Curt Doolittle

Form: Project Update

  • Patiently waiting for iMovie to render. I’ve split the Ron Manners interview int

    Patiently waiting for iMovie to render. I’ve split the Ron Manners interview into one on Ukraine and one on my work on Propertarianism and reforming libertarianism.

    We didn’t prep for this at all. I didn’t know he would interview me (or I wouldn’t look like I just rolled out of bed after a wild night – I actually wasn’t feeling well). So it’s a natural and casual discussion.

    Ron is a great guy really.

    I bet he didn’t like my answer though: that resources (USA, Australian, Canada, Argentina, and Ukraine) are simply a vehicle for constructing rent seeking polities. The UK still has an incredibly rent-seeking culture, without resources, but only because they still operate as if the empire exists. And that empire exists, except that the UK is merely the swiss banking system of the Anglo American empire. That empire is coming to an end. Along with the european discount on defense, outsourced to americans.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-07 03:33:00 UTC

  • Well, I have been lazy, and delayed publishing my better FB post to my web site

    Well, I have been lazy, and delayed publishing my better FB post to my web site (where they are searchable), and integrating them into my chapters. So today I’m going to spend the day at a coffee shop updating and editing.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-05 02:14:00 UTC

  • UPDATE: Well, I’ve let myself get distracted a bit by the sheer entertainment of

    UPDATE:

    Well, I’ve let myself get distracted a bit by the sheer entertainment of criticizing rothbardian adherents to the NAP/IVP. It’s been a useful distraction from the stress of waiting for Russians to invade Ukraine. And it has helped me simplify the arguments. Although I have to say that Eli Harman has helped me a bit too over the past few weeks.

    I feel bad if I just mention a few people, because then all the others who have helped me might feel slighted. And I can’t really list everyone. So thank you to everyone who’s given me time, advice and criticism.

    The combination of testing and marketing campaign seems to have played out pretty well. I really started in November/December and now five months later I feel pretty comfortable that I’ve made the noise I wanted to, and tried my arguments out well enough that further work really isn’t helping.

    Roman I met this weekend, and it’s time to get back to working on serious stuff.

    We are planning a writing retreat. I can’t wait. A few weeks out.

    Now I have to switch gears and put more focus on the book. And honestly it’s pretty hard to concentrate when this kind of stuff is going on in your country. And it’s much more fun to socialize argumentatively than it is to write formally. But fun is fun and work is work, and it’s time for work.

    I need to stay healthy because I just can’t work hard enough in that condition. (Almost back to normal now. Another week I bet.)

    Cheers

    Curt.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-13 10:06:00 UTC

  • Restructuring the TOC

    For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on the simplicity of the argument and I think I have it pretty close to done. Now I have to think about how to introduce it. And I think I’ll approach it by formulating the right question (stating the right problem). I don’t think I’ll tie it to libertarianism directly, but take Haidt’s approach of simply addressing the issue. That makes my arguments less ‘niche’ and less associated with ‘whacky libertarians’. PART 1 – MORAL REALISM (ETHICS) I think the best thing is to state the problem, then state the whole argument. Then list the extensions to property, ethics and morality. Then show how the argument addresses the problem. Then pose a list of questions that this argument must also address to confirm it’s assertions. Then I rearrange my chapters such that they address those questions. Then I follow that with the (many) applications. PART 2 – POLITICAL ETHICS I think at this point I address moral realism from the ground up. Including the performative (Attestation) theory of truth, and work through each of the major branches of philosophy. Next I attack platonism, obscurantism, pseudoscience, and mysticism as immoral, and add the new extensions to political ethics. PART 3 – POLITICAL ECONOMY Work through the institutional solutions now that we’ve built a foundation. PART 4 – APPENDICES APPENDIX 2 – Reform Libertarianism. Address praxeology Address ghetto ethics APPENDIX 3 – Reform Conservatism APPENDIX 4 – Brief Attack on Democratic Ideologies one by one. APPENDIX X – Go through the formal logic of cooperation. This seems very difficult but since I’m just building on Ostrom’s work I don’t have to go into all the multitudinous defenses she does, I just extend that work.

  • Restructuring the TOC

    For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on the simplicity of the argument and I think I have it pretty close to done. Now I have to think about how to introduce it. And I think I’ll approach it by formulating the right question (stating the right problem). I don’t think I’ll tie it to libertarianism directly, but take Haidt’s approach of simply addressing the issue. That makes my arguments less ‘niche’ and less associated with ‘whacky libertarians’. PART 1 – MORAL REALISM (ETHICS) I think the best thing is to state the problem, then state the whole argument. Then list the extensions to property, ethics and morality. Then show how the argument addresses the problem. Then pose a list of questions that this argument must also address to confirm it’s assertions. Then I rearrange my chapters such that they address those questions. Then I follow that with the (many) applications. PART 2 – POLITICAL ETHICS I think at this point I address moral realism from the ground up. Including the performative (Attestation) theory of truth, and work through each of the major branches of philosophy. Next I attack platonism, obscurantism, pseudoscience, and mysticism as immoral, and add the new extensions to political ethics. PART 3 – POLITICAL ECONOMY Work through the institutional solutions now that we’ve built a foundation. PART 4 – APPENDICES APPENDIX 2 – Reform Libertarianism. Address praxeology Address ghetto ethics APPENDIX 3 – Reform Conservatism APPENDIX 4 – Brief Attack on Democratic Ideologies one by one. APPENDIX X – Go through the formal logic of cooperation. This seems very difficult but since I’m just building on Ostrom’s work I don’t have to go into all the multitudinous defenses she does, I just extend that work.

  • Intellectual Influences

    [I] love bibliographies of major works. On my site I collect reading lists and the biographies of the authors that I respect most. Today, I’m working on restructuring my chapter order to be less about libertarianism, and to accommodate the improvements in my arguments over the past year. So I am working through Hiadt’s bibliographies trying to see if there is anything that I haven’t read. And, you know, there really isn’t. Which scares me. lol. Although, it really makes sense because we’re very close in age, and went through our intellectual development during the same period, and information that counteracts the progressive fantasy just sort of exploded during the last thirty years. I just was later in my development because I was distracted by ‘business’ when younger and it’s really only over the past ten years that I have been able to devote such concentrated time to my work. When you get down to it, my major (almost exclusive) influences have been: (Poincare + Brouwer + Taleb + Popper) + Hayek + Duchesne + Stephen Hicks + Kahneman + (Hoppe + Haidt). Haidt and Hoppe the most influential. I made the mistake of trying to solve the problem Haidt did with computer science (artificial intelligence) because at the time I was in school, psychology was still in the postmodern catastrophe that was progressivism. It was gut classes for stupid people. But at that point in time, despite the fact taht I understood the problem was one of emotions and objects, I couldn’t solve it. Haidt did. But it worked out as a benefit because computer science is an operational methodology and taught me how to think without the nonsensical platonic categories that are universal to that ‘lost’ discipline we call philosophy. You can say fuzzy things in philosophy, logic and math but you cannot actually operationalize them with a computer, and a computer is just a very fast way of conducting human operations (switches). I did finally understand that voluntary exchange, property, inventory, substitution and acquisitiveness are the means of creating an artificial intelligence, but I have less interest in that field than I do in formal institutions of cooperation. So this is where I’m spending my time. Anyway, collecting these biographies has been fascinating because if you collect enough of them you see that very few works by very few authors have any material impact in social and political science. It’s been a 2500 year journey to try to solve the problem of cooperation. But we are getting very close to it.

  • Intellectual Influences

    [I] love bibliographies of major works. On my site I collect reading lists and the biographies of the authors that I respect most. Today, I’m working on restructuring my chapter order to be less about libertarianism, and to accommodate the improvements in my arguments over the past year. So I am working through Hiadt’s bibliographies trying to see if there is anything that I haven’t read. And, you know, there really isn’t. Which scares me. lol. Although, it really makes sense because we’re very close in age, and went through our intellectual development during the same period, and information that counteracts the progressive fantasy just sort of exploded during the last thirty years. I just was later in my development because I was distracted by ‘business’ when younger and it’s really only over the past ten years that I have been able to devote such concentrated time to my work. When you get down to it, my major (almost exclusive) influences have been: (Poincare + Brouwer + Taleb + Popper) + Hayek + Duchesne + Stephen Hicks + Kahneman + (Hoppe + Haidt). Haidt and Hoppe the most influential. I made the mistake of trying to solve the problem Haidt did with computer science (artificial intelligence) because at the time I was in school, psychology was still in the postmodern catastrophe that was progressivism. It was gut classes for stupid people. But at that point in time, despite the fact taht I understood the problem was one of emotions and objects, I couldn’t solve it. Haidt did. But it worked out as a benefit because computer science is an operational methodology and taught me how to think without the nonsensical platonic categories that are universal to that ‘lost’ discipline we call philosophy. You can say fuzzy things in philosophy, logic and math but you cannot actually operationalize them with a computer, and a computer is just a very fast way of conducting human operations (switches). I did finally understand that voluntary exchange, property, inventory, substitution and acquisitiveness are the means of creating an artificial intelligence, but I have less interest in that field than I do in formal institutions of cooperation. So this is where I’m spending my time. Anyway, collecting these biographies has been fascinating because if you collect enough of them you see that very few works by very few authors have any material impact in social and political science. It’s been a 2500 year journey to try to solve the problem of cooperation. But we are getting very close to it.

  • GETTING CLOSER I am pretty close on ethics and performative truth. Not close eno

    GETTING CLOSER

    I am pretty close on ethics and performative truth. Not close enough to communicate it. But close enough to feel that I have the problem solved and understood.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-25 08:09:00 UTC

  • A STATUS REPORT Most of what’s up on propertarianism.com under the outline, is a

    http://www.propertarianism.com/ideas/PROPERTARIANISM : A STATUS REPORT

    Most of what’s up on propertarianism.com under the outline, is about a year old. My workflow is, well, … I just test a whole range of ways of saying something, usually on FB, Chats, Forums, – anywhere where I can get a lot of different reactions and objections. Then when I can manage to write about what I’m looking for, I put it on the web site. Periodically I go through and take a subject and update the “Ideas” an “Debate” sections with what I’m most happy with. And then I go to the book and stub it out.

    When writing the last draft of my book, I made a tremendous amount of progress in just a few weeks, but then I got stuck on calculation and operationalism. It’s really obvious in the outline that that’s where I ran into trouble. And I just couldn’t get farther along until I solved that problem: how can you construct law across multiple moral codes? How can you prohibit obscurantism in law? How can yo make it impossible to conduct theft by a government? It isn’t the institutional problem that I had difficulty with. It’s the problem of language.

    This year, (you can see from the undone’s) I mostly spent on solving the problems operationalism and calculation – the immorality of platonism etc. I’m really happy with that so it’s about time to go back and add that. But it was a lot of work really.

    So the spring and summer I spent on mathematical philosophy, intuitionism, constructivism etc.

    I did good work in the early fall on family structure and morality.

    I did really good work in the late fall on the ethical spectrum.

    This winter, (as you can possibly tell), at least since December, I’ve tried to figure out if I should try to work within the libertarian framework to reform it, or I should just drop it and move entirely into the NeoReactionary framework, and simply attack libertarianism from the outside rather than try to reform it.

    The reason is that there has to be some benefit to carrying all that libertarian baggage, and the negative association with ‘the fruitcake fringe’. If reforming libertarianism is helpful and is an access to an audience then it’s worth the cost. But if libertarianism is really just a cult that’s going to hurt Aristocratic Egalitarian Ethics, then any attempt to rescue it just damages the overall message.

    So I decided to pull out the guns and go on the attack and see. And it’s been pretty interesting. It’s actually sad. Pathetic even.

    Conservatives.

    Not an intellectual movement. No chance.

    The Ron Paul Movement.

    They are doing fine and do a better job with morality than the rothbardians. Mostly classical liberal in policy. But they’re another ‘return to what’s worked int he past’ agenda. That’s done. The Absolute nuclear family and monolithic morality is done. No chance at fixing it. Demographics don’t support it. So the only available answers are secession, nullification, revolution, or reformation. I don’t really care which. And I’m trying to answer revolution and reformation. Other people have the others covered. (Tom in particular)

    The BHL’s

    Um. I’ve abandoned the psychological model of the classical liberals in favor of the ratio-scientific model of the present and I see no hope of reforming these people, or even playing on the same field. They are all moral intuitionists seeking justification and only one (Rod Long) is strong enough to even consult with.

    The Red Pill Tribe

    “Neo-reaction is where libertarians go when they grow up.”

    The problem is I just really don’t like racism. I don’t even like race realism. I don’t like it at all. My view of the world is tribal, and we all are heads of families of different sizes, with different talents and weaknesses (the gullibility of white people for example). I care about these things because I think it’s harmful to create one-size-fits all institutions that don’t assist in the strengths and weaknesses of different tribes. And as far as I can tell, we are all happier if we have at last tacit membership in a tribe, and we need to be taught and raised by means most likely to help us. So I see a heterogeneous polity needing heterogeneous institutions that require heterogeneous moral codes. I see neo-reaction as a return to tribalism. But if it gets into racism I just don’t want much to do with it.

    STATE OF THE WEB SITE

    What I haven’t done to the web site, and very much needs doing:

    – a recent revision to address the production/family/morality axis.

    – revised the ethical spectrum to reflect the use of the charts.

    – more than outlined Scientific and Ethical Realism – I still think I have a lot of work to do there. This is, to me, more interesting than the political philosophy: that it’s possible to finally settle the matters of truth and epistemology. I really,really enjoyed that work.

    – reframed my earlier terminology referring to discounts as the suppression of free riding. Or at least clarify that one tries to take a discount by free riding, and the other tries to prevent your free riding.

    – really done the work on connecting morality, economy and trust.

    – updated the glossary to reflect the changes in terms and new terms.

    – updated the debate section which needs serious work. Some of it I use daily other parts need to be completely rewritten to make more specific use of some of the insights.

    – posted the (long) history of aristocratic liberty. I wrote it in 2010 to familiarize myself with the history of freedom and conservatism, but I want to recast it in philosophical rather than just historical terms so that I can draw out the difference between the cultural traditions and methods.

    It’s clear where the holes are because I’ve labeled them with (undone).

    The book is a lot longer than what’s on the web site, and I’ve covered a lot more individual topics – much like Ethics of Liberty. But I’m trying to keep the central ideas up here on the web site, because I refer to them all the time.

    But you can get a lot from it if anyone wants to look.

    CURRENT DIRECTION

    I’m coming around more and more to the idea dropping the libertarian context altogether because property rights are now so tainted, and they property rights are too weak a framework compared to suppression of free riding.

    Also the Aspie-tarian criticism is becoming painfully true. It’s clearer than ever to me that rothbardianism is a cult even if a pseudoscientific cult. And it’s pretty clear that rothbardianism is not only a rational argument, but participants are noticeably anti-scientific. ie: religious.

    So, the choice is then between Aristocratic Ratio-Scientific Propertarianism based upon Scientific and Ethical Realism as an ideology of action, or Ghetto Libertarianism Rationalism based upon what? Praxeology and Argumentation? And as a failed ideology of resistance?

    Is that really much of a choice?

    Off to the races.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-11 14:35:00 UTC

  • UPDATE: OVERSING PROGRESS (nerds) Our product, Oversing, has evolved from lookin

    UPDATE: OVERSING PROGRESS

    (nerds)

    Our product, Oversing, has evolved from looking and feeling like ‘Supersized-Jira’ to a full blown ERP/PSA.

    We took an interesting technical risk by using our “Panel” UI to construct task, role, and function based user interfaces out of a set of available panels.

    This risk had the potential to overload the DOM, but it seems that with judicious use of Backbone and hand coding we have managed to pull off a next-generation UI that is well… amazing, and we have not even tried to refactor for performance yet. (I love using denormalization-on-update to speed selects, and the devs just do not like it at *all*. But I will win in the end. 🙂 )

    Anyway, there is nothing like Oversing. Anywhere.

    We are a year and a half into it. And it’s beginning to come together.

    It will take us three years to put the whole scope of work together. And at that point the “ERP for Everybody”, I am pretty sure, will be on desktops and laptops everywhere.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-26 08:35:00 UTC