Form: Diary

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : ADAPTING – BECOMING UKRAINIAN 🙂 I just walked by a woma

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : ADAPTING – BECOMING UKRAINIAN 🙂

    I just walked by a woman taking out the trash in heels. Now, for most of my adult life I would have demanded she let me take it for her, completely unconsciously. But locals think helping like that is kinda weird if you offer to help them and dont know them personally. I’ve actually seen old ladies get mad ,and strike at men for trying to help them. Which is just the chivalrous thing to do.

    I don’t think women grok that paying us in status for helping them is a way for us to get status (and attention) by acts of service without getting status (and attention) for acts of violence and aggression. I mean, we are gonna do one or the other, or we going to completely check out of society and play video games.

    Controling males is a central problem of human organization. Men change the state of things. They are going to change the state of things. The only question is, what state will they change them to?

    Women create a market for attention, care, affection and sex.

    What market are women currently creating for men?

    And before you intuit the answer to that, you might want to look at the data….


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-20 08:08:00 UTC

  • Ack. Nothin’ but research all day today. Can’t seem to write a useful thing. But

    Ack. Nothin’ but research all day today. Can’t seem to write a useful thing. But it is interesting, from my drafts, that if you start writing a prioristic arguments in operational language it becomes very clear what they really mean. 🙂


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-18 12:36:00 UTC

  • Profound day today. Profound. Just profound. Sometimes you have or learn an idea

    Profound day today. Profound. Just profound. Sometimes you have or learn an idea and the entire world becomes dramatically simplified in the matter of a few moments. I love these moments. They are worth the weeks, months and years you put into them.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-17 00:39:00 UTC

  • sometimes… I just gotta think for three or four days… Always seems like I’m

    sometimes… I just gotta think for three or four days… Always seems like I’m not getting anything done. But in the end, I seem to always figure it out… sigh.

    Philosophy as a street-craftsman.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-17 00:21:00 UTC

  • I miss my guys. 🙁 (Sniffle)

    I miss my guys. 🙁 (Sniffle)


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 12:58:00 UTC

  • PROGRESS: I DID IT. (SHOCKED) It’s been an interesting week. I couldn’t write mu

    PROGRESS: I DID IT. (SHOCKED)

    It’s been an interesting week. I couldn’t write much because of all the asthma therapy, but I did read and think quite a bit, while struggling with ‘correcting’ Hoppe’s apriorism.

    But damn. I did it. I really did it. I’ll bet it takes me less than six months to get it all into digestible form with enough examples that I can communicate the concepts to at least those with scientific rather than rational frames of language.

    But, whether it takes me one month or six, if I simply state that **the problem of information absence or loss that affects the logic of physics, mathematics, and language never occurs in statements of demonstrated action – the logic of action and by consequence, the logic of cooperation***, then that is all that needs to be stated. Actions by definition and necessity correspond to reality. They are a bridge between imagination and reality. A test of correspondence. They are the only test of correspondence with reality. Human actions are, because of shared intentionality, and the biomechanical similarities between all men, universally open to subjective testing. Even if cognitive abilities differ dramatically – perhaps logarithmically – demonstrated actions do not. Since cognitive abilities can be expressed as functions consisting of a hierarchy of more simplistic operations each of which is reducible to perceptible form, then the problem of cognition is always reducible to more simplistic form, and the difference between lesser and greater minds is merely the scope of the function (network) that is testable at any given time. (This corresponds with what we know of neurological processes: aggregation)

    If we take (a) the reduction of information into perceptible form (instrumentalism), (b) subjective testing when stated as action (operations), (c) cooperation via shared intentionality and the consequential prohibition on free riding / imposed costs / involuntary transfer (ethics), then we are done.

    By ‘done’ I mean that all logical fields, categories, names, words, relations, causality, ethical action and deduction, can be united into a single consistent framework of instrumentation whose only differences are the choice of which properties we wish to inspect, and which we can and must ignore, for the purpose of testing internal consistency of statements where we are not cognitively able to construct sets without the help of such instrumentation, given the limits of our short term memory, and the composition of our intuition (thinking) as a perpetual and recursive search engine.

    COMMUNITY HELP ON ONE ISSUE OF TERMINOLOGY

    I need to ask the community to help me with the choice of terminology, or I need to at least articulate the point of view for each term, under the general category of free riding. We only free ride by the imposition of costs without contribution to production. So free riding may contribute to confusion even if its anthropologically, and in context of the problem of cooperation, the most precise term.

    THE PROBLEM OF NASH EQUILIBRIUM IN THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTY

    (I am trying to solve the problem of eliminating demand for the state, while preserving the greatest liberty, and requiring that all exchanges remain voluntary, productive, and …)

    The issue for any polity then is to control the population (distribution of abilities) such that the Nash equilibrium is actually possible and productive. This seems to be the threshold problem that primitive trust societies can’t get beyond.

    Monogamous Marriage is a Nash equilibrium problem. And Pareto efficient optimums are a Nash problems. But since we cannot test the aggregates meaningfully against any constant, all we can do is rely upon volition.

    Eh….

    ENGLISH: GETTING IT MOSTLY RIGHT

    If I were to say that the english got it mostly right. And that if we had evolved the multi-house system of private government for the provision of investments in the commons by adding a house of labor, retained the common law as inviolable by the government, allowed the church to evolve into social insurer, and NOT adopted the Napoleonic/Rothschildian credit-state and total war, then I am not sure that we would have gone very wrong. In fact, we were very close. One of the arguments that I’ve kept running across is that the agrarian and industrial revolutions happened so fast, that we could not evolve our institutions as organically as we had in the past. And that while conservative institutions are ‘scientific’ (proven by experience) they require time to evolve, and the disruption caused by the rapid economic progress overwhelmed our prior conservatism.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-11 06:46:00 UTC

  • I never feel lonely or alone in Kiev. I sometimes feel it in Seattle. I always f

    I never feel lonely or alone in Kiev. I sometimes feel it in Seattle. I always feel alone or lonely in east coast US cities. I wish I understood why…. I cant even speak the damned language. It’s something about how friendly and approachable people are.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-10 11:29:00 UTC

  • I am really trying to work. I am. But these freaking drugs, the sunshine and lon

    I am really trying to work. I am. But these freaking drugs, the sunshine and long days are making me a lazy sloth.

    Scrivener is looking at me from the laptop, intently, like a dog that wants to go outside – and i feel like a cat in the sun, unwilling to consider much more deliberate than rolling over to warm the other side…

    Thank god for alt-tab. Go away…. lol


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-09 10:33:00 UTC

  • My favorite coffee shop in Kiev. Trying to restate Jan Lester’s definition of li

    My favorite coffee shop in Kiev. Trying to restate Jan Lester’s definition of liberty in operational language. (Good exercise really).

    It’s a bit hot. About F80*. It’s a holiday so all the offices are closed. People are happy. Relaxed. And as always, beautiful. 🙂

    The crew is sending me photos of Cyprus – yesterday of them playing in the pool; today of them working. The women promise me they will make the men work. lol.

    Miss them. 🙂

    Roman is back in Lviv after playing soldier in the woods this weekend. (Roman is my hero.)

    Too long since my daughter Caitie Doolittle gave me a hug. 🙂

    Kiev feels like home.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-09 09:57:00 UTC

  • Yesterday, Yulia, Suliko, and Amanda had Roman and I over for a wonderful home c

    Yesterday, Yulia, Suliko, and Amanda had Roman and I over for a wonderful home cooked meal. It was beautiful. It’s hard to explain to Ukrainians that Americans don’t talk to their neighbors. Usually we live very far from the rest of our family. And we live in these physical as well as mental ‘boxes’ we rarely see out of. New England, or at least what’s left of it, still has a concept of family. So does the south – or what’s left of it. But that’s what I love about this country, Ukraine (and their cousins the lovable insanely crazy russians). It’s extremely genuine. I’m incredibly cognizant now of the constant status-warfare that’s the central ambition of american life. And I want nothing at all to do with it. I don’t like the countries that were fully brought into orthodoxy and dominion of the turks. Too much low trust. But you don’t see that here in Ukraine. Both the Catholics, Protestants, and the Orthodox ethics are here. and they tended to protect the value of each other somehow.

    It’s also helped me understand myself. I am really happy with a backpack, some technology, some nice clothes and a sports car. As a child I felt the same way. I used to think of it as ‘traveling light’ (freedom.) But something happened in college. I felt the need to become wealthy as a status symbol. But the truth is that, after all those serious illnesses, and selling pretty much all my ‘material burdens’, I’m a hell of a lot happier. Of course, being healthy is probably most of it. 🙂

    Because i’m free.

    I know it sounds trite. Because before I actually HAD all the things people dream of, i wanted them. But AFTER I had them all, I realized that all that matters is the people you spend time with. And that to have good friends you must supply something to the friendship. And if you need ‘things’ to get their attention, then you should probably work on your character and love instead. Because all money did for me is attract parasites and free riders that you must protect your ‘stuff’ from.

    Everyone should feel safe. And comfortable. But the data shows that after you make 60K a year, increases in wealth do not bring you happiness. Now, for me, just ’cause I’m an information junkie, it’s more expensive to feed the machine in my head. So that number appears to be about twice as high before I feel ‘comfortable’.

    And I really would just laugh at myself ten years ago. But it’s the truth. This is where I ended up. Material shit is a boatanchor. Money is freedom.

    Make money. Collect experiences. Collect friends. Collect accomplishments. And leave the ‘stuff’ to the people who only CAN collect stuff.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-09 06:57:00 UTC