Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • Running with Hayekian Scissors

    PRIVILEGE (DISCOUNTS ON OPPORTUNITY COSTS) AS INFORMATION

    —Hayek’s point about distributed knowledge applies to more than just economic issues. It also applies to social issues.—- 

    RE: http://ow.ly/Ln3uF
    [W]hile, as I’ve written before, I agree with the general argument that women sense some things and men others (and progressives, libertarians and conservatives different things as well) I have a     more complete theory of the inter-temporal division of perception, cognition, knowledge and labor (and one that eliminates equality, and monopoly decision making), there is a minor error in the logic of the first paragraph, and that is that it is irrelevant that we understand others – it is only relevant that we conduct exchanges with them.

    Because their reaction to their senses are not accurate or ‘true’ in any meaningful sense other than as a reflection of the individual’s reproductive strategy – any more than any of the rest of our senses are all that accurate – they themselves are fragments.

    This single insight is the principle cause of why democracy does not work, and the market does. The market allows us to cooperate on multitudinous means even if on disparate ends, with our successes and failures informing both us and others.

    Whereas a monopoly government prevents us from learning anything of value, and the institutionalization of foolish policy by unexpriable law, and the accretion of bureaucratic self interests, prevents adaptation outside of catastrophic chains of failure.

    In fact, monopoly government (monopoly production of commons by majority rule) promotes failure because it is precisely failed policy that permits the greatest rent seeking for all involved.

    It is not that we should prohibit government (as Hayek warns) but that we should prohibit monopoly government. It is not that we should prevent taxation, it is that we should allocate our dividends from the commons we live in to the production of commons we prefer, and not to commons we do not.

    As, furthermore, so called ‘privilege’ is precious information. It is information that informs you whose behavior you should imitate in order to gain discounts on opportunity costs. Privilege is as necessary to the human information system as is status, property rights, rule of law, money and interest.

    Privilege, if it exists, is an inter-temporal store of value that informs others as to the behaviors that they should imitate in order to obtain a discount on opportunities. Manners and language are advertisements for one’s worthiness to engage in increasingly complex inter-temporal risks and returns.

    Those who accumulate such behaviors obtain opportunity at the lowest discounts. Those that fail to adapt, and ask others to ’empathize’ with them, are seeking discounts without bearing the cost of adaptation.

    In other words, they’re free riders participating in an act of fraud.

    –“I don’t see how we can maximize our own exchanges in a given society if we don’t understand anyone in said society.”–



    Of course.

    I think you are caught up on a bit of language, and overlooking the epistemological argument I am making about the difference between seeking to impose a monopoly by law and justifying it, and seeking to develop many voluntary contracts while preventing theft.

    We only learn the truth of anyone’s opinions by what they are willing to exchange. In other words, demonstrated preferences are truthful but articulated preferences are merely negotiating positions.

    Understanding is a means of negotiating, not a means of establishing a monopoly definition of ‘good’ or ‘right’.     Source: Skye Stewart – “Hayek’s point about distributed knowledge applies…

  • YES, MY POINT OF VIEW (MY VALUES) ARE WESTERN: SCIENTIFIC. BUT THAT IMPLIES BIAS

    YES, MY POINT OF VIEW (MY VALUES) ARE WESTERN: SCIENTIFIC. BUT THAT IMPLIES BIAS AND RELATIVITY NOT TRUTH. SO WHY AM I SO INTERESTED IN TRUTH?

    (h/t Karl )

    My point of view *IS* western; meaning: scientific. That is correct.

    Operations named can indeed be used as narrative for meaning. That is correct. Although that says nothing about the truth of the meaning inferred from the operations..

    Other cultures do not use rule of law, as such do not require logic in decision making. Yet liberty is only logically possible under rule of law. Other cultures don’t desire liberty. They desire consumption (as do most people in our culture as well). At present, liberty is a cultural preference of aristocratic civilization. But that just means that aristocratic civilization is scientific in function.

    I don’t generally make moral arguments except for ‘fun’ – I make AMORAL arguments. That’s the beauty of this logic: it’s not loaded. So, if one seeks to use this logic to create any possible political order, one can do so. But one need not (and cannot) resort to deception to do it.

    What isn’t obvious is that if you use this logic you can create non-monopoly social orders in a heterogeneous polity assuming that the rulers (monarchy) persists in maintaining rule of law, common organic law, property en toto, decide-able by the requirement for fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchange.

    Unlike unlimited free-associationists (advocates of the heroism of science) I am not interested in furthering free association – I don’t think it can be furthered. I’m only interested in preventing bias, propaganda and deceit. I am not even that concerned with error.

    Just as christianity was used to destroy western religion and thought, pseudoscience as used to destroy western law and thought.

    Rule of law is our religion. Virtue is our religion. Nature is our religion. Commons are the produce of our religion. And truth is our most precious commons.

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-26 03:54:00 UTC

  • MY PURPOSE IN REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECON: SCIENCE (from elsewhere) Peter, Thanks fo

    MY PURPOSE IN REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECON: SCIENCE

    (from elsewhere)

    Peter,

    Thanks for the response. Sorry this is long, but it takes what it takes.

    —“Read one way….read another way”—

    Well of course. But then, that is the difference between analytic (empirical criticism) and continental (rational justification). Or more precisely, that’s the difference between science and philosophy.

    But it is not just a binary choice. I can read it a third way: that Mises was a member of the cosmopolitan enlightenment and subject to the category errors of that movement. Just as anglos, french and germans were subject to the errors of their enlightenments: the attempt to universalize local competitive group strategies into general moral rules. That is the goal of each of the enlightenment movements: Anglo island, French imperial, German Territorial, and Jewish diasporic strategies expressed as rational rather than mythological arguments.

    I think it’ might help to understand the purpose for my criticism:

    (1) It’s necessary to the defeat of the broader problem of cosmopolitan pseudoscience, anglo neo-puritanism, postmodern propagandism, and less so, german idealism – in all disciplines.

    (2) It’s necessary to undermine the libertarian problem-children: Rothbardians, who promote psudosicence, objective immorality, pseudorationalism, and justificationism. (People who I am very proud to have done substantial damage to over the past year – and will continue to.)

    3) It’s necessary to restate western liberty in scientific rather than rational terms in order to save the rule of law, and with it, liberty.

    So if I am hard on Mises, it’s because of these three reasons. I have to be. Because without institutionaliing a means of ending deceit, where loading, framing, overloading via propaganda and pseudoscience are principle tools of coercion, there is no possible means of reconstructing liberty.

    I am such an admirer of yours because you are a good and moral man; a great communicator; arguably one of the great teachers in the field; but your incentives as such are sympathetic and explicative, not corrective. Mine are corrective and revolutionary: the problem of pseudoscience (which has a very precise meaning) in economics, which Romer has tried to bring to the forefront, is central to the perceived Heterodoxy of Austrian economics (or more correctly “Moral Economics”).

    Mises was right in this regard: if any economic statement cannot be constructed through subjectively testable operations (human judgements in response to available information) then no proof has been demonstrated. A proof is not confirmation, it is merely a criticism. A means of falsification. If a statement survives a proof, then it is at least existentially possible.

    If it took very smart people in mathematics to create the foundations of mathematics, it will take very smart people in economics to create the foundations of economics – because the well is poisoned. Mises was very close, but for cultural reasons endemic to his era, he failed.

    This is a very complex problem, or someone else would have solved it by now. I am just lucky to live in the internet era, and have had the luxury of studying all of the disciplines, and stumbling upon Mises by accident via Hoppe’s inverted but still brilliant application of economic language to moral argument. All his other errors aside, his pedantic rigor was the first application of operational analysis using property and voluntary exchange to all of social science.

    The operational revolution failed: Minsky in Computer Science, Mises in economics, Bridgman in physics, Brouwer in Math, Popper in Philosophy.

    Einstein demonstrated the problem (frame) and instigated both Brouwer and Bridgman: no premises are certain. None.

    Economics can be the study of objective morality or of objective immorality. At present, the fallacy of majority rule provides incentive to justify objectively immoral economics, and to sideline as heterodox moral economics.

    So saving the west, saving rule of law, saving economics, saving philosophy, saving western truth, and correcting the century of pseudoscience, are all identical problems: completing the minimum set of warranties of due diligence necessary to testify that one has eliminated imaginary content, error, bias, and deceit.

    Austrian economics and conservative social mores are empirical: when the evidence forces change in behavior, then norms and law should reflect it – not before. This is an empirical and anti-hubristic philosophy. But Austrian econ and Conservative social philosophy are not yet scientific: meaning not yet truthfully stated and warrantied.

    That is what I am trying to accomplish (and think I have.)

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-24 03:45:00 UTC

  • SOME CULTURES SOLVE THE SOCIAL PROBLEM WTH MARRIAGE AND THE LONG TERM PROBLEM OF

    http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14419.htmlHOW SOME CULTURES SOLVE THE SOCIAL PROBLEM WTH MARRIAGE AND THE LONG TERM PROBLEM OF DYSGENIA – AND HOW OTHER CULTURES DON’T

    (profound) (#hbd)(marriage)

    Marriage (monogamy and pairing off), is not an evolutionary advantage unless at the same time we limit the reproduction of the lower classes (which at this point begins at 95, but I think will soon more visibly occur at 105 or so. ) So the reason for the rapid rates of western evolutionary progress despite their distance from the source of civilization, is (a) selection by attraction / women’s liberty (b)manorialism – which delays reproduction, increases the skills of women, and suppressed the lower class reproduction. Warmer climates must rely upon war and disease for selection, and the competition between so many eurasiatic tribes creates incentives for inbreeding. What it DOES select for is aggression.

    So marriage is a good thing, iff and only iff, it is accompanied by reproductive suppression of the lower classes, and penalties for the upper classes for not reproducing. Every other possible scenario is dysgenic.

    We don’t need to engage in evil medicine. We can simply redistribute only to those with one child who cannot produce, and heavily tax those who produce but do not reproduce. In four generations – one century – your civilization dramatically increases its potential far more than any other technological or social advantage.

    —-Here we test this theory experimentally by comparing whether populations with histories of strong versus weak sexual selection purge mutation load and resist extinction differently…..Lineages from populations that had previously experienced strong sexual selection were resilient to extinction and maintained fitness under inbreeding, with some families continuing to survive after 20 generations of sib × sib mating. By contrast, lineages derived from populations that experienced weak or non-existent sexual selection showed rapid fitness declines under inbreeding, and all were extinct after generation 10.—-

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-20 04:15:00 UTC

  • Using Income as a Measure Is a Pseudoscientific Distraction

    [T]he question is better served by how we spend our time, what we consume, and what we worry about, than any measure of income. Income is a poor proxy for measuring inter-temporal changes in consumption, and is only a useful measure of temporal asymmetry. What is for example, the cost of not fearing the soviet union, the change in crime in Boston and new York?

    Conversely, what is the cost of increase in political friction due to immigration? What is the cost of the conflict over Obamacare? What is the cost of maintaining the post-war empire (probably neutral). What is the cost of outsourcing? What is the cost of failing to reform education? Income is the least important of these measures. And that is precisely why it’s the topic of conversation: because it is the least important but the most emotionally loaded topic. It is an elaborate pseudoscientific distraction for purely political purposes.

  • Using Income as a Measure Is a Pseudoscientific Distraction

    [T]he question is better served by how we spend our time, what we consume, and what we worry about, than any measure of income. Income is a poor proxy for measuring inter-temporal changes in consumption, and is only a useful measure of temporal asymmetry. What is for example, the cost of not fearing the soviet union, the change in crime in Boston and new York?

    Conversely, what is the cost of increase in political friction due to immigration? What is the cost of the conflict over Obamacare? What is the cost of maintaining the post-war empire (probably neutral). What is the cost of outsourcing? What is the cost of failing to reform education? Income is the least important of these measures. And that is precisely why it’s the topic of conversation: because it is the least important but the most emotionally loaded topic. It is an elaborate pseudoscientific distraction for purely political purposes.

  • Territorial, Institutional, Normative,  and Technological Competitive Value

    (profound) [I]’ve been arguing for two decades that we have had 500 years of ‘unusual’ as we spread the voluntary organization of production around the world (often by force), and conquered and exploited two new continents. And that what we see is the new normal. There aren’t enough asymmetries to exploit any longer to maintain the prior asymmetry of wealth.

    Or rather, normative asymmetries (institutions) are terribly productive and last for generations if maintained, territorial asymmetries are almost as productive, and can last for generations if trade routes are maintained, while technological asymmetries are decreasingly durable. Or as technologists tend to say: “technology is not a competitive advantage” because it is so easily neutralized. Conversely, territorial, trade route, and normative asymmetries produce for the long run. Hence my (and Taleb’s) concern about fragility. And my concern that the progressive fantasy of technology as savior, and norm as inhibitor is backwards.

    Source: Curt Doolittle

  • To Nassim Taleb re: A Decline in Violence is Not a Decline in Predation – But A Shift.

    [N]assim (re: violence) I’d like to add an economist’s point of view: that the use of the term ‘violence’ is obscurant. (In my lexicon that is equivalent to pseudoscientific). Humans engage in a vast spectrum of parasitism whenever possible, and in production only when easy or necessary. Parasitism can be performed by violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by obscurantism, imposed cost by indirection, free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, conspiracy to extort, by normative conversion, by immigration, asymmetric reproduction, conquest, and genocide. Conversely, mutually beneficial, productive, warrantied, fully informed, cooperation by voluntary exchange is, by contrast, a very narrow field of human activity in a vast spectrum of parasitism. Over the centuries we have increasingly abstracted assets (that which we seek to consume by parasitism), from the physical to, fragments of a value chain, to mere numerical promises (accounts), so that violence is almost useless as a means of obtaining wealth. However, the volume of predation and parasitism performed by violence, is currently performed by various forms of pseudo-scientific and pseudo-moral fraud instead of violence. But the parasitism remains. Humans are open to coercion by only three technologies: Gossip(religion and morality), remuneration(trade, credit, tax and redistribution), or threat of violence(law,military). Although at any times some people specialize in some axis of coercion (public intellectuals:gossip, government:violence, corporations:purchasing influence.) So if we have exchanged parasitism via violence, for parasitism via pseudoscientific fraud (which is one aspect of what I believe you are investigating), then the form of parasitism has changed, but not the parasitism itself. We might argue that some form of parasitic equilibrium is actually some sort of Pareto optimum. But that is very different from saying that parasitism no longer exists, or has decreased. So as far as I am able to tell, net change in parasitism is zero, or perhaps as some people argue, we have seen a dramatic increase. It is just that we have created sufficient technology that our parasitism by pseudoscience does not injure production as much as parasitism by violence does. Furthermore, all the great syntopical historians have, as far as I know, come to the same conclusion: that since 1945, the Pax Americana is only paralleled by the Pax Romana. I argue rather frequently (as do many historians) that all economic measures since 1600 are little more than the reflection of the distribution of consumer capitalism, accounting, and rule of law around the world at the point of British gunships. So to address violence instead of parasitism, is to blind one’s self to the rest of the spectrum of human criminality in order to congratulate one’s self on having invented a more effective form of crime. Affections. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine. Source: Curt Doolittle – Nassim Nicholas Taleb (re: violence) I’d like…

  • To Nassim Taleb re: A Decline in Violence is Not a Decline in Predation – But A Shift.

    [N]assim (re: violence) I’d like to add an economist’s point of view: that the use of the term ‘violence’ is obscurant. (In my lexicon that is equivalent to pseudoscientific). Humans engage in a vast spectrum of parasitism whenever possible, and in production only when easy or necessary. Parasitism can be performed by violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by obscurantism, imposed cost by indirection, free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, conspiracy to extort, by normative conversion, by immigration, asymmetric reproduction, conquest, and genocide. Conversely, mutually beneficial, productive, warrantied, fully informed, cooperation by voluntary exchange is, by contrast, a very narrow field of human activity in a vast spectrum of parasitism. Over the centuries we have increasingly abstracted assets (that which we seek to consume by parasitism), from the physical to, fragments of a value chain, to mere numerical promises (accounts), so that violence is almost useless as a means of obtaining wealth. However, the volume of predation and parasitism performed by violence, is currently performed by various forms of pseudo-scientific and pseudo-moral fraud instead of violence. But the parasitism remains. Humans are open to coercion by only three technologies: Gossip(religion and morality), remuneration(trade, credit, tax and redistribution), or threat of violence(law,military). Although at any times some people specialize in some axis of coercion (public intellectuals:gossip, government:violence, corporations:purchasing influence.) So if we have exchanged parasitism via violence, for parasitism via pseudoscientific fraud (which is one aspect of what I believe you are investigating), then the form of parasitism has changed, but not the parasitism itself. We might argue that some form of parasitic equilibrium is actually some sort of Pareto optimum. But that is very different from saying that parasitism no longer exists, or has decreased. So as far as I am able to tell, net change in parasitism is zero, or perhaps as some people argue, we have seen a dramatic increase. It is just that we have created sufficient technology that our parasitism by pseudoscience does not injure production as much as parasitism by violence does. Furthermore, all the great syntopical historians have, as far as I know, come to the same conclusion: that since 1945, the Pax Americana is only paralleled by the Pax Romana. I argue rather frequently (as do many historians) that all economic measures since 1600 are little more than the reflection of the distribution of consumer capitalism, accounting, and rule of law around the world at the point of British gunships. So to address violence instead of parasitism, is to blind one’s self to the rest of the spectrum of human criminality in order to congratulate one’s self on having invented a more effective form of crime. Affections. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine. Source: Curt Doolittle – Nassim Nicholas Taleb (re: violence) I’d like…

  • THE CHRISTIAN CONENT OF THE WEST? MOSTLY A BAD THING What’s the point of lamenti

    THE CHRISTIAN CONENT OF THE WEST? MOSTLY A BAD THING

    What’s the point of lamenting the fall of christianity? It’s an obscurant, irrelevant argument.

    Compare Mithraism vs Aristotelianism/Stoicism/CommonLaw vs Buddhism and it’s predecessor hinduism, vs christianity/islam/judaism and their predecessor Zoroastrianism.

    It’s pretty obvious that aristotelianism/stoicism/law are scientific and uniquely western systems of thought.

    As far as I can tell, Christianity is an appropriation of Mithraism in order to create a utopian cult-rebellion against rome. It’s fairly obvious as a student of religions to grasp that there is nothing novel in christianity that was not in Mithraism and practiced by countless legionnaires.

    It’s pretty obvious that the romans used genocide to wipe out the norther european religion of nature worship (druidism). Although we are slowly reconstructing a bit of at present from fragments.

    It’s pretty obvious that the political value of the church was in importing eastern despotism in order to decrease the cost of managing the crumbling and impoverished empire using propaganda.

    It’s pretty obvious that the church could not resist the greeks even after forcing closed the schools, and that it took a concerted effort via propaganda (like marxism) to impose propagandism on the west.

    It’s pretty obvious that Augustine tried to defend the eastern despotism by using obscurantism to incorporate the greek thought.

    It’s pretty obvious that this strategy failed and sent us into a thousand years of ignorance.

    It’s pretty obvious that the good produced by the church was accidental: banning cousin marriage and granting property rights to break up the tribes, and then using church crowning of kings as legitimacy, using conniving politics and literacy to both keep the people ignorant and control them.

    It’s pretty obvious that the enlightenment was caused by a reassertion of greek thought.

    It’s pretty obvious that the marxist era in response to darwin, was a second attempt at creating authoritarian mysticism, this time in the form of pseudoscience.

    It’s pretty obvious that the 20th century europeans failed (the operational revolution failed – although I think I can rescue it) to counter the pseudoscientific movement (Marx/Keynes and mainstream economists).

    I care about christianity only so far as I care about having a church/temple/school because I understand the value of performing ritual together and invoking the submission-to-the-pack response that most of us feel as revelation.

    We cannot go back into mysticism. Albeit we need a new religion to rescue us from neo-puritan-secualr-social-democracy. But that religion must both provide ritual, and return us to truth/science/and reality, which is the unique western tradition, and the origin of our competitive against the other civilizations with whom we compete.

    Christianity was a bad implementation of mithraism. And it was a bad thing compared to stoicism and aristotelianism and law. I am not sure precisely what form that new religion must take (although I know parts of it) but it will not by a return to ignorance and mysticism.

    Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-18 12:33:00 UTC