Curt Doolittle

Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

  • LIBERAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND BIOLOGY Interesting book. I like my less emotionally loa

    http://www.anonymousconservative.com/one.pdfLIBERALISM, LIBERAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND BIOLOGY

    Interesting book. I like my less emotionally loaded description of the male and female reproductive strategies better. Although we end up at the same point: which bias produces the best society? Or less pragmatically, which do you and I want to tolerate?

    [Quote]

    “As an r-type psychology, Liberalism is not some super-intellectual, ultra-compassionate psychology designed to produce a perfect utopia in which no one ever suffers. Indeed quite the opposite. It is a simple, biologically imbued psychology, designed to exploit conditions of free resources by fostering the reproduction of specimens which most aggressively satiate their basest urges, without contributing to the success of their society. Promiscuity, single parenting, early onset of first intercourse, and conflict and risk avoidance through cowardice. This is the society which Liberalism seeks to foster. Worse, it does it not for intellectual reasons, but out of a desire to satiate a simple, base, r-type biological urge.”

    [/Quote]

    But other people are coming at the problem similarly. I don’t think anyone other than myself has expressed this commensurably as property rights. But at least the revolution is slowly happening.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 14:16:00 UTC

  • NEAR IMPOSSIBILITY OF MEASURING HIGH ADULT IQ

    http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.com/2013/10/comparing-mental-age-ratio-with.htmlTHE NEAR IMPOSSIBILITY OF MEASURING HIGH ADULT IQ

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 10:49:00 UTC

  • CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON THE “ASPERGERY”: (More in my series on SOLIPSISM VS AUTIS

    CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON THE “ASPERGERY”:

    (More in my series on SOLIPSISM VS AUTISM: Political correctness vs unloaded contrarian facts.)

    Solipsistic – Autistic Spectrum

    SOLIPSISTIC-SENSITIVE-SOCIAL-BALANCED-NERDY-ASPIE-AUTISTIC

    “In general, we’re seeing an ongoing convergence between the bad intellectual habits of two groups that are powerfully represented in Internet discussions: the politically correct and the Aspergery. The former dislike pattern recognition and the latter love mechanistic computer-programming style reasoning. And they increasingly come together to try to shut down probabilistic thinking about human behavior.” – iSteve

    Now, this is a really interesting topic: The Economics of Subjective Experience vs Objective Truth.

    NOTES:

    1) Notice how the commenters confuse relying upon intuition as ‘reason’.

    2) There is a definite anti-intellectual trend in conservatism that is not present in libertarianism. This is probably another artifact of IQ distributions, as well as Solipsistic-Autistic distributions.

    3) The aspie learning model is to observe, take a position, argue and learn from it. This is different from an emotionally laden dialog between individuals which would be ‘muddy’ to aspies. The autistic model is to adhere to a particular idea regardless. As is the Solipsistic (Politically correct) model.

    4) Yes, the Dark Enlightenment is the product of Aspies. As are a lot of innovations. Normal people don’t obsess over details like we do. It is extermely expensive and difficult to obsess on causal relations.

    5) There are plenty of Aspies that place infinite discount on emotional constructs just as there are plenty of Sensitives that place infinite premiums on experiences (emotions). There are plenty of normals who are oblivious. 🙂

    6) Yes, Autists are often mechanistic, just as solipsists are politically correct. After all, to be politically correct is to place a premium on experience and a discount on truth. To be mechanistic is to place a premium on truth and a discount on experience.

    7) Aspies are leery of emotional motivation and express incentives and require incentives be expressed as rational actions. This troubles conservatives who rely on emotional activation resulting from intuition.

    SELECTED COMMENTS (Fascinating Thread)

    ——————————

    For me, the most interesting part of this post is the last paragraph. I’ve been looking for a way to describe this for a while but without luck. Steve, I think you nailed it with the “convergence between the bad intellectual habits of…the politically correct and the Aspergery.”

    In many instances, no convergence was necessary–they were already one in the same.

    ——-

    …The Aspergery are subject to computer-thinking; in the digital world, everything is a 1 or a 0, it is on or it is off. As for the politically correct, John Derbyshire got it right when he called them “Totalists”. There is no room, for example, to not like homosexuals (or blacks, or immigrants) very much, but to neither wish them any harm – one must either gush endlessly about them, or one clearly wishes to destroy them. No room for subtlety in either worldview.

    …

    Understanding this point – that something that is generally true has some circumstances in which it is not – is something that PCs and Aspys have trouble with for three reasons. First, it is not Totalist. Second, it is not binary. Third, it takes genuine intelligence to understand, and PCs and Aspys tend to substitute snark and smarm for genuine intelligence, in their own version of “fake it till you make it”.

    ——-

    We live in an age in which the darling of the world economy is the tech business. This is a business in which success comes from having a certain kind of smartness that is different from intelligence in general – that borderline autistic, unsubtle, binary-oriented, goal-obsessive, kind of smart that’s most often seen in high-performance geeks. This seems to go hand-in-hand not only with bad social skills, but with some mild level of genuine sociopathy – ask anyone who ever knew Steve Jobs personally about how he treated people close to him for an example of that.

    In truth, Jobs, and Zuckerberg, and a lot of other tech-industry titans, are almost certainly high-functioning autistics who are too successful for anyone to dare call them dysfunctional.

    And -this is key – because the tech sector is so important, these people are the ones who have become heroes and role models, with people brought up to believe that their kind of smart was the best – maybe the only genuine – kind of smart. People love to copy a winner, and when a certain skill set or kind of smartness of way of thinking seems to be successful, people aspire to it and try to emulate it (or at least put on an affectation of it).

    This is one major reason why the internet – and life – is infested with tinhorn Aspys and dime-store Dawkinses.

    ——–

    CURT: Actually, it’s because aspies are infovores. They require high amounts of stimulation via information that they cannot obtain by interaction.

    What I find interesting is that this person isn’t terribly bright and he’s just railing against others with envy. When his real objection is that he can’t use moralistic argument to convince shame or guilt people into agreeing with him. How do I know that? Praxeology. The economy of persuasion.

    ——–

    this is silly….. i dont expect this sort of intellectual sloppiness from someone of your calibre. Half the commenters here are probably aspergery, I am more than certain most of the “Dark Englightenment” is a product of Aspergery thinking. PC and Asperger’s are poles apart on any spectrum of intellectual functioning. One refuses to see patterns, one sees patterns all the time. One is feminine thinking to the extreme, one is masculine thinking to the extreme.

    ——–

    “In addition to not being solid on probabilistic reasoning, software types are not trained to reason about causation.”

    Not so, just the opposite. Software types live in a world where one debugs complex systems by probabilistic reasoning. Debugging programming logic, in programs of any size, is all about reasoning about causation.

    Though some variation of what you say might be true if you modify it to be probabilistic reasoning or causation about human “systems” (society), in particular if the reasoning needs to take into account current, historical, and political social conditions at all scales. Many programming types, particularly those locked in “deathmarch” race-to-deadlines, simply don’t have time to keep up with these things. Something has to give, the task becomes all-consuming, stress and pressure wonderfully concentrates the mind. A hard problem that takes months to solve does warp the human personality trying to solve it. Don’t overlook the simple lack of time in producing aspy-type behavior.

    ——–

    Anonymous said…

    “…the politically correct and the Aspergery. In many instances, no convergence was necessary–they were already one in the same.”

    I disagree… the PCs aren’t smart enough to be Aspies.

    ——–

    Anonymous said…

    Some people with Aspergers are aware that neurotypicals exist and that they think is some really weird ways.

    Those people come around to the Dark Enlightenment once they become sufficiently disillusioned.

    Other people with Aspergers seem to be unable to grasp the simple fact that neurotypicals exist, even when it is explained to them over and over.

    When those people become economists, watch out.

    ———

    Anonymous NOTA said…

    Reasoning about probabilities and statistics is really unnatural and hard for most people to do. Reasoning toward an unwanted conclusion is also unnatural and hard for people to do well. The combination is presumably still harder, and I suspect this is one reason why statistical reasoning dealing with some unwanted conclusion is super hard for even most smart people to think through.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 08:30:00 UTC

  • NATURE, NURTURE AND CULTURE Three causal axis. Our genes and in-utero developmen

    NATURE, NURTURE AND CULTURE

    Three causal axis.

    Our genes and in-utero development. Our family structure, child rearing, and pedagogical methods. Our informal and formal institutions.

    One of the most problematic cognitive biases is the tendency to take a single axis of causality – a single explanation – and to apply anywhere and everywhere. It’s the ‘ideal type’ bias.

    But human beings are causally dense creatures. And behaviorally plastic creatures. Because the combination of memory and the ability to plan (reason) allows us to forecast the future, and adapt to it proactively. If we are successful, some of the biases in our memories and planning can become incorporated into our genetics. If our plans become successful, they are carried between overlapping generations by imitation and memory.

    Further, as creatures who find patterns between different stimuli, we are unable to separate ideas into neat drawers. They bleed into each other. As such we have explicit memories (knowledge) that we possess intentionally, we have habitual memories (knowledge) that we realize varies from group to group. We have unconscious associations and habits and value judgements that we take as physical properties of life, but can at some point become aware of and aware of their variation. We have metaphysical value judgements that CAUSE much of our unconscious biases. And we have genetic differences in our moral intuitions, and cognitive abilities that are the result of both genetic and in-utero experiences.

    Nearly all food habits are the result of regional necessity and economics. Almost all clothing habits are the same – the development of excellence in one minor technology or another as a demonstration of status. Almost all family habits are very similar at the same level of economic development. Childrearing seems to have as great an impact as does family structure.

    Rituals and religions are a complex topic but our knowledge of the social, political and economic reasons. We know why feasts, military tactics, the problem of uniting tribes, and the problem of constraining power, and in some places, the problem of resigning to difficult environments, found the idea of scriptural religion useful in a social context by transferring the family hierarchy to the ether.

    Our genetic makeup is different BECAUSE of these factors. Or rather, some minor biases in our genetic makeup interplayed with these cultural ‘genetics’ and the two together brought us to where we are today.

    When we argue that genetics is ‘all there is’ or culture is ‘all there is’ we are just confusing the Nature, Culture, Nurture argument further. we are making the same mistake that the ‘nurturists’ do but from the opposite end of the spectrum.

    Since we know that Nature, Culture and Nurture are three extant causal axis, then a simple application of Ockham’s razor for any demonstrated human behavior prevents us from being people wearing tin foil hats. All our behaviors are the product of these three axis.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 04:17:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://news.discovery.com/human/life/women-smell-competition-130924.htm

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-02 15:46:00 UTC

  • Can Atheists Fall In Love? If An Atheist Does Not Believe In God Because They Need Proof, Can They Fall In Love (which Presumably Also Cannot Be Proven)? And If So, How Do They Know?

    THE QUESTION IS A PARLOR TRICK BUT I WILL TRY TO DO IT JUSTICE – MORE JUSTICE THAN IT DESERVES. 🙂

    OBSERVABLE TYPES OF LOVE
    As far as we know, humans demonstrate these kinds of love, from the most intense to the least intense.

    1) Erotic love ( sexual attraction with the potential of joining the family)
    2) Familial Love ( members of the family – decreasing with genetic distance)
    3) Friendship Love ( treat as family even though not )
    4) “Christian Love” ( Treat as family for social and economic purposes. More recently referred to as “unconditional love”.  But which, at least, biologically and scientifically, means the extension of ‘familial love’ outside of one’s children.)

    The success of the theistic religions has been to create conditions by which familial trust (love) is extended to non family members.  THis allows social and economic cooperation at scale. It is an interesting ‘trick’. A very useful device. It was very successful at uniting (poor) tribes into larger national and cultural units with similar ethical, moral, and legal codes.  WHile we may argue that the allegorical and magical nature of most religions is logically absurd, it is not necessarily illogical that religion has been demonstrated to be the most successful means by which to aggregate people into common ethical, moral and legal structures.

    THE HIGH TRUST SOCIETY
    The west achieved it’s High Trust Society status by forbidding cousin marriage out to six, eight or even ten generations, and extending property rights to women. By those two acts, over time, in fact, all people within a region were either near genetic relations, or had the possibility of becoming near genetic relations.

    THE FAILURE OF THE RELIGIONS
    This is why the west was more successful than any other culture at extending not just ‘love’ but property rights and economic cooperation to all members of the community.  Other societies may have succeeded in extending interpersonal treatment of others beyond family boundaries, but they were unsuccessful at extending property rights away from the paternal family or the totalitarian state.  Because of this, other ‘religious love’ actually was destructive to the economic, social, legal, and political development of those countries. It prohibited rather than encouraged a division of labor into specialization, and the concentration and coordination of capital into the production of consumer goods..

    THE FAILURE OF SECULAR HUMANISM
    Secular humanism, or Totalitarian Humanism, like it’s ancestors Postmodernism, Scientific Socialism, Socialism, Marxism, Christianity, and Judaism, attempts to regress western civilization’s emphasis on private property and public actions by returning us to totalitarian management of property as a commons, and forcible rather than voluntary charity.

    THE SHORTAGE OF USEFUL ‘RELIGIONS’ (Myths and Rituals)
    Religions can work if they support production and private property as did protestantism.  The problem is that only greek and german hero-worship and perhaps Shinto, other than protestantism, are compatible with the retention of property rights and individualism.  The American Constitution, the English Common Law,

    But then, this is one of the great problems of human history and we barely understand it.

    https://www.quora.com/Can-atheists-fall-in-love-If-an-atheist-does-not-believe-in-God-because-they-need-proof-can-they-fall-in-love-which-presumably-also-cannot-be-proven-And-if-so-how-do-they-know

  • Can Atheists Fall In Love? If An Atheist Does Not Believe In God Because They Need Proof, Can They Fall In Love (which Presumably Also Cannot Be Proven)? And If So, How Do They Know?

    THE QUESTION IS A PARLOR TRICK BUT I WILL TRY TO DO IT JUSTICE – MORE JUSTICE THAN IT DESERVES. 🙂

    OBSERVABLE TYPES OF LOVE
    As far as we know, humans demonstrate these kinds of love, from the most intense to the least intense.

    1) Erotic love ( sexual attraction with the potential of joining the family)
    2) Familial Love ( members of the family – decreasing with genetic distance)
    3) Friendship Love ( treat as family even though not )
    4) “Christian Love” ( Treat as family for social and economic purposes. More recently referred to as “unconditional love”.  But which, at least, biologically and scientifically, means the extension of ‘familial love’ outside of one’s children.)

    The success of the theistic religions has been to create conditions by which familial trust (love) is extended to non family members.  THis allows social and economic cooperation at scale. It is an interesting ‘trick’. A very useful device. It was very successful at uniting (poor) tribes into larger national and cultural units with similar ethical, moral, and legal codes.  WHile we may argue that the allegorical and magical nature of most religions is logically absurd, it is not necessarily illogical that religion has been demonstrated to be the most successful means by which to aggregate people into common ethical, moral and legal structures.

    THE HIGH TRUST SOCIETY
    The west achieved it’s High Trust Society status by forbidding cousin marriage out to six, eight or even ten generations, and extending property rights to women. By those two acts, over time, in fact, all people within a region were either near genetic relations, or had the possibility of becoming near genetic relations.

    THE FAILURE OF THE RELIGIONS
    This is why the west was more successful than any other culture at extending not just ‘love’ but property rights and economic cooperation to all members of the community.  Other societies may have succeeded in extending interpersonal treatment of others beyond family boundaries, but they were unsuccessful at extending property rights away from the paternal family or the totalitarian state.  Because of this, other ‘religious love’ actually was destructive to the economic, social, legal, and political development of those countries. It prohibited rather than encouraged a division of labor into specialization, and the concentration and coordination of capital into the production of consumer goods..

    THE FAILURE OF SECULAR HUMANISM
    Secular humanism, or Totalitarian Humanism, like it’s ancestors Postmodernism, Scientific Socialism, Socialism, Marxism, Christianity, and Judaism, attempts to regress western civilization’s emphasis on private property and public actions by returning us to totalitarian management of property as a commons, and forcible rather than voluntary charity.

    THE SHORTAGE OF USEFUL ‘RELIGIONS’ (Myths and Rituals)
    Religions can work if they support production and private property as did protestantism.  The problem is that only greek and german hero-worship and perhaps Shinto, other than protestantism, are compatible with the retention of property rights and individualism.  The American Constitution, the English Common Law,

    But then, this is one of the great problems of human history and we barely understand it.

    https://www.quora.com/Can-atheists-fall-in-love-If-an-atheist-does-not-believe-in-God-because-they-need-proof-can-they-fall-in-love-which-presumably-also-cannot-be-proven-And-if-so-how-do-they-know

  • We dont need another way of thinking. We cant convince anyone to adopt it. We do

    We dont need another way of thinking. We cant convince anyone to adopt it. We dont need a new religion or belief.

    What we need is to understand why our beliefs, ways of thinking, and institutions failed to survive the extension of the franchise, and what to do about it now that they have failed.

    We cannot turn back the clock. Nor is the absurdity of the progressive fantasy either possible or survivable.

    It appears possible to reform our institutions by impending systemic collapse, or by outright insurrection.

    But it is clear that the majority favors feudal equality over entrepreneurial freedom. Numbers tell us that they do.

    So if we are to have freedom and they equality without one side conquering the other then we must sever our relations into multiple states or develop an alternative to majority monopoly rule.

    Given the value of scale in an insurer of last resort, and the virtue of a multiplicity of city states. And given the economic opportunity and cultural freedom that secession creates for each state, it may be possible to design a compromise solution which serves the moral differences and financial commonalities if each given modern technology.

    It would take a few years to implement but that time would permit demographic adjustment as well as the dismantlement of the federal monopoly, and the possibility if the solution would give vent to what is now leading to civil war.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-28 14:47:00 UTC

  • THE ASIAN-WHITE-ASHKENAZIM GAP “In 1989, the Law School Admission Council commis

    THE ASIAN-WHITE-ASHKENAZIM GAP

    “In 1989, the Law School Admission Council commissioned a study of bar passage rates. Its report, The LSAC National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study was published in 1998, with results disaggregated by race and ethnicity. Linda F. Wightman, the project head, collected data from more than 27,000 students who entered ABA approved law schools in fall 1991. The study found that only 80.75% of Asians passed the bar on the first try compared with 91.93% of non-Hispanic whites. This corresponds to a white-Asian mean-score difference of 0.53 standard deviation or in IQ terms a verbal gap of 8 points”

    Basically, we’re in the middle between Jewish verbal aptitude and east Asian spatial aptitude. Specialization matters.

    The advantage we have is in ethics.

    We have such a thing as universal ethics.

    They don’t.

    Our advantage is predicated on maintaining a certain amount of the population with an IQ over 106, and preferably over 115, in control of property and institutions.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-26 06:08:00 UTC

  • TWO BOOKS CONTAINING DISCUSSIONS OF THE AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER It’s a genetic

    TWO BOOKS CONTAINING DISCUSSIONS OF THE AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

    It’s a genetic benefit that’s gone too far. But I still cannot find similar work on it’s mirror effect: solipsism.

    “Autism is an interesting phenomenon. Two books that I recommend on this subject are Thomas Sowell’s Late-Talking Children and Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy. To grossly oversimplify, it appears that clinical autism results from the same gene complexes that, in their less extreme form, result in introversion, a fascination with structure, and spatial reasoning skills. A genetic propensity for autism, like sickle-cell anemia, confers benefits to mild cases despite being maladaptive in its extreme form. Schizophrenia and Manic-Depression have been similarly linked to superior cognitive abilities, and it stands to reason that genes for any mental illness with a genetic component must confer some benefit, whether we understand it or not.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 01:04:00 UTC