacy. This might seem to you as if I am making a sentimental argument,b ecause you argue largely sentimentally. But I don’t. I might actually be largely incapable of it. Most of my arguments are in the general vein of pointing out the fallacy of the libertarian and classical liberal, and progressive canons that do not account for the problem of trust, intelligence, and impulsivity in the construction of a polity capable of constant innovation necessary to stay ahead of both the genetic red queen, the malthusian red queen, and the technological red queen, and how those three red queens must be defeated in order to preserve economic prosperity that allows us to have whatever nonsensical social order we choose. I suspect that this argument is not obvious to you and most others, but that is my fundamental argument and the insight I am trying to incorporate into political science, political economy, economics, and philosophical ethics. -Cheers
—“Surely you understand how individualists might view your little eugenics project as pretty unworkable, fucked and backwards, don’t you”— [I] don’t have a eugenics project, I make the argument that at some point in your chain of reasoning you must have a means of making judgements between one set of preferences and another, and that the progressive preference is dysgenic. To warn against dysgenia is very different from conducting eugenia. I do not see the political reason for redistributing from the middle class to the lower class if this constructs dysgenia that inhibits the formation of the high trust society which is necessary for the standard of living that allows for redistribution. In other words, i’m making an argument against a logical fallacy. This might seem to you as if I am making a sentimental argument,b ecause you argue largely sentimentally. But I don’t. I might actually be largely incapable of it. Most of my arguments are in the general vein of pointing out the fallacy of the libertarian and classical liberal, and progressive canons that do not account for the problem of trust, intelligence, and impulsivity in the construction of a polity capable of constant innovation necessary to stay ahead of both the genetic red queen, the malthusian red queen, and the technological red queen, and how those three red queens must be defeated in order to preserve economic prosperity that allows us to have whatever nonsensical social order we choose. I suspect that this argument is not obvious to you and most others, but that is my fundamental argument and the insight I am trying to incorporate into political science, political economy, economics, and philosophical ethics. -Cheers
MOST ANNOYING AMERICAN TRAIT
The least likely people on earth to day “I don’t know enough about that to have an opinion.”
We have the most confident, yet most ignorant populace in the developed world. A massive progressive-induced, Dunning Kreuger test, serving no other purpose than to give righteous inspiration to the ignorant to cast votes for that which they cannot comprehend.
I mean, when you sort of sit back an think about it, at first it’s funny, then its tragic, then depressing, then frightening.
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-04 14:19:00 UTC
[T]he least likely people on earth to say “I don’t know enough about that to have an opinion.” We have the most confident, yet most ignorant populace in the developed world. A massive progressive-induced, Dunning Kreuger test, serving no other purpose than to give righteous inspiration to the ignorant to cast votes for that which they cannot comprehend. I mean, when you sort of sit back an think about it, at first it’s funny, then its tragic, then depressing, then frightening.
[T]he least likely people on earth to say “I don’t know enough about that to have an opinion.” We have the most confident, yet most ignorant populace in the developed world. A massive progressive-induced, Dunning Kreuger test, serving no other purpose than to give righteous inspiration to the ignorant to cast votes for that which they cannot comprehend. I mean, when you sort of sit back an think about it, at first it’s funny, then its tragic, then depressing, then frightening.
http://takimag.com/article/15_myths_millennials_accept_as_fact_gavin_mcinnes/page_2#axzz36K6C7f1uWHITE PEOPLE A HAVE DEMONSTRATED “GULLIBILITY” GENE
While this may help us with the formation of our high trust society, it helps others, and us, more easily destroy that high trust society.
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-04 02:59:00 UTC