[W]e can fail to agree, and conflict with one another. We can agree to boycott (avoid) one another. Or we can agree to cooperate with one another. In any rational exchange for cooperation and trust, we require the positive assertion of the requirement of production, and the negative assertion of the prohibition on free riding. Cooperation is not rational without this requirement, in both positive and negative forms. In some cases we tolerate intertemporal gains and losses in the expectation that the net outcome will be to our favor. For the weak, cooperation or boycott, are to be agreed upon at all costs, even if parasitic, since the weak are unable to fight. For the strong, conquest, cooperation and boycott are merely a choice between preferences, where cooperation can often provide the greatest return. Power and weakness produce different metaphysical assumptions and logical biases. See Power and Weakness by Robert Kagan http://files.janjires.webnode.cz/200000472-2879a29738/Robert%20Kagan%20-%20Power%20and%20Weakness.pdf
Form: Mini Essay
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THE PROBLEM OF INCOMPLETE STATEMENTS OF TRUTH PROPOSITIONS Operationally, I cann
THE PROBLEM OF INCOMPLETE STATEMENTS OF TRUTH PROPOSITIONS
Operationally, I cannot rely upon the verb to be, particularly in the case ‘…is X true?’, which is platonic and obscurant, and must say instead “am I willing to…?” or “…can I…?” Carrying it further, I am not sure of the value of the statement ‘is X true’, because, outside of an analogy for proofs of consistency within a tautological system, I think as an incomplete statement, it is an empty statement. Instead, I would ask a complete question: ‘Is X sufficient for me to act at cost Y?’ which requires only knowledge of use, or ‘Is it ethical for me to claim that X is true, or is it merely an hypothesis?’ which requires knowledge of construction. We know it is never possible to say ‘X is ultimately true’, because, outside of reductio examples, we lack the ability to ever know if it is the most parsimonious set of statements (constructions) with the greatest explanatory power (empirical content).
(Note: I’m getting closer. Not quite there yet. But very close.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-19 00:10:00 UTC
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LATECOMER: THE KILLING (series) Binge watching the Killing series. Takes place i
LATECOMER: THE KILLING (series)
Binge watching the Killing series. Takes place in Seattle. It really is beautiful. Funny tho: the location scouts work pretty hard at finding skeevy sections of Seattle. Because there really aren’t any. Seattle never had mass immigration or underclass industrialization. And where the hell do they find the black people? There aren’t any black people in seattle? It’s the second whitest city in america. They have a murder in Discovery Park, then shoot the scene in what I think is Issaquah? They get the light right (it’s blue grey in seattle all the time). The camera work is excellent. I keep saying “fk, I wouldn’t have thought of that, that’s good.”
The directing is excellent. I love long shots. The use of long shots rather than filler dialog lets actors actually act rather than wrestle with crap lines.
But what gets me is how good the casting is. The casting is awesome. It’s interesting. So the combination of long shots and good casting is just – I don’t know, it’s more than refreshing. It’s satisfying – elegant even.
I really don’t understand why casting is so bad in some movies and series. Casting is a discipline. A craft. It isn’t rocket science. But it certainly isn’t intuitive. Actors should not pitch to amateurs. It’s insulting And I see movie after movie with terrible casting. I wish I understood the process better but you know, it’s really frustrating to watch a series die because of weak casting.
Anyway, I can’t watch most series – too exasperating. This one is up in my top five. It’s a work of art. Not just Because Seattle is home, but because like Seattle, it’s elegant and smart.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 15:24:00 UTC
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THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE ON PHILOSOPHY It turns out that I’m not alone in
THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE ON PHILOSOPHY
It turns out that I’m not alone in this thought: computer science, which is operational (algorithmic) and constructivist(computable), has been replacing and will replace mathematics as the primary method of argument, and classical mathematics as well as Cantorian sets, will remain ‘verbal toolkits’ for the purpose of approximation (lower precision) which allow human minds to think in approximations (deductions) which can later be operationalized. That approach is what intuitionist mathematics recommends for example: discover necessary axioms then prove them.
Does the operational constraint (algorithmic and computable) in computer science explain why philosophical thought leadership at least on the right and libertarian spectra is coming out of the computer science wing? Is that why austrian economics makes such sense to computer scientists? Or is it merely the skew in IQ distributions as talent follows money, leading to the saturation of technology with smart folk? Or is it a combination of both?
Programming is pretty much like logic: an art of clear communication that can be conducted many ways. But databases are a bit more like philosophy of science: they must be constructed to correspond with reality. And both programming and databases force you to account for whether information is present for the purpose of making a choice – which is the problem of decidability (sufficiency of information presence) in all fields. Decidability is a serious problem as we create general rules with lower information density. We desperately want to create general rules in which the information is present for deduction. Because this limits the effort of cognition to something we can manage with our feeble minds.
I learned physics first, computer science second, austrian economics third, and contemporary keynesian economics last. Austrian principles are intuitively constructionist (consisting of a sequence of human actions). And the ethics of voluntary transfer (the requirement that transfers are constructed of voluntary exchanges) are an operationalist’s method of testing each original/primitive/minimum activity (exchange) as ‘computable’ (decidable).
I suppose that I have the luxury of a century of computing that Mises didn’t have, and the luxury of cognitive science and experimental psychology that Rothbard and Hoppe didn’t have. And I suppose as an operationalist (scientist) I have a higher demand for truth than did Mises, Rothbard or Hoppe. And as a software developer, I have learned that the human mind is an undisciplined creature and it is very difficult to demonstrate that we know what we claim to when we are forced to. Writing advanced software is terribly humbling. Engineering is terribly humbling. If only economics and law were as humbling as software and engineering. But teachers, lawyers and economists (at least those who recommend policy) are insulated from the failure of their models. Whereas in computer science and engineering, large sums of money can be lost, business opportunities lost, and people can die, and there is no one else to blame.
So I don’t know if what I’ve done is all that smart – we stand on the shoulders of giants – but it was pretty hard to get to this point: where all of philosophy, all of the logics, and all fields, are reducible to a single problem of constructing theories (general rules) consisting of arbitrary precision of some sort or other (including or excluding properties of reality), while preserving the sufficiency of information for use in deduction (the confidence that our general rules allow us to conduct comparisons).
In any event, it appears that far from being merely engineering, that the practice of software development, particularly in those cases where we deal with human machine interactions, is not subordinate to mathematics precisely because (now that over the past decade we have produced algorithmic equivalents) it is operational and therefore provable.
And those of us working in ethics, myself in particular, can make use of this insight: that you cannot make a truth claim unless you can operationally construct the argument.
That austrian economics is ‘correct’ in that it’s operationally moral.
That praxeology failed because it is a fallacy as mises and rothbard defined it in pseudoscientific and false philosophical terms. Even if we give Kantian arguments some childish validity, we can say that they are useful only by analogy, not by construction and operation.
Whereas, we can provide a superior explanation of economics, of the logic of cooperation, of the logic of human choice, and the necessity of human acquisition, by the simple acknowledgment of the necessit of property for incentives and economic calculation, the necessary morality of voluntary transfer and exchange, and the empirical analysis of emergent economic phenomenon, from which, like intuitionist mathematics, we explain as rational human actions.
Curt Doolittle
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 06:25:00 UTC
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CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS: MOMMY TRAINING AND MORE American women need classes in ba
CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS: MOMMY TRAINING AND MORE
American women need classes in baby care and child rearing. (Really. hospitals often require it.). And pretty often in cooking. But here in Kiev, where it seems like every woman in her twenties that I know, if not teens, has a small child, they have this novel way of training: they help each other, and they help other women in their families. Sort of ‘hands on training’. Same for cooking. I mean, all the girls can cook, and they don’t think of it as a chore. It’s like breathing.
Kids get LOTS of attention. So they aren’t trying to get attention all the time. It seems that slavic children (and adults) appear to be less aggressive and impulsive. Which isn’t true of Georgians and other black haired tribes to the south and east. I need to get some data on it. Because I’m skeptical that it’s something else. But it seems pretty much the case.
Mysticism, or, I don’t know what to call it, but all the orthodox countries have it, and russians more so: this strange fatalism or belief ‘things work out this way’ as if they never heard of catallactic and self organizing processes. Or in the Russian case: the fear of not knowing something requires ignorance be replaced by confidence in pseudoscience. (I wonder how crazy this culture was before the communists just wiped out church mysticism.).
I dunno. But you know, if you have to live a lifestyle, the whole extended family thing is pretty awesome. And I think it is MUCH BETTER FOR MEN than the ANF which statistically, in a migratory industrial population, leaves you old, lonely, poor, and increasingly suicidal.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 15:00:00 UTC
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EVERY DISCIPLINE CAME CLOSE, BUT NONE SOLVED IT : TRUTH —“Truth is replaced by
EVERY DISCIPLINE CAME CLOSE, BUT NONE SOLVED IT : TRUTH
—“Truth is replaced by (algorithmic) proof as a primitive notion, and
Existence requires constructibility.”—
It’s interesting (telling?) that Bridgman did his work on Operationalism (in psychology, where I first came across it, it’s “Operationism”), because he understood that the only reason that Physics had not discovered Einstein’s relativity earlier, and the profession had spent years on fallacies, was because they didn’t practice operationalism: articulating (constructions) of all their ideas so that when they extended an abstract idea, they revisited all its underlying assumptions.
Now, Operationalism is practiced in Psychology as a matter of course, and in as much of physical science as is possible without unnecessary constraint. But the problem remains extant in most disciplines where it has been addressed somehow or other by the mathematicians including Brouwer on in Intuitionist Mathematics, and from Poincare on in Constructivist Mathematics, and the logicians through Kripke and Goedel, and much less intelligently, Mises in Economics, and with less success in law, from the antebellum period through the present on Textualism, Originalism, and Strict Constructionism. And the concept is completely missing from ethics.
Which is strange because **operationalism is an ethical not logical constraint** on our thinking. We cannot make honest truth claims without it, but that does not constrain us from making approximate deductions – explorations. Exploration is approximate by definition.
So, I am once again at the realization that the failure of the greeks to solve the problem of free riding, property rights and voluntary exchange, and therefore ethics is the cause of so much of our intellectual failure over the centuries. The answer was sort of sitting there in law but no one seems to have really done much with it.
And so uniting all the logics and all the branches of philosophy into a single contiguous, consistent system has been impossible. But it’s not impossible..
It was just sitting there. I dunno. At this point it looks obvious. But that’s because I ran into the ‘economic calculation’ argument, and property rights. And when I did, everything else slowly fell into place. Because they are necessary rather than preferential statements. I think they may be the most important insight into logic that has ever occurred.
I just don’t understand why it took us so long. Maybe we had to cook individualism sufficiently? I don’t know yet. That seems like the answer.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 14:45:00 UTC
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Over my lifetime there have been interesting dramatic changes in the underclasse
Over my lifetime there have been interesting dramatic changes in the underclasses that I wouldn’t have expected. We know that the spread of science has had profound impact and is probably responsible for the continued increase in intelligence. We know that the spread of general knowledge has had impact. But we have also seen the spread of ‘general awareness’, which means everyone seems to know about almost everything so that unscientific or irrational rumours are much harder to spread.
A lot of this has accelerated since the expansion of the internet, and now even more so because of the universal spread of smartphones. But it was already happening under television, radio, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets and books.
But while the method and content of intellectual discourse (IMHO) hasn’t changed much in the past 150 years or more, the method and content of underclass conversation has changed so much that it’s unimaginable.
I sat at a kitchen table listening to some ‘poor-folk’ (loggers) as a child and I remember how much it horrified me that adults could talk about such nonsense. I couldn’t have been more than twelve at the time. Probably younger. Conspiracy theory is and must be (Dunning Krueger) part and parcel of underclass experience. And it’s probably the most consistent metaphysical assumption of underclass conversation.
But that level of ignorance has been forced out of all but the sub-80-IQ crowd.
I routinely read academic work written over a century ago, and some back into the post-civil-war period. And honestly, aside from changes in technology, the metaphysical assumptions shared in that thought is pretty consistent across the century. (We have to largely discount the sixties and seventies though as an age of mysticism.) I could talk to most pre-war thinkers on level terms and not feel a void separated us. But if you talked to common people in 1900, 1965 and 2014 the difference would be astounding. Not just in what they talked abut, but what they knew about.
Knowledge is enough. Saturation in information will do the job that training cannot.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 08:52:00 UTC
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The Difference In Underclass Communication Due To Science
[O]ver my lifetime there have been interesting dramatic changes in the underclasses that I wouldn’t have expected. We know that the spread of science has had profound impact and is probably responsible for the continued increase in intelligence. We know that the spread of general knowledge has had impact. But we have also seen the spread of ‘general awareness’, which means everyone seems to know about almost everything so that unscientific or irrational rumours are much harder to spread. A lot of this has accelerated since the expansion of the internet, and now even more so because of the universal spread of smartphones. But it was already happening under television, radio, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets and books. But while the method and content of intellectual discourse (IMHO) hasn’t changed much in the past 150 years or more, the method and content of underclass conversation has changed so much that it’s unimaginable. I sat at a kitchen table listening to some ‘poor-folk’ (loggers) as a child and I remember how much it horrified me that adults could talk about such nonsense. I couldn’t have been more than twelve at the time. Probably younger. Conspiracy theory is and must be (Dunning Krueger) part and parcel of underclass experience. And it’s probably the most consistent metaphysical assumption of underclass conversation. But that level of ignorance has been forced out of all but the sub-80-IQ crowd. I routinely read academic work written over a century ago, and some back into the post-civil-war period. And honestly, aside from changes in technology, the metaphysical assumptions shared in that thought is pretty consistent across the century. (We have to largely discount the sixties and seventies though as an age of mysticism.) I could talk to most pre-war thinkers on level terms and not feel a void separated us. But if you talked to common people in 1900, 1965 and 2014 the difference would be astounding. Not just in what they talked abut, but what they knew about. Knowledge is enough. Saturation in information will do the job that training cannot.
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The Difference In Underclass Communication Due To Science
[O]ver my lifetime there have been interesting dramatic changes in the underclasses that I wouldn’t have expected. We know that the spread of science has had profound impact and is probably responsible for the continued increase in intelligence. We know that the spread of general knowledge has had impact. But we have also seen the spread of ‘general awareness’, which means everyone seems to know about almost everything so that unscientific or irrational rumours are much harder to spread. A lot of this has accelerated since the expansion of the internet, and now even more so because of the universal spread of smartphones. But it was already happening under television, radio, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets and books. But while the method and content of intellectual discourse (IMHO) hasn’t changed much in the past 150 years or more, the method and content of underclass conversation has changed so much that it’s unimaginable. I sat at a kitchen table listening to some ‘poor-folk’ (loggers) as a child and I remember how much it horrified me that adults could talk about such nonsense. I couldn’t have been more than twelve at the time. Probably younger. Conspiracy theory is and must be (Dunning Krueger) part and parcel of underclass experience. And it’s probably the most consistent metaphysical assumption of underclass conversation. But that level of ignorance has been forced out of all but the sub-80-IQ crowd. I routinely read academic work written over a century ago, and some back into the post-civil-war period. And honestly, aside from changes in technology, the metaphysical assumptions shared in that thought is pretty consistent across the century. (We have to largely discount the sixties and seventies though as an age of mysticism.) I could talk to most pre-war thinkers on level terms and not feel a void separated us. But if you talked to common people in 1900, 1965 and 2014 the difference would be astounding. Not just in what they talked abut, but what they knew about. Knowledge is enough. Saturation in information will do the job that training cannot.
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Moral Realism: The Prohibition On Free Riding
(pulled out and reposted) [L]ibertarianism argues that Non Aggression, (NAP) + Intersubjectively Verifiable Property (IVP) constitute a universal moral natural law. This is ‘almost real’. And any claim that natural rights or natural law exist is to claim moral realism (constant correspondence.) Now, I disagree with IVP and NAP, because I have learned that human moral standards are universally higher than that. That no groups exist and can exist by treating internal members as such. And that peoples who use the NAP with outsiders are usually outcast and exterminated. However, if we look at universally demonstrated human behaviors, we see that it is quite possible to identify a small number of constant moral constraints upon our action. And that these moral constraints reflect our reproductive strategies – and must. Further, that all cultures may implement more or less of these moral constraints, and that many of these moral constraints are mixed with signaling (which is not a moral constraint, but a signal of commitment to moral constraints – usually ritualistic costs that one must bear). This means that all moral systems include the universal moral rules, a level of adoption of those rules that suits their reproductive structure within the particular moral structure of production available to them, and a body of rituals and signals. And that all moral codes in all groups can be reduced to technical descriptions on the axes I have described. If this is true, and I am correct, and I think the evidence suggests that I am correct, then the underlying moral code is on that is in favor of cooperation while prohibiting free riding, where failing to engage in cooperation is also free riding. As such, the underlying moral intuition begins with the prohibition on free riding. Further that depending on a number of environmental variables such as geography and competition, humans will produce predictable moral codes, albeit a wide variety of signals. And yes, the genders differ in the distribution of weights that they give to those underlying moral codes. As such, we have finally uncovered the logic and science of morality. And as such, morality is both real, and non arbitrary. Thus the only means of moral action we possess is voluntary, fully informed, warrantied exchange, free of negative externalities, in which we contributed to production. It implies that one cannot refuse a trade that causes one no loss, takes no effort, exposes one to no risk, and benefits another. Everyone has something to trade. Even if it’s merely respect for life, property, manners, ethics, morals and rituals. And that is enough to trade for the benefits of the market, and the opportunity to conduct other trades with those who likewise enter into the bargain.