Curt Doolittle

Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

  • Sean Gabb shared a link to your timeline

    Sean Gabb shared a link to your timeline.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-16 15:48:00 UTC

  • (whining.)(travel) 1) Why is it that every restaurant and shop in London plays m

    (whining.)(travel)

    1) Why is it that every restaurant and shop in London plays music so loudly that conversation, or even thought, is impossible? If I want to go to a dance club I will. It is ruining my trip. Aspies and chaotic overstimulation do not go well together. (Today I’m buying ear plugs.)

    2) Service is economically Peter-Principled everywhere. The help is useless. Another artifact of the state’s abuse of credit.

    3) The clothing selection in Kiev is better. Everything on Regent St is just a minor variation on The Gap. I can’t get Saville Row and Polo in Kiev but I can get everything else in greater variety.

    4) I forgot how bad the food is here. Potatoes should NOT taste like cardboard.

    5) It is so GOOD to hear English spoken and to see ‘my people’. 🙂 Sigh.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-16 04:44:00 UTC

  • SHOPPING : LONDON Like an oasis. Visit to the Apple store today to stock up on e

    SHOPPING : LONDON

    Like an oasis.

    Visit to the Apple store today to stock up on equipment. :). It feels like Christmas! Whoo hooo! ;).

    I haven’t been to civilization in over a year.

    Ralph Lauren. 7 Jeans. English leather. Tailored sport jackets. Eyeglasses from Japanese designers. A visit to the movies. A show. A club. And starbucks coffee in venti size.

    More shoes for V’s addiction.

    Sigh.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-14 09:01:00 UTC

  • We have a suite in one of the better hotels, overlooking Parliament across the T

    We have a suite in one of the better hotels, overlooking Parliament across the Thames. The service is exceptional, although not as good as German or American.

    And the internet is completely useless.

    I know I’m from Seattle. And that service is ubiquitous. So perhaps I have a skewed perspective.

    But service is better in the average restaurant or cafe in Kiev.

    I know the systemic cause of the problem. It’s that wealth and credit cause pervasive distortion of the talent pool such that all employees are beyond their range of competence. That doesn’t happen in countries with surplus talented labor.

    Which is why I do business in Ukraine despite the obvious, and numerous difficulties. Our team is amazing.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-13 19:40:00 UTC

  • Well they let me out of Ukraine without banning me from reentry. I get my reside

    Well they let me out of Ukraine without banning me from reentry. I get my residency visa from the embassy on Monday.

    So unless we have further complications we will be able to travel in and out of Ukraine without risk to the business.

    Which means that I can visit my friends in Europe this year.

    😉

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-13 03:05:00 UTC

  • (OK. I worked hard enough today. Only about 11 hours but now it’s time for netfl

    (OK. I worked hard enough today. Only about 11 hours but now it’s time for netflix….. lol Besides V just stuffed me with one of her great meals and my eyes are getting fuzzy.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-11 15:54:00 UTC

  • STRUGGLING This damned problem is just frustrating me. I know it’s because I don

    STRUGGLING

    This damned problem is just frustrating me. I know it’s because I don’t feel well and I’m tired. But I cannot quite get my arms around how to easily communicate all these different causal axis. I must make it easier to understand moral rules, transaction costs of immorality, and the consequential demand for state intervention. If I can do a better job of that, then it will be more obvious that the common law must correspond to morality en toto (crime, ethics and immorality), not just aggression against intersubjectively verifiable private property.

    It seems like I should be able to do it with a graph. But I must be able to make a better narrative first. If I cannot articulate it as human action I’ll have failed my own criteria for moral claims.

    Years ago I would struggle to get the most basic ideas across. Now at least I only struggle with the most complex. Decades of slow progress to improve my weakness.

    I knew I had something sitting out there to block me. I just didn’t see this one coming.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-09 18:41:00 UTC

  • VISITING LONDON — ALL OF NEXT WEEK– Tickets already in my callus free hands th

    — VISITING LONDON — ALL OF NEXT WEEK–

    Tickets already in my callus free hands that have never done an honest day’s toil. Hoping to see libertarian friends while in town. First trip out of Ukraine since September.

    🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-08 18:15:00 UTC

  • For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on the simplicity of the argument

    For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on the simplicity of the argument and I think I have it pretty close to done. Now I have to think about how to introduce it. And I think I’lld approach it by formulating the right question (stating the right problem). I don’t think I’ll tie it to libertarianism directly, but take Haidt’s approach of simply addressing the issue. That makes my arguments less ‘niche’ and less associated with ‘whacky libertarians’.

    PART 1 – MORAL REALISM (ETHICS)

    I think the best thing is to state the problem, then state the whole argument.

    Then list the extensions to property, ethics and morality.

    Then show how the argument addresses the problem. Then pose a list of questions that this argument must also address to confirm it’s assertions.

    Then I rearrange my chapters such that they address those questions.

    Then I follow that with the (many) applications.

    PART 2 – POLITICAL ETHICS

    I think at this point I address moral realism from the ground up. Including the performative (Attestation) theory of truth, and work through each of the major branches of philosophy.

    Next I attack platonism, obscurantism, pseudoscience, and mysticism as immoral, and add the new extensions to political ethics.

    PART 3 – POLITICAL ECONOMY

    Work through the institutional solutions now that we’ve built a foundation.

    PART 4 – APPENDICES

    APPENDIX 2 – Reform Libertarianism.

    Address praxeology

    Address ghetto ethics

    APPENDIX 3 – Reform Conservatism

    APPENDIX 4 – Brief Attack on Democratic Ideologies one by one.

    APPENDIX X – Go through the formal logic of cooperation. This seems very difficult but since I’m just building on Ostrom’s work I don’t have to go into all the multitudinous defenses she does, I just extend that work.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-08 15:12:00 UTC

  • INFLUENCES I love bibliographies of major works. On my site I collect reading li

    INFLUENCES

    I love bibliographies of major works. On my site I collect reading lists and the biographies of the authors that I respect most.

    Today, I’m working on restructuring my chapter order to be less about libertarianism, and to accommodate the improvements in my arguments over the past year. So I am working through Hiadt’s bibliographies trying to see if there is anything that I haven’t read.

    And, you know, there really isn’t. Which scares me. lol. Although, it really makes sense because we’re very close in age, and went through our intellectual development during the same period, and information that counteracts the progressive fantasy just sort of exploded during the last thirty years. I just was later in my development because I was distracted by ‘business’ when younger and it’s really only over the past ten years that I have been able to devote such concentrated time to my work.

    When you get down to it, my major (almost exclusive) influences have been: (Poincare + Brouwer + Taleb + Popper) + Hayek + Duchesne + Stephen Hicks + Kahneman + (Hoppe + Haidt). Haidt and Hoppe the most influential.

    I made the mistake of trying to solve the problem Haidt did with computer science (artificial intelligence) because at the time I was in school, psychology was still in the postmodern catastrophe that was progressivism. It was gut classes for stupid people. But at that point in time, despite the fact taht I understood the problem was one of emotions and objects, I couldn’t solve it. Haidt did.

    But it worked out as a benefit because computer science is an operational methodology and taught me how to think without the nonsensical platonic categories that are universal to that ‘lost’ discipline we call philosophy. You can say fuzzy things in philosophy, logic and math but you cannot actually operationalize them with a computer, and a computer is just a very fast way of conducting human operations (switches).

    I did finally understand that voluntary exchange, property, inventory, substitution and acquisitiveness are the means of creating an artificial intelligence, but I have less interest in that field than I do in formal institutions of cooperation. So this is where I’m spending my time.

    Anyway, collecting these biographies has been fascinating because if you collect enough of them you see that very few works by very few authors have any material impact in social and political science.

    It’s been a 2500 year journey to try to solve the problem of cooperation. But we are getting very close to it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-08 08:24:00 UTC