Curt Doolittle

Form: Critique

  • Operationalism is a Means of Falsification

     [A] criticism from Bruce, on my failure to make clear that Operationalism is a means of conducting a test of falsification.

    –“This monotheistic passion for reduction to operations seems to lead to cul-de-sacs.”— Bruce Caithness

    Bruce,

    1) Operationalism is an attempt at falsification. Just as in math, if we can construct a statement through operations then it is existentially possible. Just as in economics, if we can reduce an economic statement to a sequence of rationally executable decisions. Just as in science, if we can reduce a test to a repeatable sequence of operations, and if we can reduce our measures to those that are possible then the test is existentially possible, assuming determinism in the universe and therefore the constancy of that which we measure (without which no science ,and no theory, can be possible).

    If I conduct tests of identity, internal consistency, external correspondence, repeatability, full accounting, parsimony (limits), existential possibility, objective morality (voluntary transfer), then I have laundered imaginary content from my statements. This is what science consists in: identifying existential information and eliminating imaginary information.

    If I have performed the due diligence to launder by speech of imaginary information, then I speak as truthfully as is possible. I may indeed speak the most parsimonious testimony possible (the truth) or I may not – a matter of error at one end of the possibilities, or of imprecision at the other end.

    I can warranty that I have performed that due diligence by stating that I speak truthfully: I give testimony in public, as to the truthfulness of my speech.

     

    2) One can speak truthfully, and warranty that one speaks truthfully. If one speaks in e-prime (specifying means of existence), and in operational definitions (rather than experiences), it is extremely difficult to articulate an idea that still contains imaginary content.

     

    3) Rather than “leading to cul-de-sac’s” I suspect that this is the completion (or repair) of the critical rationalist research program and the most important invention in philosophy since the failure of that program.

    Just is what it is. I just did a good yeoman’s labor. But between explanatory power, and parsimony it’s a pretty powerful theoretical structure, and it’s pretty hard to defeat it.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • POPPER IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR GOD – HE FAILED TOO (from elsewhere) (good piece) B

    POPPER IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR GOD – HE FAILED TOO

    (from elsewhere) (good piece)

    Bruce. (All)

    You’re a good guy. A moral man. But you do realize that Popper failed to complete his program – even the falsificationary program – and most of what he says is pseudoscience with moral loading?

    If you cannot describe something as a series of actions, then you are engaging in pseudoscientific double speak – an error of aggregation not dissimilar from the averaging of averages. Popper’s double-speak is not as artful or complete as Marx’s pseudoscientific double speak (dialectic), but it is equally untruthful: claiming parsimony that it does not contain.

    We may indeed face a kaleidic future but that’s immaterial. We divide our perception, cognition, knowledge and labor, and constantly try to outwit the course of events in a deterministic non-sentient universe, for our benefits: consumption. That future needn’t be known by anyone, and cannot be. It is not the individual perception of the future that matters, but the collective outwitting of the course of events, so that we can seize the difference and call it ‘production’.

    It’s true that justificationism is dead. But Critical Rationalism was incomplete. Critical Preference is a logical, not empirical statement. In fact, it appears at least, that we can choose which avenue to pursue by that which requires the lowest cost. This is identical to the means nature uses. So the least cost route appears to be the most efficient route we can ever know. So it appears that critical preference is a moral argument – a bit of advice – rather than logical or empirical argument.

    I am fairly certain at this point that you are somehow desperately trying to find a source of supernatural wisdom to replace the supernatural wisdom of scripture. But it’s not to be found in Popper. Popper and his entire generation of thinkers failed to solve the problem of the social sciences. All of them. Because they were logically attached to enlightenment egalitarian, equalitarian, universalism: an advocacy of monopoly if there ever was one.

    We can never stop problem-solving. Never cease innovation. Never cease competition. We can never ‘relax’ and fall upon past wisdom. Because submission is not available to man. We are the only gods we know of in this universe. Those we imagine are merely those we aspire to be. And by that aspiration we achieve.

    If there is any devil, any fallen god, any fallen angel, it is the one who whispers that there is but one god. If there is one evil scripture it is equality. If but one sin it is submission. We divide our perception, cognition, knowledge, advocacy and labor, and by exchange we collectively compute that which is necessary to persist.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-29 05:49:00 UTC

  • Art is Criticizable. And Like Morality, It’s Objectively Better or Worse

    (worth repeating) [A]s for art theory it’s pretty simple stuff. You can read every significant tome on it in a month. (I am honestly not sure that Rand’s book isn’t one of the best really, in retrospect. And I don’t think much of rand as other than the children’s book version of philosophy for newbs.) All art can be criticized on these three criteria – Craftsmanship (skill in use of materials) – Design (aesthetics – skill in associative pre-cognitive patterns) – Content (meaning – skill in associative cognitive patterns) And, in all three dimensions by these criteria: – Novelty is better (innovation) – Parsimony is better (clarity) – More information is better (richness or density) – Monumental (level of public/social/political value) – Durable is better (the persistence of the work as a reference is better) – Unique is better (the symbol that captures an excellence of a time and place) We tend to see these criteria as as ‘excellence’. Using the three axis, and six criteria, all: – Craft– Design – Art Can be compared and contrasted if not quantitatively(cardinally) at least qualitatively(ordinary). You would think not, but opinion in art coalesces just as do theories in science. While one might have one taste or another, it is very hard to study the whole of art history and not come to about the same conclusion as have all the others: These works are clearly better and these works are clearly not as good. But I PREFER these over the objectively better ones as they suit my taste. (( I didn’t expect to love Medieval art, but I do.  I did come to appreciate through economics the struggles of post-photography artists, and I can also appreciate the minimalists, even if I still despise the pop and marxists. )) If you try it, sort of by stack ranking any set of art pieces by the criteria above it will rapidly become clear to you that art criticism and scientific criticism are extremely similar endeavors. This [messes] with the mind of sentimental people who desperately want an internal intuitionistic truth to appeal to – but it’s sad for them. I’m sorry. Carful criticism still defeats your ‘intuition’. Art is just as open to criticism as any other work of man. There is just a lot of marginal indifference within each strata of work. It’s very obvious after a while that the communists and socialists and feminists and postmodernists attacked art just as they attacked truth. ‘Cause they desperately wanna lie.

  • Art is Criticizable. And Like Morality, It’s Objectively Better or Worse

    (worth repeating) [A]s for art theory it’s pretty simple stuff. You can read every significant tome on it in a month. (I am honestly not sure that Rand’s book isn’t one of the best really, in retrospect. And I don’t think much of rand as other than the children’s book version of philosophy for newbs.) All art can be criticized on these three criteria – Craftsmanship (skill in use of materials) – Design (aesthetics – skill in associative pre-cognitive patterns) – Content (meaning – skill in associative cognitive patterns) And, in all three dimensions by these criteria: – Novelty is better (innovation) – Parsimony is better (clarity) – More information is better (richness or density) – Monumental (level of public/social/political value) – Durable is better (the persistence of the work as a reference is better) – Unique is better (the symbol that captures an excellence of a time and place) We tend to see these criteria as as ‘excellence’. Using the three axis, and six criteria, all: – Craft– Design – Art Can be compared and contrasted if not quantitatively(cardinally) at least qualitatively(ordinary). You would think not, but opinion in art coalesces just as do theories in science. While one might have one taste or another, it is very hard to study the whole of art history and not come to about the same conclusion as have all the others: These works are clearly better and these works are clearly not as good. But I PREFER these over the objectively better ones as they suit my taste. (( I didn’t expect to love Medieval art, but I do.  I did come to appreciate through economics the struggles of post-photography artists, and I can also appreciate the minimalists, even if I still despise the pop and marxists. )) If you try it, sort of by stack ranking any set of art pieces by the criteria above it will rapidly become clear to you that art criticism and scientific criticism are extremely similar endeavors. This [messes] with the mind of sentimental people who desperately want an internal intuitionistic truth to appeal to – but it’s sad for them. I’m sorry. Carful criticism still defeats your ‘intuition’. Art is just as open to criticism as any other work of man. There is just a lot of marginal indifference within each strata of work. It’s very obvious after a while that the communists and socialists and feminists and postmodernists attacked art just as they attacked truth. ‘Cause they desperately wanna lie.

  • ANARCHIC WELL INTENTIONED FOOLS (worth repeating) (from elsewhere) It is a typic

    ANARCHIC WELL INTENTIONED FOOLS

    (worth repeating) (from elsewhere)

    It is a typical tactic of the marxists, and the rothbardians adopted marxist methods of critique, to throw criticism of one’s opponents as a means of distraction from the failure or incompetence or lack of one’s ideas.

    A great example of this technique is Lew Rockwell’s most recent book, which purports to offer solutions, but like most anarchic drivel, consists of nothing more than repeating rants against the state, leaving you waiting for the punch line (solution) that never comes.

    That’s because there isn’t one.

    The only way to eliminate the state (monopoly bureaucracy) is to eliminate demand for the state. And that is non-trivial. It is possible. But it’s non trivial/. And rothbardian low trust ghetto ethics (“aggression against intersubjectively verifiable property”) would increase demand for the state. How do we know? Because low trust ethics are practiced all over the world, and the lower the trust the higher the demand for authoritarian state. (See Russia and every single Arab country.)

    Rothbard is like Marx, Freud, and Cantor and unfortunately Mises: well-intentioned fool using extraordinary verbal productivity and ability to create pseudoscience as means of justifying priors.

    (giving them benefit of the doubt)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-25 15:46:00 UTC

  • WHY ARE MOST DESIGNERS ‘SH_T’? (rant on) They have no formal training in design,

    WHY ARE MOST DESIGNERS ‘SH_T’?

    (rant on)

    They have no formal training in design, in aesthetics, in composition, in the fine arts, in art history and very little intuitive talent.

    They have no understanding of type, it’s history or symbolism. They think in boxes instead of white spaces. They think of getting information instead of only the necessary information. They think color matters rather than color suggests time and space “moments”.

    If you cannot design it with white space and type, then you should go home. So design it with white space and type, and without any boxes at all. Ok? Remember “wax on, wax off”? Well, do the same: white space and type (wax on), new page (wax off), until you get it right.

    To do that, (a) you start with a message, (b) you build a type pallette after researching the associations the audience will make with that type, and (b) you draw it freehand with pencil and paper, or at least Illustrator and a stylus.

    After that, you add images and after that, color.

    And then let the marketing people write all their absolutely sh_t copy, and then get it to a good writer or editor that can reduce it to no more than eight words. And hopefully not more than three. And test the sh_t copy from marketing and the edited copy on someone other than the marketer – preferably a customer. Watch how they read it, and then just ask them how they feel. Don’t ask for an opinion. How they feel is all that matters. Your client is an idiot. That’s their job: to be smart in their profession and an idiot in yours. (So try not to ALSO be an idiot.)

    For most of you untalented ‘creatives’ (which is the opposite of what you really are), research the entire brand space. Put it in a hierarchy (order).

    Build a pallet of fonts, symbols, colours and layouts.

    And try to be craftsmanly. Try not to be ‘creative’, because in your case that means relying on your intuition. And really, it sucks. Becuase unless you have mastered your craft, your intuition is a hodge-podge of lower middle class and upper proletarian propaganda.

    Great advertising is the truth spoken elegantly and succinctly.

    Good artists copy great artists. Great artist steal.

    Pre-schoolers and amateurs rely on ‘inspiration’.

    Try not to suck. You just make the world uglier than if we only let the good people publish work, and sent you back to washing dishes in the scullery.

    Sigh.

    (rant off)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-19 06:04:00 UTC

  • QUIGGIN IS AT IT AGAIN. Some small percent of any thinker’s ideas survive the te

    http://johnquiggin.com/2015/06/15/john-locke-an-enemy-of-freedom/LEFTIST QUIGGIN IS AT IT AGAIN.

    Some small percent of any thinker’s ideas survive the test of time. We acknowledge these thinkers for their surviving ideas – the duration of an idea as a capital asset. Those ideas that do not survive the test of time are irrelevant.

    The only reason to argue that an individual is or is not morally something or other, is if one is attributing authority to the individual, rather than to the asset value of his surviving ideas.

    In other words, John’s post is an authoritarian and unscientific argument against an authoritarian and unscientific hypothesis.

    Aristotle was wrong about almost everything. But that does not diminish that of the thinkers in the age of transformation, that he was not more ‘right’ and therefore more influential than all other thinkers combined.

    He gave us a way of thinking. Locke gave us a way of thinking.

    (BTW: The Catholics were just as damaging to the Rule of Law as Locke and his contemporaries supposed. They were certainly catastrophically damaging to the American constitution and American rule of law. And that’s before we get to Socialism and Judaism. Australia, like Canada, is one of the most privileged nations on earth, and Australians are notorious for confusing and conflating virtue with luxury and signaling.)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-15 05:54:00 UTC

  • Answering Charles Murray on Legalizing Blackmail

    RE: http://www.aei.org/publication/charles-murray-asks-why-should-blackmail-be-a-crime-walter-block-makes-the-case-for-legalizing-blackmail/ [W]alter Block starts with the rhetorical position that property is a natural right rather than the result of a necessary contractual exchange of rights, agreed to in order to construct property rights that are adjudicable, in order to prevent retaliation for impositions of costs upon one another, by providing a means of restitution and punishment by the community rather than retaliation by the individual. His position is illogical. The first question of ethics is not one in which we assume the value of cooperation, but one in which we assume the value of predation. So cooperation must be preferable to predation. And it is only preferable if it is productive.

    Cooperation must be rational or it is irrational (obviously). For cooperation to be rational, it must be: – Mutually Productive, – Fully informed, – Warrantied to be fully informed, – Consisting of Voluntary Exchange or Transfer, – Free of negative externality (of the same criteria). If these are all true then there is no need for retaliation. Walter Block, like his mentor Rothbard, is attempting to restate Maimonides’ dualist ethics as if they are a universal good. Instead of a utilitarian tactic for a minority living at the behest of a tyrant attempting to minimize his costs of policing. But, the first logically necessary question of ethics is ‘Why don’t I kill you and take your stuff?’ Block’s position on blackmail is one in which it is preferable to kill the blackmailer and take his stuff rather than to cooperate with him. So, it’s not complicated. Dualist (and poly-logical) ethics cannot by logical necessity be advocated as a universal ethic – it’s a logical contradiction. Natural rights are used as a nonsensical justification for various spurious ends. We do not presume rights, nor are they ‘existent’ prior to contract. They are merely the necessary terms for rational political contract. Cosmopolitan ethics attempt to preserve ingroup parasitism on outgroup members, while at the same time prohibiting the formation of family organizations that suppress parasitism. Rothbardian anarchism (libertinism), is an expression of group evolutionary strategy that ‘games’ (circumvents) the defenses of western aristocratic, truth telling civilization. So, instead, the first rule of ethics is that one should not engage in parasitism. Blackmail is unproductive and parasitic, and therefore a violation of the agreement for non-imposition of costs that serves as the only rational incentive to cooperate. (Although this level of argument is probably a bit deep for even the interested and informed.) Cheers

  • Answering Charles Murray on Legalizing Blackmail

    RE: http://www.aei.org/publication/charles-murray-asks-why-should-blackmail-be-a-crime-walter-block-makes-the-case-for-legalizing-blackmail/ [W]alter Block starts with the rhetorical position that property is a natural right rather than the result of a necessary contractual exchange of rights, agreed to in order to construct property rights that are adjudicable, in order to prevent retaliation for impositions of costs upon one another, by providing a means of restitution and punishment by the community rather than retaliation by the individual. His position is illogical. The first question of ethics is not one in which we assume the value of cooperation, but one in which we assume the value of predation. So cooperation must be preferable to predation. And it is only preferable if it is productive.

    Cooperation must be rational or it is irrational (obviously). For cooperation to be rational, it must be: – Mutually Productive, – Fully informed, – Warrantied to be fully informed, – Consisting of Voluntary Exchange or Transfer, – Free of negative externality (of the same criteria). If these are all true then there is no need for retaliation. Walter Block, like his mentor Rothbard, is attempting to restate Maimonides’ dualist ethics as if they are a universal good. Instead of a utilitarian tactic for a minority living at the behest of a tyrant attempting to minimize his costs of policing. But, the first logically necessary question of ethics is ‘Why don’t I kill you and take your stuff?’ Block’s position on blackmail is one in which it is preferable to kill the blackmailer and take his stuff rather than to cooperate with him. So, it’s not complicated. Dualist (and poly-logical) ethics cannot by logical necessity be advocated as a universal ethic – it’s a logical contradiction. Natural rights are used as a nonsensical justification for various spurious ends. We do not presume rights, nor are they ‘existent’ prior to contract. They are merely the necessary terms for rational political contract. Cosmopolitan ethics attempt to preserve ingroup parasitism on outgroup members, while at the same time prohibiting the formation of family organizations that suppress parasitism. Rothbardian anarchism (libertinism), is an expression of group evolutionary strategy that ‘games’ (circumvents) the defenses of western aristocratic, truth telling civilization. So, instead, the first rule of ethics is that one should not engage in parasitism. Blackmail is unproductive and parasitic, and therefore a violation of the agreement for non-imposition of costs that serves as the only rational incentive to cooperate. (Although this level of argument is probably a bit deep for even the interested and informed.) Cheers

  • Defending Murray : Even Scott Sumner is the Victim of Selective Temporal ‘Mathiness’.

    RE: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/06/charles_murray_5.html [S]cott, Murray, like most conservatives, is studying, and conveying observations about our change in NORMATIVE capital, not income or consumption. Deviation from northern european traditional norms is a luxury good ( the absolute nuclear family, delayed marriage, delayed reproduction, high investment parenting, the manorial/protestant work ethic, hight trust from homogeneity, truth-telling/testimony ). RELATING YOUR POST TO ROMER’S ‘MATHINESS’ (a)While you haven’t read the book, the fact that you, who are one of our very best (IMHO), immediately assume the mainstream bias that income (an easily visible measure) is somehow meaningful rather than merely a justification of priors – and it provides a more valuable insight into the ‘mathiness’ of mainstream economics, than murray’s book does about the destruction of the family as the central unit of inter-temporal reproduction and temporal production that was in no small part, caused by that mainstream bias and ‘mathiness’. (b) No economic hypothesis can be ‘true’ in the sense that it is descriptively complete, and therefore free of error, bias, and deception, if we fail to account for the full spectrum of costs in the full spectrum of time frames. That is after all, the only measure of costs: opportunity costs. So solving for income or consumption demonstrates a selection bias, under the assumption that all negative externalities are less ‘bad’ than the ‘good’ produced by observable increases in income and consumption. In other words, if we stack all possible forms of capital by the length of the production cycle and it’s corresponding consumption or decay, then what is the net change? The conservative mind is biased to the long term, to saving, to risk, and to disgust. It is a reproductive strategy – a very masculine one perhaps – and the absolute nuclear family is central to it. And it was a very expensive reproductive strategy to develop – which is why was unique. He does not make the leap (not being an economist) to the extremely damaging suggestion that we move people to capital (a heavy industrial era bias) and it’s destruction of the family and its impact upon norms, instead of moving capital to people (a post-heaving-industrial economy) in order to preserve and expand normative capital. America’s dirty secret is that pervasive consumption is an insufficient reward for loneliness and isolation. Americans are heavily drug dependent for the sole reason that they are the most lonely and isolated peoples on earth, for whom the media is a poor substitute for friends and family. The absolute nuclear family is necessary, perhaps, but it can only persist within a civic society. The civic society is a product of the absolute nuclear family. It cannot exist otherwise. So what is the cost of the destruction of the family in pursuit of income and consumption? What will be the cost of 40% of american women on anti-depressants? Mathiness is most visible in the selection bias demonstrated by measuring temporally differential income rather than inter-temporarily differential consumption. But that is not the most important effect of quantitative pseudoscience: it is the destruction of long term capital in favor of short term consumption and the placement of faith in technology to rescue us from the consequences of it. So, it is not so trivial a question as you suppose. It’s an illustration of everything that is wrong with modern macro’s mathniess. It’s not the use of math. It’s measuring in favor of bias. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine