Curt Doolittle

Form: Critique

  • REVIEW: A WASTE OF PHOTO PAPER “At the Border of Truth: Photographing the New Ea

    REVIEW: A WASTE OF PHOTO PAPER

    “At the Border of Truth: Photographing the New East “

    Sasha Rudensky, Assistant Professor of Art

    Tuesday, September 26, 2017, 5:00 pm

    Ring Family Performing Arts Hall, Center for the Arts

    Wesleyan University

    Aside from three or four shots that showed insight into stereotypical russian working class archetypes – which I found insulting as I assume they would – the work is worse than student quality – so much so that the viewer is left not pondering the image, but pondering why one would select such images other than for their lack of composition, content, and insight.

    Seriously. I know the art world has been a relative wasteland since the dawn of the digital age, and americans lack the culture and acculturation necessary to produce high arts. And I know the ‘new inspirationless and aspiration-less primitivism’ is meant to appeal to the rising anti-western underclasses now aspiring to upper middle class decor.

    So, why don’t we just rename Art in America,

    (New) American Painter, Art News, … the whole lot of them to “Proletarian Decoration in Western Civilization”?

    I have literally not seen a gallery show in over a decade that didn’t insult my intelligence and my aesthetics.

    God. What A Wasteland Aesthetics Has Become.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-09-13 17:37:00 UTC

  • Junk Science at its best. Either we have three or four emotional ‘reward’ system

    Junk Science at its best. Either we have three or four emotional ‘reward’ systems, we can describe Pluchik’s eight dimensions (which is a projection of four). Then we have five or six personality factors that bias them (certain, because they correspond to physical reward systems). And if we assume that in general, humans can distinguish at best, between five states, that should yield Pluchik’s diagram, of, at least five levels, with no less than three emotions ‘active’ at the same time. Meanwhile we can experience any combination at once, or sequence of emotions that result in a transitory, temporal, or durable state of emotional experience. That means there are no less than 64 simple emotions, at no less than five degrees of intensity, in some combination … often in many combinations, including ’emotional confusion’. Ergo the number of discernable permutations may be more than two thousand, even if we only possess names for a few hundred of them, and even if we have only four reward(punishment) systems.

  • Junk Science at its best. Either we have three or four emotional ‘reward’ system

    Junk Science at its best. Either we have three or four emotional ‘reward’ systems, we can describe Pluchik’s eight dimensions (which is a projection of four). Then we have five or six personality factors that bias them (certain, because they correspond to physical reward systems). And if we assume that in general, humans can distinguish at best, between five states, that should yield Pluchik’s diagram, of, at least five levels, with no less than three emotions ‘active’ at the same time. Meanwhile we can experience any combination at once, or sequence of emotions that result in a transitory, temporal, or durable state of emotional experience. That means there are no less than 64 simple emotions, at no less than five degrees of intensity, in some combination … often in many combinations, including ’emotional confusion’. Ergo the number of discernable permutations may be more than two thousand, even if we only possess names for a few hundred of them, and even if we have only four reward(punishment) systems.

  • Junk Science at its best. Either we have three or four emotional ‘reward’ system

    Junk Science at its best. Either we have three or four emotional ‘reward’ systems, we can describe Pluchik’s eight dimensions (which is a projection of four). Then we have five or six personality factors that bias them (certain, because they correspond to physical reward systems). And if we assume that in general, humans can distinguish at best, between five states, that should yield Pluchik’s diagram, of, at least five levels, with no less than three emotions ‘active’ at the same time. Meanwhile we can experience any combination at once, or sequence of emotions that result in a transitory, temporal, or durable state of emotional experience. That means there are no less than 64 simple emotions, at no less than five degrees of intensity, in some combination … often in many combinations, including ’emotional confusion’. Ergo the number of discernable permutations may be more than two thousand, even if we only possess names for a few hundred of them, and even if we have only four reward(punishment) systems.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-09-12 11:24:00 UTC

  • It takes a special kind of idiot to connect natural disasters to solar cycles, b

    It takes a special kind of idiot to connect natural disasters to solar cycles, but unfortunately, that special kind of idiocy is not rare. https://twitter.com/caraelysse/status/907036252012150784

  • DON’T BE STUPID. Look. Do you understand Locke/Smith/Hume? What about Kant/Marx?

    DON’T BE STUPID.

    Look. Do you understand Locke/Smith/Hume? What about Kant/Marx? Or Darwin/Menger/Spencer/Nietzche? The history of epistemology? Or Hayek/Popper/Turing? Do you understand the foundations of mathematics, logic, economics? Do you understand the limits of logic and mathematics? What about cognitive science, and experimental psychology? What about the history and logic of the common law? Do you understand comparative institutional, economic, and demographic history? If you do, do you understand one of those series? Two of them, or all of them?

    Of course you don’t. You’re a normal person. You’re probably a smart normal person. You might even be a smart well read person. But its nearly impossible to master all of those fields sufficiently to identify how to reform them so that they operate scientifically.

    But why the hell, if you don’t understand ALL of those disciplines, do you think you’re going to understand my work in Propertarianism without some serious effort over more than a year? I mean, I cover the *entire* spectrum from metaphysics to aesthetics. Everything. ALL OF IT.

    You won’t reduce my work to a single idea that you can easily understand, because the central idea is the completion of the scientific method using testimonial truth – which itself is something you can spend a couple of years thinking about all on its own.

    Learning propertarianism is pretty similar to learning law. It requires at least the same intellectual capacity, and at least the same amount of work *UNLESS* you have already been very lucky in life or born with precisely the right combination of personality traits.

    And it turns out that some people are smart enough or lucky enough that they can both identify patterns of problems it solves, and learn it more quickly because they’ve had the experience or the raw intellectual talent. But those people are few and far between.

    So don’t be a dork. Learn what you can. Learn what you can use. If this was easy someone would have been done by now. It’s a really, really hard problem and some of the greatest minds of the last century didn’t solve it. And the problem has been around for at least 2500 years.

    Truth is enough. But understanding what that means might take a long time. Which is why its so important to institutionalize these ideas. Because it’s far better to learn them environmentally then have to learn to CORRECT the errors of thought and RELEARN what truth means – and relearn the entire spectrum of knowledge in new terms.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-09-01 12:15:00 UTC

  • Class 3 of 3 – The Defeat Of Jared Howe, And By Extension The Entirety Of ‘Austrian’ Economic Pseudoscience

    PART 3 – THE DEFEAT OF JARED HOWE, AND BY EXTENSION THE ENTIRETY OF ‘AUSTRIAN’ ECONOMIC PSEUDOSCIENCE. Jared Howe, I think you’re just a disingenuous at this point, and using the very method of mandated ignorance I accuse mises and rothbard of, of kant of by claiming special pleading for general rules of behavior. You see, while you can identify possible truth propositions with justificationary reasoning, you cannot prevent false propositions with justificationary reasoning – that requires competition. Or what we call ’empiricism’: the competition between the ideal and the real. —“You’re still contradicting yourself by rejecting the validity of a priorism via a priori truth statements”— But what did I say actually? I said apriorism in economics is demonstrably insufficient for the identification of *all* economic phenomenon (including both general rules, variations from those general rules.) I said economics was indifferent from the others sciences in that it required survival from a competition between the analytic(thought), logical(words), existential(actions). And that all economic phenomenon have proven to be resistant to deduction even if they are not resistant to operational (praxeologica) explanation through sympathetic reconstruction of a series of actions taken in response to available incentives. I claimed that empirically, unavoidably, we have observed, that all truth claims about reality are contingent, including in economics. That even the a prior of ‘length’, ‘space’ and ‘time’ were false. For example, “all other things being equal, increasing the minimum wage will increase unemployment” is not true in general, and is not true in all cases. In other words, it is a synthetic, contingent, a priori proposition. Which is a pseudoscientific posturing – a way of saying ‘a general rule’. I am not claiming that spectrum of categories which kant referred to as a priori, are false so much as that they reflect dimensions of reality, that the scientific method is superior in describing and testing. A Priori: “independent of observation.” There are three dimensions to claims of a priori truth claim: i) Aprioricity vs A posteriori, ii) Analyticity vs Syntheticity, and iii) Necessity vs Contingency Therefore we can produce at least the following spectrum of a priori claims. (a) Analytic A Priori: tautological: 2+2=4 and all deductions thereof. (c) Necessary Synthetic A Priori: Childless women will have no grandchildren. (b) “General” Synthetic A Priori : Increasing money increases inflation. (d) Contingent Synthetic A Priori: “all other things being equal, as a general trend, increasing demand will increase supply, although we cannot know the composition of that supply in advance, we can identify it from recorded evidence.” This produces a an ordered spectrum of declining precision: (a) Identity(categorical consistency) – Analytic A Priori (b) Logical:(internal consistency) – Nec. Synthetic a priori (c) Empirical: (external consistency) – Gen. Synth. a priori (d) Existential: (operational consistency) – Cont. Synth. a priori Both Mises and Rothbard confess to this later in life. Sorry. It is what it is. They realized they had failed. Economics is like any other science “a mix of the empirical and operational”. And the praxeological movement and all that was related to it crumbled as nothing more than a pseudoscientific resistance movement against the continuing progress of science. Competition between the rational and the real. Markets in knowledge just like markets in everything else. There is no justificationary reasoning available to man for real world phenomenon. WELCOME TO THE REAL. You are currently in the heavy-resistance phase, as the entire cosmopolitan program comes crashing down, including the marxist-postmodern, libertine-libertarian, and neo-conservative, as well as the social democratic and classical liberal. That is because all the enlightenment views of man and all the enlightenment counter-reactions against the progress of the scientific method (criticism) by various methods of justification(justificationism) have been demonstrated to be false. Man was not oppressed by aristocracy. He was a beast that a small minority of gifted martial aristocrats domesticated from animal, to slave, to serf, to freeman, to citizen resulting in the diminution of the lower and increase in the middle and upper middle classes through reproductive suppression, war, starvation, and aggressive hanging. Man is a rational actor for whom cooperation is possible and generally superior choice. But at all times he chooses moral or immoral action by little more than either habit or accounting of consequences. And as such we invented the natural common law of reciprocity since no matter how complex our social orders, all conflicts over demonstrated investments are decidable by tests of reciprocity. There is but one epistemological method and that is the the market for competition for consistency between the dimensions, and the market for competition for consistent application in reality. And because of that competition, both truth and lie can survive. If only because it is cheaper to produce deception than truth. Cheers.

  • Class 3 of 3 – The Defeat Of Jared Howe, And By Extension The Entirety Of ‘Austrian’ Economic Pseudoscience

    PART 3 – THE DEFEAT OF JARED HOWE, AND BY EXTENSION THE ENTIRETY OF ‘AUSTRIAN’ ECONOMIC PSEUDOSCIENCE. Jared Howe, I think you’re just a disingenuous at this point, and using the very method of mandated ignorance I accuse mises and rothbard of, of kant of by claiming special pleading for general rules of behavior. You see, while you can identify possible truth propositions with justificationary reasoning, you cannot prevent false propositions with justificationary reasoning – that requires competition. Or what we call ’empiricism’: the competition between the ideal and the real. —“You’re still contradicting yourself by rejecting the validity of a priorism via a priori truth statements”— But what did I say actually? I said apriorism in economics is demonstrably insufficient for the identification of *all* economic phenomenon (including both general rules, variations from those general rules.) I said economics was indifferent from the others sciences in that it required survival from a competition between the analytic(thought), logical(words), existential(actions). And that all economic phenomenon have proven to be resistant to deduction even if they are not resistant to operational (praxeologica) explanation through sympathetic reconstruction of a series of actions taken in response to available incentives. I claimed that empirically, unavoidably, we have observed, that all truth claims about reality are contingent, including in economics. That even the a prior of ‘length’, ‘space’ and ‘time’ were false. For example, “all other things being equal, increasing the minimum wage will increase unemployment” is not true in general, and is not true in all cases. In other words, it is a synthetic, contingent, a priori proposition. Which is a pseudoscientific posturing – a way of saying ‘a general rule’. I am not claiming that spectrum of categories which kant referred to as a priori, are false so much as that they reflect dimensions of reality, that the scientific method is superior in describing and testing. A Priori: “independent of observation.” There are three dimensions to claims of a priori truth claim: i) Aprioricity vs A posteriori, ii) Analyticity vs Syntheticity, and iii) Necessity vs Contingency Therefore we can produce at least the following spectrum of a priori claims. (a) Analytic A Priori: tautological: 2+2=4 and all deductions thereof. (c) Necessary Synthetic A Priori: Childless women will have no grandchildren. (b) “General” Synthetic A Priori : Increasing money increases inflation. (d) Contingent Synthetic A Priori: “all other things being equal, as a general trend, increasing demand will increase supply, although we cannot know the composition of that supply in advance, we can identify it from recorded evidence.” This produces a an ordered spectrum of declining precision: (a) Identity(categorical consistency) – Analytic A Priori (b) Logical:(internal consistency) – Nec. Synthetic a priori (c) Empirical: (external consistency) – Gen. Synth. a priori (d) Existential: (operational consistency) – Cont. Synth. a priori Both Mises and Rothbard confess to this later in life. Sorry. It is what it is. They realized they had failed. Economics is like any other science “a mix of the empirical and operational”. And the praxeological movement and all that was related to it crumbled as nothing more than a pseudoscientific resistance movement against the continuing progress of science. Competition between the rational and the real. Markets in knowledge just like markets in everything else. There is no justificationary reasoning available to man for real world phenomenon. WELCOME TO THE REAL. You are currently in the heavy-resistance phase, as the entire cosmopolitan program comes crashing down, including the marxist-postmodern, libertine-libertarian, and neo-conservative, as well as the social democratic and classical liberal. That is because all the enlightenment views of man and all the enlightenment counter-reactions against the progress of the scientific method (criticism) by various methods of justification(justificationism) have been demonstrated to be false. Man was not oppressed by aristocracy. He was a beast that a small minority of gifted martial aristocrats domesticated from animal, to slave, to serf, to freeman, to citizen resulting in the diminution of the lower and increase in the middle and upper middle classes through reproductive suppression, war, starvation, and aggressive hanging. Man is a rational actor for whom cooperation is possible and generally superior choice. But at all times he chooses moral or immoral action by little more than either habit or accounting of consequences. And as such we invented the natural common law of reciprocity since no matter how complex our social orders, all conflicts over demonstrated investments are decidable by tests of reciprocity. There is but one epistemological method and that is the the market for competition for consistency between the dimensions, and the market for competition for consistent application in reality. And because of that competition, both truth and lie can survive. If only because it is cheaper to produce deception than truth. Cheers.

  • We’re conservatives Donald. We aren’t progressives. We never forgive failure. Yo

    We’re conservatives Donald. We aren’t progressives. We never forgive failure. You’re just a doorstop now.

    #Trump @realDonaldTrump @POTUS

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-19 16:41:00 UTC

  • You’re done Trump. Base Gone. You are Alone. You should have doubled-down on the

    You’re done Trump. Base Gone. You are Alone. You should have doubled-down on the base, and used us. But no.

    #Trump @realDonaldTrump @POTUS

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-19 16:40:00 UTC