Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • MANAGEMENT PARADOX I always try to empower my staff. Always. I assume everything

    MANAGEMENT PARADOX

    I always try to empower my staff. Always. I assume everything I know is a theory. And that all theories are open to both falsification and revision. But that in business, as in all life, the problem is that someone has to choose when opinions and preferences differ. I dont know why. But I encounter this problem in every company I start.

    I want to say “Do not confuse the difference between your marginal improvement on the theoretical structure I created, as equal to the construction of the theoretical structure. Don’t think it’s you. Yes you’re steering. I’m still navigating.”

    But if I talk like that no one understands what the hell I am saying.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-27 12:14:00 UTC

  • THE POWER OF PARSIMONY If you learn enough about Physics, Math, Computer Science

    THE POWER OF PARSIMONY

    If you learn enough about Physics, Math, Computer Science, Economics and Philosophy (and hopefully in that order), it becomes readily apparent that all of these disciplines create all sorts of language for very, very simple principles that are constant across all of them.

    I don’t know what we need to call that basic set of ideas. In theory that’s part of the domain philosophy, because they are all tools for helping us think cogently, and act cogently, in a given discipline.

    But I can tell you one thing: there isn’t much difference between how science is practiced, than that set of basic principles. The only exception being that science discounts subjectivity and morality, economics includes subjectivity but not morality, and philosophy includes morality, subjectivity and objectivity.

    What I like most about computer programming is that it forces us to avoid the platonism in mathematics. And as such, avoids postmodernist influences on academia and the “res publica”.

    There are only a few dozen ideas for man to learn, but an infinite set of applications of them. Unfortunately, we ask our children, and each other, to memorize an infinite number of techniques, instead of a handful of necessary causal relations.

    This foundation, if it can be articulated as a finite set of principles with infinite application, is what we have been unable to define. That is because the political impact of those definitions would be problematic.

    If you don’t believe me. Then you might just have to take a look at the history of ideas. Because that history is little more than attempts to justify claims against the property of others in order to achieve alternate ends.

    Period.

    MANS WORLD IS QUITE SIMPLE. IT”S THE LIES THAT MAKE IT COMPLICATED.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-27 06:41:00 UTC

  • MADNESS American foreign policy is predicated on self determination. People can

    MADNESS

    American foreign policy is predicated on self determination. People can choose what government they want. But the Americans will hold the government accountable to a variety of standards – including consumer capitalism, and human rights. Assuming a country moves in both of those directions, or at least doesn’t regress against them, there isn’t a policy problem.

    If the government is ‘bad’ then even if the people select it and want it, obviously something is not right, so the government can be replaced.

    But this is confusing, and unnecessary. First, it’s a two step process. We tell people ‘you have freedom to choose what you want, but don’t choose badly.’ Except we don’t tell them what bad is. And we don’t tell them not to choose it, or we’ll blow up their entire country.

    Secondly, there isn’t a lot of evidence that people use democracy wisely. In fact, it looks pretty much the opposite. So our whole self determination and democracy fetish turns out to, scientifically anyway, be wrong.

    For example, African and Muslim tribes have used democracy to legitimize taking power to oppress other tribes. Sometimes to commit genocide.

    Even, and especially here at home. In america, democracy is just a means of conquering the Protestants.

    It’s no different in America. Not at all. It’s just legal violence rather than physical violence.

    What’s the difference?

    There isn’t any.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-25 16:37:00 UTC

  • NATURALISM AND MARGINAL INDIFFERENCE AS PROPERTARIAN MORALITY In the discipline

    NATURALISM AND MARGINAL INDIFFERENCE AS PROPERTARIAN MORALITY

    In the discipline of law, the jury determines guilt or innocence. This is irrespective of your guilt or innocence. We can deduce your guilt or

    innocence. We can justify your guilt or innocence. But without OBSERVABLE DEMONSTRATION we cannot DEMONSTRATE your guilt or innocence. It is just true in the ABSENCE of observable demonstration because we say so – because we agree.

    In the discipline of math, the accepted practice, is that .999… = 1. This is irrespective of the fact that it is impossible to construct 1 from .9999999… There is no numeric operation that we can perform to do so. We can only DEDUCE it, or claim it.

    We can create arguments. We can create deductions. But we cannot operationally create the number 1 from .999… by the process of addition or subtraction: which is in fact, the basis of all mathematics.

    So if I can get a bunch of people to agree that all people named ‘Brian’, are hosts of demons and should be put to death, then I can have all ‘Brian’s’ put to death. Or if I can get a bunch of people to test whether Brian is telling the truth by seeing if he sinks in a lake, then, if he floats (survives) he is lying.

    I think that is Brian’s argument. Which, of course, is exactly what I’ve been saying. Math can do so, because it is irrelevant. Mathematics is marginally indifferent to more important disciplines. The test of true DEDUCTION is marginal indifference to the outcome. The test of truth existence, is OPERATIONAL (causal) CONSTRUCTION.

    Postmodernism is predicated on the very principle that Brian is advocating: that truth is what we agree it is, not what is independently of our agreement. Not what is OPERATIONALLY and SCIENTIFICALLY true, but what is consensually true – by language.

    A theory can NEVER be true. An operation cannot be false. it just IS. Mathematical operations cannot be false. Mathematical theories (deductions) can NEVER be true.

    Mathematics is responsible for the the creation of the worlds most dangerous religion since Zoroaster invented law of the gods. Math has reinvented magic. And Brian is an acolyte of that religion.

    ’tis how it ’tis. ’tis an inescapable box.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-23 21:44:00 UTC

  • I’d feel differently, perhaps, if I had ever met a bureaucrat whose incentives w

    I’d feel differently, perhaps, if I had ever met a bureaucrat whose incentives were to help the customer rather than engage in rent seeking. I haven’t. The people who deal with the tradesmen and permits are much better than the rest. But none of them is anywhere near the service provider of the worst discount store, or the best coffee shop.

    If you spend any time with government at all (I was in the justice department) it’s pretty clear that aside from perhaps judges and short term members of the house of representatives, that everyone’s a rent seeker. Everyone. And they want expansion of powers so they have access to expansion of rents.

    I don’t know yet how I feel about condo and neighborhood associations, but from what I’ve been able to collect (and it’s not easy) a town of ten thousand people is probably the maximum scale where bureaucrats act anything like citizens rather than rent seekers.

    Once you’re out of the city-state, everything collapses rapidly into corruption. In america, corruption is systemic and procedural, and takes advantage of the fact that the voting process cannot correct a bureaucracy. The competition to a bureaucracy is the court, not the vote.

    I actually prefer the corruption here in the east. I dont mind increasing the payroll of policemen and bureaucrats if they provide service for it. I do mind increasing the budget of the bureaucracy when they DONT give service for it.

    Russian friends always told me this was true but I couldn’t put my arms around it. They’re right. It’s MORE CORRUPT in America than in the east. It’s just that the corruption in systemic, not interpersonal.

    The rule of law is good government. Bureaucracy is bad government. The problem of government is bureaucracy.

    If a government wants to conspire to achieve my preferred ends, then it is not a government that’s hired labor. If it wants to conspire to use the products of my labor to achieve ends I disapprove of, then that is not government that is slavery.

    I am having a hard time defining good government. Unless government is hired labor under the law, rather than dictators in charge of the law.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-20 03:34:00 UTC

  • DEMOCRACY, KANT, ROUSSEAU, MARX, ERRORS AND FAMILY My ambition, like many that o

    DEMOCRACY, KANT, ROUSSEAU, MARX, ERRORS AND FAMILY

    My ambition, like many that of many others, is to find a resolution to the problem of political conflict between and within heterogeneous groups – which seems to be a barrier to our happiness and prosperity.

    Since Postmodern thought has become the religion of the state, it’s useful if we study influential works of Rousseau, Kant and Marx.

    MARX

    Interestingly enough, we find that only Marx dealt with material reality, even if an impossible economy, while Rousseau an impossible morality, and Kant an impossible philosophy.

    Marx is most interesting. His logical failures were at least understandable:

    (a) the labor theory of value was an error, because it was an impossibility. Value is subjective, and objectively only known at the point of exchange, and must be so. (Locke making the same mistake);

    (b) Consequently he failed to understand the problem of prices and incentives in organizing a division of labor. (He was not alone.) And;

    (c) He conflated the problem of alienation from work, with the problem of alienation from membership in a group, drawing the emotions from the second to justify the first.

    (d) He didn’t grasp that mass production is only valuable in the service of consumer wants (which is where capitalism often fails to satisfy our reason: it satisfies consumer wants, not what is ‘good or necessary’ in the abstract sense.)

    These failures were catastrophic, and he built his entire edifice on misplaced emotions, misplaced causes, and impossible means and ends.

    Our feelings are reactions to changes in state both of present and future. And the human mind excels at conflation, and is weak at causal discrimination. It is easy for people to make these mistakes, and Marx was not immune to them. While it is true that working on an expensive pair of shoes if you can’t own one can be alienating, the fact that one can eventually afford something other than them is something else entirely. If one can drive a used ford mustang by working on a luxury BMW, when the difference is merely signaling, it seems difficult to say that one has moral right to status signals.

    The problem with our feelings is that we don’t live in tribes. Our feelings originated when we could have some idea of our place in the family and the world. We still seek it. All of us. The problem is the only information system we operate by outside of the family is prices and it’s exasperating: prices, unlike family, don’t care about us. So capitalism is alienating, yes. But Marx misplaced the source of alienation. Because it’s not possible to obtain the same feeling of cause and effect in a vast division of knowledge and labor, that it is as a craftsman. Thats’ why so many people practice hobby crafts.

    ROUSSEAU

    Rousseau actually doesn’t say anything more meaning than “I was cast out by my family and I want a means of survival as an outcast, so that I can experience eternal childhood.” He tries to recreate the obligations of the family for all of society. Which is what we all want – instinctually. The problem is people don’t act that way if they aren’t homogenous in family structure, and mythos. So, under heterogeneity there can be no ‘general will’, as we see from current political polarity.

    KANT

    Kant tries desperately, to recreate the protestant church by rational rather than mystical means. Not only does he fail, but he tells us that we can never understand reality – the most anti-scientific ideology in history, second only in harm to Zoroaster and Abraham.

    PERSON, FAMILY, TRIBE, and PRODUCTION

    The data appears to universally demonstrate that extended families who eschew marriage of relations develop both high trust and redistributive morality. It appears that people who do not do this, do not, and experience high corruption.

    As diversity of any kind increases (particularly of family structure) morality changes with it, and disparate family models compete with different moral codes. Signaling is used by groups to demonstrate moral affiliation, and trust declines. (just the data. That’s how it is.)

    This explains why northern european countries are redistributive: they are highly related, homogenous extended families, with small political structures. So they do not feel ‘alienated’ from their labor under capitalism. Whereas transitional families do. ie: Marx got it wrong. Capitalism isn’t alienating if you’re a tribe. It is if you’re alone.

    Despite the fact that the vast number of social cognitive biases we evolved with lie to us about the similarity of our thoughts, and the Dunning Krueger effect prevents us from discovering it. We always believe we are ‘the average person’ or ‘in the top 20%’. But neither is true. And all but a few are competent to make that assessment, and those that are, underrate their competence.

    Democracy is a familial process – for use with Kin. It can be used to choose which of the priorities is highest among people with similar interests. But it cannot choose between competing interests without conquest of one group by another. That is purely logical. And that is what the evidence has shown us.

    As such alienation CAN ONLY be a product of inclusion or exclusion from the commons of production that we call a family. Where a family has some maximum size before interests are no longer common. A social contract always exists. It is called ‘norms’: manners, ethics and morals. And they vary by family structure. And family structure is determined by the means of production, whether that be informational, industrial, agrarian, or hunter gatherer.

    As such I am fairly sure that diversity and scale are contrary to both any social contract, and any desire to prevent alienation. And Kant’s contribution is just another iteration of mysticism.

    Smith and Hume were right. And the conservatives were right: democracy across any variation in interests, is just the slow road to dictatorship.

    Cheers.

    (eh… not a fan of comparative religion. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-18 07:11:00 UTC

  • THE CHOICE OF ALIENATION Alienated: ostracized, outcast, irrelevant, indifferent

    THE CHOICE OF ALIENATION

    Alienated: ostracized, outcast, irrelevant, indifferent, without value to the group, independent, alone.

    Why have we evolved this feeling?

    Because it is an instinctual warning that our status is low. Not only are we not desirable mating material. But we do not provide the other members of the group with value. They see no promise that we will provide value. And we see no promise of providing value. So our wishes can be comfortably discounted in any group decision. We need not consume group effort and resources. And we can be left behind in duress (die or be fired). We evolved that feeling so that we would be desperately incentivized to find a way to provide value. In history it was a death sentence. Today it is a subject of cognitive therapy.

    What causes this feeling in history?

    The organization of humans engaged production has been declining from the tribe (Hunter gatherer), to extended family (agrarian settlement), to nuclear family (prohibition on inbreeding), to the Isolated family(industrialism) to the individual (information age and feminism), as the division of labor and knowledge increases due the increase of people in the work-force.

    We evolved to use visible signals, emotional expressions, and personal knowledge of one another, living in bands and tribes, and we now communicate by pricing signals and a hierarchy of manners, ethics and morals, whose only visible feedback is negative, and our only success metric consumption and survival. We are not administered by the knowledge of others, but by antique religious norms, contemporary-religious norms (Postmodernism), an inconceivable network of laws, and a system of credit information which cares nothing about the vicissitudes of our lives. We live in physically isolated spaces, free from the compromise with others, free to imaging our own status within our family, tribe and nation, as whatever we dream it to be. We choose to live alone. We choose our spatial freedom. We choose our freedom to consume. To spend our efforts on the self, without compromise to the family, extended family, clan, tribe and nation. We choose it on purpose. Willingly. And almost universally, all people, who have the opportunity to choose spatial freedom, person consumption, and freedom from compromise do so whenever possible. We are confronted not with inequality, but with the pervasive evidence that we are all equal in our near-irrelevance to one another outside of the mother-child bond. The further west we move the less tangible is the tradition of kinship, so even genes do not guarantee us membership.

    But given the choice we almost always choose consumption. Because we are too selfish to forgo the opportunity for stimulation, experience, consumption and status to compromise with others and reduce both the opportunity to gain stimulation, as well as the chance that the illusion of our status, be erased by constant interaction with others who would dispel it.

    Alienation is the price we pay for selfishness. And we pay it willingly.

    We complain about the prevalence of a McDonalds hamburger, which has more calories than most people could consume in a week, and more chemicals that they could absorb in a lifetime. We complain about the cost of everything, even though our purchasing power is unrivaled.

    We criticize the cost of living near good schools. We envy those with clothes, goods, cars and homes as conspicuous consumers when the only difference between their goods and ours is the status signal that accompanies it, and the conflict this causes between the illusion of our mating status and our observable reality.

    Status in american life requires little more than a college education, a two income family, that provides someone else what they want, so that we can get what we want. But most other people want something the provision of which is mundane, uninteresting, boring, repetitious – because that is what makes something inexpensive.

    We complain about military spending, while it is paid for almost entirely by exporting debt, so the dollars can be used in the market for petroleum, and then we inflate the debt away, conveniently taxing the developed world for our military, while providing us extraordinary trading rights, and the stabilization of prices of commodities, without which americans would lose between a quarter and a third of their standard of living.

    Will women choose to restore the nuclear family and abandon the workplace? Will people forgo selling their labor at ‘jobs’ and return to direct participation in production and commerce, and the risk that comes with doing so? Will they abandon commerce altogether and resort to sustenance farming? It does not appear so.

    Will the american society become as redistributionist as the smaller nations try to? No. We are no longer kin, or near kin. and People sacrifice only for kin. Kinship can be determined by values and culture alone, not genetic relation. But we are not homogenous enough. WHy? Because human moral codes are determined by family structures, family structures by the allocation of property, and the level of technology involved in production. People will not fund alternative moral codes. Redistribution is for the small and homogenous, where homogenous means homogenous family structure, and homogenous morality, homogenous values, and marginally homogenous kinship. Trust is necessary to avoid the economic friction of corruption and a diversity of manners, ethics, morals, values and family structure leads to a competition for status signals, a competition for power, divisiveness, and a decline in trust necessary for the prevention of corruption and the low friction of trade.

    We still worship Marx’s moral vision, which all of us would embrace if it was possible, even though we know that without prices and incentives to inform us what to do, we would be at the merciless subjection of those who would command us into equality. But where our only possible equality is in poverty.

    Everyone wants the same thing: the illusion that is Denmark. The problem is, all the adults can’t figure out any other way to get there. The only way we know of is ‘small’.

    Equality of care for one another amidst the inequality of value to one another is only achievable with kin.

    And that’s where we got the feeling from.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-16 09:43:00 UTC

  • IN JOURNALISM; A PROBLEM AND A SOLUTION (The Common Law) Craig WIlly, a blogger

    http://www.craigwilly.info/2013/08/14/can-media-tell-the-truth-on-new-vs-traditional-journalism/TRUTH IN JOURNALISM; A PROBLEM AND A SOLUTION

    (The Common Law)

    Craig WIlly, a blogger who I follow who writes honestly about EU affairs, will leave blogging for a position as a reporter with a financial new service in Germany.

    In his column he states the obvious: that there is no such thing as journalism, only opinion writing. “Opinion Journalism”. He uses a quote from Julian Assange to justify the journalistic economy: It is the clashing of these voices together that reveals the truth about the world as a whole”. Just like any other form of capitalism.

    But I would argue, given the statements below, that if you don’t get paid for it, it’s an opinion. But if you sell it, it’s a product. And if you sell a product, you must warrantee it. And journalists, or at least media providers, should be held accountable for the quality of their products.

    Our courts made a vast mistake undermining traditional common law on libel and slander. And we worsen that mistake with not requiring warrantee on the products of reporters. If products must come to market with warrantee, then fewer of them will come, but they will be of much higher quality.

    It should be noted that the government gives corporations the permission to pollute, and journalists the permission to lie, slander and commit fraud, by revoking your right of standing in the court of law, as a consumer of a good that was purchased on the market.

    So while I agree with Craig’s argument, I do not agree that the market without the courts, is a sufficient guarantee of public good. Not even market anarchists make this argument. Nor do I agree that the market for information is a sufficient guarantee of public good without the protection of the courts in enforcing warrantee on the quality of the product that we consume. Nor do I agree that the market for academic knowledge without the courts is a sufficient guarantee of public good.

    Personally, I’d like to take Dan Rather to court for all the damage he did to America.

    QUOTE:

    “Today, years later, I’ve come to be more aware than ever that media are generally not in a particularly good position to tell the truth. There are too many structural problems:

    The journalist (or media) is often an amateur-generalist who writes about subjects about which he has no expertise. (How many Yugoslavia-experts were there in Western media in the 1990s? How many Islam experts after 9/11? How many Germany experts since the euro crisis?)

    1) The journalist has to write to very short time constraints, before the “fog of war” clears.

    2) The traditional (print or TV) journalist has to simplify according to the constraints of column size and screen time (“concision”).

    3) The journalist panders to the powerful in order to preserve “access.”

    4) The journalist panders to his audience’s prejudices in order to acquire and keep readers.

    5) The journalist engages in sensationalism to get “hits.”

    6) The journalist must respect the interests of his paymasters (corporate or government owners, subsidizers, advertisers, subscribers…).

    7) “The journalist” is defined here as he who lives by his writing, each of these points could be extended to media in general.

    The point here is all media, all journalists, have necessary and structural conflicts of interest that potentially compromise and bias the truthfulness of their writing.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-15 13:18:00 UTC

  • CLOWN: EVIDENCE OF A STATE RELIGION? Now, we have a long history of ridiculing o

    CLOWN: EVIDENCE OF A STATE RELIGION?

    Now, we have a long history of ridiculing our officials. I have spent halloween dressed as both Reagan and Clinton – neither of them very charitable representations.

    So a clown gets up and plays the president. Or Hollywood puts out a discrediting film using prominent left wing actors about Reagan or the iron lady.

    We burn effigies of Bush, and copies of the flag.

    Funny enough that the progressive reaction to a clown wearing an Obama mask at a rodeo produces the same intensity of reaction that a cartoon of mohammed did from fundamentalist muslims.

    American libertarians and conservatives must understand that the philosophical framework we call postmodernism, is a FUNDAMENTALIST religion far more dangerous than islam. Far more dangerous than socialism or communism.

    Christianity had churches against the nobility. Communism had the state against the nobility and the capitalists. Socialism had universities and argued that it was a science – until it was demonstrated in theory and practice that it was not.

    But universities did not give up upon the failure of their new religion. They invented postmodernism.

    We see postmodernism as political correctness. As feminism that did not grant equal rights, but extraordinary privileged. As absurd liberal logic: Equality as a fact rather than a necessity of just law. Diversity as a good rather than a temporary tolerance until people assimilate . Merit as an obscurity for invisible inexplicable but assumed corruption. Support for the unfortunate as an obligation to subsidize poor judgement.

    That the separation of church and state must equally apply to universities and their religion of postmodernism, as it did to our cathedrals and christianity.

    Universities, like advertising agencies and consumer brands have the incentives to mislead people, whether customers or citizens. To sell them lies, dreams and fantasies. And since they are unaccountable there is

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-15 11:39:00 UTC

  • RISING ANTI-CAPLANISM – THE MOVEMENT AGAINST OPEN BORDERS I go back and forth on

    RISING ANTI-CAPLANISM – THE MOVEMENT AGAINST OPEN BORDERS

    I go back and forth on Brian Caplan. I agree on almost everything is but his stand on immigration and his argument against calculation getting blown out of proportion by giving higher priority to incentives. That’s silly. They’re two sides of the same coin, and neither has meaning without the other. He had an opportunity to clarify an issue and just clouded it. And that’s been a problem for me and the movement.

    There is a bit of an anti-Caplan movement building in the conservative intellectual community. Which, I think is only driven by his immigration stance.

    I can’t expect him to think differently. Any more than I can be expected to disavow my ancestors.

    But it’s a preference, not a truth.

    Open immigration is incompatible with the preservation of individual, several, private property rights.

    Period. We didn’t know that. Now we do.

    Conservatives didn’t know that homosexuality was genetic and in-utero, not a choice. But they stick to their position out of religious conviction, even when they know the rational reasoning.

    Libertarians stick to the fantasy that property was a moral preference, rather than a reflection of a reproductive strategy, that is in opposition to the desires of the majority of people on the planet.

    It’s illogical to hold to a position when the evidence is contrary to your beliefs.

    Open borders must require symmetrical respect for property rights. And open borders and democracy are a direct opposition to property rights.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-15 09:27:00 UTC