Curt Doolittle

Category: Science, Physics, and Philosophy of Science

  • The Pseudosciences

    Empirically speaking, we already overspend on Grad and PhD students. We overspend on most sciences (because they’re psuedosciences) and underspend on those that matter (physics, material science, chemistry, biological chemistry, genetics, archaeology) Virtually all other programs (psychology, social sciences, political sciences), and certainly all pseudosciences (the humanities) are a waste of money. Even in those hard sciences we can see in the cites that the number of scientists that do meaningful work remains relatively constant over time, no matter how many scientists we add to the pool it seems to make very little difference. Just why this is true, we aren’t sure.

  • The Pseudosciences

    Empirically speaking, we already overspend on Grad and PhD students. We overspend on most sciences (because they’re psuedosciences) and underspend on those that matter (physics, material science, chemistry, biological chemistry, genetics, archaeology) Virtually all other programs (psychology, social sciences, political sciences), and certainly all pseudosciences (the humanities) are a waste of money. Even in those hard sciences we can see in the cites that the number of scientists that do meaningful work remains relatively constant over time, no matter how many scientists we add to the pool it seems to make very little difference. Just why this is true, we aren’t sure.

  • Our Ascent Crushes Our Vanity

    Copernican Revolution made us understand we were not the center of the universe. Darwinian revolution made us realize that we are a glorious accident.

    The exploration of greater and lesser space made us realize the universe is quite hostile to us. The Propertarian revolution has made me understand that our consciousness is a puppet for our genes to use in negotiating cooperation with others. And all our vanity childish, and all our achievement an externality. We have progressed from confident to humble to frightened to humiliated. But the only possible language of the gods is truth. And we learn that language slowly and humbly. But there is a lesson here: the most foolish of creatures can become gods with enough effort.

  • Our Ascent Crushes Our Vanity

    Copernican Revolution made us understand we were not the center of the universe. Darwinian revolution made us realize that we are a glorious accident.

    The exploration of greater and lesser space made us realize the universe is quite hostile to us. The Propertarian revolution has made me understand that our consciousness is a puppet for our genes to use in negotiating cooperation with others. And all our vanity childish, and all our achievement an externality. We have progressed from confident to humble to frightened to humiliated. But the only possible language of the gods is truth. And we learn that language slowly and humbly. But there is a lesson here: the most foolish of creatures can become gods with enough effort.

  • Current Topic: Clarity On Metaphysics Of Time, Rather Than Just Action

    Metaphysics: Time The most effective conservation of energy is to save time. We expend energy to alter events in new state we would not have in current state. In this sense we’d not produce but we save. And inventory what we save. We can understand that as farmers we would adapt our thinking to production an d inventory rather than as hunters to capture and save. But it is the mental concept of hunters that is correct. We act to reorganize and save. We capture this difference between expenditure of energy and capture of energy We expend some of that energy as heat and the rest as action, and attempt against nature to inventory the rest, and invest it in more of the same actions as possible. And the reason we have been so insanely good at everything we do is that cooperation (Organizing) is so disproportionately rewarding because the concentration of energy is so rewarding. And because the use of information via cooperation, trade, and money and now post-money substitutes has assisted us in ever larger concentrations of energy/effort. Man transcends to god hood by outwitting the universe’s course of events Our ultimate expression of this strategy is to effectively stop time for all but the energy we consume. ***So just as truth exists in the greatest informational parsimony short of tautology, perfect transcendence exists in perfect energy parsimony short of the stopping of time***. We are no longer farmers and no longer need be subject to the metaphysics of farmers. Savers of time. And as such the savers of energy. For humans, time and energy and mass are synonyms.

  • Current Topic: Clarity On Metaphysics Of Time, Rather Than Just Action

    Metaphysics: Time The most effective conservation of energy is to save time. We expend energy to alter events in new state we would not have in current state. In this sense we’d not produce but we save. And inventory what we save. We can understand that as farmers we would adapt our thinking to production an d inventory rather than as hunters to capture and save. But it is the mental concept of hunters that is correct. We act to reorganize and save. We capture this difference between expenditure of energy and capture of energy We expend some of that energy as heat and the rest as action, and attempt against nature to inventory the rest, and invest it in more of the same actions as possible. And the reason we have been so insanely good at everything we do is that cooperation (Organizing) is so disproportionately rewarding because the concentration of energy is so rewarding. And because the use of information via cooperation, trade, and money and now post-money substitutes has assisted us in ever larger concentrations of energy/effort. Man transcends to god hood by outwitting the universe’s course of events Our ultimate expression of this strategy is to effectively stop time for all but the energy we consume. ***So just as truth exists in the greatest informational parsimony short of tautology, perfect transcendence exists in perfect energy parsimony short of the stopping of time***. We are no longer farmers and no longer need be subject to the metaphysics of farmers. Savers of time. And as such the savers of energy. For humans, time and energy and mass are synonyms.

  • Why are so many scientists bashing philosophers? 1 – Philosophy has not kept up

    Why are so many scientists bashing philosophers?

    1 – Philosophy has not kept up with developments: in particular, the universe is saying pretty consistently “I am simple”.

    2 – But it is much, much, more than this. It’s that:

    …… While undergraduate, graduate, and PHD physics programs improves the general understanding of the body politic, undergraduate, and graduate, and a very substantial part of the phd philosophy programs cause HARM to the general understanding of the body politic, second only to the pseudoscience of psychology, and third only to the pseudoscience of social science. So the issue is the HARM done by teaching philosophy as the literature of justificationary utopias, rather than the incremental knowledge we obtain in testifying (ensuring we are stating truth). As far as I can tell, philosophers have done far more harm than good in the past two hundred years. And before the past two hundred years, the list of philosophers that did good (Smith, Locke, Hume, Jefferson) is quite small, while the list of scientists and mathematicians who have done good (too many to list) quite large. And the list of philosophers who have done terrible harm (Rousseau and the entire french school, Kant and the entire german school, The entire cosmopolitan school: Boaz, Marx/Keynes, Freud, Cantor, Mises, Rand/Rothbard, Adorno in particular) is nearly endless.

    3 – Why are philosophers of my generation bashing philosophers as in need of the same Operationalist revolution as has been forced on Physics and Psychology?

    3.1 – Does not incorporate costs.

    3.2 – Does not preserve

    3.3 – Does not incorporate actionability.

    3.4 – Meaning (verbalism) not truth (elimination of error)

    3.5 – The unknowable communal Pareto ‘Good’, rather than the knowable interpersonal Nash Optimum.

    3.6 – False understanding of Truth as Binary, logical, platonic rather than as a sequence of sufficient for given purposes: True Enough For:

    … – Understanding/Meaning, (Learning)

    … – Communication of Meaning ( communication, teaching)

    … – Opportunity Discovery, ( what most of us desire from learning )

    … – Actionability, (domain of science, how is this possible)

    … – Voluntary Contract/Cooperation, (economics and ethics)

    … – Dispute resolution(decidability) (conflict and law)

    Source date (UTC): 2016-09-30 08:04:00 UTC

  • “When Francis Bacon was writing his Novum Organum, he cautioned would-be scienti

    —“When Francis Bacon was writing his Novum Organum, he cautioned would-be scientists about what he called the idols of the mind. He listed them in the book:

    • Idola tribus (idols of the tribe) This is our tendency to see more order than truly exists. It comes about because people try to feed new facts into their preconceived ideas. (Cultural Bias)

    • Idola specus (idols of the cave) This weakness is due to each individual’s personal likes and dislikes, which cloud judgement and reason. (Preferential Bias)

    • Idola fori (idols of the marketplace) This is confusion that comes about through the use of words in science that may have a slightly different meaning than that of common language. This also leads to confusion between individual disciplines as well. (Framing Bias)

    • Idola theatri (idols of the theatre) This idol comes about by blindly following academic dogma and therefore not asking enough real questions about the world. (Methodological Bias)”—

    Source date (UTC): 2016-09-29 07:57:00 UTC

  • free assoc(meaning), hypothesis (justification), theory( criticism), law( surviv

    free assoc(meaning), hypothesis (justification), theory( criticism), law( survival)

    Source date (UTC): 2016-09-28 08:10:18 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/781043341689556992

    Reply addressees: @Aristokles11235 @NotEvenWrongRTs

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/780890917444001792

    IN REPLY TO:

    @Aristokles11235

    @curtdoolittle @NotEvenWrongRTs
    Anology seems to be the way the human mind is structered to transfer information from one domain to another.

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/780890917444001792

  • math is not a science. It is a logic. We can use logics to test theories. But th

    math is not a science. It is a logic. We can use logics to test theories. But this is not twitter material

    Source date (UTC): 2016-09-27 17:06:39 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/780815931740135424

    Reply addressees: @JimmyTrussels @Outsideness

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/780790500542582784

    IN REPLY TO:

    Original post on X

    Original tweet unavailable — we could not load the text of the post this reply is addressing on X. That usually means the tweet was deleted, the account is protected, or X does not expose it to the account used for archiving. The Original post link below may still open if you view it in X while signed in.

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/780790500542582784