Curt Doolittle

Form: Diary

  • (OK. I worked hard enough today. Only about 11 hours but now it’s time for netfl

    (OK. I worked hard enough today. Only about 11 hours but now it’s time for netflix….. lol Besides V just stuffed me with one of her great meals and my eyes are getting fuzzy.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-11 15:54:00 UTC

  • STRUGGLING This damned problem is just frustrating me. I know it’s because I don

    STRUGGLING

    This damned problem is just frustrating me. I know it’s because I don’t feel well and I’m tired. But I cannot quite get my arms around how to easily communicate all these different causal axis. I must make it easier to understand moral rules, transaction costs of immorality, and the consequential demand for state intervention. If I can do a better job of that, then it will be more obvious that the common law must correspond to morality en toto (crime, ethics and immorality), not just aggression against intersubjectively verifiable private property.

    It seems like I should be able to do it with a graph. But I must be able to make a better narrative first. If I cannot articulate it as human action I’ll have failed my own criteria for moral claims.

    Years ago I would struggle to get the most basic ideas across. Now at least I only struggle with the most complex. Decades of slow progress to improve my weakness.

    I knew I had something sitting out there to block me. I just didn’t see this one coming.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-09 18:41:00 UTC

  • For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on the simplicity of the argument

    For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on the simplicity of the argument and I think I have it pretty close to done. Now I have to think about how to introduce it. And I think I’lld approach it by formulating the right question (stating the right problem). I don’t think I’ll tie it to libertarianism directly, but take Haidt’s approach of simply addressing the issue. That makes my arguments less ‘niche’ and less associated with ‘whacky libertarians’.

    PART 1 – MORAL REALISM (ETHICS)

    I think the best thing is to state the problem, then state the whole argument.

    Then list the extensions to property, ethics and morality.

    Then show how the argument addresses the problem. Then pose a list of questions that this argument must also address to confirm it’s assertions.

    Then I rearrange my chapters such that they address those questions.

    Then I follow that with the (many) applications.

    PART 2 – POLITICAL ETHICS

    I think at this point I address moral realism from the ground up. Including the performative (Attestation) theory of truth, and work through each of the major branches of philosophy.

    Next I attack platonism, obscurantism, pseudoscience, and mysticism as immoral, and add the new extensions to political ethics.

    PART 3 – POLITICAL ECONOMY

    Work through the institutional solutions now that we’ve built a foundation.

    PART 4 – APPENDICES

    APPENDIX 2 – Reform Libertarianism.

    Address praxeology

    Address ghetto ethics

    APPENDIX 3 – Reform Conservatism

    APPENDIX 4 – Brief Attack on Democratic Ideologies one by one.

    APPENDIX X – Go through the formal logic of cooperation. This seems very difficult but since I’m just building on Ostrom’s work I don’t have to go into all the multitudinous defenses she does, I just extend that work.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-08 15:12:00 UTC

  • INFLUENCES I love bibliographies of major works. On my site I collect reading li

    INFLUENCES

    I love bibliographies of major works. On my site I collect reading lists and the biographies of the authors that I respect most.

    Today, I’m working on restructuring my chapter order to be less about libertarianism, and to accommodate the improvements in my arguments over the past year. So I am working through Hiadt’s bibliographies trying to see if there is anything that I haven’t read.

    And, you know, there really isn’t. Which scares me. lol. Although, it really makes sense because we’re very close in age, and went through our intellectual development during the same period, and information that counteracts the progressive fantasy just sort of exploded during the last thirty years. I just was later in my development because I was distracted by ‘business’ when younger and it’s really only over the past ten years that I have been able to devote such concentrated time to my work.

    When you get down to it, my major (almost exclusive) influences have been: (Poincare + Brouwer + Taleb + Popper) + Hayek + Duchesne + Stephen Hicks + Kahneman + (Hoppe + Haidt). Haidt and Hoppe the most influential.

    I made the mistake of trying to solve the problem Haidt did with computer science (artificial intelligence) because at the time I was in school, psychology was still in the postmodern catastrophe that was progressivism. It was gut classes for stupid people. But at that point in time, despite the fact taht I understood the problem was one of emotions and objects, I couldn’t solve it. Haidt did.

    But it worked out as a benefit because computer science is an operational methodology and taught me how to think without the nonsensical platonic categories that are universal to that ‘lost’ discipline we call philosophy. You can say fuzzy things in philosophy, logic and math but you cannot actually operationalize them with a computer, and a computer is just a very fast way of conducting human operations (switches).

    I did finally understand that voluntary exchange, property, inventory, substitution and acquisitiveness are the means of creating an artificial intelligence, but I have less interest in that field than I do in formal institutions of cooperation. So this is where I’m spending my time.

    Anyway, collecting these biographies has been fascinating because if you collect enough of them you see that very few works by very few authors have any material impact in social and political science.

    It’s been a 2500 year journey to try to solve the problem of cooperation. But we are getting very close to it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-08 08:24:00 UTC

  • Observations and Apologies

    (I’m slow. Painfully diligent and slow. I frustrate people around me when working on a theory. But I seem to pretty much always get there. It was a great day today. I’m confident that I will succeed in reforming or delegitimizing both misesian pseudoscience and rothbardian parasitic ethics. I can see it all working now. ……but… right now, I need some chocolate cake.)

  • Observations and Apologies

    (I’m slow. Painfully diligent and slow. I frustrate people around me when working on a theory. But I seem to pretty much always get there. It was a great day today. I’m confident that I will succeed in reforming or delegitimizing both misesian pseudoscience and rothbardian parasitic ethics. I can see it all working now. ……but… right now, I need some chocolate cake.)

  • (diary) My life is insane, really. It’s this kind of “Curt in Wonderland” experi

    (diary)

    My life is insane, really. It’s this kind of “Curt in Wonderland” experience that I can’t really take any more seriously than Alice took the Hatter.

    First, you know, Roman plays white rabbit and brings me here. I meet V the first or second day. Stumble into Kirill, who turns out to be one in a million. Go through the revolution, the invasion, and everything else, and… it’s just got this *unreal* sort of feeling to it.

    I mean, I can sit in a restaurant or coffee shop in the states and write for days and, sure in the Seattle area someone is bound to say hi. I know to many people not to run into people to chat with. (And, most people know that Seattle is a pretty anti-social culture).

    But even as a rather world weary business traveller I’ve been pretty much all over. And even though I’m hyper-friendly (like most aspies) and really I don’t get much chit chat unless I work at it. (And most americans are so self-absorbed that they aren’t worth chatting with, honestly.)

    But I mean, wtf. I can’t sit in a coffee shop in Kiev, or go out to dinner without some woman starting some conversation with me. And you can start a conversation with most men here if they have any english at all.

    It’s just…. weird to have women in their twenties to forties just aggressively pursue you. I mean, I have this self image of a nerd. I’m pretty good looking and I dress well, but I”m a nerd – unquestionably. I read an write all day.

    It’s just like… I’ve been down the rabbit hole for a year and a half and I wonder when the blue pill is going to wear off….

    Thanks for letting me share. You know, I just had to because otherwise I’d have to start sticking myself with pins to make sure I’m not in the matrix or something…..

    Life is awesome. I don’t recommend multiple seriously illnesses, but they sure as hell make you appreciate the world for what it is.

    I love Ukrainians. Every crazy beautiful, gentle, lovable one of them.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-03 11:13:00 UTC

  • ( Dear god. Thank you for helping me get through this winter, which was one of t

    ( Dear god. Thank you for helping me get through this winter, which was one of the worst experiences of my life. It’s bad enough that my own government became a life threatening enemy, and tried to ruin me out of bureaucratic laziness and incompetence. It’s worse that in our civilization being a white protestant male is a crime, wealth is to be punished. And worst of all, that as a father you are essentially of the same legal status as a felon. Follow that up with revolution and threat of invasion while trying to launch a new company. And it was just not a good time to be alive. So thank you for getting me through it. )

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-02 08:43:00 UTC

  • (personal) That Flu did a number on my winter weight and now I won’t have to wor

    (personal)

    That Flu did a number on my winter weight and now I won’t have to work very hard to lose a bit for summer season. Shaved my beard yesterday because the grey has really taken over.

    Funny. Without the beard, I used to get mistaken for Paul Allen around Redmond now and then. Which always amused me, since Paul is about four inches taller than I am. We have similarly shaped faces, similar body language, and the same taste in eyeglasses. Same gene pool.

    But, damn Paul. I’m aging waaaaaay better than you are man. WTF? Is it Hodgkins? Cigarettes? What?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-31 04:23:00 UTC

  • (I’m slow. Painfully diligent and slow. I frustrate people around me when workin

    (I’m slow. Painfully diligent and slow. I frustrate people around me when working on a theory. But I seem to pretty much always get there. It was a great day today. I’m confident that I will succeed in reforming or delegitimizing both misesian pseudoscience and rothbardian parasitic ethics. I can see it all working now. ……but… I need some chocolate cake.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-30 11:37:00 UTC