Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • I would say that ZFC constitutes a proof of the limits of mathematics. I would s

    I would say that ZFC constitutes a proof of the limits of mathematics.

    I would say that the construction of all of mathematics from operations is trivial. Which is its strength.

    I would say that the the development of techniques of deduction (proofs of possibility) given constant relations made possible by positional names is one of the high points of human intellectual achievement.

    I would say that those that are capable of applied mathematics in the discovery of patterns in reality is an art that never ceases to amaze me. if for no other reason, than like chess, it requires extraordinary state memory (modeling), extraordinary discipline, and the exercise of talent without much chance of material reward.

    I mean, the only people I am absolutely awed by when I meet them are applied and theoretical mathematicians. And I know that in the very least, they have far superior short term memories and modeling capabilities.

    And while I seem to have a talent for deflation (causality), I could never compete with that category of mind.

    I am fairly happy playing second fiddle to their art.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-02 18:04:00 UTC

  • The “Unreasonable effectiveness” trope annoys the hell out of me. The only reaso

    The “Unreasonable effectiveness” trope annoys the hell out of me. The only reason this ‘magical mathematics’ nonsense perpetuates, and the average person is still afraid of mathematics, is because it’s taught as a superstition.

    Math is trivial. 1 = any unitary measure. By the combination of some number of symbols – in the current case 0123456789, we can create positional names. By adding, subtracting units, and by adding and subtracting sets of units (multiplication and division), we can create positional names (numbers) for an unlimited set of positions. we can create names of positions in an unlimited number of directions (dimensions). We can create positions relative to any other position (relative positions). We can create changes in positions of relative positions. producing numbers, sets, and fields, and topographies (many different fields.

    So the fact that math is ‘unreasonable’ is rather ridiculous. It’s people who are unreasonable. Math is TRIVIAL. Deduction in multiple dimensions is hard because we are not well suited to it.

    I mean, we have 26 letters, and 44 phonemes in the english language. If we were ‘elegant’ we might increase the 26 to 44 letters, so that english was easier to read. but look at what we can say with those 44 phonemes, 26 characters, and 250K words in some including terms, and maybe 200K words that are not archaic.

    There are roughly 100,000 word-families in the English language.

    A native English speaking person knows between 10,000 (uneducated) to 20,000 (educated) word families.

    A person needs to know 8,000-9,000 word families to enjoy reading a book.

    A person with a vocabulary size of 2,500 passive word-families and 2,000 active word-families can speak a language fluently.

    Of those we can pretty much COMMUNICATE anything, although in wordy prose, with only 300 words.

    Now think of how much MORE you can say in language than you can say in mathematics.

    Why should it surprise you that running around with a perfectly scalable yardstick that can measure any distance, allows you to measure and compare anything? It shouldn’t. It’s freaking obvious.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-01 14:46:00 UTC

  • WOMEN AND REPRODUCTION It’s just data. In middle occupations, because women are

    WOMEN AND REPRODUCTION

    It’s just data.

    In middle occupations, because women are more adaptable to changes in social circumstances (even if men are more adaptable to changes in technical and military circumstances), and given that as in any distribution, only a small number of women are genetically ‘worthy’ of reproduction (as are men), the economic value of women is higher than their reproductive value.

    A woman can only birth so many children, and is only willing to undergo the physical costs of it. And can only bear the effort of raising so many children unless spaced enough apart that they raise those younger than them (which appears to be the best education possible). This means the most able women are least incentivized to reproduce and the least able women are most incentivized to reproduce.

    This means that women are of more value in productivity than they are in maintaining replacement birth rates.

    Women are the weak link in the chain of reproduction. They choose poorly. Their in-utero variation creates defects. They overinvest in underperformance. And they reproduce dysgenically.

    If our choices are to coerce them back in the home, or to alleviate the burden of reproduction for the best, then it seems that if the technological solution is possible it is desirable. Although, I cannot see it being more ‘inexpensive’ than the traditional method, even if produced at consumer scale.

    I mean, If I could raise six sons without a woman… imagine what that would look like? I mean, men would signal by breeding their own clans….. Modernity is not good for men. And breeding a clan and obviating the need for women except as entertainment is interesting.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-01 10:28:00 UTC

  • Observation is limited to reduce our costs. Memory is limited to reduce our cost

    Observation is limited to reduce our costs.

    Memory is limited to reduce our costs, improve our speed of recall, and maximize our storage.

    Reconstruction of experience is limited to that which is necessary for action.

    Reconstruction requires stimuli necessary to access memory – it’s fragmentary.

    Free association (imagination) is useful in searching for opportunities thereby reducing our costs.

    To say that the observed world is a fiction is very hard to agree with since we can sense and perceive pretty much the full range of the universe where actions and reactions are possible for man. It would be a wasted cost (evolutionary drag) for us to sense and perceive that which we cannot act upon.

    To say our values and judgements of that world are INCONSISTENT is evidenced by the effects of different drugs and circumstances on the interpretation of every phenomenon. To say they are false is something else it is hard to agree with. Since we readily reinterpret those perceptions when returning to normal state.

    To say that our MODELS of reality are questionable, is highly variable by individual, and that’s demonstrable in all walks of life. For some people, modeling is exceptional. To say that our imaginations are fantasy, that’s true. To say that some people’s models are but fantasy that’s true.

    To say ‘consciousness’ is an illusion is something I have to deny for the simple reason that I have a multi-decade experience with frequently losing consciousness under the right (not rare) conditions. And each stage of ‘awareness’ is relatively obvious. There is a base ‘you’ which may or may not be in the lower or mid-brain, that awakens slowly as more and more information is available to it as you return to consciousness by full use of your senses and memories, generating some semblance of a model of yourself in the world. Now, that base consciousness doesn’t do much more than wait and feel and react, but in my experience, it is definitely ‘me’ with my memories and current context, continually altering ‘me’ through various stages, which I notice are less happy and more skeptical as each stage begins to fully participate. I assume that ‘me’ is ‘womb me’. So for me, this isn’t a theory. it’s an experience I go through with painful frequency. (I have asthma and allergies and when coughing and changing body position causes me to faint if I don’t manage it. It’s called “Syncope” )

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-30 14:21:00 UTC

  • Um. Postmodern nonsense. The problem is, that the more power you have the more e

    Um. Postmodern nonsense. The problem is, that the more power you have the more empirical you must be, and the less, and less empathy you must rely on. People do not put you in charge because you have the ‘trivial’ skill of empathy. The put you in charge because you have the ‘rare’ skill of insulating yourself from noise and limiting yourself to signal. We have known this even before brain imaging gave us the photos of it. Just as we have known that say, conservatives have more hypothalamic activity (fear, purity, disgust, loyalty) and progressives less. Just as we have known that men and women illustrate their preferences differently – feminine for aesthetic openness and masculine for idea-openness. In other words, feelz vs reals. Or in more evolutionary terms, tools vs consumption.

    The strangeness of these studies (and the method of identifying feminine or postmodern thought) is the freudian (vs Nietzschean) presumption of an ideal uniform monopoly (feminine) character, rather than hierarchical distributed market (masculine) character.

    I mean. you know. If it wasn’t for the marxists, feminists, and postmodernists we wouldn’t have lost a century in the pseudo-sciences. sigh.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-30 13:56:00 UTC

  • There used to be value for the professors although that has diminished with the

    There used to be value for the professors although that has diminished with the financialization of the university mission – likewise it appears that the quality of teaching professors has declined by the measurement of research performance rather than student life performance.

    There is social value not accounted for in the material alone.

    There is a concentration of talent in university setting that does not exist outside of that setting and we learn through imitation of it and measurement of other environments by that standard.

    There is value in minimizing the number of inputs (distractions) – although we might argue that insulation from market forces produces worse consequences than minimization of inputs provide.

    Even if there is commodity value in the material, there is unsubstitutable value in tutoring – taking responsibility for the transition in state of each individual. There is very little if any value to administration.

    The relationship between Professors and students in the college system (a collection of professors offering their courses together on the open market).

    LIttle if anything is learned, retained, and practiced outside of the university setting (meaning universities primarily sort not train). There is very questionable measured value of a degree other than sorting and filtering (signaling).

    We could measure this by measuring first two decade performance. But the consequences for universities would be damning.

    The problem of the contemporary university is largely the conflation of vocational(craft), clerical (administrative), STEM (calculative), and religious(civic) services in one institution without variations in price, and the consequential redistribution of debt between those students.

    The conflation of student, research, and sport revenues at the expense of student debt only exacerbates this problem. So by and large the degree process has no empirical measurement other than filtering.

    If instead, universities had to carry student debt on behalf of the student, and could collect it only over 10 years as payroll deduction, and universities had to warranty their degrees just like other purveyors of goods and services, we would end the prior privileges we granted to universities as extensions of the church, and treat them as ordinary businesses (which is how they act) that produce a product that they must involuntarily warranty shall perform in the market.

    If that were the case, it is quite likely that the schools would re-parition, the costs of education would reflect lifetime returns for each discipline, and those people who pay the high cost of ‘university’ (calculative) degrees would return to statistical levels wherein only 10% of a normally distributed ethnically european population would enter university – because that is approximately the maximum percentage of the population that is capable of university level (calculative) work.

    Most importantly, the funding of marxist and postmodern propaganda produced by under sanction of the academy-as-replacment-for-church would be eliminated. etc. etc.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-30 13:26:00 UTC

  • COMING CORRECTIONS, SHIFTS, AND SHOCKS There are corrections, shifts, and shocks

    COMING CORRECTIONS, SHIFTS, AND SHOCKS

    There are corrections, shifts, and shocks to choose from. A correction involves the overinvestment in an opportunity the value of which has peaked. A shift is a change in strategy, demographics, trade routes, or power structures that significantly disrupts the existing sustainable patterns of specialization and trade. A shock is a rapid and unexpected alteration in supply or demand, for which insufficient substitutes are available in the market, or which cause redirection of investments from opportunity, to maintenance, to defense, or to rescue.

    Corrections (business cycles), shifts (demographic cycles), and shocks (natural world, political world, vicissitudes and cycles ) are all, to some degree predictable existentially. Business cycles are historically testable, so are shifts, and so are shocks. But on time scales we cannot ‘time’. Yet all of us seek to maximize returns through ‘timing’. For reasons that it would take a book to cover.

    It certainly appears that we will see a coincidence of correction, shift and shock all at the same time on a global scale, which will likely be exacerbated by seizure of political and military and trade route opportunities given the invasion of advanced civilizations by vast underclasses. I have been predicting this to occur between 2020-2025 since 2004. I was right on timing of everything except china – but everyone else has been wrong on china too. The information is just to crappy to work from. So much so that I stopped following.

    The underlying cause of all economic and political and strategic change is demographic. Ergo, by 2025 a dramatic demographic shift will occur that will likely result in another world war of the military, political economic labor, class variety – or all of the above combined – unless we are very, very lucky. History is not friendly to such coincidences of cycles.

    I would say that the best thing to do is limit one’s ‘enforceable’ debt. That might include just limiting your debts and costs. That might include maximizing all bank debt and maximizing all physical property and stores. It might include just staying fit and armed. But I don’t think there is much defense from a coincidence of cycles of this magnitude other than home, family, and friends.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-30 11:34:00 UTC

  • WHAT HISTORY TELLS ME ABOUT THE STATE OF PHYSICS My reading of intellectual hist

    WHAT HISTORY TELLS ME ABOUT THE STATE OF PHYSICS

    My reading of intellectual history suggests humans make the same mistakes over and over again, and the current paradigm in physics just radiates those mistakes.

    And I am pretty sure that confirms my central thesis: that the problem of advancement in science is primarily one of costs. And that the current problem in physics is a combination of anchoring, first principle, causal (dimensional) density, and cost of conducting the research necessary to run tests rather than mathematical models.

    I have seen nothing to counter most parsimonious explanation of the universe as a single medium, expressing a simple geometry, the different forces of which, are produced by different degrees of excitement (density), the apparent complexity of which is nothing more that overlapping field effects, and that the general problem of comprehension is reducible to the measurement of a subset of states ( fields, waves, particles) rather than merely densities). In other words, our attempts at deflation are causing categorical analysis that obscures the underlying symmetry.

    That is not a statement about the universe. It is a statement only of observations of the categories of human error in the past, and by analysis of those errors we can look for the solution. Not in our findings, but our errors.

    Meaning that in general, we have a serious problem increasing the number of dimensions we can comprehend, and the tools necessary for their comprehension. A problem which historically is solved by advances in mathematics. The applied elsewhere – endlessly for generations.

    In other words I don’t need to understand much about physics to make that statement. I just need to understand that all similar problems in history follow a similar pattern.

    At present the study of intermediary phenomenon (advanced mathematics) and operational patterns (computer science) appears to be providing us with slow but incremental progress in the hope of identifying patterns of causal relations that limit the variation in high causal density (high numbers of dimensions).

    So I suspect that the possibility is out there. And I suspect the central problem is not awarding prizes for the solutions to this category of problem and therefore ending the incentives to reinforce the paradigm.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-30 11:13:00 UTC

  • THE CAUSE OF USA’S DEEP STATE MALINCENTIVES: ERROR. The USA ended up with the br

    THE CAUSE OF USA’S DEEP STATE MALINCENTIVES: ERROR.

    The USA ended up with the british empire and the international network of finance, trade, and law created by the british empire’s ‘globalization’ of knowledge, technology, law, finance, and trade.

    After the second world war, the ‘postwar consensus’ was that to prevent another world war, all nations should limit their actions to the development of ‘human rights’, and markets for commons (democracy) within their borders. Human rights being a pseudo-religious proxy for ‘property rights’. Democracy being a proxy for ‘commercial consumer capitalist state’.

    The problem is, that this cannot be achieved without direct rule. And without exploitation of the local people direct rule of the globe was too expensive in the postwar period. (a problem the soviets and chinese tried to solve through central control – to tragic ends.)

    So the USA’s postwar mission has been a failure for the simple reason that demographic groups are not equally able to produce sufficient returns to construct a voluntary network of specialization and trade because there is not enough productivity to pay for marginal incentives necessary to organize those networks. And there is too little experience with creating commons, and too little chance of preventing privatization of commons, to make consumer capitalist orders possible WITHOUT western rule.

    So it is more that the postwar ideals were institutionalized in the american and british and german systems of government, and we cannot exit them without revolution, because we lack a means of producing alternate incentives for our deep state (bureaucracy) that was specifically ‘bred’ for the purpose it pursues. (we see the uk still trying to create an empire at home.)

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-30 10:52:00 UTC

  • I LOVE THE HIPPIES OF ALL TYPES. 😉 I love ‘hippies’. I love ‘counter culture’ a

    I LOVE THE HIPPIES OF ALL TYPES. 😉

    I love ‘hippies’. I love ‘counter culture’ artists. I love the musician class. I love ‘libertarians’ – the counter-culture commercial class. These people want nothing from others.

    I love working class people who conform. I love laboring class family, humor, and love of life. I can tolerate my fellow professional classes as long as they are self employed.

    I rapidly dislike those who are bureaucratically employed. I despise the political and bureaucratic classes. And my experience with the upper out-of-sight classes varies dramatically. With the entrepreneurial having some saving graces.

    The people I can’t stand, and want to protect us from, are the evangelical, zealous, righteous, fraudulent, and controlling. The State, Church, Academy, Media, and the whining gossips who serve them in every class.

    Now, I know how to eliminate the parasitic financial classes and the parasitic talking-classes, and the parasitic political classes, and the corrupting priestly classes. And it turns out that it’s relatively easy.

    But you never dethrone princes cheaply. Usually heads must roll. And we should celebrate the heady murder of it. Not so much for our own pleasure. But to keep the memory fresh for generations to come.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-30 10:38:00 UTC