Curt Doolittle

Form: Argument

  • AND COLLEGES SHOULD WARRANTY THEIR PRODUCTS, AND WE SHOULD SUE THEM FOR THE FAIL

    https://www.quora.com/Education/Should-a-college-education-be-offered-to-all-people-or-to-a-certain-group-of-people-only?srid=u4Qv&share=1UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES SHOULD WARRANTY THEIR PRODUCTS, AND WE SHOULD SUE THEM FOR THE FAILURE OF THEIR PRODUCTS TO PERFORM.

    The state gives the universities protection from suits. For selling non-performing products. (But then, the government is a monopoly that forces us to buy its services too.)

    Q: “Should a college education be offered to all people or to just a certain group of people?”

    “Should” is an interesting question.

    “College Education” is a loose term.

    “Offered” is a questionable term.

    The data suggest we send way too many people to college and way too few people to apprenticeship programs.

    Just statistically speaking, if it takes a 110-115 IQ to complete liberal arts education that means that we should be only educating `10-20% of the population and the rest should get vocational training rather than liberal arts training.

    Now that said, if colleges and universities had to warrantee their products, rather than sell non performing products, say, by getting x% of your payroll for 30 years, then we could drop tuition fees altogether, loans altogether, and let universities borrow to cover float (receiveables) themselves.

    This would rapidly change the university system from just another parasitic quasi-governmental bureaucracy, to a market driven organization.

    University costs and administrative costs would plummet, and courses woukd be outcome oriented.

    This is the best idea for solving the problem of parasitic but useless university degrees.

    We know now that we learn nothing at university if value. All they do is sort and filter the population.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-25 05:39:00 UTC

  • THE SLIVER RULE REIGNS. THE GOLDEN RULE IS AN INVITATION TO INTERVENTIONISM AND

    THE SLIVER RULE REIGNS. THE GOLDEN RULE IS AN INVITATION TO INTERVENTIONISM AND UTOPIANISM.

    —“The Golden Rule (do to others what you want them to do to you) is an invitation to interventionism, utopianism, and meddling into other people’s affairs, particularly poor nations, as represented by the the NGO clowns at TED conferences trying to “save the world”, and causing more harm with unseen side effects. Remember that Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and were following the positive Golden rule. At the personal level, I may feel good trying to nudge a vegetarian to eat raw kebbeh (Lebanese steak tartare) because I like it myself.

    —

    The Silver rule (do NOT do to others what you don’t want them to do to you) leads to a systematic way to live “doing no harm” and gives rise to a liberating type of ethics: your obligation is to pursue your personal interests provided you do not hurt others probabilistically unless you are yourself exposed, & not transfer risks to others (skin-in-the-game at all times). But, and here is the key, should there be a spillover, it will necessarily be positive. It is therefore convex.(Typical via negativa rules are convex). It separates the “self-interest” in Adam Smith from the “selfish” version. And if you want to help society, just try to benefit WHILE at least harming no one.

    —

    This distinction puts a lot of clarity behind the idea of free markets and morality. You should never have to prove that what you do is GOOD for society (hard to express in words and rationalistic framework), but you can certainly show you are NOT hurting others more than yourself via skin-in-the-game.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-21 12:51:00 UTC

  • CONTRA JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF Justified true belief is not an important question

    CONTRA JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF

    Justified true belief is not an important question – it is purely utilitarian. Your belief is not an ethical question. Your testimony is however, an ethical question. . You may believe whatever you have knowledge of use of. But you may not testify that you know that which you cannot construct in operational language.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-18 13:21:00 UTC

  • PROPERTY EVOLVED AS A MEANS OF SUPPRESSING FREE RIDING FIRST. (worth repeating)

    PROPERTY EVOLVED AS A MEANS OF SUPPRESSING FREE RIDING FIRST.

    (worth repeating)

    Well, I think the scarcity-as-primary cause of the evolution of property is probably false, and should be replaced by the prohibition on free riding:

    (a) Property evolved for preventing free riding during cooperation (along with mating – we dont’ know which was first – cooperation or pairing off, but it looks like cooperation was first.)

    (b) Language evolved to control mating (pairing off conditional monogamy – mates as property)

    (c) Property matured to facilitate the retention of goods and tools.

    (d) Property matured to facilitate capture of livestock.

    (e) Property matured to facilitate inheritance in families

    (f) Property matured to facilitate the division of labor.

    (g) Property evolved as a means of forming cooperative networks and positive expression of legal rules.

    As far as I can tell, it is the prevention of free riding needed to maintain incentives to produce that was the source of the evolution of property.

    As far as I can tell, it is probably more accurate to say that scarcity forced retention of redistribution within family and tribe, it did not cause the evolution of property.

    The hard problem that only Northern Europeans have solved, is to suppress redistribution in the tribe and family.

    I don’t think this is a meaningful revision of libertarian theory. It’s a correction. But the order of development doesn’t change the importance of property rights for the purpose of incentives, calculation, and dispute resolution.

    But it does reinforce my argument that the purpose of property is the prevention of free riding necessary for cooperation. So that property evolved a positive expression of the negative prohibition. Not as a good in itself in response to scarcity.

    In fact, I am pretty confident that the scarcity argument is a CROSS-GROUP problem not an in-group problem. (Again, this is why ghetto ethics were a failure – wrong problem. In group evolved prior to out-group.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 09:58:00 UTC

  • The Irony Of Praxeological Apriorism

    [I]n retrospect, isn’t it ironic that not just a single thinker, but a group of thinkers have tried to construct a logic of rational action, and extend it into a logic of cooperation, and further into a logic of economics, by using a method of philosophical argument that is expressly not constructed of actions – operations? It is ironic. Its Ironic as hell. But when the irony ends we are left with a tragedy. We lost a century. And we may have lost a century of our liberty because of it.

  • Since moral differences are expressions of differences in reproductive strategy,

    Since moral differences are expressions of differences in reproductive strategy, and since moral intuitions are reflections of those differences, and since we appear out of necessity to be morally blind to competing sets of differences, then moral intuition tells us noting whatsoever. We can agree to cooperate on means, but we cannot agree to cooperate on ends. In the end, we are competing, and the byproduct of our reproductive cooperation is generally beneficial for all. Government can be used to transfer the benefits between classes (as it has been for 150 years) at the expense of dysgenic reproduction.

    The value of property rights (propertarianism) is that it reduces all statements to non-moral form.

    Property is the logic of cooperation.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-09 09:14:00 UTC

  • SIMPLE ARGUMENT WHY WE APPEAR TO BE ALONE —“This cosmic time scale for the evo

    http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1304/1304.3381.pdfTHE SIMPLE ARGUMENT WHY WE APPEAR TO BE ALONE

    —“This cosmic time scale for the evolution of life has important consequences: (1) life took a long time (ca. 5 billion years) to reach the complexity of bacteria; (2) the environments in which life originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on Earth; (3) there was no intelligent life in our universe prior to the origin of Earth, thus Earth could not have been deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens; (4) Earth was seeded by panspermia; (5) experimental replication of the origin of life from scratch may have to emulate many cumulative rare events; and (6) the Drake equation for guesstimating the number of civilizations in the universe is likely wrong, as intelligent life has just begun appearing in our universe.”—

    The “We might be the first” argument isn’t irrational.

    Wouldn’t it be nice if we could become ‘the ancients”?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-09 06:09:00 UTC

  • ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIANISM VS THE CENTRAL LIBERTARIAN FALLACIES (worth repeatin

    ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIANISM VS THE CENTRAL LIBERTARIAN FALLACIES

    (worth repeating)

    –Aristocratic Egalitarianism is a replacement for the fallacy of immaculate conception we call natural law. And High trust society is a replacement for the fallacy of aggression as sufficient for the formation of a voluntary polity in the absence of a state. Propertarianism is the explanation why.—

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-04 14:56:00 UTC

  • THE FALLACY OF STARTING WITH THE ASSUMPTION YOU HAVE PROPERTY RIGHTS RATHER THAN

    THE FALLACY OF STARTING WITH THE ASSUMPTION YOU HAVE PROPERTY RIGHTS RATHER THAN NEEDING TO CONSTRUCT THEM

    If you have no property rights, but only permission from the state, to use its property in certain fashion, then the state cannot aggress against your property – nor can anyone else, except to the extent determined by the state.

    To defend against this argument you must counter that natural rights exist like a soul, or are merely an allegory to contract rights, envisioned out of necessity for flourishing – or some other magical concept. Despite the fact that, contradictory to universal claims, nowhere on earth do private property rights exist. They are profoundly unnatural.

    All that is necessary for cooperation is the institution of property. The scope of property is not defined by the means of transgression against property. We can only possibly hold a right that we have obtained in contract. The contract for property rights in the absence of a state can only be constructed by individuals exchanging the promise of defense in response to transgression, and the means of aggressively constructing those rights . The only means of preventing the universally extant violations of those rights obtained in such a contract, and reciprocally insured via that contract, is the organized application of violence against the state.

    So it is an erroneous assumption, and a convenient one, that you start from a position of liberty, rather than start from a position of needing to construct liberty.

    Intersubjectively verifiable property is a fallacy. Aggression is a fallacy. Natural rights are a fallacy. Crusoe’s Island is a fallacy. Man evolved from consanguineous bands by suppressing free riding, thereby pressing all into participation in production. Property is the natural result of suppressing free riding. At all points and at all times property is constructed by resisting free riding. Property results from the suppression of free riding. The origin of private property as we understand it occurred when Indo European cattle raiders were able to concentrate extraordinary wealth under pastoralism, by way of organized violence and they kept what they obtained in those raids. This is the origin of property: the organized application of violence against free riding.

    People who are unwilling to enter the contract for organized violence in order to construct property rights both in contract and in daily practice (as a norm), are merely free riders (thieves) from those who are willing to act to construct property rights in contract and in daily practice (as a norm).

    In other words, by claiming you have ‘natural rights’ you’re not only demonstrably wrong, but just trying to obtain property rights at a discount by free riding on the efforts of those who do construct property rights.

    So, you’re not only wrong, but a dishonest, free riding thief, like statists you condemn are.

    As far as I know this argument is bulletproof.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    Kiev Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-24 23:00:00 UTC

  • IN DEFENSE OF EMPIRICISM, OPERATIONALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM. Theories must some

    IN DEFENSE OF EMPIRICISM, OPERATIONALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM.

    Theories must somehow be made extant (constructed). What action renders them extant? If falsification hardens theories, why must they be hardened? What is the purpose of talking about that which we imagine, if not to test it? Why do we need truth except to test correspondence with reality?

    I intuit a problem. I imagine a theory. I describe it in words. I imagine a test of that theory. I construct a test of that theory using instrumentation. I test that theory by taking actions to do so. I observe the results of those actions with and without instrumentation. (repeat).

    This process requires observation (empiricism), instruments(instrumentalism), operations(operationalism). But in all cases, we start with intuition (pre-cognitive) and imagination (cognitive), and in all cases, all observations of actions in the real world must be reduced to an analogy to experience such that we can apprehend it with our senses. With practice we can learn to habituate general rules that we in turn can apprehend, because of habituation of individual cases. But in all cases, we apprehend only what we can apprehend with our senses.

    Likewise we lack the ability to compare and contrast complex information, and as such we must rely on instrumentation (numbers, symbols, transformations (operations) to assist us in our thinking.

    Note that In the preceding three paragraphs I rely upon actions, not platonism or obscurantism (the use of ‘is’).

    Falsification forces us to overcome the cognitive bias of confirmation (a biological necessity for the conservation of energy). Operationalism forces us to overcome the cognitive bias of conflating imagination and action such that we know whether or not we understand the means of constructing (acting) such that the concepts we rely upon are understood, and therefore our claims are ‘true’ – or whether they are conveniently not understood and therefore our claims CANNOT be true and are therefore ‘false’.

    One cannot attest to unconstructed imagination and make a true statement, any more than one can attest to the truth of a theory that has not been subject to falsification.

    As far as I know it is impossible to refute this argument, and it is, at least in sketch, a refutation of Kant’s appeal to the authority of apriorism. And that refutation is supported by the relatively recent findings of cognitive science and experimental psychology.

    This bundle of ideas meaning that the failure of the previous generation in which popper was a member, was an insufficient disregard for remnants of religion and platonist philosophy, entrapment in the russellian program’s attempt at claiming philosophy as science, and an insufficient regard for the operational methods of science.

    If one cannot state one’s concepts in operational language, one does not understand them. And as failing to understand them, cannot levy truth claims about them. Knowledge of use != Knowledge of construction. I may ACT with knowledge of use, but I may not make truth claims without knowledge of construction.

    This constraint for operational language places higher demands on speakers in the same way that falsification places higher demand on speakers.

    Cheers

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-24 00:51:00 UTC