Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • SMALL THINGS MATTER We make many hundreds if not thousands of decisions every da

    SMALL THINGS MATTER

    We make many hundreds if not thousands of decisions every day, and the cumulative effect of those many small decisions is usually more influential than the effect of our larger decisions.

    this is the central problem with running increasingly large organizations: providing a means of decidability for the many little decisions that people make every day.

    In Good To Great, the author reduces this problem to having a ‘strategy’ that is very simple. It provides a method of decidability to everyone in the company so that many zillions of little decisions accumulate in the production of the organizations competitive strategy in the market.

    Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of our decisions are made in theoretical rather than empirical context. In particular, those that require we influence others (customers and co workers). This influence requires local knowlege that is not really open to generalization.

    One of the cool features of software is that if you organize your business process into workflows you can control a lot of those small decisions.

    The opposite problem occurs when the local phenomenon (the interpersonal actions) more more significant in influencing a decision by peer, manager or customer than are the facts.

    Why? because the marginal difference between suppliers (merchants) forces prices to neurality, leaving non-price matters the reason for decisions. Ergo, talent and customer service and knowledge of particular businesses tends to be more influential in business relations and product signaling value more influential in consumer relations.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-05-13 06:17:00 UTC

  • EASTERN EUROPE AS GHETTO: PERMISSION NOT LIBERTY (from elsewhere) I like Tucker

    EASTERN EUROPE AS GHETTO: PERMISSION NOT LIBERTY

    (from elsewhere)

    I like Tucker Personally. But (a) these guys are not exactly serious intellectuals – libertarians tend not to be. And (b) he is trying to find an income stream and that’s difficult in libertarianism other than selling complaints (not solutions). I have a hard time understanding why Lew moves so slowly when the science and the evidence (and my arguments) have pretty much eliminated the Cosmopolitan libertinism of the diasporic people being applied to land holding capital creating warrior aristocracy that DOES produce liberty.

    I mean, I live here in Eastern Europe where their ideology comes from. And it’s just like the Icelandic or Wild West fallacies: you have freedom only because there are no near competitors AND your territory is ruled and owed by a major power that merely wants some tribute for defending it.

    In most cases, government is lax in frontiers for the simple reason that they want you to bear all the costs of living there, and if you’re there it gives them moral authority to stop others from conquering and possessing the territory without a fight.

    Eastern Europe was a ghetto. Just a very big, very poor one. A polish, a lithuanian, an austrian, and a russian ghetto. That’s all it ever was.

    Ergo ghetto ethics only apply in the ghetto.

    You might notice that the Crusoe’s Island arguments use the sea as the walls of the ghetto.

    But in real life, in reality, ghettos exist by permission. Ergo. One does not have liberty in a ghetto one merely has permission. Crusoe lives at the will of the sea just as ghettos live at the will of the ruling state.

    ROTHBARDIANISM IS DEAD

    There is only one source of liberty: the point of a knife, the tip of a spear, the shaft of an arrow, the barrel of a rifle, the shells of a gun, the velocity of a bomb.

    Liberty is constructed through violence and violence alone. All else is but permission.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-05-11 05:28:00 UTC

  • I think once you understand what the Germans are doing the entire program is lit

    I think once you understand what the Germans are doing the entire program is little different from Christian mysticism.

    If we take each enlightenment culture and compare them we see that each attempts to employ a different argumentative technique.

    Of the different cultures, the most successful was the Cosmopolitan use of suggestion and pseudoscience combined with new media ( propaganda).

    Furthermore that each culture kept the form of media and reasoning that they employed when they reacted to the enlightenment.

    British moral. Smith/Hume.

    American legal. Jefferson.

    German literary. Kant.

    Cosmopolitan pseudoscientific. Freud/Marx/Boaz/cantor.

    The most successful and influential author was Keynes who took Marx’s pseudoscience and adapted it to mathematics.

    Keynes remains the most influential thinker of the 20th century.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-05-07 00:35:00 UTC

  • On Gossip and Shunning

    by Vivek UpadhyayGOSSIP Gossip is a non-correspondent, warranty-free means of enhancing personal status through deploying and extrapolating upon selective information about the person being gossiped about. Through use of loaded statements, jokes, rash impressionistic judgments, etc. in a shared consensus often exhibiting “shared information bias” despite the demonstrable costs of this error, gossipers seek to obtain a non-correspondent and parasitic discount on interpersonal status relative to a subject gossiped about, in part, by circumventing the high cognitive requirements of engaging in constructive criticism (rather than loaded critique) which involves a truthful gauging of the gossip subject’s incentives to have said or done supposedly cost-imposing and investment worthiness-undermining things. Gossip also circumvents the fully correspondent comparison of interpersonal track records of transparently conducted, measurable, merit-based, productive and value-adding achievements and attempts thereof (which comprise some rudiments of a bottom line determining whether a person is distinctly worth investing in to complete a designated task or succession of tasks relative to other candidates in his/her task competitor pool). Gossip imposes gratuitous costs in (at least) two forms: i) via avoiding truthful, fully correspondent conversational language in the gossiping interlocutors conversations, thereby polluting the informational commons within their interpersonal dealings, which when exported elsewhere gradually expands outside of the scope of their interactions to lower interpersonal trust through producing gratuitous trust-establishing mechanisms in social interactions between interlocutors whose interpersonal economic velocity becomes susceptible to needless compromise, and ii) via rallying and shaming: eventually confronting the person gossiped about with loaded statements and questions instead of first seeking the incentives-based context of the gossiped about person’s purportedly (but not yet demonstrably) costly or varied capital investment-disincentivizing speech and actions. _____ SHUNNING (vaguely, an advice post – not written as carefully, just a provisional post in its imperfect form) Shunning is a cost-imposing behavior which fails to give a fully informed accounting of why one shuns the shunned. It imposes conduct boundaries upon the shunned within which the shunned must operate to maintain relations; these boundaries are non-correspondent transaction terms upon the shunned which reinforce the shunner’s loaded, non-correspondent interpretation of events (even if in shared consensus with another). What a shunner administers an unexplained test delivered without warranty that this test is even worth taking: ‘behave and speak as I want or I will deprive you of affection, instruction, resources, and the investment of other forms of capital’. It fails to register the behavioral and speech incentives of the shunned and thereby compromises the shunner’s reality-testing in favor of his/her intuited, discounted means to pressure the shunned into appeasing to the shunner’s preferences; preferences which are demonstrably or intuitively costly for the shunned). If someone shuns you, question their value in your life before you consider even asking for the context of their shunning. They provide nothing of unique value that you couldn’t get elsewhere at a mutually understood (comparable) discount between yourself and your non-shunning interlocutor? You confirm that through the non-intuitive convenience of their shunning, you incidentally gain peace and more capital with which to love and produce for those kin and kith in your trust, who do not demonstrate the imposition of such costs as shunning upon you? You lose nothing by leaving them *after* having tried to establish a non-loaded context-seeking for their shunning — if they are even worth *that* to begin with — to no avail, perhaps while receiving an accountability-avoiding, evasive answer? Yes? Then leave them while sharing that these newfound value additions must continually incentivize your non-interaction with them. After clarifying this simply leave them to their own devices. Leave them without any animosity. Make sure that if it’s ever in your interests to rekindle dealings with them, you can do so without having the stain of a cost-imposing attack — that is, a critique not based on a criticism of someone’s alterable choices and/or virtues — inject gratuitous costs into your attempts to re-establish a connection in which the both of you can either exclusively add value to the lives of one another, according to voluntary and mutually established communicative terms which do not impose costs upon your family and friends, or choose to simply not interact in a given instance.

  • On Gossip and Shunning

    by Vivek UpadhyayGOSSIP Gossip is a non-correspondent, warranty-free means of enhancing personal status through deploying and extrapolating upon selective information about the person being gossiped about. Through use of loaded statements, jokes, rash impressionistic judgments, etc. in a shared consensus often exhibiting “shared information bias” despite the demonstrable costs of this error, gossipers seek to obtain a non-correspondent and parasitic discount on interpersonal status relative to a subject gossiped about, in part, by circumventing the high cognitive requirements of engaging in constructive criticism (rather than loaded critique) which involves a truthful gauging of the gossip subject’s incentives to have said or done supposedly cost-imposing and investment worthiness-undermining things. Gossip also circumvents the fully correspondent comparison of interpersonal track records of transparently conducted, measurable, merit-based, productive and value-adding achievements and attempts thereof (which comprise some rudiments of a bottom line determining whether a person is distinctly worth investing in to complete a designated task or succession of tasks relative to other candidates in his/her task competitor pool). Gossip imposes gratuitous costs in (at least) two forms: i) via avoiding truthful, fully correspondent conversational language in the gossiping interlocutors conversations, thereby polluting the informational commons within their interpersonal dealings, which when exported elsewhere gradually expands outside of the scope of their interactions to lower interpersonal trust through producing gratuitous trust-establishing mechanisms in social interactions between interlocutors whose interpersonal economic velocity becomes susceptible to needless compromise, and ii) via rallying and shaming: eventually confronting the person gossiped about with loaded statements and questions instead of first seeking the incentives-based context of the gossiped about person’s purportedly (but not yet demonstrably) costly or varied capital investment-disincentivizing speech and actions. _____ SHUNNING (vaguely, an advice post – not written as carefully, just a provisional post in its imperfect form) Shunning is a cost-imposing behavior which fails to give a fully informed accounting of why one shuns the shunned. It imposes conduct boundaries upon the shunned within which the shunned must operate to maintain relations; these boundaries are non-correspondent transaction terms upon the shunned which reinforce the shunner’s loaded, non-correspondent interpretation of events (even if in shared consensus with another). What a shunner administers an unexplained test delivered without warranty that this test is even worth taking: ‘behave and speak as I want or I will deprive you of affection, instruction, resources, and the investment of other forms of capital’. It fails to register the behavioral and speech incentives of the shunned and thereby compromises the shunner’s reality-testing in favor of his/her intuited, discounted means to pressure the shunned into appeasing to the shunner’s preferences; preferences which are demonstrably or intuitively costly for the shunned). If someone shuns you, question their value in your life before you consider even asking for the context of their shunning. They provide nothing of unique value that you couldn’t get elsewhere at a mutually understood (comparable) discount between yourself and your non-shunning interlocutor? You confirm that through the non-intuitive convenience of their shunning, you incidentally gain peace and more capital with which to love and produce for those kin and kith in your trust, who do not demonstrate the imposition of such costs as shunning upon you? You lose nothing by leaving them *after* having tried to establish a non-loaded context-seeking for their shunning — if they are even worth *that* to begin with — to no avail, perhaps while receiving an accountability-avoiding, evasive answer? Yes? Then leave them while sharing that these newfound value additions must continually incentivize your non-interaction with them. After clarifying this simply leave them to their own devices. Leave them without any animosity. Make sure that if it’s ever in your interests to rekindle dealings with them, you can do so without having the stain of a cost-imposing attack — that is, a critique not based on a criticism of someone’s alterable choices and/or virtues — inject gratuitous costs into your attempts to re-establish a connection in which the both of you can either exclusively add value to the lives of one another, according to voluntary and mutually established communicative terms which do not impose costs upon your family and friends, or choose to simply not interact in a given instance.

  • ( You know, when most of us see something well designed we ‘notice it’ and feel

    ( You know, when most of us see something well designed we ‘notice it’ and feel ‘pleasure’ in it. But we tend to ignore what is not well designed. We accommodate it. But some of us (aspies and ocd’s) don’t ever accommodate the imperfect. It’s more that we feel relaxation at the perfect, not pleasure. Instead we feel the absence of displeasure. I look at everything, and I see what’s ‘wrong’ with it – meaning asymmetric or atonal or disordered.

    I look at the building next to me and I see that one of the windows is bricked in, and it ruins the aesthetic of an otherwise beautiful 19th century building. It bothers me that there are salmon curtains in the window of this other building. I notice that the lines of that car were a compromise not a solution. I notice that the brick joinery on the curb was done lazily. I notice facial asymmetries, walking, and body language patterns. And I notice all of it as constant unending stream. And worse I tend to see the whole history and future of these things at the same time as a rushing set of images. And yes it’s freaking annoying. But it’s also useful.

    This ‘seeing the bad’ makes me ‘look for the good’. And I usually find some good to compliment in almost everyone. But, despite seeing a world of imperfect things, I don’t find it ‘dishonest’ to say ‘I like this person’, or ‘he is a good person’, and at the same time say ‘he’s terribly stupid in this way’ or ‘he has very bad taste in this context’. Any more than I notice my own facial asymmetries, my own ‘stiff’ body language, my own weakness in the left side, my own stupidities in one way or another. I can love my dog, my friends, my family, my mate and still know their failings. I don’t see a contradiction in any of that. It just is what it is.

    What I have been told quite frequently here in Ukraine, is that it’s dishonest – lying – to seek the optimistic path even if I see all these negatives. And this is an interesting insight into the intuitionism and moralism of Ukrainians – and Russians – that we don’t experience in the west: we work with the good we have. We tolerate that which we can tolerate. We ignore what we can ignore. And we operate from an optimistic if not utopian set of judgements – or at least, some of us do. I certainly do. Because if I thought of or worried about the imperfections I would be incapable of action. Worse, if I was ‘honest’ in all that I SAW people would fucking hate me. lol. And neither they, nor I, would be better off. So, while germans are empirical, British are moral, and Americans are utopian, Ukrainians are intuitionistic, call themselves ‘honest’, and in fact, are not trustworthy whatsoever except to their closest friends. Russians are equally intuitionistic, but nihilistic, call themselves honest, and are only trustworthy if they have no other choice. And this is borne out in all the data on trustworthiness, language use in negotiations, and visible corruption.

    Hence we must humor people from other cultures because as intuitionistic they cannot be reasoned with. )

    Source date (UTC): 2016-05-05 08:22:00 UTC

  • Well, existentially, a “Number” CAN only refer to a “name”. That name can refer

    Well, existentially, a “Number” CAN only refer to a “name”. That name can refer to the base number set (in base ten, that’s 0-9), or it can refer to a positional number ( say, 12,345 ) or it can refer to a FUNCTION (say .9, 1/2, or the square root of 2, or any other non-reducible function.)

    So the only ‘numbers’ that can exist are the natural numbers. The rest of the so called ‘numbers’ must refer to functions (a sequence of operations).

    We can however, speak in terms of ‘meaning’ not ‘truth’. This is what mathematicians do. They speak in meaning. But we can translate ‘meaning’ into ‘truth’ (parsimonious existential necessity) for all mathematical statements. And as such, we can restate mathematics in truthful, existential, natural language.

    But this would be burdensome. Because the reason that mathematicians use ‘meaning’ is to make the best use of symbols to save both state, and the possible operations upon that state. In other words, just as we use analogies (meaning) to simplify our effort at communication, mathematicians use symbols to simplify the difficulty in saving and transforming ratios.

    Now, once we embark upon pragmatism (analogy, meaning) and not names (names) we get into the problem error, conflation, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, and deceit.

    But as long as we can still translate meaning into truthfulness we can test our statements (series of symbols) against error conflation, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion and deceit. But then if we communicate by meaning, one either takes responsibility for the recipient’s interpretation, or one is exporting the cost of testing our statements to the other parties.

    In other words, if we take a discount on communication, we force the cost of falsification upon others. Which may be beneficial for both sides. On the other hand, if one commits error, conflation, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion or deceit, then how do we know whether which of those that one engaged in?

    Especially when many thinkers have seeded humanity with vast costly falsehoods by speaking meaningfully but not truthfully.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-05-04 14:04:00 UTC

  • I mean. I was involved in every kind of prank imaginable. Pranks are a great sub

    I mean. I was involved in every kind of prank imaginable. Pranks are a great substitute for raiding the tribes on the other side of the valley. As long as they are witty, unexpected, and don’t cause (serious) damage, pranks are a fantastic outlet, they are entertaining, and they keep you out of real trouble. I mean, if I listed all of the pranks I could remember … it would take a long, long long, time.

    Yeah. some of them were a bit dangerous. And some were a tad destructive. And I am sure most were somewhat annoying. But I mean…. it was awesome.

    1) Switching ALL the political signs in a west-hartford neighborhood. I mean ALL of them. Personal favorite. Every year.

    2) Garbage-can bowling.

    3) Mailbox baseball.

    4) Snowballs at cars and trucks – especially police cars – I pity Connecticut police officers. They were mere pawns for our entertainment.

    5) Lighting a stream gasoline across the road.

    6) Scotch tape across the road between signs (favorite)

    7) Switching hubcaps between cars in the same driveway.

    8) Every imaginable amount of trouble you can get into with fireworks

    9) Shooting out Streetlights with rocks or wrist-rockets.

    10) Hanging signs upside down. Switching Signs.

    11) Moving under-construction signs, road blocks etc in some confusing arrangement.

    12) Collecting traffic cones and then making ‘crop circles’ with them somewhere unexpected.

    13) Drawing chalk-outlines of ‘dead’-people in random places.

    14) Moving an entire fence. (that was so fun I still can’t believe we did it).

    15) Hanging whatever strange thing was possible from the school flag pole.

    16) Stacking bales of hay in the middle of main street.

    17) Every imaginable bit of trouble you could get into with model rocketry.

    18) Trying to ‘spank’ girls while driving by in a car, hanging out the window. (never succeeding. that would be uncool).

    19) Stuffing old clothes as a dummy and throwing it out of the car.

    20) (oops…. Accidentally lighting the biggest brush fire in the city’s history…)

    21) Minibike jousting.

    22) On bikes: Snowball or insult Hit and run on the older boys. (omg. so awesome.)

    23) I met my girlfriend Anna Marie by just walking up to her and grabbing her backside. We dated for the whole summer. I mean, you just can’t do this stuff any more.

    You get the idea. In other words. Celebrating life. 🙂

    Sorry but it was waaaaay better than video games, getting high, or drinking.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-05-04 07:52:00 UTC

  • British vs American vs German Cultural Rules

    [L]eft the video on, and ended up listening to Brits debate policy all night, and it is very clear that there is a difference between the moral structure of British argument and the LEGAL structure of american argument. In my dreams I kept arguing with people about the use of nonsense words. There is also a very great difference between the British fascination with procedure and moral righteousness defending it, and american fascination with law, and punishment for transgressions. Again, this illustrates the great difference between British abstract moral, American articulate legal, and German duty/empirical Cultures. A procedural person always seeks a process even though people do not follow those processes they follow rational incentives. An american seeks to understand incentives so that we produce the right rewards and punishments. Germans TRAIN YOU UNEQUIVOCALLY to know your duty and practice it, and to be intolerant of those who don’t. I won’t get into what jewish philosophy says, but it is translatable to “Whatever you can get someone else to agree to – damn the consequences or externalities.”

  • British vs American vs German Cultural Rules

    [L]eft the video on, and ended up listening to Brits debate policy all night, and it is very clear that there is a difference between the moral structure of British argument and the LEGAL structure of american argument. In my dreams I kept arguing with people about the use of nonsense words. There is also a very great difference between the British fascination with procedure and moral righteousness defending it, and american fascination with law, and punishment for transgressions. Again, this illustrates the great difference between British abstract moral, American articulate legal, and German duty/empirical Cultures. A procedural person always seeks a process even though people do not follow those processes they follow rational incentives. An american seeks to understand incentives so that we produce the right rewards and punishments. Germans TRAIN YOU UNEQUIVOCALLY to know your duty and practice it, and to be intolerant of those who don’t. I won’t get into what jewish philosophy says, but it is translatable to “Whatever you can get someone else to agree to – damn the consequences or externalities.”