Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • THE PATTERN OF HUMAN ERROR IN PSEUDOSCIENCE (from elsewhere) Mark, There is a pa

    THE PATTERN OF HUMAN ERROR IN PSEUDOSCIENCE

    (from elsewhere)

    Mark,

    There is a pattern to human error.

    There is a particular pattern to 20th c. error, if not to enlightenment error, and certainly to French->Cosmopolitan error.

    One does not need to necessarily know the answer to a scientific question as much as know the categories of error that humans make in pursuing answers to questions. In other words, when confronted with a complex problem, it is just as valuable to look at cognitive, personal, social, cultural, and methodological biases as it is to explore the question. (Einstein’s late discovery is an example of our assumption of the nature of such a basic concept as length.)

    Anti-spanking, like anti-fist-fighting, like anti-duelling, like anti-hanging (death penalty), like anti-war sentiments fall into a category of common human errors. Just like democracy, universalism, scale, peace, and predictability fall into that same category of human error.

    Maximizing the pleasure or comfort of individual life on a society-wide scale is the result of conspicuous consumption in an era of windfall-wealth.

    A simple person can isolate a particular cause effect relationship but this fails to make take full accounting of the consequences of ‘the peace’: fragility, vulnerability, overextension, risk expansion.

    How do you know that the luxury good of not-doing X (in this case spanking) is in fact a good, rather than an example of hyperconsumption that causes externalities that are the opposite of what one predicts?

    And is not the Period of the 19th and 20th century science not one of a series of optimistic predictions the culmination of which are rather obvious bads?

    Keynesian economics appears to be a good. Democracy appears to be good. Universal enfranchisement seems to be a good. No fault divorce seemed to be a good. Social security seems to be a good. Welfare seems to be a good.

    We have attempted to create many goods that are dependent upon what we call ‘science’. But the experiment that we have been conducting since the enlightenment seems entirely predicated upon the physical sciences – and almost everything we have attempted in the social sciences that was the product of the Cosmopolitan enlightenment (Boaz, Marx, Freud, Adorno-et-al) appears to be false. If for no other reason than the time scale of our measurements.

    In other words, our SENSES and our REASONING from our senses appears to be just as erroneous in social science as it was in physical science prior to empiricism. And we solved much more of physical science precisely because it’s more simple than social science given the rate at which changes are reflected in the universe.

    We have mostly overthrown all Boaz, Marx-Keynes, Freud by the replacement of their disciplines with anthropology, genetics, and cognitive science. Our libertarian and conservative movements are attempting to overthrow Adorno-et-al. But the reason that we are the victims of pseudoscience in anthropology, politics, sociology, psychology, economics, and to a lesser degree in physics, came out of the enlightenment – an era in which each society (british, american, german, french, jewish/cosmopolitan, and russian) attempted to state their LOCAL group evolutionary strategy as a universal moral good, as a justification for overthrowing the church-monarchy balance of powers with a political monopoly we call ‘democracy’.

    Now, I work on this problem, so does Taleb – albeit we work from different perspectives – but any number of historians work on it (Ferguson, Acemoglu, Emmanuel Todd et all.) And we are all engaged in attempting to correct these erroneous presumptions that have caused the accumulated damage to western civilization despite the vast returns on (largely 19th c.) science.

    And it’s very easy, from the perspective of “humans are making these kinds of errors all over the place for these historical reasons”, simply because of the insufficiency of what we call the scientific method, to identify areas of high probably of error by the kind of arguments made and the means of decidability those arguments depend upon.

    And spanking, like all anti-violence, anti-stress, hyperconsumptive arguments fall into that category.

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2017-01-05 07:46:00 UTC

  • MIXED AND UNMIXED ECONOMIES? 0) lets look at these terms: COMMUNISM: unorganized

    MIXED AND UNMIXED ECONOMIES?

    0) lets look at these terms:

    COMMUNISM: unorganized equalitarian production of private and commons. Collective ownership of the means of production.

    (PARASITISM UPON THE INDIVIDUAL)

    SOCIALISM: state (involuntary) organization of production. State ownerhship of the means of production. state ownership of the proceeds of production. state distribution of the proceeds of production to common or private ends.

    (INVOLUNTARY COMMONS)

    SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: state organization of some part of production. State ownership of the MEANS of production, state ownership of the PROCEEDS of production. Individual retains COMMISSION on his production for his private consumption, the remainder is held by the state for the production of commons.

    (COMPETITION FOR PRIVATE AND COMMONS)

    CLASSICAL LIBERALISM: individual ownership of the means of production, individual ownership of the proceeds of production. The voluntary organization of production. individuals contribute to the production of commons by majority assent.

    (VOLUNTARY COMMONS)

    CAPITALISM (market anarchism). Individual ownership of the means of production, individual ownership of the proceeds of production, the voluntary organization of production, and the private construction of common goods.

    (PARASITISM UPON THE COMMONS)

    1) EXTREMES FAIL

    Neither socialism nor capitalism is possible. Hence neither exists.

    2) MONOPOLIES FAIL:

    Instead we develop mixed economies.

    Social democracy (mixed economies) are the constant throughout history. At present the mainstream seeks to identify the maximum taxation possible without disincentivizing production. This appears to be dependent upon the homogeneity of the population.

    3) MIXED WORK, BUT MORE MIXING IS BETTER

    We appear to need a different economic model for each CLASS.

    … Lets look at the hierarchy of labor:

    – barbarian (outside the system – person is candidate or enemy)

    – prisoner (owner bears risk but person is disposable)

    – slave/soldiery (owner bears risk – person is tradable/releasable)

    – serf (split cost of risk) (supported by own production)

    – employee (full cost of risk) (supported by production returns)

    – professional (burgher) (supported by trade returns)

    – capitalist (landowner) (supported by management returns)

    – statist (aristocracy) (supported by proceeds of taxation)

    – warriors (aristocracy) (supported by proceeds of conquest)

    So we do not have ENOUGH of a mixed economy.

    We have no slavery, too small a military, no regiments, too small a disaster releif organization, no commons- maintenance organizations, too few syndicates and unions, and no monasteries or nunneries, and the academy functions as the only monastery. Yet we have a bloated financial sector that is clearly parasitic.

    Why? Because we allowed collective bargaining, and parasitic private and public contracts to award pensions we could not afford at our rates of inflation.

    We have created the worst possible mix of large homes and small expensive urban apartments, rather than large family apartments in large numbers in urban areas.

    We have created an empire with constant political conflict in order to gain mobility, rather than a collection of small homogenous states with constant political satisfaction of local demands, at the expense of mobility. However, that mobility is the reason for the decline of social order and the fmaily and care for the commons, and our culture itself.

    Economists are even WORSE idiots than theologians.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev,Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2017-01-03 13:03:00 UTC

  • THE CENTURY OF MADWOMEN As far as I can tell, the left’s liberalism, anti-famili

    THE CENTURY OF MADWOMEN

    As far as I can tell, the left’s liberalism, anti-familialism, school-anarchism, and ‘tolerance’ has produced a vast increase in mental illness the origin of which is simply the prohibition that we demand discipline from one another.

    When I travel the world this is the main difference between our culture and others. We are not more progressive or more tolerant, we are simply failing to educate the human animal to funciton as a member of a polity – and they’re going insane in vast numbers because of it.

    I see this as the ultimate expression of the feminine: to escape accountability for the management of her impulses. And what is the reason? Women evolved to have children in their teens where those impulses are governed by the offsetting demand to care for children.

    We have created madwomen in vast numbers.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-12-31 13:15:00 UTC

  • Apple Will Have No Choice…

    Chris, Great unbiased Venturebeat article on Apple. Thank you. Have a few thoughts to share (and curious if you have any feedback). As someone intimately familiar with the Post-Bill-Gates internal consequences at Microsoft, I see all the same behaviors at Apple, and I suspect we will see the same ‘lost decade’ of results. The difference is, Apple does not benefit from the network effect of entrenched products as did Microsoft, and Apple’s fall will be more rapid and their time to adapt much shorter. Over the past six years I’ve suggested that Apple will continue to bet on the consumer and fail – because (a)the accumulated media of the past century is now widely distributed, and (b) the touch-screen revolution that propelled Apple’s iPhone revenues is widely distributed, and (c) everyone in the world is researching the verbal-AI revolution since they’re aware that’s the next interface hurdle, and (d) the Bauhaus design ethic is firmly entrenched worldwide. And so there are no ‘failures of engineering and design’ among device manufacturers that Apple can compensate for, and use to obtain large consumer market share as both Apple and Microsoft had done during their evolutions. We tend to think of Apple and Microsoft as innovators, but they were merely consumer commoditizers of existing technologies during an era of pent up demand. This condition no longer exists in the world – just the opposite. Industrial design for consumer users has been adopted everywhere in the mainstream. So, as far as I can see, Apple has no choice of means of maintaining share price other than pivoting to business and industry, and displacing Microsoft – who, for cultural reasons, is the software equivalent of IBM/DEC/WANG in the industrial space, and Motorola/Nokia in the mobile phone space. Yet as (a) the merger of iOS and Mac OS groups (another mistake we saw Microsoft make in the pursuit of false operating system efficiencies) and as (b) the abandonment of the power-user market with the new ‘Mac Air’ rebranded as ‘Mac Pro’ and the termination of the mac pro line (c) the abandonment of network/backup devices (d) the continuous abandonment of the professional market (video editing), (e) the abandonment of the ‘maintainable’ mac server hardware (f) the abandonment of the mac server software community (g) the failure of Apple to produce competitive cloud services — all of which indicate Apple is either gambling on an other miracle-research-and-development effort (historically a terrible tragedy), Now, perhaps I’ve been studying business and industry transformation for too many decades, but it would seem far more prudent to maintain a portfolio and CREATE a network effect as a resistance to unpredictable innovation by a wildcard competitor, and to continue the trend of making industrial engineering innovations usable by consumers and power users, than it would be to continue to put all one’s eggs in a consumer basket when consumers are fickle and industry allows you to create an entrenched revenue stream. Microsoft repeatedly pursued false efficiency instead of creating separate units that pursued the interests of different users. And when they did so they still caused havoc: attempting to move users to the xbox platform instead of preserving the ‘elite’ gamer on the PC and the ‘casual’ gamer on the xbox. There are no efficiencies. There are only lost opportunities. Microsoft also abandoned their evangelists, abandoned their dominance as an application platform, and they are currently in the process of abandoning the .net stack that they tried to use to create a walled garden. And on a broader horizon, given the influence the ‘new age’ companies have on the stock market and as a consequence the economy (FB/email-fax, Google/YellowPages, Apple/AT&T-Communications) we are living in the most fragile economy since the end of the roaring twenties. Why? Because quite a few of us know how to displace Facebook, google, apple and Microsoft. And of those only Microsoft retains a durable network effect. And the only company currently capable of eroding the Microsoft network effect is Apple – because their products are simply better in every regard. The only think preventing Apple from displacing Microsoft’s revenues is the acquisition of and incorporation of a virtualization product and thereby achieving for Apple with Microsoft achieved because of IBM/DEC. THE SKYSCRAPER THEORY OF ECONOMICS Just as a bit of humor: there is a correlation between the launch of a tallest building and a market crash. Meaning that any economic conditions allowing for a new tallest building are indicators of an economy that will bust. I recognize the same effect in Apple’s spaceship office. The fact that anyone would do that, is an indicator of a bubble that will bust. APPLE REDIRECTION I suppose that the function of those of us who are students and teachers of business cycles can ‘help’ Apple by writing about it quite a bit. And pushing ideas into the public discourse that are culturally suppressed internally. But I suspect that the damage that will be done to Apple by the first five years post-Steve will be so significant that (like Microsoft) it may not be possible to correct it. Company cultures function analogously to an instruction set, and companies can only calculate what instructions are culturally available. Apple (like google and FB) have cultures (as did MSFT) that enshrine values that gave rise to them and were mythical at the time – and are now simply false. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine. obrien@venturebeat.com http://venturebeat.com/…/apple-survived-a-horrible-2016-an…/

  • Apple Will Have No Choice…

    Chris, Great unbiased Venturebeat article on Apple. Thank you. Have a few thoughts to share (and curious if you have any feedback). As someone intimately familiar with the Post-Bill-Gates internal consequences at Microsoft, I see all the same behaviors at Apple, and I suspect we will see the same ‘lost decade’ of results. The difference is, Apple does not benefit from the network effect of entrenched products as did Microsoft, and Apple’s fall will be more rapid and their time to adapt much shorter. Over the past six years I’ve suggested that Apple will continue to bet on the consumer and fail – because (a)the accumulated media of the past century is now widely distributed, and (b) the touch-screen revolution that propelled Apple’s iPhone revenues is widely distributed, and (c) everyone in the world is researching the verbal-AI revolution since they’re aware that’s the next interface hurdle, and (d) the Bauhaus design ethic is firmly entrenched worldwide. And so there are no ‘failures of engineering and design’ among device manufacturers that Apple can compensate for, and use to obtain large consumer market share as both Apple and Microsoft had done during their evolutions. We tend to think of Apple and Microsoft as innovators, but they were merely consumer commoditizers of existing technologies during an era of pent up demand. This condition no longer exists in the world – just the opposite. Industrial design for consumer users has been adopted everywhere in the mainstream. So, as far as I can see, Apple has no choice of means of maintaining share price other than pivoting to business and industry, and displacing Microsoft – who, for cultural reasons, is the software equivalent of IBM/DEC/WANG in the industrial space, and Motorola/Nokia in the mobile phone space. Yet as (a) the merger of iOS and Mac OS groups (another mistake we saw Microsoft make in the pursuit of false operating system efficiencies) and as (b) the abandonment of the power-user market with the new ‘Mac Air’ rebranded as ‘Mac Pro’ and the termination of the mac pro line (c) the abandonment of network/backup devices (d) the continuous abandonment of the professional market (video editing), (e) the abandonment of the ‘maintainable’ mac server hardware (f) the abandonment of the mac server software community (g) the failure of Apple to produce competitive cloud services — all of which indicate Apple is either gambling on an other miracle-research-and-development effort (historically a terrible tragedy), Now, perhaps I’ve been studying business and industry transformation for too many decades, but it would seem far more prudent to maintain a portfolio and CREATE a network effect as a resistance to unpredictable innovation by a wildcard competitor, and to continue the trend of making industrial engineering innovations usable by consumers and power users, than it would be to continue to put all one’s eggs in a consumer basket when consumers are fickle and industry allows you to create an entrenched revenue stream. Microsoft repeatedly pursued false efficiency instead of creating separate units that pursued the interests of different users. And when they did so they still caused havoc: attempting to move users to the xbox platform instead of preserving the ‘elite’ gamer on the PC and the ‘casual’ gamer on the xbox. There are no efficiencies. There are only lost opportunities. Microsoft also abandoned their evangelists, abandoned their dominance as an application platform, and they are currently in the process of abandoning the .net stack that they tried to use to create a walled garden. And on a broader horizon, given the influence the ‘new age’ companies have on the stock market and as a consequence the economy (FB/email-fax, Google/YellowPages, Apple/AT&T-Communications) we are living in the most fragile economy since the end of the roaring twenties. Why? Because quite a few of us know how to displace Facebook, google, apple and Microsoft. And of those only Microsoft retains a durable network effect. And the only company currently capable of eroding the Microsoft network effect is Apple – because their products are simply better in every regard. The only think preventing Apple from displacing Microsoft’s revenues is the acquisition of and incorporation of a virtualization product and thereby achieving for Apple with Microsoft achieved because of IBM/DEC. THE SKYSCRAPER THEORY OF ECONOMICS Just as a bit of humor: there is a correlation between the launch of a tallest building and a market crash. Meaning that any economic conditions allowing for a new tallest building are indicators of an economy that will bust. I recognize the same effect in Apple’s spaceship office. The fact that anyone would do that, is an indicator of a bubble that will bust. APPLE REDIRECTION I suppose that the function of those of us who are students and teachers of business cycles can ‘help’ Apple by writing about it quite a bit. And pushing ideas into the public discourse that are culturally suppressed internally. But I suspect that the damage that will be done to Apple by the first five years post-Steve will be so significant that (like Microsoft) it may not be possible to correct it. Company cultures function analogously to an instruction set, and companies can only calculate what instructions are culturally available. Apple (like google and FB) have cultures (as did MSFT) that enshrine values that gave rise to them and were mythical at the time – and are now simply false. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine. obrien@venturebeat.com http://venturebeat.com/…/apple-survived-a-horrible-2016-an…/

  • NO ARISTOCRACY OF EVERYONE, NOR SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT FOR EVERYONE. I think we need

    NO ARISTOCRACY OF EVERYONE, NOR SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT FOR EVERYONE.

    I think we need to give up on the hope that all people can be taught to think as we call ‘scientifically’ for the simple reason that as we dip below 105, the challenge becomes insurmountable.

    If we had the IQ of every person quoted or tested I think we would tend to have a much clearer view of ‘what people think’.

    We definitely have a spectrum that starts with neuroticism, progresses through paranoia, graduates to conspiracy theory, and matures in to schizophrenia – and its not an insignificant portion of the population.

    We definitely have a spectrum that starts with sensitive, progresses through solipsism, and matures into solipsistic paranoia.

    We definitely have a spectrum from needy, to extroversion, to balance, to introversion, to disconnected/withdrawn.

    These three traits TEND to run in families and are only mediated by familial cohesion (indoctrination).

    When I see quotes like this article, what I see is the “I am average” fallacy. If we had IQ markers along with our opinions then it would be a lot harder for pseudo-academics, and pseudo-intellectuals, to use SUGGESTION to deceive us by appealing to “i am average” or ‘most people are like me’.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-12-19 12:20:00 UTC

  • THE ONLY MEANS OF CONSTRUCTING THE SEQUENCE: SOVEREIGNTY, LIBERTY, FREEDOM, AND

    THE ONLY MEANS OF CONSTRUCTING THE SEQUENCE: SOVEREIGNTY, LIBERTY, FREEDOM, AND SUBSIDY

    Sovereignty can exist if and only if we reciprocally agree to insure one another against impositions of costs upon our property-in-toto by non-substitutable martial service against outgroups and deference to resolving our ingroup differences by courts of natural law of non imposition.

    If we do so, then Sovereignty exists for the ruling class, liberty is available to the middle class, freedom to the working class, and subsidy to the dependent class by virtue of that rule of law. And as a consequence of the rule of law between individuals, mates, and classes, markets can be constructed for the production of reproduction; goods services and information; commons; and rule.

    There is only one source of Sovereignty, Liberty, Freedom, and Subsidy: the organized application of violence to insure one another against impositions of costs, by a combination of martial service, and the use of Common, Judge Discovered, Natural Law of non imposition, under universal standing and universal application, before a jury of our peers, the number of which reflects the scale of the violation.

    We had it right all along – and we blew it with democracy, pseudoscientific anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics and politics.

    Thankfully we can easily fix it.

    Sovereignty(benefit) and Heroism (payment)

    Common, Judge Discovered, Natural Law of non imposition.

    Nomocracy, jury, universal standing and applicability.

    And Markets in Everything.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2016-12-13 11:52:00 UTC

  • ONLY HUMANS CAN MAKE TRUTH CLAIMS. We cannot know the truth proper (the most par

    ONLY HUMANS CAN MAKE TRUTH CLAIMS.

    We cannot know the truth proper (the most parsimonious statement possible by humans if possessed of perfect information) even if we speak it. We can only know that we do not speak in error, bias, wishful thinking, or deceit.

    If we perform due diligences (proofs of survival) in an attempt to falsify our statements, then we demonstrate that 1) we speak as truthfully as humanly possible in the moment, 2) we speak morally, and if we err will not be judged harshly by our peers, 3) and we progress toward the truth even if we later discover that we err.

    The verb to-be is a pleasant shortcut, but our primary source of overconfidence in our speech. And if we eliminate the verb to-be then we cannot say ‘this phrase is true’. We can only say “I promise I speak truthfully when I say this phrase.”

    We are often confused by conflating honesty, proof, analytic truth, truthfulness, and ‘truth’ proper.

    But only humans can make truth claims. We speak truthfully or not. we testify to the truthfulness of symbols and measures. Symbols and measures cannot promise so they cannot speak truthfully. Only their authors can.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-12-11 11:12:00 UTC

  • The alt-right consider being called Nazis a badge of honor. 1) You cannot shame

    The alt-right consider being called Nazis a badge of honor.

    1) You cannot shame them. If you resort to rallying and shaming they consider you to have demonstrated their point: for the ‘new right’ world view, the left speaks nothing but error, bias, pseudoscience and lies and rallies and shames, to cover error, bias, pseudoscience and lies, in order to obtain by force of government that which cannot be obtained by voluntary cooperation.

    2) They counter rallying and shaming with ridicule. (Green frogs, Memes, Trolling, etc). And in some cases they have adopted the left’s exploitation of and use of falsehoods.

    3) They are adopting the digital age’s equivalent of the left’s community organizing. And it is working.

    4) So, just as the islamic fundamentalists have adopted the techniques of the Marxists, the new right has adopted the techniques of the Marxists. In other words, they are seeking to use the techniques invented by the left to create a revolution where the left failed, and instead, achieved through incrementalism in law, incrementalism in education, and incrementalism in immigration.

    My expectation is that they will continue this cycle, since the status quo always presents an easy target of criticism.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-12-11 10:28:00 UTC

  • Moral Accounting vs General Moral Rules

    MORAL ACCOUNTING IN FACT VS MORAL GENERAL RULES OF APPROXIMATION AND GUESSWORK Curt Doolittle It’s hard to believe but truth is enough. There is certainly room for a new fundamentalism. Natural Law fundamentalism. A violent expansionist fundamentalism more aggressive than islam. John Dow —“I dont see imperialist war as economically viable or morally just. The argument that we should protect what we have I agree with, and I think we can find mutual respect with other nations if we respect their autonomy…..”— Curt Doolittle Expansion has been, throughout history, the only means of limiting the imposition of costs permanently. In other words, it is the only means of cheaply solving a cost that will only increase. John Dow —“Our governments and corporations have economic and political hegemony. Why use the military when you can use trade agreements and the CIA? Surely that is more cost effective? The rest of the world needs access to our consumers, technology and capital. We are in a very strong bargaining position.”— Curt Doolittle Why are you afraid of TRUTH? Violence is TRUE. Wars of conquest are PROFITABLE. Complete defeat ends a threat rather than constantly paying to keep it at bay Forcibly converting a group from a low trust to higher trust polity is moral. So it is more moral, cheaper, more permanent, and more honest to conquer, subject to rule of law, to defend yourself through conquest whenever you can. Chinese history in a nutshell. (The world does not need access to our consumers, it needs access to our technology and rule of law) John Dow —“Your argument is logical and rather compelling. I agree the world needs access to our technology and our system has benefitted many nations we (anglo-saxons) have defeated considerably.. Japan, Korea (partially), India and the Phillipines are the best examples of the top of my head. I’m not sure if all out wars of conquest is exclusively required however. We have nukes and clandestine prowess, surely we can infiltrate other nations and bend them to our will without requiring all out war (the US has done this all over the world since WW2, unfortunately they have cared only about corporate profit and have abandoned the white man’s burden) Also, how do you suppose we conquer India, Pakistan or China (or potentially Iran and North Korea) on account of their nuclear capabilities? Surely it is impossible?”— Curt Doolittle Now, just a form of self-testing, what can you reduce the general criticism —“logical but not compelling”—? Because AFAIK, what that reduces to is “true but not preferable”. Where ‘preferable’ refers to ‘personal’. By which you mean ‘to you’. So it’s true but you don’t like it. Secondly, black or what fallacy. just because you Can conquer a hostile islam, does not mean we need to conquer a divergent but not hostile china. You are engaging in the (religious) form of argument we call ‘general rules’ by applying them (illogically) to specific instances. Rather than applying logical and scientific analysis to provide decidability in specific cases. That’s analogous to interpersonal racism and political universalism: confusing the properties of a class with those of an individual, or those of an individual with those of the class. In other words, you’re speaking illogically in an attempt to justify a prior not discover the truth. So, rather than rely upon a general rule, lets just measure the COSTS, and PRICE THE RISK, of acting and not acting. The question isn’t one of general rules, but of pricing of cost and risk. Which is what I”m advocating. MORAL ACCOUNTING IN FACT VS MORAL GENERAL RULES OF APPROXIMATION AND GUESSWORK