Curt Doolittle

Form: Argument

  • THE ABSURDITY OF THE LIBERTINE LIE AND THE SOLUTION IN PROPERTARIAN LOGIC (worth

    THE ABSURDITY OF THE LIBERTINE LIE AND THE SOLUTION IN PROPERTARIAN LOGIC

    (worth repeating)

    Violence is the starting point for all cooperative, ethical, moral, and political questions. The first question of all ethics is quite simple: “Why do I not kill you and take your stuff?” All questions of cooperation, ethics, and politics are consequent to that question.

    It is a common fallacy, including the fallacy of argumentation, that violence is external to the question of cooperation. Arguing such is an attempt, by use of obscurant, verbalist deception, to forbid retaliation while retaining the ability to conduct fraud, conspiracy, and immorality.

    The fact that it was so easy to attract and persuade fools who fall prey to the rationalist fallacy, and to the fallacy of aggression, and even to the fallacy of argumentation, is an example of how simple it is to overload human reason.

    I find it somewhat humorous that we had to invent writing, numbers, arithmetic, history, and law, to compensate for our ability merely to remember. We had to invent mathematics, geometry to overcome the limits of our perception. We had an enormously absurd struggle to invent calculus of independent objects, and that Einstein’s (albeit not Poincare’s) revolution is nothing more than the absolute abandonment of relative framing.

    Yet the average imbecile still suggests that reason and rationalism are somehow of the same caliber as the various forms of calculation and the vast institutional networks for calculating, we have built in every single area of life, in order for us to compensate for the absolutely illusory competence of reason, perception, memory and judgement.

    Only an idiot would fall for such a fallacy. But then, without a means of calculation, it is easy to be an idiot.

    Hence, Propertarianism. ie: morality stated as calculation, independent of judgement, memory, perception, and reason.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-21 15:13:00 UTC

  • SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT INTERVENE AND MAKE ME A FORTUNE 500 CEO? Feminists are abs

    SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT INTERVENE AND MAKE ME A FORTUNE 500 CEO?

    Feminists are absurd. Now, here is the data. CEO’s of large companies are (a) really smart, and (b) tall. Now, there is a correlation between height and brain size which correlates with intelligence. But also, the very primitive power that superior height conveys is tangible, and measurable.

    Does that mean that the government should redistribute CEO positions from tall people to short people?

    Then why should we redistribute CEO positions (or any position in society) from socially superior people to socially inferior people?

    I have no problem with the fact that I can never play basketball well, and that in both soccer and volleyball I am working at a disadvantage. I have no problem that in business I am working at a disadvantage. I have no problem that even in the pursuit of desirable women that I am at a disadvantage. These are disadvantages. But I cannot comprehend wanting others to sacrifice the maximum that they can achieve in life to compensate for my disadvantage.

    Yet feminists will argue the opposite day in and day out. The fact is that women work fewer hours, are less willing to make economic sacrifices, less willing to take economic risks, are less loyal to internal political networks, and are vastly outnumbered at both the top and bottom of the intelligence and aggressive impulsivity scales.

    Just as I cannot possibly sense but 1/100’th of what an average women can about any other human being she encounters in the first fifteen seconds, I understand that nearly all women on earth, cannot make political assessments in the same short time frame.

    We are compatible. But we are not equal. And group competition requires we make the best use of our best, because everyone else is merely a commodity.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-20 05:13:00 UTC

  • THE PROBLEM OF THE IS-OUGHT GAP IS ONLY TRUE UNDER THE FALLACY OF UNIVERSALISM.

    THE PROBLEM OF THE IS-OUGHT GAP IS ONLY TRUE UNDER THE FALLACY OF UNIVERSALISM.

    We ‘ought’ to develop cooperative institutions, even if we can’t know what we ‘ought’ to accomplish using them.

    —“As Hume has made abundantly clear, there can be no basis in physical nature of any values or norms. The is-ought gap is unbridgeable.”—

    Not quite sure how to say this, but the reason I disagree with Hume is that he means ‘universal theories (“is” statements) exist for physically transformational (physics – say of geology), genetically heuristic (plans and animals), and memory-heuristic (man or AI) entities.

    However (a) the arbitrary precision for any system on that spectrum decreases from the physical-transformational to the memory-heuristic. Meaning that the precision of predictability of any instance decreases as we progress – gasses are hard to predict, and humans are harder to predict than gasses. We can make general statements (theories) about man, but we cannot make specific predictions about any given human. And (b) for sentient creatures, given what “is” both in the universe, and in our physical properties, we can choose from a variety of strategies, but we cannot know which we ‘ought’ to choose, because if we claim an ‘ought’ as a universal strategy for all of man, all choices are to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others, because we are sufficiently unequal to compete on equal terms. So any universal strategy ‘harms’ some body of people.

    However (c), assuming we desire both the best competitive choices for every group AND the best overall strategy for man, we can construct institutions that allow cooperation between heterogeneous moral codes (reproductive and evolutionary strategies), such as the market, because in such institutions we can cooperate on means, if not ends, and that through diverse pursuit of ends we can still ‘advance’.

    Yes it is not possible to select which theory might be right, or which human strategy might be right – those are synonyms. But we can choose what strategy might be wrong: chaos, violence and dysgenia that forbid the accumulation of capital sufficient for our long term prosperity.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-19 02:49:00 UTC

  • ECONOMICS IS AN EMPIRICAL SCIENCE – ALL DISCIPLINES MUST BE CONSTRUCTED AS EMPIR

    ECONOMICS IS AN EMPIRICAL SCIENCE – ALL DISCIPLINES MUST BE CONSTRUCTED AS EMPIRICAL SCIENCES – AND THOSE THAT ONE ARGUES OTHERWISE DEMONSTRATE EMPTY VERBALISM ON THE PART OF THE ADVOCATE.

    (from elsewhere)

    a) to be classified as a science a discipline must practice the scientific method: observation (measurement to overcome limits to perception and memory), tests of external correspondence (experiments), tests of internal consistency (logic).

    b) empiricism (observation) is not equal to experimentation (positivism).

    c) economic properties are not deducible from first principles, and we have dozens of examples, the most common of which is sticky prices.

    d) humans are able to cooperate because of sympathetic intention, and could not do so without it. That is, we can (as can dogs, but not apes) understand intentions. We are also marginally indifferent in our incentives. As such we can test the rationality of incentives. Therefore all economic statements are empirically testable by sympathetic experience (the reduction of stimuli to that which we can perceive by our senses.) Or what is called ‘instrumentalism’.

    e) as such economics does not differ from any other scientific discipline in that we require instrumentation (both mechanical and logical) to reduce that which we cannot experience to that which we can experience, and upon experiencing, make a comparison. We simply need less instrumentation to perceive the data than we do in most other fields.

    f) the purpose of which is to develop general rules of arbitrary precision that we can use to model that which we cannot experience directly, from fragmentary information that we can experience directly.

    g) All statements of external correspondence are and always must be theoretical (in the spectrum intuition->hypothesis->theory->law.

    h) Since all hypothetical statements must include arbitrary precision, all general rules are limited by some scale or another(greater or lesser), beyond which the theory fails. In other words, all phenomenon demonstrate a distribution. That which does not is merely tautological.

    i) All axiomatic statements consist of constructions, with deterministic consequences, not observations – because all information that can exist, exists in the axioms.

    Ergo, economics is an empirical science as are all disciplines. All thought is empirical, hypothetical, theoretical, and bound by one or more axis of arbitrary precision. Logical MODELS consist of general rules. Axiomatic systems are TAUTOLOGICAL. Their value is in their tautology: which allows us to test the internal consistency of our statements.

    Mises failed to grasp operationalism which is why he had to create a lot of verbalist nonsense by equating verbal definitions with the properties of reality, so that he could justify his failure.

    (Honestly in retrospect, it’s amazing that like marx he could create that much nonsense – enough nonsense to overload the gullible.).

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-14 03:48:00 UTC

  • THE ONLY REASON TO STUDY ECONOMICS IS TO JUSTIFY RULE OF LAW. (ok, yes, I”m taun

    THE ONLY REASON TO STUDY ECONOMICS IS TO JUSTIFY RULE OF LAW.

    (ok, yes, I”m taunting you with that statement)

    Humans are capable of four weapons of influence, and human institutions can be discussed using the frame of reference of any one of them – or all of them. I try to objectively address all of them in my work:

    1) Morality/Gossip/Ostracization/Cult/Religion : Priests and public intellectuals.

    2) Rules/force/punishment/law/Government : Warriors police, judges and politicians.

    3) Volition/exchange/reward/trade/Economics : traders, distributors financiers, bankers

    4) Production/education/utility/Knowledge : craftsmen, engineers, scientists

    Each group specializing in each frame of reference has evolved a language (a set of languages) and a discipline (a set of methods), and institutions (means of propagating, applying, organizing) for the application of their means of influence.

    I use the term ‘legal philosophy’ in the sense that the weapon of influence (force) using the institution of law, is different from the weapon of influence (morality) using gossip (public speech), in the institution of religion.

    Rothbard constructed a religious (cult) narrative, and hayek a legal narrative. My criticisms of mises is that he simply failed, because he conflated science, logic, and craft, thereby creating praxeology as a pseudoscience (by claiming logic constitutes a science). Just why the cosmopolitans (freud, marx, mises, rothbard, cantor, adorno, etc) created so many pseudosciences is something I have written quite a bit about, but can be boiled down to ‘verbalism’ and platonic truth, from the cultural emphasis on scripture and religion, rather than the western tradition of operationalism and testimonial truth, and the cultural emphasis on craft and martial order. (But again this is a very deep topic.)

    So It is not that I fail to grasp that economics must be stated in a particular language. Or that I fail to grasp the missing formal logic of cooperation that mises intuited must exist, but failed to develop. Or that it is possible to articulate economics objectively as a scientific discipline.

    ***It is that since the means of OBTAINING a free society MUST (as far as we know) depend upon the rule of law (Hayek), then the philosophical framework for CONSTRUCTING rule of law must be articulate as a legal one. In fact, no understanding of economics will meaningfully effect rule of law under property rights, other than to justify it. Or more strongly: it is unnecessary to understand economics except as a means of justifying the law necessary to construct the voluntary organization of production.**** (That should be slightly mind-bending for most people.)

    There are reasons why a small internal community like judaism or gypsies or any other cult can rely on the pressure of ostracism. But to possess land, and build fixed capital necessary for organized production, one requires the institution of law.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-14 01:51:00 UTC

  • DRINKING AGE AND FIGHTING AGE? (worth repeating) In war you follow orders, destr

    DRINKING AGE AND FIGHTING AGE?

    (worth repeating)

    In war you follow orders, destroy and kill, and are in the constant presence of others who can violently constrain you – even kill you.

    At home you have precisely the opposite conditions: you act on your own volition, are prohibited from almost every possible harm, you are in the presence of others who are by law limited in constraint of you.

    Liberty requires cognizance and alcohol and testosterone erase it. So no. Drinking at home, and fighting in war are very different environments. The two have nothing to do with one another as long as young males under the influence of alcohol continue to cause a disproportionate amount of damage.

    The question isn’t moral, and the environments are not commensurable. It’s empirical and the environments pose opposite conditions with opposite consequences.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-08 09:56:00 UTC

  • DECIDABILITY IN ETHICS AND LAW: DYSGENIC, STATIC OR EUGENIC. (very dense but ver

    DECIDABILITY IN ETHICS AND LAW: DYSGENIC, STATIC OR EUGENIC.

    (very dense but very important argument) (edited and reposted)

    From David Hamilton:

    —“Why not just admit that ethics is ultimately about our being in fundamental states of conflict with each other – that we are all simply trapped in the same metaphorical room preferring either Matisse or Picasso to hang on the common wall, and that ethics is ultimately about our agitating to impose our aesthetic tastes and preferences on everyone else, lest they impose theirs on us?”—

    Well written, common frustration, but, No.

    Determination of criminal, ethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions are universal. There exists only one universal law: the prohibition on free riding (imposed costs / lost time and effort).

    It’s true that by analogy, we refer to contractual obligations, commands, and regulations as law, to grant them the same standard. Just as we refer to a host of signals as ethical or moral, when they are only analogies thereof. But this analogy conveys import by analogy not truth content.

    MORAL THEORY RESULTS IN LAW

    So while you are correct that we are, outside of kin, ultimately in conflict on ends and means, we can develop rules – Like monogamy, for Nash equilibria – that allow us to cooperate on means if not ends: to engage in productive conflict rather than unproductive conflict. That is, after all, the function of the market.

    And if such rules are sufficiently internally consistent that (a) they can be used as general rules (b) applicable to all, for (c) a multitude of conditions we can then use such rules deductively. If these three (a,b,c) properties exist then such a general rule can be embodied in law, under rule of law. And only under such deductive, universally applicable, general rules can we live under rule of law, rather than arbitrary decision predicated upon the biases of an authority.

    So ethics, politics and law constitute reasoning by which we can construct general rules of cooperation (competition:productive conflict) WITHOUT relying on individual bias, given the reality of our conflict.

    So the question becomes one of ensuring that such general rules are decideable. Which is the central problem of all general rules in all logical models. The only means of decidability, is either dysgenic (socialism: the female reproductive strategy) or eugenic (libertarian meritocratic) or static (authoritarian).

    As far as I know that is a logical box without exit.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-08 02:26:00 UTC

  • not narcissism. It’s theatre. Sorry but you’re making two catastrophic errors: 1

    http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2014/10/narcissism-hubris-and-success.htmlIt’s not narcissism. It’s theatre.

    http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2014/10/narcissism-hubris-and-success.html

    Sorry but you’re making two catastrophic errors:

    1) that rational argument is persuasive. That leadership of a body of people is rational. Only very naive people who lack experience as leaders make this error. Quite the contrary: mastering delivery, mastering body language. Mastering moral intuitions. Mastering not rhetoric but sermon is both difficult, an art, and mastery of leadership. I would enumerate the reasons why but this is the wrong forum.

    (2) Any reasonable student of Michels, Burnham, or the vast body of data on organisations would remind us of the obvious: that leadership is necessary, and great leaders are in fact worth their high cost to organisations.. Man is a tribal creature and a moral creature. Reason is a thin layer of justification and nothing more. We do not make great organisations by rational argument but by constructing a moral narrative in which all members are heroes.

    Some people should get out more.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-05 16:09:00 UTC

  • MARX WAS WRONG ON LABOR. THE PROBLEM IS ORGANIZING PRODUCTION NOT LABOR. LABOR I

    MARX WAS WRONG ON LABOR. THE PROBLEM IS ORGANIZING PRODUCTION NOT LABOR. LABOR IS A COMMODITY WHOSE ONLY VALUE IS DETERMINED BY SCARCITY. THE MORE POPULOUS THE LOWER CLASSES THE LESS SCARCE, THE LESS VALUE.

    Organizing production is where the value is created. Potential labor is merely a commodity like wood or wheat.

    Organizing production, and in particularly organizing voluntary production using nothing but incentives, in an environment where your offered incentives are tested against other incentives, (your theory of demand for your good or service is tested), is where value is created.

    If that was not true, people would never have to look for work. When people look for work they are seeking to ‘buy’ income by participation in the organization of production that they themselves cannot organize and profit from – they are capable only of organizing their OWN labor. Property-Rights Makers(aristocracy), Investors, Bankers, Entrepreneurs, People who calculate in various jobs, down to the people who manage machines and who operate machines, each organize labor – their own and that of others. And we do this all in real time with constantly changing wants, needs, scarcity and prices.

    We are rewarded for the value of our contribution, which is determined by the scarcity of our contribution. Organizing production is more rewarding than any other activity. It is extremely difficult. It is extremely difficult and highly unproductive to organize production involuntarily in a managed economy. It is extremely difficult but highly productive to organize production in a voluntary economy.

    There is no reason that we cannot use both involuntary (the military) and voluntary (the market) organization of production in the same economy. There is no reason that the physical commons cannot be maintained involuntarily as is the military, while the more complex commons and the market itself are organized voluntarily. Only socialism and libertarianism have tried to enforce a monopoly mode of production. And while I agree that an aristocratic, highly homogenous society that that of the English once possessed could produce a libertarian order, the fact of the matter is that even in that order, we had a lot of lower class labor in oversupply, which for all intents and purposes could have been organized, like the military, for the production of commons.

    THE OBJECTIVE OF THE LOWER CLASSES MUST ALWAYS BE TO REDUCE THEIR NUMBER TO INCREASE THEIR TAKE. DEMOCRACY REVERSES THIS AND WORKS AGAINST THEM.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-29 05:10:00 UTC

  • REFORMING PHILOSOPHY: ITS ALL CALCULATION NOW. ALGORITHMS WIN OVER SET OPERATION

    REFORMING PHILOSOPHY: ITS ALL CALCULATION NOW. ALGORITHMS WIN OVER SET OPERATIONS.

    That any general rule,

    Requires a utilitarian context (a ‘question’)

    AND

    That answering that question,

    Requires an hypothesis{intuition,->hypothesis, ->theory, ->law}

    AND

    Any hypothesis,

    Requires a test of verbal construction,

    Requires tests of internal consistency,

    Using the instruments of logical operations{identity, ->category(logic proper), ->scale, ->relation, ->time, ->cause, ->cooperation}

    AND

    Requires tests of external correspondence,

    Using the instruments of physical operations {a sequence of actions},

    Recorded as a sequence of actions and measurements(observations)

    That can be followed and reproduced by others,

    AND

    Requires Warranty,

    Provided to the self, or to others, consisting of:

    Tests of falsification recorded

    Using instruments of physical and logical operations.

    Recorded as a sequence of actions and measurements(observations),

    That can be reproduced by others.

    AND

    Requires Warranty,

    Provided to the self and others, consisting of:

    Testimony to the truthful witness of all the above.

    This algorithm applies in all cases of human construction of general rules. There is no need for any other model except to lower the standard, and to obviate the individual from warranty.

    Philosophy suffers, possibly catastrophically, from verbalism: syllogism and set operation, rather than algorithmic operations. These verbalisms rely on extant meaning of words, themselves general rules. These words carry properties and relations whenever used. We use only some subset of those properties and relations in any context.This means that the use of words can add informational content to any statement that would not be extant if expressed as an operation.

    As such philosophy as a discipline tolerates polluted (extra information) that obscures, incorrectly weights, confuses and conflates theories. The majority of errors come not from comparisons (calculations) but from information external to the operation included in the language. This is why defining terms is so important. It is equivalent to using pure ingredients in chemistry.

    As far as I know, once we have solved the problem of ethics, morality, and politics, we possess all necessary logical instrumentation, and philosophy is a closed domain in which all statements can be represented logically through operations.

    As far as I know, if we follow what originated as the scientific method, but is simply the algorithmic application of instruments both mental and physical: “THE method”, no other method is needed.

    Worse philosophy, outside of science, appears to be extremely useful for the purpose of conducting interpersonal, social, political, and economic, fraud. In fact, the singular purpose of the vast majority of philosophy, has been used for the purpose of justifying these categories of fraud: justifying takings.

    Apriorism, as we have seen in Mises and Rothbard, can be abused, can be used to state pseudoscience (misesian praxeology), and to state immorality as moral (Rothbard), and requires no warranty. And all products in the market, whether physical operations (goods and services) or mental operations (hypothesis) can cause negative externalities that impose costs upon others.

    When our theories were confined to human action at human scale, mythology was adequate, and even when our investigation of the physical world was limited to human scale, our reason was largely adequate. Because humans can test arguments at human scale. But all theories exceeding human scale (human perception) require instrumentation. And instrumentation is required for any operation that is not possible to conduct with human sense perception alone.

    So, while it may be true that relying upon apriorism is useful. It is also true that constructing and publishing a theory in that manner is an avoidance of providing warranty to your ideas. And labeling your ideas as a black-market product that may have dangerous, keynesian levels, freudian levels, cantorian levels, rothbardian levels, of side effects.

    And any moral man should seek to prosecute you in every possible venue for the pollution of the commons.

    (I think I can wrap it all together even better, but I’m getting there.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-29 04:52:00 UTC