Eli Harman Methodological individualism: individuals form groups.
Curt Doolittle Individuals cooperate in groups because cooperation is the most scarce and most valuable resource, so disproportionately rewarding that we spent millennia trying to find anything even close to it – and without it we can rarely survive.
https://egtheory.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/how-ethnocentrics-rule/THE ERROR OF ANGLO UNIVERSALISM – CONVERSATION WITH NICHOLAS CARDACI ON EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES
NICK
Were you aware of this series of experiments that were carried out on evolutionary strategies competing with one another? I found them very useful:
https://egtheory.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/how-ethnocentrics-rule/
CURT
Yes. Axelrod and followers have been working on this model for many years. I include him in my reading list.
This particular set of studies is interesting in that it addresses the value of ethnocentrism.
While economic utility CAN be expressed as reproduction, it is not always the case as Sweden shows today.
But I should probably comment on the study so that I draw the connection with propertarianism.
NICK
Were you surprised that the mechanism of ethnocentric ascension was straight up robbery of humanitarians, rather than limitation of free riding?
I think there’s definitely both going on, but the weakness of the mediation (?) hypothesis surprised me.
CURT
No, it’s obvious. One of the values of modeling that Axelrod (and other life-models) brought to the debate (with the aid of computer science) was equilibrial modeling rather than linear projection.
It’s great stuff. I think I read him first … I dunno. It seems like the 80’s or maybe early 90’s. My wife and I were travelling in the UK at the time and I read it in the wee hours of the morning.
It was one of the most influential pieces that I read.
Actually, maybe i’ll write a post about the relationship between axelrod in cooperation and mandelbrot in stock markets, and taleb in risk, and equilibrium in prices. These behaviors are all the same: before we had data and computers we could not conduct these measurements and we could not see them.
This means that unless one can describe an idea as a supply and demand curve, that one is engaging in idealism.
NICK
I’ve been pondering this topic recently, mulling over the conflict between the moral universalism and ethnocentrism.
One thing that’s readily obvious to me, especially being around alot of southern europeans, is that this ethnocentrism though isn’t always great. As it seems to me that it’s always accompanied with high family nepotism. Italy, is extremely regionalist and nepotistic within the family, and seriously limits how big their commons can be I think. The country is way too big as it is, with that level of heterogeneity.
Some of it seems to be the greater levels of inbreeding that’s gone on historically.
The bolded text in this post by hbd chick pretty much nails the kinship/family nepotism that goes on down there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Reaction/comments/3gckby/the_reality_of_deep_southern_euro_inbreeding_is/
Even in the anglo countries, I still see it going on, with italians from the same region letting eachother off parking fines
It makes them more impervious to outside infiltration, but they can never reach the same commons as their northern neighbors.
CURT
Nepotism (family corporialism) is not the same as corruption or deceit. if one biases opportunities toward the family in maters not in the commons then that is not an imposition of costs upon others.
If one exercises corruption in the production of commons, then that is another thing altogether.
So you’d distinguish those then?
CURT
Yes. Favoring market opportunity is different from imposing costs upon the commons.
Even the innocent nepotism, seems to be harmful to an extent. Like you mentioned on the Shoah, it limits a society’s ability to put the best person in the job.
There was a good article recently outlining how in Romance Europe, family owned corporations are far more dominant than in the Anglo markets, where there’s ‘market-based management’, meritocracy essentially.
So just as anglo model works under great opportunity (and as the model shows) the family model (and aristocracy which is also a family model) defeats the anglo over time.
that’s what Axelrod’s model shows.
NICK
This is true. As they cooperate with people defecting against them. Yes. It seems to me to be both a gift and a curse. That’s cliched, but its the only way I can think do describe attitudes in southern europe.
CURT
It’s just that no principle of measurement is infinitely extensible. A rule acts as a means of measurement (decidability). There are not infinitely true rules. There are limits to every rule. (Which is a very complex bit of philosophy, but the reason why apriorism can’t be true.)
The tactics you use in one circumstance and those in another are different. It is probably short term better to use universal ethics until your competitors catch up, and then return to familial ethics in order to prevent defectors from becoming parasites.
(this is a very good discussion we should probably post for others to follow)
NICK
Yes. That’s what it seems to me. Southern europeans are capped in what they can do, but what they have is far more robust and secure than what the anglos and co have achieved.
Should we post it on the Subreddit?
CURT
Yes. It’s a pretty good conversation that we can probably use to educate others. We are touching on a set of very big ideas here that are not obvious: the limits to any evolutaionary strategy, the advantage of familialism over universalism in the long term, the conceptual problem of training people to models and demand curves instead of ideal types and linear progressions.
What we are saying is that we must increase the complexity of the basis of moral argument.
NICK
Yes, we cant simply pretend to have moral arguments among ourselves (as europeans) in isolation any longer. It’s eating away at us.
I went through my finance textbook and found the study about family ownership I mentioned.
Faccio & Lang, “The Ultimate Ownership of Western European Corporations” (1997)
A bit older than I thought
Also, there’s a study indicating their outperformance over more anglo style firms, strangely enough.
Anderson & Reeb, “Founding Family Ownership and Firm Performance from the S&P500” (2003)
Going to head off.
CURT
Cheers
Source date (UTC): 2015-08-12 07:02:00 UTC
(worth repeating)QUESTION:
—“How do we demand a return to an Aristocracy of the right people? This is a steep hill we’re climbing.”—
(worth repeating)QUESTION:
—“How do we demand a return to an Aristocracy of the right people? This is a steep hill we’re climbing.”—
Q&A: IS CHRISTIANITY DECEITFUL?
QUESTION:
“Curt, could you expand upon this? I’ve often heard you make multiple positive references to Christianity, yet still find it to be deceitful? Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding you.”
—“This is the greatest legal deception in human history third only to the forcible introduction of Christianity, and the universal deceit of scriptural monotheism.”—
ANSWER:
Have you ever been graded on a paper in English class where you get separate grades for content and form? Well, lets try to think of mythology as form(method of argument), content(the narrative or explanation), implied content (metaphysical contend), the intended consequences, and the unintended consequences produced by it.
If you were to create a school, and a body of law, the first principle of which was to unify a people by promoting the extension of kinship love to non kin, training teachers (priests) and legitimizing (crowning) rulers who held to this principle, I would say that would be a truthful religion. It would also be equal in metaphysical content to christianity, and produce similar results: it increases trust and cooperation and economic velocity.
So “love one another” is a pretty good message. Now if you had added that message(ethical philosophy) to stoicism(personal philosophy), and aristotelianism(political philosophy), I think you would have had the world’s best possible religion. But we didn’t. They didn’t. They lied instead.
My criticism of christianity is that it’s a good idea wrapped in lies. And that those lies are in no small part responsible for a thousand years of ignorance forcibly extended by the government and the church as a means of bringing submissive mysticism to europa now that the expense of governing the territory had become impossible by military, economic, and judicial means.
The bible isn’t an heroic document. It’s the story of the rise and fall of judea because of the failure of their god and their religion to convert them from immoral herders and merchants to a martial people capable of holding land and farms. If compared to the same greek works of the time it is the equivalent of comparing today’s science to islamic mysticism – even witchcraft. It’s absurd.
Christianity was a mental plague that nearly destroyed us, and we were only rescued a thousand years later by the rediscovery of our greek and therefore indo-european method of thought.
If truth is the secret of the west, and christianity is a lie, then how can it be ‘good’?
What is ‘good’ about the west was there before the church. The church amplified what was there. but that’s all. And the price of that amplification was a devolution in to mysticism and ignorance we still struggle to climb out of.
So as an institution of government as a creator of law and as an advocate of love the church was good. As a distributor and imposer of lies, it was harmful.
What might have happened if instead of closing the stoic schools and imposing christianity Justinian had done the opposite?
What if the Romanticists in the victorian era in Germany had succeeded in restoring paganism and naturalism?
What if today we could escape the lies, the lies that are created from those lies (puritanism, neo-puritanism, socialism, postmodernism, and feminism) and instead saturated our people in truth rather than lies?
What if we made lying into the commons illegal? What if we made polluting the commons with lies and untruths illegal, and punishable?
So I appreciate the law and order of the church as an institution but I curse it forever, and justinian in particular, and kant, marx, muhammed, jesus, abraham and zoroaster for the most evil lies that have ever been constructed by man. Confucius merely failed. Buddha tried to kill off mysticism and was corrupted by later generations. Aristotle persists thankfully, as the greatest philosopher in history, despite the near total loss of his works. But ALL the rest are just liars. Incompetents who could not find a solution to the problem of politics without lying. For expedience due to incompetence they lied. Lying works if there is enough of it. And religion creates enough of it.
We are the people who invented and speak the truth, and we have dragged humanity out of ignorance and poverty in both the ancient and modern worlds. We were conquered by lies in the first to third centuries using the availability of writing and travel. The same people, using the same strategy are attempting to conquer us with a new series of pseudoscientific and pseudo-rational lies using modern technology and media. The second conquest of lies has been in progress for coming up on two centuries.
A thing need not be all good or all bad unless you claim omniscience and authority. The church is no authority – It is neither all good nor all bad. Christianity is no authority – it is neither all good or all bad. The central proposition of Christianity is to love one another – to increase trust cooperation and prosperity by the expurgation of evil from the heart of man.
But if the truth cannot be stated truthfully, then it too is only partly good and partly bad. And our future is then partly good and partly bad – and we are left without fulfilling our potential.
Love is enough. Truth is enough. Non-parasitism is enough. The common law is enough. Voluntary organization of production is enough. And the voluntary construction of commons by the surviving of dissent is enough.
NO MORE LIES. TRUTH IS ENOUGH.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine (Tallinn, Estonia)
Source date (UTC): 2015-08-06 10:35:00 UTC
AND THE SOUL? IS THAT PROPERTY?
Q&A: “Curt, What do you say about soul? And its relation to property?” – Mahmoud B.
PROPERTY
Your indisputable Property is that which you act to obtain without forcing involuntary transfers upon others. Meaning: without {violence,theft, fraud, suggestion, obscurantism, omission, indirection (externality), free riding, socializing losses and privatizing commons, conspiracy, conversion, immigration, war, conquest, and genocide.}
You may act to construct your life.
You may act to construct your kin.
You may act to construct cooperative relations.
You may act to construct your reputation.
You may act to construct private property
You may act to construct common physical property.
You may act to construct normative property (by forging opportunity)
You may act to construct institutional property (by bearing costs of such things as military service, jury duty, emergency services, and ‘policing’ the preservation of life and property.)
Your soul, if you believe in such things, and act as if you believe in such things, is, like reputation, something you must constantly bear costs to maintain.
As such since you have born costs for both physical and normative constructs, and have done so morally – without the imposition of costs upon others – they are by definition your property.
EXISTENCE
Now, the manner in which your soul may or may not exist is somewhat challenging, because it can only knowingly exist as an analogy: a form of anthropomorphization of the record of one’s actions recorded in memories of people, physical marks on reality, and the long term consequences of events in the physical world.
In this sense your ‘soul’ good or ill, does persist, just as the interaction of molecule of water affects all those around it. (the theory that water has memory is a useful analogy.)
So for those who wish to preserve the traditional behavior and traditional anthropomorphism in a manner that we can say may or may not be scientific, we can suggest that primitive man intuits his soul as his thoughts and actions, just as we intuit the persistence of our genes through reproduction.
To take it farther, we can (and we will very likely never disprove this so it’s useful for religious folk), we can work with what is called quantum mysticism. That is, that your thoughts take place in physical space and time and affect the universe around you. So even your thoughts affect the universe.
The thing is, the concept of a soul (an accounting of your life) is a useful one. It seems to produce good outcomes.
You should not take this argument as terribly firm support for monotheism, but as a purely normative exercise in the economically beneficial results of providing an intuitive means of behavioral accounting in which individuals can resist cooperating with others on matters of ill intent under the correct presumption that the consequences of thought and action are kaleidic and infinite, and that one cannot be forced for any reason into immoral actions (those that impose costs upon others property.) Not all of us are above 125 in intelligence, and we require such analogies for both pedagogical purposes and for use by those who cannot grasp either rational or scientific arguments. The same is true for ethics. We need virtue (imitative), rule, and outcome based ethics, because we have young and simple, adult but not wise, and wise and experienced people in the world. We are unequal. As unequals we need unequal tools.
I hope this helps you. As far as I know this argument will survive all current criticism. Existentially, your soul does exist as a record of your actions in the universe, and primitive man could not articulate such ideas. If you want to get into reincarnation then I cna’t help you. Neither can the Dali Lama. He knows it’s a great argument because it is untestable.
As you may see, I am trying to provide a means of reformation to the main religions while at the same time undermining those parts of religion that are false, lies, or harmful. But I am not hostile to religion: myth and ritual. Personal religion is a good thing (having been near death at least three times myself).
I hope that this answered your question.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.
Source date (UTC): 2015-06-30 06:11:00 UTC
WHAT DOES PHILOSOPHY “BOIL DOWN TO”?
>>Bogdan Kolesnyk
So philosophy boils down to pragmatism?
>>Max Andronichuk
Curt Doolittle I thought this could be a topic you might get sucked into smile
>>Curt Doolittle
Thanks Max Andronichuk
Lets see if I can do this justice:
Nassim and I are working on the same problem from different directions. But out of the current generation of intellectuals we are the only two who have identified the central problem. I don’t know the proper way to frame it for everyone’s understanding, but he is trying either to determine roughly what information is necessary to justify an argument, or to state that the amount of information necessary to justify any argument is unknowable (or at least, that it is either very vast, or very expensive). I sort of see him as trying to prevent fraudulent use of innumeracy. What I would like to see (and I think what Mandelbrot was trying with his later work, is to find empirical measurements of this limit from our best empirical evidence of human decisions: economics, stock markets, and finance.
I am trying the same thing, but I have approached it differently, because I stumbled upon the failure of the Operational Revolution in a similar way to how Nassim did. I was modeling AI decisions for tanks in the 80’s as part of game design, and he was modeling decision trees for risk in the 80s. But I think what’s important about Mandelbrot’s analysis, Nassim’s analysis, and mine, is that we all were subject to Minsky’s observation: that computers teach you to think in existential operations, using a particular grammar that insulated from the errors common in philosophy that unfortunately worked their way into mathematics, and now into physics.
So our generation of thinkers understands that there is a significant problem in intellectual history that much of the 20th and now 21st century (despite Hayek’s warning) has stumbled into what Hayek called ‘mysticism’, what Poincare, Brouwer and Bridgman called pejoratively ‘philosophy’, but what most of us today would call ‘pseudoscience’ in various disciplines: philosophy, economics, social science, the physical sciences, and mathematics.
Or what I would call ‘the failure to warranty that you have sufficiently laundered error, imagination, bias, wishful thinking and deception from your theories (statements), leaving only existential information, free of projection, as truth candidates.
We can fix this problem in both philosophy and science once we grasp that practice of what we call science is nothing more than the moral discipline of laundering error, imagination, bias, wishful thinking, and deception from your statements, by various forms of testing (criticism).
If we understand then, that science, once the set of moral warranties that constitute science is complete, is identical to ethics, then philosophy and science are for all intents and purposes identical systems of thought. (I will cover why philosophy and science couldn’t merge earlier in another post at another time.)
But then we need to show how we can complete science, which consists of these criticisms:
…(a) Identity and/or ‘Naming’ (comparable, calculable)
…(b) Internal Consistency (logical)
…(c) Externally correspondent (empirical)
…(d) Parsimony (limits, or imprecisely: falsifiability)
by adding these criticisms:
…(e) Operational Descriptions (tests of existential possibility)
…(f) Full Accounting (tests against selection bias) (freedom from information loss)
…(g) Morality (tests that any statement is objectively moral);
Where:
Full Accounting refers to what economists refer to as opportunity costs: the full inter-temporal consequences – which in ethics, economics and politics is much more complex than the physical sciences.
And where:
Objective morality refers to the involuntary imposition of costs. Or stated positively, as the requirement for productive, fully informed, voluntary transfer, free of negative externality of the same criteria.
SO THE QUESTION OF WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY REDUCIBLE TO:
It is reducible to truth-telling (science), whereby we produce truth candidates that survive criticism as a means of defeating error, imaginary content, bias, wishful thinking, justification (justificationary rationalism), and deception.
Conversely: If it isn’t reducible to truth telling, then you have a serious problem on your hands. smile emoticon
(That should melt your brains for a few months.)
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
Kiev, Ukraine.
>>>Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I am working on bias-variance where we see that it is OK to miss the truth if it lowers the error rate.
>>>Curt Doolittle
I will flip this from the justificationary phrasing that Nassim is using, to “It is ok to miss truth if you warranty that you have performed due diligence against negative externalities.” This is “SKIN IN THE GAME”.
>>>Curt Doolittle
“SKIN IN THE GAME”
An individual performs a demonstrated preference for a theory prior to action, where as an observation functions as a demonstrated preference post-action.
In other words, there is no test of an individuals hypothesis, even to himself, without demonstrated preference. Statements are meaningless. The only way we know if someone has made a statement that has passed his own cognitive biases is if he demonstrates a preference by placing skin in the game.
Source date (UTC): 2015-06-24 10:08:00 UTC
CURT—“Why can’t we demand that people warranty the truthfulness of their statements?”—
RICHARD—“because truth is determined, if at all, by debate and testing, and what cannot be stated while untested is unlikely to receive the scrutiny needed to determine its truth or falsity.”—
[T]his is not true. TRUTHFULNESS, in all walks of life, not only in the physical sciences, is the result of performance of due diligence: criticism of our testimony. The act of laundering imagination, fantasy, bias, error and deception from our testimony. Justification is false. There are no non-trivial complete premises. We can criticize our extant understanding as thoroughly as possible, but we can never know if we are informationally complete.
Testimony is unnatural to man. Which is why westerner’s are unique in its construction as a norm: it’s prohibitively expensive.
Analytic truth (the case you use in your statement above), is impossible to know for other than tautological and trivial statements.
—”No, I was on about the truth of assumptions about the external facts.
But mere honesty is not truthfulness in any case.
My guess is that you have no clear idea even of what analytic truth means, Curt. “—-
—-David McDonagh mcdonagh_d@yahoo.co.uk
1) Honesty exists (and can only exist) as warranty that one’s testimony is free of deceit – but not free of imagination, ignorance, bias, and error.
2) Truthfulness exists (and can only exist) as warranty that one’s testimony is free of deceit, and that one has performed due diligence against imagination, bias and error.
3) Truth (Analytic Truth) exists (and can only exist) as a definition of a Truthful statement that complete.
4) Tautology exists (and can only exist) two statements that are identical in informational content for a given precision (context).
REGARDING SNARKY DAVIDISM
–”…what analytic truth means”–
What meaning people normatively derive from the term, and what meaning (content) is necessary for the term to correspond to the testimony given using it, are two different things. So, on order to put forth a substantive criticism – you would actually have to put forward a criticism. 😉
But in an effort to assist you in your journey: the word ‘is’ must refer to existence if one is not engaging in conflation; and ‘truth’ can only exist as testimony (promise). Any other use of the term ‘true’ is an analogy that we must test for internal consistency given the context of its use.
“The ball is red” = “Having observed the ball, I promise you that if you observe the ball, you will also perceive that it appears red.”
This is the only existentially possible operational definition. “The ball Is red” is an expression of verbal brevity.
OR more generally “is” = “I promise that subject to the same observations you will percieve what I testify that you will”
So:
–” I was on about the truth of assumptions about the external facts.”–
is an excellent example of how the term truth is misused.
Translates to (and can only translate to):
“I was talking about the degree of criticism I had performed in my due diligence of my premises, and therefore the scope of diligence I must perform upon my deductions from those premises”.
As far as I know I am one of the best people living and working on this subject.
Cheers.
DEFINITIONS: TRUTH, TRUTHFULNESS, AND HONESTY http://www.propertarianism.com/2015/05/29/definitions-truth/ DUE DILIGENCE
NECESSARY FOR WARRANTY OF TRUTHFULNESS http://www.propertarianism.com/…/due-diligence-necessary-f…/
CURT—“Why can’t we demand that people warranty the truthfulness of their statements?”—
RICHARD—“because truth is determined, if at all, by debate and testing, and what cannot be stated while untested is unlikely to receive the scrutiny needed to determine its truth or falsity.”—
[T]his is not true. TRUTHFULNESS, in all walks of life, not only in the physical sciences, is the result of performance of due diligence: criticism of our testimony. The act of laundering imagination, fantasy, bias, error and deception from our testimony. Justification is false. There are no non-trivial complete premises. We can criticize our extant understanding as thoroughly as possible, but we can never know if we are informationally complete.
Testimony is unnatural to man. Which is why westerner’s are unique in its construction as a norm: it’s prohibitively expensive.
Analytic truth (the case you use in your statement above), is impossible to know for other than tautological and trivial statements.
—”No, I was on about the truth of assumptions about the external facts.
But mere honesty is not truthfulness in any case.
My guess is that you have no clear idea even of what analytic truth means, Curt. “—-
—-David McDonagh mcdonagh_d@yahoo.co.uk
1) Honesty exists (and can only exist) as warranty that one’s testimony is free of deceit – but not free of imagination, ignorance, bias, and error.
2) Truthfulness exists (and can only exist) as warranty that one’s testimony is free of deceit, and that one has performed due diligence against imagination, bias and error.
3) Truth (Analytic Truth) exists (and can only exist) as a definition of a Truthful statement that complete.
4) Tautology exists (and can only exist) two statements that are identical in informational content for a given precision (context).
REGARDING SNARKY DAVIDISM
–”…what analytic truth means”–
What meaning people normatively derive from the term, and what meaning (content) is necessary for the term to correspond to the testimony given using it, are two different things. So, on order to put forth a substantive criticism – you would actually have to put forward a criticism. 😉
But in an effort to assist you in your journey: the word ‘is’ must refer to existence if one is not engaging in conflation; and ‘truth’ can only exist as testimony (promise). Any other use of the term ‘true’ is an analogy that we must test for internal consistency given the context of its use.
“The ball is red” = “Having observed the ball, I promise you that if you observe the ball, you will also perceive that it appears red.”
This is the only existentially possible operational definition. “The ball Is red” is an expression of verbal brevity.
OR more generally “is” = “I promise that subject to the same observations you will percieve what I testify that you will”
So:
–” I was on about the truth of assumptions about the external facts.”–
is an excellent example of how the term truth is misused.
Translates to (and can only translate to):
“I was talking about the degree of criticism I had performed in my due diligence of my premises, and therefore the scope of diligence I must perform upon my deductions from those premises”.
As far as I know I am one of the best people living and working on this subject.
Cheers.
DEFINITIONS: TRUTH, TRUTHFULNESS, AND HONESTY http://www.propertarianism.com/2015/05/29/definitions-truth/ DUE DILIGENCE
NECESSARY FOR WARRANTY OF TRUTHFULNESS http://www.propertarianism.com/…/due-diligence-necessary-f…/
Roman: “Curt didn’t approve it. But that doesn’t matter. We will just do what we want anyway. Like always.”
Kirill: (laughter).
Why does this always happen to me? Why? lol.
I am a hamster.
Source date (UTC): 2015-04-15 12:47:00 UTC