Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • Why Are Some Very Smart People So Quiet?

    I’ll give you a much better answer.

    1) You learn fairly quickly that you cannot help people to come to a conclusion faster than they are able to comfortably do so with confidence.

    2) You learn fairly quickly that giving them the answer early will lead to resisting it – fighting it, or denying it, because they didn’t ‘own it’ by going through the journey.

    3) You learn fairly quickly that people grow suspicious of you and even avoid or exclude you if you make them feel inferior, inadequate, or unable to gain pleasure from working themselves or with others to come to a shared conclusion on their own.

    4) You learn fairly quickly that people will overload you with decisions that are uninteresting – and you prefer to work on things you find interesting yourself.

    5) You learn that the way to help people using your intelligence is to (a) let them come to you, (b) provide them with the next step in their reasoning (assist them on their journey don’t force them into yours), (c) in groups, prevent them from doing wrong or harm, and suggest paths of opportunity rather than give them the answer.

    6) You only aggressively dominate the conversation (because we can generally do so with trivial ease) to prevent an immoral, unethical, criminal, or otherwise terribly harmful wrong.

    In other words, you learn to speak with other humans like parents talk to children.

    If you do this, people will generally like you very much.

    We all want leaders. We just want leaders who we choose, and we choose them because they help us on our journey just as much as they take us with them on theirs.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Philosophy of Aristocracy
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

    https://www.quora.com/Why-are-some-very-smart-people-so-quiet

  • Why Is It That Iranian Americans Make More Than Double Income Per Capita Than Iraqi Americans?

    There are some questions that you should not ask because they produce answers you will not like. It is my job to answer uncomfortable questions so I’ll give you the respect of the correct answer, if you’ll respect that it might be unpleasant.

    We were horrified by the Galilean Revolution but we adapted to it anyway. In the west we were horrified by the Darwinian Revolution. But we adapted to it anyway. We were somewhat horrified by the consequences of industrialization but we adapted to it anyway. So some knowledge must be adapted to if we want to prosper.

    Persians divided from common ancestors with Europeans a long time ago, but are the ethnic group closest to West Eurasians (Europeans) – They integrate well, tend toward professional occupations, and demonstrate relatively high trust versus their other levantine neighbors. They have an extraordinary history of intelligence and scholarship despite the destruction to their civilization, language, culture, and demographics by the Arab conquest. So they are ‘compatible’ with American Civilization.

    Persians, like the Ashkenazi, are high performance ethnic group. They will do better in any country no matter where they go. The Indians and Chinese start with very large populations, and their best talent travels the world. They are consistently high performers. The difference is that Persians and Ashkenazi produce asymmetric success despite their small numbers.

    Some groups consist largely of the upper genetic classes, some the middle, and some the lower. Economic, scientific, and artistic performance corresponds directly with the demographic constitution of an ethnic group. So no matter what anyone does, the fact that some ethnic groups consist almost exclusively of the genetic middle and upper classes means that they will always statistically outperform those groups with large underclasses. It’s just math.

    So the differences in performances of ethnic groups is not so much due to genetic differences between groups but the scale of the underclass and the drag that the underclasses put on language, culture, institutions, and knowledge.

    The problem that produces inequality isn’t race, or ethnicity, it’s class. Some groups have vast underclasses, and some have nearly eliminated them.

    The Arab conquest was the most catastrophic event in human history, destroying the four great civilizations of the ancient world, causing 500M dead, and creating a 1400 year dark age from which only a remote corner of northern europe was able to rescue the world from.

    And the side effect of that civilization was a rapid expansion of the size of the underclass due to the inability to develop a middle class, due to low trust, due to tribalism. Outbreeding with the slaves didn’t help much either. It just made it worse.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-that-Iranian-Americans-make-more-than-double-income-per-capita-than-Iraqi-Americans

  • Is The ACLU Good For America?

    I’m going to criticize then compliment the ACLU.

    CRITICISM – THE SINGULAR IMPORTANCE OF NATURAL LAW (RECIPROCITY)
    Unfortunately while the ACLU has defended those who need defending, they have also been instrumental in pursuing a set of cases with the objective of using the courts to circumvent the process by which our constitution was designed to be changed.

    And they have been the principle prosecutors of the intentional destruction of the limits to expression that prohibit that behavior that westerners had developed carefully over centuries: the treatment of all common spaces as sacred – as extensions of the interiors of their church.

    Now expressed in scientific rather than normative terms, this means that the west has aggressively prosecuted the underclass for at least one thousand years, by enforcing strict limits on “display, word, and deed” that would normalize behavior that would put the young, the foolish, and those of less able families at risk of imitating. The result was the west’s High Trust Society that no civilization has been in any way close to achieving.

    HISTORICAL CONTEXT
    Lost to common people’s history was that the founders were conducting an experiment in ‘the third way’ which was rule by the middle class (or at least upper middle class) and business people, in a world run traditionally by church, state, or a competition between the two. They ran this experiment by encoding individual sovereignty (Natural Law) and rule of law (as opposed to rule by human discretion) into the constitution with strict processes to follow – unfortunately they did not yet understand strict construction or their experiment would have been even more successful.

    The original Mission of the ACLU was decidedly Communist and Socialist (see their platform changes over time) and this strategy a means by which to undermine Anglo (western) civilization by taking advantage of a very tolerant legal and cultural system – the first system of its kind, in a territory never ruled by the Aristocracy or Church.

    So the ACLU’s mission has produced some goods, but equal if not offsetting bads, not the least of which was the destruction of rule of law by the natural law of reciprocity (natural law) by continuing the undermining of that constitution begun during the Civil War, the Reconstruction, under FDR, and under Johnson’s Great Society movement (trying to imitate the Soviets.)

    The constitution failed to include such provisions for the defense of high trust norms, in no small part because the discussion at the time assumed that the church would play the civic and familial role and the domain of the government was largely defense and commerce.

    In addition, while all of us have universal standing in matters private, we do not have univeresal standing in matters public – we deliver our agency to proxies we call politicians. We do this because at the time of the constitution, (a) the population capable of such activity was limited, and (b) the time delay of communication was prohibitive.

    And the constitution did not provide a mechanism for suing the state, the bureaucracy, or members of the state, nor taking up matters of norms at the federal level, in part because such activities were not the purview of the federal government, even the state governments, but the church enforced by polity and local government.

    WHAT WENT RIGHT

    So, while the ACLU has undermined those high trust norms, and contributed significantly to the present and future conflict:

    (a) it is a civic organization not a state organization and therefore property constructed under natural, reciprocal, anglo saxon (meaning sovereign and contractualist), common law. In other words, it is constructed as the founders would have all civic institutions constructed – continuing long standing tradition.

    (b) it was able to fulfill some of the functions that the church was unable to post the industrial and second scientific revolutions (post 1870) by providing a civic institution that levied for the underclasses the way the church had done throughout western history.

    (c) by centralizing the government during the civil war, developing fiat money and the federal reserve, followed by the income tax, and vastly expanding the federal government influence, money that had (in europe) been in civic organizations and church assets was available for consumption by democratic politics and the court. This increased the power of the federal government and the need for an institutional means by which to limit abuses by a government with a concentration of wealth that was all but limitless – at least after the world wars.

    In my reading of history the democratic socialist movement in general can be seen as the slow replacement of the prior theological church with secular (if frequently pseudoscientific) institutions and prose.

    WHAT WENT WRONG

    The principle problem with their movement was the search for monopoly power and single-house government, by underclass rule, rather than adding a house for the underclass through which their interests could be negotiated with the other classes now that the church no longer existed as a semi-governing body responsible for norm and family.

    In other words, MONOPOLY IS ALWAYS BAD and the world communist and socialist movements attempted (as did the church but the church also failed) attempted to achieve authoritarian monopoly, without understanding that the Tripartism of Church, Burger, and State functioned as a balance of power between the classes from the end of the empire to the first world war.

    The court is a poor proxy for markets, and had we created additional houses for the classes rather than (i) the anglo enlightenment fantasy of an aristocracy of all, or (ii) the French/Russian/Jewish fantasy of underclass authoritarianism. Or the (iii) German fantasy of an army of civic duty replacing the church with secular rationalist prose (The Germans had the least inaccurate vision of man.)

    WE LEARN FROM RETROSPECT

    Small things in large numbers have vast consequences and if I am right then we will have another civil war within our lifetimes.

    Hopefully our next constitutions will be written in strictly constructed law from the first law of reciprocity, but we will have many small states the normative, formal, economic, and military organizations of which are customized for the reproductive interest of the polities.

    The only value of political scale is debt and the war made possible by access to that debt. We are seeing worldwide the slow collapse of nations that used credit not to transform behaviors to those of the high trust middle class, but to subsidize behaviors of the political, laboring, and underclasses.

    The continental government has outlived its usefulness as an institution that controls the sale and distribution of a conquered continent to immigrants. The american economy is and always has been housing and the goods to fill those houses. And that’s all there is and ever was. We congratulates ourselves on many aspects of our society. But selling off a continent conquered by advanced weaponry, by using an action system funded by shares in the future is simply the most profitable enterprise humans have ever invented.

    But like the Athenian Silver Mine, the veins eventually run dry, resulting in Brazil, India, and the Levant.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-the-ACLU-good-for-America

  • Why Are Some Very Smart People So Quiet?

    I’ll give you a much better answer.

    1) You learn fairly quickly that you cannot help people to come to a conclusion faster than they are able to comfortably do so with confidence.

    2) You learn fairly quickly that giving them the answer early will lead to resisting it – fighting it, or denying it, because they didn’t ‘own it’ by going through the journey.

    3) You learn fairly quickly that people grow suspicious of you and even avoid or exclude you if you make them feel inferior, inadequate, or unable to gain pleasure from working themselves or with others to come to a shared conclusion on their own.

    4) You learn fairly quickly that people will overload you with decisions that are uninteresting – and you prefer to work on things you find interesting yourself.

    5) You learn that the way to help people using your intelligence is to (a) let them come to you, (b) provide them with the next step in their reasoning (assist them on their journey don’t force them into yours), (c) in groups, prevent them from doing wrong or harm, and suggest paths of opportunity rather than give them the answer.

    6) You only aggressively dominate the conversation (because we can generally do so with trivial ease) to prevent an immoral, unethical, criminal, or otherwise terribly harmful wrong.

    In other words, you learn to speak with other humans like parents talk to children.

    If you do this, people will generally like you very much.

    We all want leaders. We just want leaders who we choose, and we choose them because they help us on our journey just as much as they take us with them on theirs.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Philosophy of Aristocracy
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

    https://www.quora.com/Why-are-some-very-smart-people-so-quiet

  • This is not so much a philosophy as the results of science that I can no longer

    This is not so much a philosophy as the results of science that I can no longer deny, and so I live according to the science – in large part because it is advantageous. 1. We are an expensive life form. Particularly our brains. 2. We must acquire, and we acquire at cost to ourselves. 3. All our emotions are nothing but reflections in state of that which we plan to, are in the process of, or have acquired an interest. 4. Cooperation is logarithmically more productive than any action an individual can take, and therefore we must cooperate to survive. (Possibly as much as ten thousand times as productive.) 5. People are purely rational, not moral or immoral but amoral: they cheat and try to acquire disproportionately from cooperation, they free ride, steal from, and prey upon others. This is why we demonstrate altruistic punishment of cheaters in all walks of life, even at high personal cost: to prevent defectors from cheating. 6. The optimum algorithm (really) for developing cooperation is to exhaust every opportunity for cooperation even from cheaters. They almost always come around, because it is always an advantage to come around. This was the entire message of christianity which was lost in the dogma. But it’s just science. 7. All our speech is merely a dance of negotiation so that we may create opportunities to acquire, do acquire, or preserve what we acquire. All of it is just signaling. 8. We are entirely incognizant of these behaviors because it is evolutionarily disadvantageous for us to be intuitively honest, honest with ourselves, and honest with others. This is the same reason we have many cognitive, social, and probabilistic biases in our genes. To keep us going when evidence would overwhelm us. 9. Most of the joy in life is playing this set of word games, cooperative games, and acquisition games with others so that we all acquire what we want as best we can without making others avoid us so that we can’t acquire what we want and need. This is why people commit suicide when they are lonely, and do not commit suicide when they are not. 10. Therefor the only rule of cooperation, of morality, and of law, is reciprocity: productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary cooperation with each other, and the only immoral actions are those that violate that moral rule by free riding, parasitism, theft, or predation. And that is why reciprocity is the basis of all traditional laws (and why it is not the basis of legislation). This little list is the answer to nearly all of metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, sociology, ethics, and politics.

  • This is not so much a philosophy as the results of science that I can no longer

    This is not so much a philosophy as the results of science that I can no longer deny, and so I live according to the science – in large part because it is advantageous. 1. We are an expensive life form. Particularly our brains. 2. We must acquire, and we acquire at cost to ourselves. 3. All our emotions are nothing but reflections in state of that which we plan to, are in the process of, or have acquired an interest. 4. Cooperation is logarithmically more productive than any action an individual can take, and therefore we must cooperate to survive. (Possibly as much as ten thousand times as productive.) 5. People are purely rational, not moral or immoral but amoral: they cheat and try to acquire disproportionately from cooperation, they free ride, steal from, and prey upon others. This is why we demonstrate altruistic punishment of cheaters in all walks of life, even at high personal cost: to prevent defectors from cheating. 6. The optimum algorithm (really) for developing cooperation is to exhaust every opportunity for cooperation even from cheaters. They almost always come around, because it is always an advantage to come around. This was the entire message of christianity which was lost in the dogma. But it’s just science. 7. All our speech is merely a dance of negotiation so that we may create opportunities to acquire, do acquire, or preserve what we acquire. All of it is just signaling. 8. We are entirely incognizant of these behaviors because it is evolutionarily disadvantageous for us to be intuitively honest, honest with ourselves, and honest with others. This is the same reason we have many cognitive, social, and probabilistic biases in our genes. To keep us going when evidence would overwhelm us. 9. Most of the joy in life is playing this set of word games, cooperative games, and acquisition games with others so that we all acquire what we want as best we can without making others avoid us so that we can’t acquire what we want and need. This is why people commit suicide when they are lonely, and do not commit suicide when they are not. 10. Therefor the only rule of cooperation, of morality, and of law, is reciprocity: productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary cooperation with each other, and the only immoral actions are those that violate that moral rule by free riding, parasitism, theft, or predation. And that is why reciprocity is the basis of all traditional laws (and why it is not the basis of legislation). This little list is the answer to nearly all of metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, sociology, ethics, and politics.

  • Sorry Emma, There Is Never A Reason To Trust Your Own Thoughts

    —“If you have an IQ lower than 130, can you trust your own thoughts?”– Emma Hmmm…. Interesting question. Can you trust your own thoughts? Does intelligence mean you can trust your own thoughts? I have an answer for you that you’ll find insightful. Intelligence generally translates to time required to learn – although below somewhere in the 80’s learning even the most trivial of sequences appears nearly impossible. And below the mid 90’s begins to become prohibitively costly upon those that teach. 10% of people are impossible to teach, and nearly half of people are costly to teach. Hence the future problem of employment. Intelligence above 105 is largely reducible to a learning curve. at 105 or so you can learn from instructions, repair machines, and express yourself logically. About every 7–10 points or so higher, it’s easier to learn from increasingly abstract (less obviously related) bits of information. Around 115 learn on your own. Around 125 invent new machines. Around 135 understand complex relations and synthesize them for others. Around 145 invent and reorganize existing ideas. Above that I have not seen anything meaningful other than the ability to construct longer denser sentences (I cannot speak in long narrations like Chomsky, and I cannot grasp and translate ideas as fast as Terence Tau. And I have also seen the opposite, which is a tendency to place too much value on intuitions (some people who shall remain nameless), and given that I specialize in identifying pseudoscience, there are a vast number of theorists in many fields who do not know about that which they speak. Those higher than you are not so much smarter as we they had more ‘time’ to create vast networks of relations (associations) – so the time required to identify a new pattern is shorter. The only way I know to improve your “demonstrated” intelligence in every day life is to be well read (possess more general knowledge) in multiple fields, and be lucky to have high conscientiousness as a personality trait. (All fields develop systemic falsehoods, so cross field knowledge is necessary). Those that are nearly frightening (children), and born with extraordinary abilities are very rare but I think we are beginning to understand what makes them possible (in utero). And their abilities do not necessarily continue past maturity. People in the 130’s tend to specialize in synthesizing and communicating difficult ideas to those in the standard deviations below them, and you would find that most CEO’s are in the 130’s, just like a lot of professors are in the 140’s. This is why the ability to articulate your ideas and make use of vocabulary is such an extraordinary proxy for intelligence. So here is my suggestion no matter where you are on the spectrum: Assume you’re wrong until you can’t possible find an alternative. Because that’s actually what demonstrated intelligence means. So I want to reframe your question for you: there is NEVER A REASON to trust your thoughts, feelings, or intuitions for anything other than “ouch, that hurts”. Knowledge like evolution is the result of survival, not justification. No matter how good you think your reasoning, the only test of truth is survival against all odds. That’s what being smart means. Which was Socrates’ whole point.

  • How Do We Teach Morality If We Disagree What Is Moral?

    Because if we disagree, then one, the other, or both, are wrong. There is (both logically and empirically) only one moral law, and it is the basis for all law from the common law to international law : reciprocity. The only question is, given the demographics, economy, norms, and institutions, and traditions, whether the current order provides reciprocity, free riding, parasitism, predation, or all of the above. The only reason we can ask this question today is because we have gained sufficient wealth that we desire to specialize in self fulfillment rather than cooperative survival, and with our specialization, form many more smaller more specialized groups. But this is impossible under large diverse governments. The optimum solution is to divide into groups with shared moral biases (and pay the price and gain the reward for doing so). It is trivial to teach morality. The silver rule: do not unto others as you would not want done unto you, and do unto others ONLY what they wish done to them. The golden rule merely amplifies the silver rule: do unto others as you would have done unto you – but do not expect reciprocity. You are merely trying to encourage them to prefer cooperating with you rather than someone else more rewarding. The value of the golden rule is that exhaustion of attempts at cooperation tends to (in all cases) produce more cooperation than any other strategy. That’s it.That’s all there is. The rest is just techicalities of achieving some form of voluntary cooperation in any set of circumstances.

  • How Do We Teach Morality If We Disagree What Is Moral?

    Because if we disagree, then one, the other, or both, are wrong. There is (both logically and empirically) only one moral law, and it is the basis for all law from the common law to international law : reciprocity. The only question is, given the demographics, economy, norms, and institutions, and traditions, whether the current order provides reciprocity, free riding, parasitism, predation, or all of the above. The only reason we can ask this question today is because we have gained sufficient wealth that we desire to specialize in self fulfillment rather than cooperative survival, and with our specialization, form many more smaller more specialized groups. But this is impossible under large diverse governments. The optimum solution is to divide into groups with shared moral biases (and pay the price and gain the reward for doing so). It is trivial to teach morality. The silver rule: do not unto others as you would not want done unto you, and do unto others ONLY what they wish done to them. The golden rule merely amplifies the silver rule: do unto others as you would have done unto you – but do not expect reciprocity. You are merely trying to encourage them to prefer cooperating with you rather than someone else more rewarding. The value of the golden rule is that exhaustion of attempts at cooperation tends to (in all cases) produce more cooperation than any other strategy. That’s it.That’s all there is. The rest is just techicalities of achieving some form of voluntary cooperation in any set of circumstances.

  • HOW DO WE TEACH MORALITY IF WE DISAGREE WHAT IS MORAL? Because if we disagree, t

    HOW DO WE TEACH MORALITY IF WE DISAGREE WHAT IS MORAL?

    Because if we disagree, then one, the other, or both, are wrong.

    There is (both logically and empirically) only one moral law, and it is the basis for all law from the common law to international law : reciprocity.

    The only question is, given the demographics, economy, norms, and institutions, and traditions, whether the current order provides reciprocity, free riding, parasitism, predation, or all of the above.

    The only reason we can ask this question today is because we have gained sufficient wealth that we desire to specialize in self fulfillment rather than cooperative survival, and with our specialization, form many more smaller more specialized groups. But this is impossible under large diverse governments.

    The optimum solution is to divide into groups with shared moral biases (and pay the price and gain the reward for doing so).

    It is trivial to teach morality. The silver rule: do not unto others as you would not want done unto you, and do unto others ONLY what they wish done to them. The golden rule merely amplifies the silver rule: do unto others as you would have done unto you – but do not expect reciprocity. You are merely trying to encourage them to prefer cooperating with you rather than someone else more rewarding. The value of the golden rule is that exhaustion of attempts at cooperation tends to (in all cases) produce more cooperation than any other strategy.

    That’s it.That’s all there is. The rest is just techicalities of achieving some form of voluntary cooperation in any set of circumstances.

    Source date (UTC): 2018-03-18 16:25:00 UTC