Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • Q: “WHAT’S YOUR CURRENT OPINION ON BITCOIN?” 1) a BTC is a “Share of stock in th

    Q: “WHAT’S YOUR CURRENT OPINION ON BITCOIN?”

    1) a BTC is a “Share of stock in the BTC network”. Knowing that it’s a share in the BTC network helps you understand what it is – everything else is what someone claims it is. It is dependent on that network. It is not backed by anything but demand. It is not insured by anyone or anything – and can’t be. It can fluctuate as any other stock, the network can drive the price to zero, with zero demand (the equivalent of bankruptcy).

    2) the goal was to make these shares useful substitutes for monetary transactions. In this case, then those shares function as what’s called “Token Money Substitutes”. (Like buying tickets for rides at a carnival)

    3) IT hasn’t resulted in that outcome for the simple reason that user interface limitations, transaction response time, and limited acceptance because of limited demand, haven’t provided enough incentives.

    4) As a consequence BTC has filled a more traditional role as a stock, and store of value, in the hopes that developers will solve the technical problems above.

    5) Is this technology an innovation? Let’s disambiguate whether it’s a novel technology, and one that’s a novel innovation that survives in the marketplace. That judgment depends on answering whether it’s not just better to fund a distributed data store under traditional transaction processing, able to handle high volume transactions, using encryption but without proof of work or stake. It’s rather easy to design and program that system with current technology, and ride on the existing networking protocols without any bank intervention.

    6) The criticism of this approach is that it requires a corporation, investors, etc. But how is that different from BTC? I invested in a company that monitored who processed what transactions and predicted who would process the next one or two or three etc, and it became obvious that for all intents and purposes, the system was always fighting to not evolve into a cartel.

    8) But compare that to BTC: (a) The power consumption problem is absurd. (b) The alternative proof of stake is absurd (c) The absence of an insurer of last resort is absurd. (d) AFAIK we’re doing research and development for the State’s development of a digital currency which will subject us to even greater manipulation than ‘social credit’ scores. (e) And the pretense that the state can’t either shut down BTC, declare a 30 day price to convert BTC into FEDCOIN before prohibiting it, or prosecuting it into something used only by criminals, is equally absurd.

    9) So, I’ve had the same opinion for almost ten years: (a) The only long-term value of BTC is the experiment with whether the public will tolerate a digital currency – that test succeeded. (b) But the technology stack has failed to solve the problem of concurrency, volume, insurability, and restitutability. (c) So the result will be a hybrid model of encryption, the ledger, and a privately held, distributed high-performance network OR the state equivalent OR both.

    10) Now, there are a lot of people who will agree with me but if you understand the fundamental problems, then the only possible solution is serialization in a distributed network, that is insured, restitutable, reversible, fast, and so integrated into the economy that we can’t do without it. IMO it also requires protective LEGISLATION.

    11) I’m bullish only for circumventing the banking system for cost-free transfers of title whether that title be to assets of monetary substitutes, or assets of financial instruments, or assets in the real world.

    12) And my primary interest is making it so the poor have cost-free access to digital banking, borrowing, and redistribution if destitute. The rest of us will do just fine.

    13) I haven’t been wrong. I’m not often wrong. I don’t think I’ll be wrong. Because I don’t think I CAN be wrong. That doesn’t mean BTC won’t survive. It only means BTC is very likely BETAMAX or CDROM while we wait for VHS or Flash Drives.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-15 02:53:35 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1625689750953664513

  • Adulting is awful for all children because it demands responsibility, judgment,

    Adulting is awful for all children because it demands responsibility, judgment, and truth before face regardless of cost.

    Given that the only reason you don’t live in dirt scratching poverty, hard labor, starvation, disease, suffering, child mortality, and early death are that western civilization’s more rapid evolution than all other civilizations combined, in the bronze, iron, steel, and industrial ages was mad possible

    (a) maximization of individual responsibility
    (b) including truth before face regardless of cost
    (c) and commons before self regardless of cost.

    In other words, your lies of convenience are the worse privilege, the worst crime against the commons, and the most destructive idea in two thousand years.

    Feels are evil when they obscure reals.
    So no. You’re the awful person.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-15 00:17:11 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1625650393991548928

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1625648527027146756

  • WOLFRAM’S INSIGHTS I have a special place in my heart for @stephen_wolfram. I th

    WOLFRAM’S INSIGHTS
    I have a special place in my heart for @stephen_wolfram. I think he’s the most underappreciated intellectual of our age. And he works hard and endlessly for our collective benefit.

    For those of you not yet aware of Stephen’s achievements:
    1. He’s created extraordinary software for math and science: The Computerized Algebra System, Wolfram Programming Language, Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, and more.
    2. He’s disambiguated mathematics and computation and developed a set of ‘principles or rules’ that explain the capacities of math(description), computation(operations), simulation(consequences).
    3. And he’s created an interesting alternative to evolutionary simulations by what we might call exhaustive search for survival using simple causal rules.
    4. And while it’s still controversial, he’s used this exhaustive evolutionary model of computation to demonstrate that the universe will emerge as it has because it’s the only universe that would survive evolutionary competition.

    Now, we saw peak interest in Mandelbrot’s fractals because ‘they were pretty’. But mandelbrot was demonstrating that computers could achieve when humans never could, by sheer work performed in time. But we haven’t internalized Mandalbrot’s insights – particularly in monetary policy, economics, and finance. (or AI)

    But we haven’t seen the same popular interest in Wolfram’s work because there isn’t a ‘hook’ like the artistic renderings of Fractals. Similarly, we’re now overwhelmed by the first two generations of AI: Bayesian Accounting (image, speech, and patern recognition), and now, speech prediction.

    As someone who also had to create science and vocabulary of Operationalism (the behavioral sciences equivalent of what Stephen’s accomplished in Mathematics, Physics, and Computation), I empathize with the difficulty of both the innovation, but more importantly, explaining, distributing, and popularizing it.

    My only lament when listening to Stephen is that he’s still struggling to describe his insights from OUTSIDE of the framework that he’s developed them within. But he’s not alone. We see this problem in every discipline because we lack the skills for describing any phenomena across the very scales Stephen is disambiguating. Philosophers failing tragically, and it’s worse in psychology, sociology, economics, law, politics, and world systems (the market between group evolutionary strategies).

    We have lost the art of cross-disciplinary comprehension, and in doing so, lost the benefit of cross-disciplinary pattern recognition. So, at least until now, we’ve failed to produce a universally commensurable paradigm, vocabulary, grammar, and logic sufficient to satisfy EO Wilson’s prediction of the unification of the formal(logical), physical(before), behavioral(during), and evolutionary(after) sciences.

    And while his insights are spreading, they aren’t spreading where it matters most to common people: in the behavioral sciences.

    And if they did they’d face the same resistance Darwinian thought still does. I’ll state that more pejoratively, as the academy is open to mathematics where it suits them and closed to mathematics where it doesn’t. And worse, the academy is closed to innovation where innovation from mathematics(statistics), to computation(operations), to simulation(consequences).

    And when I say the academy I’m not even sure that’s the case – it’s likely administration as much as behavioral pseudoscience within the disciplines themselves.

    If we are still revolting against the Darwinian explanation of behavior, what does that mean for Wolfram’s formalization of the Darwinian structure of the universe – or my work that applies a similar method to the formal and behavioral sciences?

    So Wolfram’s work is a profound innovation, but what if we’re entering a new dark age because we fear that the Darwinian universe doesn’t care about our wishes and wants – we are still bound by its laws.

    Pay attention to things that are hard to understand.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-14 16:34:20 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1625533912205213696

  • There are a lot of educated but ignorant historians of america in specific and t

    There are a lot of educated but ignorant historians of america in specific and the broader west in general, who claim innovations that were not, but were continuations of the european strategy and tradition.

    Largely this is caused by ignoring the HRE, and lionizing France and England and the supposed ‘enlightenment’ (that was not).

    In other words, in an effort to justify middle class use of democratic dogma to capture of the state from the aristocracy and subsequently to produce authoritarian positiva rather than natural negativa law, ‘scribblers’ attributed innovations in the HRE to the more backward states (france, spain, italy, russia).

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-13 16:36:49 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1625172150440148999

  • FWIW: (For law nerds) The law should enumerate that the State(corporation, asset

    FWIW: (For law nerds)
    The law should enumerate that the State(corporation, assets), via its management (Government) has responsibilities for defense, inter-state relationships, agreements, and alliances, especially trade, its role as insurer of last resort in everything, the many assets of the interior, thru the treasury, finance and many others. (shortened for brevity)

    As such we can and should eunumerate at least categorically those ‘demonstrated interests’ of the state, on behalf of the people. The law is cautious of enumerations because they create loopholes, but by enumerating the state’s responsibilities (they are narrow) any demonstrated interest within those responsibilities is covered whether enumerated or not. Enumeration then serves as examples but no list is finite.

    The difference between a tort, a sedition, and a treason, is determined by the motive whether intentional or not, the harm done, and the reversibility (restitution) of the harm done, and most importantly the externalities that the state may be aware of, and the actors not.

    In general the USA is too soft on all three degrees of severity.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-13 01:49:22 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1624948816129540098

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1624944940106100736

    IN REPLY TO:

    Unknown author

    @LGcommaI One cannot publish information that would harm the country or undermine its security. In particular, one cannot publish information that compromises the security of the nation – using the test of “clear and present danger”.

    This seems vague but judicial interpretation isn’t.

    Original post: https://x.com/i/web/status/1624944940106100736

  • A VERY HUMAN PROBLEM My work is terribly rigorous, complex, and requires you to

    A VERY HUMAN PROBLEM
    My work is terribly rigorous, complex, and requires you to think first and feel last = which is totally alien to human beings.
    In the more than twenty years I’ve worked on epistemology and its application, it’s rather obvious that a tiny fraction of people participate in my work, our project, and our rather small intellectual movement, because they have the personality, intelligence, motive, and life experience to do so.
    Instead the majority of people we find, identify some one of my/our explanations or arguments as satisfying a cognitive or moral bias, and then affiliate or support us without understanding the work, or integrating it sufficiently to benefit from it.
    This behavior isn’t particular to us. It’s the same for all movements with political potential. Religion, Philosophy, and the hierarchy of marxist pseudosciences are all plagued by the same attraction by self-sortition.
    Even in the sciences, how many people in physics can’t distinguish between a statement about mathematics and a statement about the physical world? How are they not acting as platonists do with their ‘ideal forms’ or other such nonsense? They aren’t.
    Worse, how many mathematicians can perform advanced mathematics (measurement by deduction), without grasping the foundations of mathematics, or why it ‘works’ (and why it fails)?
    Much Much worse, how many philosophers of law are no better, an dperhaps worse, than theologians discussing how many angels fit on the head of a pin? Well, frankly, none of them Even when we name the best (our dear departed Saint Judge Antonin Scalia), do they really understand what they’re stating – in the same sense a chemist understands what he’s stating? Of course not.
    Much, Much, Much worse, how many legislators bureaucrats, professors are other than parroting recieved knoweldge almost aall of which is at best half true, and more likely largely false – at least outside of the applied sciences?
    Our system worked because the natural law program of the USA’s founding was a scientific revolution in human organization. And because the english had restored classical reason and empiricism. And americans classical roman pragmatism. And they might have succeeded if the french hadn’t restored authoritarianism, the russians copied them, and the jews undermined all of them with marxism-feminism-woke.
    We are at that point where we take nothing for granted any longer – and this is where athens and rome and england made their great reforms and advancements: at the precipice of failure.
    But there is only one way to reform an imperial government that has been overcome by credentialists, and ideological religion, and like the chinese abandoned empirial rule for philosophical moralizing, disconnected from reality necessary for continued prosperity. Or when the muslims returned to fundamentalism leaving behind the wisdom accumulated by the plunder of the great civilizations of the ancient world. Or when the bright light of the Hindustani’s failed to solve the problem of politics and returned to mysticism. Or when the roman world was so crushed by invaders that they could be forced into chrsitan subission to the east, rather than restore their aristocratic martial empiricism.
    The way is a scientific advancement in the means of organizing human beings that does not deviate from the laws of nature.
    America was closest pre-war.
    The credentialist and managerial revolutions destroyed our institutions.
    The credentialist religions of marxism, neo-marxism, postmodernism, feminism, pc-woke, and antiwestern-antiwhite-antimale have repeated with chrsitand destruction of the ancient world did to the aristocracy of the past, in the present.
    We can and have produced that scienfic revolution.
    The problem is implementing it.
    But you cannot morally persuade a criminal to give up crime.
    And so you can only threaten them with punishment if they don’t.
    That’s the only answer.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-12 21:35:08 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1624884835549425664

  • P-LAW AND THE VERITASIUM ELECTRICITY DEBATE. Just a note that this author in thi

    P-LAW AND THE VERITASIUM ELECTRICITY DEBATE.
    Just a note that this author in this video: https://t.co/MTa3Kf8Al1 … uses the P-Law method of operationalization and serialization to illustrate disambiguation by use of the: [Electricity] Antenna > Capacitor > Wire sequence. Meaning the answer is “in every way possible” – which is the answer to pretty much every question in each generation of the hierarchy of sciences. (Especially neuroscience.)

    So the confusion IMO was created by the typical means by which all pseudo-conundrums are created in philosophy (sophistry) and academy (pseudoscience(: by asking for a single solution instead of the spectrum of solutions to the problem.

    And thereby not solving the principle cognitive problem plaguing modern thought: one-ness, ideal types, ideals, instead of equilibria producing stable relations.

    This is, as I often criticize, the problem of framing a question as a means of suggestion that produces ignorance and error as a consequence. When instead we should habituate students, and citizens, into serialization of possible solutions until they have at least the “three points necessary to test a line”, not just in geometry but in everything we do.

    This also explains how education seeking right answers instead of a sequence or spectrum of answers produces ignorance in modernity, despite it’s utility in the 3R’s under the simple cognitive load of agrarianism.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-12 20:32:15 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1624869009584685057

  • P-Law and the Veritasium Electricity Debate. Just a note that this author in thi

    P-Law and the Veritasium Electricity Debate.
    Just a note that this author in this video: https://t.co/MTa3Kf8Al1 … uses the P-Law method of operationalization and serialization to illustrate disambiguation by use of the: [Electricity] Antenna > Capacitor > Wire sequence. Meaning the answer is “in every way possible” – which is the answer to pretty much every question in each generation of the hierarchy of sciences. (Especially neuroscience.)

    So the confusion IMO was created by the typical means by which all pseudo-conundrums are created in philosophy (sophistry) and academy (pseudoscience(: by asking for a single solution instead of the spectrum of solutions to the problem.

    And thereby not solving the principle cognitive problem plaguing modern thought: one-ness, ideal types, ideals, instead of equilibria producing stable relations.

    This is, as I often criticize, the problem of framing a question as a means of suggestion that produces ignorance and error as a consequence. When instead we should habituate students, and citizens, into serialization of possible solutions until they have at least the “three points necessary to test a line”, not just in geometry but in everything we do.

    This also explains how education seeking right answers instead of a sequence or spectrum of answers produces ignorance in modernity, despite it’s utility in the 3R’s under the simple cognitive load of agrarianism.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-12 20:31:47 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1624868894375567371

  • I can’t testify to it. I can only anthropomorphize it, and describe its behavior

    I can’t testify to it. I can only anthropomorphize it, and describe its behavior as supernormal or supernatural by doing so. This is a subtle but important difference: I’m not claiming special knowledge. I’m seeking to convey moral messaging by anthropomorphism. And doing so is the most easily understood system of understanding available to man – AND – has the benefit of not attributing mind to either a known individual, or group, and therefore maintaining the ‘purity’ of meaning independent of the experience of the audience.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-11 01:08:01 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1624213633847762944

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1624212553437155328

  • Why? Because while we think we reason, we decide what is good and logical by int

    Why? Because while we think we reason, we decide what is good and logical by intution. This is why religions traditions morals and institutions succeed at propagation.

    Jewish diaspora, Anglo/Scandinavian Naval, German Territorial, Russian Borderland… etc.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-01 22:21:22 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1620910204543188992

    Reply addressees: @SevernDarden @TheAutistocrat @jamesfoxhiggins @JohnGalt2727

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1620909012626579456