Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • PROGRESSIVE VS LIBERTARIAN VS CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT PROCESSES It frustrates progr

    PROGRESSIVE VS LIBERTARIAN VS CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT PROCESSES

    It frustrates progressives no end, that libertarians generally provide solutions to progressive problems but without ‘consensus making’. They object to our solutions, not on the grounds that we haven’t provided a solution. But because that solution originates in cooperation by competition rather than by consensus. For progressives, how a process feels is as, or more, important than what hit achieves. Precisely the opposite of libertarians.

    But it’s easy to understand why. Progressives are driven by consensus-making as a good in itself. Whereas libertarians understand that the market makes millions of parallel forms of consensus at every moment, and verbal consensus does not, and cannot, because it is a simple local phenomenon. Not that it’s bad. It isn’t. It just is incredibly ineffective at at market scale.

    For conservatives, a process must be intuitively moral, or they will reject it. Not because it fails to achieve their objectives, but because it is not intuitively moral. And they value that something is intuitively moral as much more more than they value achieving a particular outcome. This is precisely the opposite of how libertarians see the world: as reason not intuition.

    We have the most rational policy recommendations. But we fail to satisfy the emotional needs of conservatives and progressives in solving policy ideas. That is because they want to win the war of having people think like they do, more than they want to produce any outcome.

    That is why we libertarians tend to think of the other political dimensions as either arational or absurd. ‘Cause they are. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-12 05:31:00 UTC

  • (cultural observation) TAXI DRIVERS I take a taxi along the same street every da

    (cultural observation)

    TAXI DRIVERS

    I take a taxi along the same street every day. Its about a $5 fare to the office at most. The taxis collect both on the corner across from my house where Pavel waits for me most mornings unless he gets a fare to the airport. The majority sit around Kontractova (The Place Of Contracts – the old market).

    Now, you know, I have this aristocratic moral intuition that means speaking truth to power, being unforgivingly demanding of peers, forgiving of dependents, and charitable to the working man. And so I like to tip people at the bottom who do good work and deliver good customer service. I see it as a civic duty. A way of creating a feedback loop of good service, and the ‘commercial society’.

    So, because of this behavior, I have this reputation as a ‘mark’ among the taxi drivers. And I love it.

    Every morning I get to play this game. Everyone knows its a game. And it’s a pretty fun game. If Pavel is across the street he charges me $5, and he won’t take more. If I dont have a five, he gets it from me the next day. If He’s not there, then I walk to Kontractova and try to find someone else.

    And the drivers at Kontractova compete, good naturedly, for my fare. Why? Because they know that I love the game with them, and that I’ll always pay more. So we always have this dance. I tell them $4, they tell me $10, I tell them that it’s robbery and offer $5, they tell me “You are businessman!, I have good car!” and finally we settle on $6 or $7, and they know I’ll give them $8 or $10. So I get to play this sort of human pokemon game every morning for the price of a latte, and I absolutely love it. It’s a weird way of belonging to the community but every single person who works on this street pretty much knows me now.

    It’s a Karma thing. I just love it. Conservatism is, after all, a social philosophy tightly bound by the law of Karma. And while I’m a libertarian, I’m a conservative and therefore aristocratic, libertarian.

    We are only equal in our care for one another.

    And that’s the only equality we need.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-11 06:38:00 UTC

  • (inspiration) WRITE TO SOMEONE I love writing on the web because when I write on

    (inspiration)

    WRITE TO SOMEONE

    I love writing on the web because when I write on a blog, or FB or a comment somewhere I know what voice to use: the speaking voice, not the thinking voice. And it is very hard to write philosophy without falling into the trap of writing with the thinking voice.

    Most writers will tell you to visualize talking to someone particular. For some reason, that doesn’t work for me. It might for novelists. But for argument, you have to understand the particular logic of the person you’re speaking to. And that’s pretty hard to visualize. I do best if I visualize writing to PFS friends. Because it forces me to be clear without carrying the burden of communicating basic concepts.

    If we write to ourselves, we aren’t communicating very well. You can tell when a writer is doing it. It’s when he’s having a hard time engaging you. One of the reasons lecturing professors tend to communicate well in writing, is that they practice their ideas verbally in front of students a few times before putting a book together. After a while your book voice can evolve to become your lecture voice, and at that point most of us are comprehensible.

    There is a very narrow space for self-talking voice. Poetry certainly, and the sort of stream of consciousness technique that borders on poetry can work if it’s full of cultural associations, gives insight into psychology that’s eccentric, or helps descend into the maelstrom of madness.

    Using your outer voice also stops you from the little lies we tell ourselves to feel good about ourselves. It is very easy to lie to yourself, or let yourself skate on something or other. I just read a book by a very well known economist that suggested we have voters take tests. And of course, that’s ridiculous and only an academic would be stupid enough to write a book on politics that would recommend testing as voter criteria. So it’s not possible to stop all your stupid ideas. But it is possible to at least avoid the obvious ones.

    Given that libertarians tend toward the autistic end of the scale, this advice is even more valuable for our end of the spectrum. Reading for example Hayek, whose language structure I largely adopt, is quite different from reading Bohm-Bawerk’s impenetrable, arduous, self-talking paragraphs. I don’t think writers should try to reach everyone because that’s impossible, but they should try to address someone as a defense against the inner voice.

    We all have inner voices. Mine is spatial. I don’t really talk to myself as much as visualize as ‘real’ spaces – something I can’t really express easily, even if I want to. Logic is very intuitive. I feel it the way normals feel emotions. Logical things make me calm and illogical things make me agitated. So I sort of feel my way through arguments, the way you feel your way through a cave in the dark.

    So in my head it’s a lot like my writing. I sort of construct arguments as tests. like stacking playing cards or something. I just try them this way and that way. And most of them fall down. But every now and then, usually in the morning, I try something new and I can build the stack of logical cards a little higher.

    Then all the work is trying to reduce that sensation to some sort of simple expression that others can, if it’s worth their time, try to grasp. And its at that moment you appreciate the great poets, great authors, and particularly Lao Tzu, for their talent at using words to tie together concepts and generate new understanding that we today, can still make use of. And that is humbling. Awe inspiring. And at least for most of us, an unattainable goal.

    There are those who do the same, not with ideas, but with experiences. I am not so in awe of those authors. Possibly again for artistic reasons. They just confuse me. I run away from those authors as fast as I can. 🙂 But that isn’t to say it isnt an equally exceptional art. Just one that has an audience that the author is speaking to, and some of us are not in it.

    Now, you can desperately try to remember all this while you are writing. Or, instead, you can pretend you are arguing with someone who disagrees with you or doesn’t understand, and write as if you are speaking to that person. You don’t have to write his responses. Just answer his objections one paragraph at a time. Something Hayek is absurdly adept at.

    The advice I would give in writing argument, that I have learned over time, is Popperian. Do not try to be right. Make your argument. If you can’t make it. Start over and try again. If you still can’t, then you don’t know enough to make it. Over time you should understand a problem well enough to handle any objection to it. And be able to enumerate all the known objections. And when you have sufficient scope of knowledge to handle all known objections, it starts to become fun trying to find new objections that you can answer.

    Mastery is the best form of persuasion. Persuasion without mastery is just trickery. Rhetoric, if an art of trickery is immoral. Discourse, in the pursuit of truth is not.

    And it is the pursuit of truth and liberty that makes us libertarian.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-11 06:23:00 UTC

  • DEADLY SINS” (important) Propertarianism captures the universal human moral intu

    http://www.propertarianism.com/”PROPERTARIANISM’S DEADLY SINS” (important)

    Propertarianism captures the universal human moral intuition that prohibits involuntary transfer, and then presses all competition into the market for goods and services under the requirements of transparency and warranty so that competition is, while intuitively immoral to many, a system of incentives that produces a virtuous cycle of innovation, production and adaptation.

    All rights in all moral systems are reducible to statements of property rights – assuming we take a descriptive definition of property not a proscriptive one.

    DEADLY SINS

    Murder

    Violence

    Theft

    Fraud

    Omission

    Impedance

    Externalization

    Free-Riding

    Privatization

    Socialization

    Rent-Seeking

    Corruption

    Obfuscation

    Pooling-and-Laundering

    Conspiracy

    Legislation

    Taxation

    Conscription

    War

    Genocide

    Do you want to know why my book is taking so long?

    Because there are a lot of deadly sins.

    http://www.propertarianism.com/

    VIRTUES

    Property,

    symmetry,

    warranty,

    internality,

    operational language,

    “calculability”,

    contract,

    natural law,

    common law,

    voluntary commons.

    Still not done with the second list. I need to find a way to talk about calculability more accessibly.

    PROPERTIES

    Personal (Private, Several)

    Interpersonal

    Normative

    Institutional

    Artificial

    PROPERTARIANISM IS THE RHETORICAL SOLUTION TO POLITICAL DISCOURSE

    It’s what praxeology should have been. It’s what conservatives and libertarians need. It’s what progressives and progressive libertarians should fear. Because it’s true. Its explanatory power is universal, and independent of any moral code. And it is based upon testable empirical science. Humans vehemently reject involuntary transfers of property. They just differ on the distribution of ownership of property. And they differ because of their necessary and inalterable reproductive strategies.

    COMMON GOODS

    There can be no common good unless there are common interests. We can learn from the market that we can cooperate on means even if we have alternate ends. But democracy is a family model, and assumes de facto, that we have common or optimally common ends. When we do not, because reproductive and productive strategies are not longer sufficiently homogenous. Democracy can assist us in establishing priorities from common interests, but it cannot assist us in establishing goals between disparate and conflicting interests – such as those that we have under a division of knowledge and labor as extreme as under industrialism and information economies.

    MONOPOLY

    There is no reason for monopoly bureaucracy and monopoly government in a diverse heterogeneous population. In this environment democracy is simply a means of conquest of one or more groups by others.

    It is possible to construct means of achieving the benefits of scale organizations in insurance, investment in the commons, and group bargaining over trade. And to do so without a monopoly.

    Democratic and representative government is an artifact of the age of agrarianism and sail. It’s time for a reformation. We have to adapt government to our new diversity. And that means, small states, and governments that facilitate ANY cooperation, not just those that are approved by the majority. And that approach will make law making impossible, only contract negotiation. Because laws are local phenomenon, and contracts for the commons are not. They are merely cooperation at scale, on goods that cannot be produced by the market because free riding prohibits their construction.

    More later. But that is the essence of Propertarianism in a few thousand words.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-10 07:21:00 UTC

  • ON REFERENCING DATA You know, I love empirical data. Really good data is pretty

    ON REFERENCING DATA

    You know, I love empirical data. Really good data is pretty specific. You can know what went into it. And if you collect lots of BITS of really good data, then you can learn a lot from it.

    But most government data about an economy is incredibly loaded. I’m pretty good at getting through it (although, not like, my hero Karl Smith who is on the other side of the political fence.) That data has been manipulated, contrived, and god knows what else. As an index it’s relatively valuable in pointing out general directions. But unless you know a lot about the individuals that constitute the source of that data, It’s pretty hard to say that data has much meaning.

    And they can’t really show you that underlying data, or collect it, because doing so would justify and be used by different groups for mutual criticism.

    That might be true.

    But at least it would be honest.

    THe thing is, that if you’re trying to solve political conflict by creating growth then obfuscation is pretty useful.

    But if you’re trying to solve for a solution to political conflict when growth isn’t available to you, or when political and moral conflict provides greater incentive than economic growth, you NEED those underlying numbers, because they tell you want you might be able to DO now that growth is not available to lubricate the friction between groups with disharmonious interests.

    It matters that the postwar era is over. We no longer can think we’re special. We’re not. We were special only because the rest of the world had either committed economic suicide or adopted communism and was in the process of committing economic suicide.

    WIthout that temporary advantage we can’t create the same growth in the bottom of the population that masked their competing interests.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-09 05:00:00 UTC

  • MORE FASCINATING HUMAN STUFF : RATES OF GAY DIVORCE (interesting) Regarding UK c

    MORE FASCINATING HUMAN STUFF : RATES OF GAY DIVORCE

    (interesting)

    Regarding UK civil marriages.

    Women, whether straight or gay:

    a) want to tie the knot faster than men

    b) have higher _emotional_ expectations than men

    c) want to end it sooner, and more frequently than men

    Men, by contrast, are:

    a) slower to grasp and understand emotional relations than women.

    b) form lasting emotional relations mostly out of habituation.

    c) stay in relationships out of habituation – ‘comfort’, (Regularity of a relationship rather than stimulation from the relationship. This is partly because of the long emotional adaptation time men require vs women.)

    d) demonstrate being more sentimental than women after the end of a relationship.

    Durability of Relations:

    For women, children are permanent relations, but men are disposable relations. For men, all women are permanent relations. It’s just reproductive economics. It is this way. Because it has to be this way. Women build their children but men build entire tribes.

    It’s not complicated. What makes it complicated is confusing equality under the law in disputes over property, with equality of productivity in the work place, with inequality of reproductive, moral and personal interests.

    We are equal in economic cooperation, but not in emotional interests or reproduction.

    QUOTE

    “In the seven years since gay couples were able to have civil partnerships, 3.2 per cent of male unions ended in dissolution, compared to 6.1 per cent of female couples.”

    (Note: there is a pretty common life cycle to breakups. It pretty much takes about 20 years to be sure you’ll stay together. But rates decline rapidly after five to seven years.)

    “Sociologists believe the lower rates of ‘divorces’ among gay men may reflect a trend of women committing sooner and having higher expectations for a relationship. Women in civil partnerships tie the knot at an average age of 37.6, compared to men, for whom the average age is 40. Erzsebet Bukodim, sociologist at the University of Oxford, said: “In heterosexual marriage the divorce rate is higher if you enter marriage at a very young age. That might be one of the reasons we’re seeing this [high dissolution rate for women] in civil partnerships.”

    “Gunnar Andersson, professor of demography at Stockholm University, has found in successive studies that women in Norway, Sweden and Denmark are twice as likely to dissolve their civil partnerships than men. He said: “This reflects trends in a heterosexual marriage because women are more prone to say they want to marry – but they’re also more likely to initiate a divorce. Women usually have higher demands on relationship quality, that’s often been said in studies. Even if you control for age there is still a trend of more women ending partnerships than men.”

    “Previous figures show British women in heterosexual relationships are more likely to file for divorce than men. Women initiated the divorce in two thirds of cases in the UK in 2011.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-09 04:22:00 UTC

  • A couple of years ago I was in a lawsuit with a particularly screwed up individu

    A couple of years ago I was in a lawsuit with a particularly screwed up individual named Muti (who some of us know) who lied to me and everyone else in a venture, about the source of money he committed to contribute. When he fell thru, and he was exposed. And got a note from him. He signed it. A friend witnessed it. I shut down the venture, and paid everyone myself out of my pocket. At the time I was in the middle of divorce and had just finished my second round of cancer and therapy. So this particular douche bag tries every scumbag maneuver in the book, and because judges are stupid, pulled up an arcane bit of logic and misapplied it. It was so bizarre that I was stunned a judge could be that stupid. The fact is, he was just fucking lazy and wanted to get on to the next piece of paper. So we went to arbitration and what they didn’t get, was that I was willing to lose it all on the chance that I would win in court. Immoral people just don’t get it. They think you’re greedy. But it’s not the money. I’d already planned to give it to my ex-wife. But if I won, Id force the guy out of his house cause he was out of cash. Now, I really don’t want to do that either. But if he didn’t settle for a reasonable amount, then I’ll just go to court and roll the dice. Since I don’t get the money either way, it’s just a function of whether it’s moral or not.

    Americans have removed the legal system from most of their lives (which is one of the reasons that we are overpopulated with lawyers) and the courts have built up a pretty good body of law to encourage that. But it’s the very opposite of the common law. It’s a mess. And it’s incomprehensible to ordinary people. And it’s just plain immoral.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 17:18:00 UTC

  • RACISM Well, you know, pointing out our differences is all well and good. I want

    RACISM

    Well, you know, pointing out our differences is all well and good. I want to preserve my culture and my extended family and our gene pool too. And I certainly prefer to sacrifice and contribute to my gene pool rather than someone elses. I can’t imagine anything more moral and ethical than that. And I certainly respect the data that shows homogenous societies are superior to diverse societies in every respect.

    But those statements are in the context of city states and a barrier to political participation. With political participation, minorities can attempt to use the state to redistribute status, and with that, create friction and civil conflict that if conducted in the market would be beneficial, but conducted in politics is nothing but destructive.

    I am all for africa for africans, south american for natives, asia for asia, and every other blend of people’s on earth. But I’d also like europe for europeans. And that’s because there is in fact something very special about our culture, or we would not have started the industrial revolution in greece, and restarted in britain.

    So the moral argument is that the ultimate imperative is not redistribution, it is to create an environment where all extended families can compete in the market according to their abilities, biase and preferences without relying on majority tyranny to oppress one another.

    WHile I don’t feel guilty for the white man’s burden so to speak: I am happy that we dragged humanity out of ignorance and poverty with consumer capitalism and as the remainder of the world reluctantly secularized into the corporeal consumer capitalist system, I think westerners should take credit for it. No matter how badly they did it. No one changes the world easily and we destroyed our civilization in the process. if there is any price to be paid we have paid it.

    No more guilt. Ever.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 11:12:00 UTC

  • WHY ASIANS LAG : THE PROBLEM OF +106 VERBAL IQ : PARETO REVISITED While spatial

    WHY ASIANS LAG : THE PROBLEM OF +106 VERBAL IQ : PARETO REVISITED

    While spatial IQ is very good for workers, engineers, and scientists, we must remember that CONTRARY to Marxist and now dominant postmodern western economic intuitions that have been derived from the ERRONEOUS labor theory of value, that ORGANIZING production is what is difficult, not production itself. Organizing requires persuasion and negotiation and collaboration. We are generally compensated for ORGANIZING society into vast networks of production of goods and services, and REORGANIZING society as needed. This is the job of entrepreneurs. And it is somewhat surprising that our Austrian forbears only got it sort of half right. They corrected the Marxists, but they din’t quite solve the problem for us. It isn’t efficiency or prices that really matter, it is using price and efficiency information in order to organize production using people and capital and supplying them with incentives.

    THAT IS VERBAL WORK. THAT VERBAL WORK REQUIRES A PRECISE LANGUAGE as well as precise property definitions and precise laws for the resolution of conflicts.

    My argument is that this is the Pareto Principle in effect. In every nation 20% controls 80% of the capital. And there is a good reason for that. Because that capital is used to organize the production of consumer goods. It is not ‘consumed’ It is used to manage society’s dynamic and chaotic, and entirely schumpeterian means of production.

    In order for those people to succeed, both they and the rest of the administrative and operations people that flow from them must be able to negotiate by expressing ideas in increasingly articulated form.

    —EXCERPT FROM LE GRIFFE DU LION’s WHY ASIANS LAG—

    “In market economies, per capita GDP is directly proportional to the population fraction with verbal IQ equal to or greater than 106.

    “Smart Fraction Theory recognizes that smart people produce wealth. It asserts that a nation’s per capita GDP varies directly with the fraction of its population that is smart. SFT II changes the definition of “smart” by linking it to verbal IQ instead of general IQ. SFT II asserts:

    “***In market economies, per capita GDP is directly proportional to the population fraction with verbal IQ at or above some determinable threshold.***

    “Verbal IQ is a score derived from verbal subtests of an IQ test. The subtests measure abilities like abstract and common sense reasoning, language comprehension, short-term auditory memory, concentration, attention, word knowledge, verbal fluency and social judgment. It is the kind of intelligence that serves lawyers well. I actually prefer the term “verbal-analytical IQ.”

    “Their IQ is bifurcated. NE Asians have the highest IQ of all peoples other than Ashkenazim. They owe that superior IQ, however, to extraordinary visuospatial ability, which, despite verbal shortcomings, lifts their IQ above that of Europeans.

    “The bifurcation is evident in the workplace where, for example, fully-assimilated second and third generation NE Asian Americans are overrepresented in science, medicine and engineering, and underrepresented in law, social science and the humanities. According to the 1999 National Science Foundation survey of PhDs awarded to US citizens and permanent residents, Asian Americans earned 11% of the science and engineering PhDs but less than 5% of other PhDs.

    “Is it that NE Asians perform less well than Europeans on verbal subtests?

    “[Yes,] but there is other evidence of their verbal deficiency. Take the bar exam for example. In 1989, the Law School Admission Council commissioned a study of bar passage rates. Its report, The LSAC National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study was published in 1998, with results disaggregated by race and ethnicity. Linda F. Wightman, the project head, collected data from more than 27,000 students who entered ABA approved law schools in fall 1991. The study found that only 80.75% of Asians passed the bar on the first try compared with 91.93% of non-Hispanic whites. This corresponds to a white-Asian mean-score difference of 0.53 standard deviation or in IQ terms a verbal gap of 8 points!

    “Unfortunately, Wightman put NE Asians into one big Asian box along with Filipinos, Hmong and others whose IQs are more than a standard deviation lower than Chinese, Koreans and Japanese. It is true that relatively few from low-IQ groups make it to the bar exam, but some do. Consequently, 8 points must be regarded as an upper bound to the white-NE Asian verbal gap.

    “R. Lynn reviewed the literature on racial IQ in The Mankind Quarterly, 31:3, Spring 1991, 255-296. IQ averages for Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids, Negroid-Caucasoid hybrids, Amerindians and South East Asians were reported. More than 100 studies were referenced, most from peer-reviewed journals and not a small number from Lynn himself. Of these, 12 reported both general and verbal IQ averages for NE Asians. Three of the 12 indicated a white-NE Asian verbal IQ gap of about 8 points in agreement with the bar exam result, but these are at the high end. The average verbal gap was a bit less than 4 points or about a quarter standard deviation.

    “Among the races, only NE Asians and Amerindians exhibit this particular kind of verbal-nonverbal cognitive split. For other races verbal and general IQ averages have similar values, making the distinction between the two transparent to smart fraction theory. In the 12 studies reporting both general and verbal IQ for NE Asians, the general-verbal gap averaged 6.5 IQ points.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 09:36:00 UTC

  • THE 150 YEAR BATTLE Hmmm… We won the battle over capitalism – property rights.

    THE 150 YEAR BATTLE

    Hmmm…

    We won the battle over capitalism – property rights.

    We’re in the middle of winning the battle over economics – a) the necessity of preserving the quality of the information system, b) the limit of credit and interest, and c) the restoration of the contract between the generations.

    We are very close to overturning a century of progressive anti-reason and anti-science.

    We have at least undermined the fantasy of universal democracy as a ‘good’.

    But we are just beginning to work on institutions and norms. And, of all of these. That will be the most difficult I think. I do not know if we can put destruction of the family by the feminists back in the bottle.

    (Which as a nerd, is what makes it an interesting problem. 🙂 )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 03:44:00 UTC