PROPERTY AND FREEDOM SOCIETY CONFERENCE – BODRUM TURKEY
Notes from the front:
1) Both Perpetual Traveller and I are sick as dogs. Flu. He was worse today, but it caught up with me tonight and I’m a total mess as well now. Today (Monday) is ‘Boat Day’ where we all go out on the local wooden ships and get trashed in the sunshine, in this beautiful little cove. It’s our high point of the year. Unfortunately, I suspect neither of us is going to be able to engage in the usual troublemaking. (I can barely breathe.)
2) Roman Skaskiw finally has convinced me to love Bitcoin. I’m not exactly an early adopter of technology. But there are at least two means of making money. Roman is more interested in the anarchic and political properties of Bitcoin, but I’m mostly interested in whether I can make money with it or not. (I always feel like I’m pissing on his parade with my skepticism – but that’s just because I couldn’t see how to make a business out of it until today.) So I think we’ll find a venture to kick off together. Something small. Learn it. Then try for the big one. ‘Cause the big one interests me a great deal.
3) Dr Flynn (of The Flynn Effect) is quite wonderful to listen to, and I finally got the chance to ask him two of my burning questions. One he had the answer to (the decline of Anglo IQ over the past century and a half). The other he confirmed for me, closely enough: that Pareto’s rule appears to be correlated with IQ and Trust. He didn’t and others don’t see trust has having the same level of importance, but then, I’m interested in the informal institutions that set the west apart, and trust is one of the ‘miracles’ that the west developed. The problem is that trust won’t do you much good if you can’t get the vast majority of the property into the hands of your population with IQ over 115, where it can be used by problem-solvers. My third question I couldn’t get answered which was my argument that the ability to articulate your ideas in verbal form, and the ability to repair machines (both forms of problem solving) seem to require about 106 or so IQ. 106 looks like, to me, the ‘median IQ’ that is the minimum for greek, english and jewish levels of intellectual expansion. I think I can prove this with the data pretty easily, but he kept insisting that we can TRAIN people to do most of those things if they are TRAINABLE (meaning down to 90 or 95). But that they can’t innovate. Which appears to be true. But that’s an educational question, that the germans have clearly solved. Whereas I’m concerned about informal institutions (norms) and what norms can develop regardless of whether there is explicit training. Again, the germans have this down cold, and the americans are terrible at it. This is sort of “Le Lion’s” argument to smart fraction put in economic terms. Really, what I got out of the conversation is that I pretty much understand the literature and I’ve pretty much got the arguments down. So It’s going to be pretty hard to attack me on that front.
3) Continuing my transition from a Hayekian to anarcho capitalist to a Dark Enlightenment Libertarian. And I’m working to unify the economic and political insights of Hoppe with the cultural and informal institutional insights of the Dark Enlightenment project. The problem is that the Dark Enlightenment (Aristocratic Philosophy) is positioned as a reactionary rather than revolutionary movement and I would need to change that. And that involves organizing rather than writing and while that’s something I can do, it’s not something that I enjoy very much.
FYI: “Dark Enlightenment — A new intellectual current made up of Reactionary components. The unifying factor of the Dark Enlightenment is a critique of Democracy, bluntly summarized by Peter Thiel when he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” The “Dark Enlightenment” is a term coined by British philosopher Nick Land, who explicated the concept in his Dark Enlightenment sequence. This sequence, along with the writings of Mencius Moldbug, make up the core literature of the movement. The Dark Enlightenment is a Reactionary project that rejects modernity, universalism, and Democracy in favor of Traditionalist, particularist, and aristocratic values. “
4) @Khan Thank you for the brilliant strategy. Planning is the work of a general staff and everyone finds it interesting. Again. Thank you.
(More Later)
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-23 00:02:00 UTC