Curt Doolittle

Form: Reply

  • QUESTION: “How did you come up with your company and product names?” – Jean. Com

    QUESTION: “How did you come up with your company and product names?”

    – Jean.

    Company name: Reality by Chanting.

    Product name: Oversing.

    BRAND VALUE

    Music. Dancing. Rythm. Joy. Stuff we do together. Moving together in a coordinated way. This is fertile territory for a brand, because it gives us material to work with in a space that is overly financial and deprived of all of those positive values. Current logo work uses a sort of hyper enthusiastic conductor haling to the throng. That’s where we going with it.

    We don’t want to look like a dot bomb era ‘efficiency’ snake oil salesman. Efficiency is a chimera. Technology is something you keep pace with, not an advantage. But your company culture can be the asset second only to your customer base. And we understand that in a business where employees often feel like street walkers, that creating a joyous and familial culture is a competitive advantage that ‘s hard to duplicate.

    TERMINOLOGY

    Reality by Chanting and Oversing.

    Both terms are forms of self-deprecating humor.

    In effect we’re saying:

    …”If your job is leadership, try not to take yourself too seriously – we just have a job, that job is to lead, and to lead by storytelling. Storytelling creates a mythology. A mythology is necessary for any culture, from the very great scale of a civilization to the small scale of a business, to the smallest scale of a family – to the philosophy we tell ourselves as our rules to live by.”…

    But in the end, they’re just stories. We need stories and myths to help us choose in the face of incomplete information, many seemingly equal choices, and risk and uncertainty. By giving a people a set of myths, we make it very easy for them to make a lot of very small decisions that are so similar that they need ‘tie breakers’ in favor of a collective end. In this way, we ‘fund’ our civilization, company, family and selves, toward long term goals, at very little cost to us, because those goals are accomplished as a byproduct of focus on very ordinary ends. This is why cultural values matter. It’s how we work together at low cost to make great things happen. 🙂

    OVERSING

    “OverSing” is a colloquial african-american term from the music industry which refers to a vocalist who is trying too hard, beyond his or her ability, and usually shouting rather than singing – and perhaps losing his or her voice as a result. I like this term because it means you’re trying too hard.

    Our product ‘Oversing’ tries to accomplish the goals of the owners and leaders of advertising, marketing, and technology firms, which are to steer their organizations to serve customers and do so profitably without having them resort to shouting – often uselessly. 🙂 This steering is easiest if you have a mythology. Our software doesn’t so much tell a story as show people repeatedly what’s really going on, and therefore steering them to do what’s good for the business as a byproduct of doing whatever else that tehy are doing. Think of it as accomplishing goals by raindrops rather than tidal waves.

    REALITY BY CHANTING

    “Realty by Chanting” is from the advertising business, but it’s origins are in the Marxist, Socialist, Progressive, Postmodernist ideological principle that if you repeat something often enough people will believe it – even if it’s obviously false. I like this idea because it is what philosophers, politicians, public intellectuals, marketers, CEO’s , Coaches, teachers and parents must do: create a cultural reality – cultural ‘values’ by chanting them until they are so pervasive that they become real to the people who hear them.

    This is somewhat different from ‘the big lie’ which was popularized by George Orwell’s book 1984. Orwell took it from the progressives the progressives from the Nazis, and the Nazis from the Communists, and the Communists possibly from Nietzsche, but most likely from monotheistic religions leading back to Abraham and Zoroaster.

    The idea is that for any lie to be believable it must be ‘big’, and the bigger the better. Because very popular, very big lies, have an air of legitimacy that satisfies our cognitive biases sufficiently to make us desire them to be true.

    THE PREVENTION OF LIES AND THE CHANTING OF TRUTH

    With Oversing we prevent lies – even big ones, and make them unnecessary. Oversing is a very transparent way of running your business. We tell everyone in the company the truth, and do it transparently. By doing this we undermine the political structure of bureaucracies that makes people in companies, particularly middle management, become self-serving rather than serve the interest of their peers and their customers. And by accident, then, they serve the business and it’s owners.

    Not the other way around. 🙂

    So yes, I put a little of my own nerdy philosophical humor into my company. It’s better than just combining random syllables. 🙂 That’s what we did the last time. And it was boring. 🙂

    Curt Doolittle, Keiv

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-22 12:57:00 UTC

  • Señor Doolittle: I recommend the following book as it deals (on a rather basic l

    Señor Doolittle: I recommend the following book as it deals (on a rather basic level) with social psychology, yet it contains lots of links to more literature concerning cultural differences in attitudes and prejudices or ingroup/outgroup behaviour.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-05 06:04:00 UTC

  • If An Alien Race Launches A Nuclear Missile Towards Earth, Could Nasa Defend Our Planet?

    The mass necessary to fuel the transport a nuclear weapon across light years of space is so large that there would have to be some reason to do such a thing in the first place.  I mean, if you can move something that far, you don’t need to use a nuclear weapon, just move a rock a little bit so that it hits us. That’s much more logical.

    And these things tactics don’t make sense either. THere isn’t any reason to use nuclear weapons. Planets like ours appear to be pretty scarce, so they’re valuable. You wouldn’t want to damage it.

    I can’t imagine wanting to trade with aliens.  I think it’s more likely that we would be pets. You don’t nuke pets. You catch and breed them.

    https://www.quora.com/If-an-alien-race-launches-a-nuclear-missile-towards-Earth-could-NASA-defend-our-planet

  • What Are Some American (us) Ways That Cause People From Other Cultures To Find Them Hard To Work With?

    For whom are they hard to work with?

    We follow the Protestant Work Ethic. Tell the truth, the whole truth, up front, make a promise and stick to it regardless of change.

    https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-American-US-ways-that-cause-people-from-other-cultures-to-find-them-hard-to-work-with

  • “THE PROFITABILITY OF DAYDREAMING WITH REASON” QUESTION VIA EMAIL “Curt, how do

    “THE PROFITABILITY OF DAYDREAMING WITH REASON”

    QUESTION VIA EMAIL

    “Curt, how do you write all this stuff during the day? And still get work done?”

    MY ANSWER

    We all screw-off differently. When I’m working, I focus on some problem until I am not in the ‘flow’ — which means, working by effortless free association. Then I take fifteen or twenty minutes to eat a piece of fruit, have a cup of coffe, look out the window, walk across the room, or visit a variety of economics blogs, facebook groups, Quora, my web site’s draft pages, SSRN, whatever stack of books I have on the table, and whatever, and I let myself react to whatever it is that interests me, and I write about it.

    Then, when that’s done, after my short term memory has changed contexts, I go back to whatever I was working on, and keep going with renewed interest both conscious and subconscious, letting my short term memory do it’s work of free association for me. (This is the secret to all creativity.)

    In this way, I’m never really ‘working’ in the sense that most people mean it. I’m daydreaming and writing down the content of my dreams. It takes a very long time to develop this habit, which is why most writers and programmers will tell you ‘just write’, and most artists will tell you ‘just make work’. Reason is actually a pretty weak property of the human mind. If you can teach yourself to daydream (intuit) something useful, then it isn’t work. It’s just habit and its effortless – like watching a campfire, or boats on the horizon. And when that happens, you end up chasing your feelings rather than fighting to suppress your feelings. Discipline is a function of reason. Creativity is a function of intuition.

    I write software, proposals, arguments, and analytical philosophy by daydreaming. Seriously. The entire skill is just to teach yourself to type fast enough that you can narrate your dreams.

    I do not think in words. It’s a very visual process. I feel logic the way most people feel space, or emotions. I’ve just become adept at becoming an observer of those feelings and intuitions, and capturing them. Editing’s the hard part. That’s work. I don’t have much patience for real work. lol.

    The byproduct of daydreaming as a profession, is that you can literally work eighteen hours a day, because you can’t imagine doing anything more wonderful than daydreaming for a living.

    The mind is just an enormous volume of memory with a few primitive instincts. Fill your short term memory with stuff. Let it do it’s job. It helps a whole lot if you like the stuff you fill your memory with. And you can only make money at filling your memory with things that are scarce, because only those things that are scarce are things that are valuable. It doesn’t do much good to fill your head with pop music, and gossip, it’s just easy to acquire. So the trick is to fill your head, constantly, with something that is interesting but rare.

    Marginal differences in intelligence simply make it easier to acquire increasingly scarce information. Because marginal differences in the intelligence necessary to produces scarce information are rare.

    There isn’t much mystery to man really. We’re pretty simple. It’s just that every other creature we know of has to evolve by dying or breeding and incorporating that knowledge into genes. We have the ability to incorporate it into memory. Both serve the same purpose.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-10 08:05:00 UTC

  • Does Fernand Braudel’s Analysis In Civilization & Capitalism (1955-79) Still Hold?

    The problem is, I’m not sure what you are really asking here.

    If you mean, that the success of europe was due to the independence of small city-states that were privately owned enterprises (oligarchies), with heavy integration between the governemtn and privileged (monopolist) industries, and that european success can be attributed in part to this relationship rather than ‘free trade and Smithian compeition”  then his analysis holds as far as that statement is concerned.  I think Smith’s argument was an attempt to suggest free trade would limit wars caused by these monopoly interests, since the transformation that we call the enlightenment was an effort to correct the problem of the 30 years war by finding an alternative social order.

    If we mean, that capital has been divorced from the city state by more widespread production networks, I think that’s accepted wisdom. I think it’s become apparent that capital is mobile and that states have a limited ability to control it.  States generally desire to remain autarkic and capitalists have the polar opposite position.

    If we mean, do norms and culture matter and does it matter that they remain constant and uninterrupted, I think Hayek and others have supported that pretty aggressively, and that the right agrees and the left hates it because it violates postmodernism’s religious doctrines.

    That governments operate almost entirely today as insurance companies, and that in retrospect it looks like city states insured their industries, I think also that this is accepted wisdom. 

    That capitalists compete against the state is also true, and if we understand that the state has appropriated the capitalist-oligarchical-industrial organization that was the reason for the success of europe, I’m not sure that the fact that the insurance company (the state) has invaded and stolen the assets of the business people, on behalf of the common people, is probably the way most look at it. But that is what happened.

    That Braudel may have attempted to justify state monopoly and socialism rather than small states, is propbably an incorrect deduction to make from that analysis. 

    Braudel is one of many historians, social scientists, economists and  philosophers, that have tried to solve the problem of the theory of the social sciences.  One thing I would suggest and so would have Nietzsche, is that the fundamental disconnect in Braudel’s argument is that there is a common good, and one that can be known, and certainly one that is homogenous, and about which we can achieve consensus. Instead, this is one of the mistakes we inherited with the conquest of European paganism by judeo-christian totalitarian mysticism.   Democracy being yet aother instantiation of that monotheistic and therefor monopolistic and therefore totalitarain mysticism. (If you can follow that line of Nietzscheian reasoning. 🙂

    https://www.quora.com/Does-Fernand-Braudels-analysis-in-Civilization-Capitalism-1955-79-still-hold

  • What Are Fun Things To Do In Bellevue, Wa?

    Spend money shopping.
    Eat at exceptionally good restaurants that are equal to NY or SF.
    Drive to hiking. Walk to hiking. Ride bicycles. Drive to Skiing.
    Raise kids.
    That’s it.
    No joke.
    That’s it.

    https://www.quora.com/What-are-fun-things-to-do-in-Bellevue-WA

  • What Is It Like To Live In Bellevue, Wa?

    Bellevue is one of the top three or four cities to live in, in America if you’re in the upper middle class.  Which is a decidedly unambiguous ‘if’.

    The first thing to get out of the way is the weather.  First, if you watch movies filmed in Seattle or Vancouver Canada, notice how little yellow is in the light. It’s grey here. Aways.  Second, we have wind storms in the fall that take down our pine trees like a locust harvest, and they in turn take down power lines for days or weeks at a time. Third, Seattle never experienced the small farm phase of the eighteenth and nineteenth century so there aren’t side roads, villages, and ‘other ways’ of getting anywhere. Traffic can be brutal.  Lastly, and most importantly, Bellevue’s most popular drugs are anti depressants and hemorrhoid prescriptions. Why? The rain is absolutely devastating for anyone who is not acclimated to it, or predisposed to perpetual cheerfulness. If it rains for one hundred days and it’s grey it will absolutely demoralize most people to the point where they sit around all day without motivation.  This can only be countered with physical exercise. If the correlation between weather and outdoor recreation here isn’t obvous then hopefully this makes it clear to you. If you are not predisposed toward outdoor activity this is not a good place to live unless you love a life bound by pharmaceuticals.

    The next thing is the geography.  It is absolutely beautiful. It is also really, really, really far from the rest of the country.  Other than driving to Portland, which is four hours away, it literally takes DAYS, not hours, DAYS of driving to get out of the northwest.  I’ve lived in Boston and seen a Museum show in the morning and been at party in new york city that night. That doesn’t happen out here. If you don’t like mountains and trails then this is a very bad place to live – because that’s all there is.

    Dating.  There are more males in the northwest than females, and while it’s single digits, it’s pretty obvious single digits. If you are a woman, men here are more nerdy or casual than they are masculine.  Women are, shall we say, outside of Bellevue anyway, more likely to be wearing sandals and a t shirt and no makeup than any other form of dress.  People do not ‘dress up’ at night eitehr.  I pretty much live in jeans and a sport jacket and I’m usually one of the bettter dressed people. Like every city in america there is one woman who does exclusive matchmaking. And this statement from her is telling: “in twenty years I have never matched a Seattle man to a Seattle woman’.  The meaning of that statement is profound – women have to be imported now, just like they were for Seattle’s lumberjacks – albiet less crassly.  The concept of ‘cultured’ in Seattle is definitely west coast, meaning ‘unassuming and inoffensive’ it does not mean ‘possessed of knowelge about the arts and letters”.  As someone who is traditionally ‘cultured’ I had a very hard time adapting to the northwest culture.

    The northwest was irrelevant during the period of industrial migration, so it never experienced the immigration of diversity that has led to such conflict,  crime and decay in the industrial centers from Minneapolis to Boston, nor did it experience the historical problems from Chicago to the south.  Because of this, Seattle is still the second or third whitest city in america. And whether it is politic to say or not, that means that it’s a pretty calm and perhaps boring place to live, that is absent endemic class, race and cultural warfare.

    The one obvious thing that is disappearing is the remainder of the ‘hippie’ movement of the sixties and seventies.  This group, and their culture, and the goth type cultures that followed them, are pretty evident here.

    Boeing imported a culture of engineers, and Microsoft imported a culture of technologists. Bellevue/Redmond/Seattle is sort of like living in Cambridge without the incessant poverty, malcontents, tourists and students. Until recently, Seattle had the highest per capita consumption of non fiction books in the country. Nerds need something to do in the rain.

    Moreover, Microsoft gave more of its profits to employees than any company in history, and quite possibly more than all companies in history combined. This combination of upper middle class engineers, immigrant engineers from India and Asia, and a cost of housing that prohibits the entry of ‘undesirables’ has created an interesting artificial economy – a sort of ‘green zone’ that really exists nowhere else other than perhaps, a little more radically in Austin Texas.

    The lakes and bridges separate Seattle culture (more urban) from Bellevue culture (more upper middle class).  This means one has access to downtown Seattle (which is decreasing in importance as bellevue restaurants are now as good or better) but keeps the rabble at a distance.

    Microsoft is a company in decline and while it is an unspoken truth, everyone carries on with the pretense that it isn’t Steve Ballmer’s fault (it is).    But service in stores is fantastic because the guy with messy hair and jeans might be worth ten million.  And everyone including the incompetent politicians in Redmond who have doomed their town with planning and debt, carry on as if the emperor had clothes.

    A town can be judged by its car dealerships and Bellevue has one of the largest and most popular exotic car dealerships in America (They sold my Ferrari for me).  Seattle has a Ferrari/Maserati dealer, and Bellevue has everything including a Porsche dealer that has to keep a lot full of back-stock to keep up with demand, as well as lotus, Bentley and Aston Martin Dealerships, as well as Jaguar Land Rover and the commong german brands of Mercedes, BMW and Audi.  You have to leave town to find an American car dealership.  

    The mall is a family run enterprise, and a good one,  and the downtown core is owned by a local. Cops are unnecessarily strict and are not above giving tickets just to raise department revenue.  The city has grown a lot and I’m not sure it’s been for the good.  The parks in Bellevue  and the rapid access to every outdoor activity you can imagine means that you can actually take your kids out of the house in relative safety an get them exhausted enough to let you sleep at night.

    And that is the reason to live there.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-live-in-Bellevue-WA

  • What Restaurants In Bellevue, Wa Are Good For Large Groups?

    I’ve hosted something or other at most of the restaurants with space. Starting from downtown and working outward:  If you have a very large group, Maggianos has the best facilities and parking, service and food. I don’t think anyone else is nearly as good for scale. For the next step down in size, but up in quality, El Gaucho.  Most of the restaurants can be booked out.  Best food is pretty clearly Seastar, but they have constrained space – although they can take over the conference room on the first floor and that will suit a decent crowd. The facilities at twisted cork (or whatever it is called now) are awesome, and the kitchen is fairly good, and it’s locally owned so you can get attention and care. I would recommend the Bellevue Club, and … what’s the other one…. right downtown..  Can’t remember the name.  Barking Frog if you can get it.   Pomegranate in Bellevue is the top caterer on the eastside in my opinion, although Seattle has plenty to offer. So you could get a hotel (cheap) then hire Pomegranate. I won’t recommend the hotels – they’re universally bad. Outside of town the winery is popular (but good luck with that) and my favorite facility that I always recommend is Newcastle golf course. Especially for brunches. But booking it out is something that you have to compete with

    I can’t recommend downscale, because I don’t use it.

    Hope that helps.

    https://www.quora.com/What-restaurants-in-Bellevue-WA-are-good-for-large-groups

  • Has There Been A Decline In Civility In America?

    YES.  See “Coming Apart”, and the surveys on trust, and the measurements of civic participation of all forms. 

    As diversity increases, government increases, and civility, and civil participation decrease. 

    It has to.  Signals require that does.

    https://www.quora.com/Has-there-been-a-decline-in-civility-in-America