Curt Doolittle

Form: Short Note

  • Curt Doolittle shared a photo

    Curt Doolittle shared a photo.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-09 19:35:00 UTC

  • STORY OF MY LIFE (venting) Now that you have once again learned what happens whe

    STORY OF MY LIFE

    (venting)

    Now that you have once again learned what happens when you disagree with my business forecasts, and cost us and shareholders millions, can you please stop disagreeing? Its not like this was a unique case.

    Do us all a f–king favor and try to know more than I do. But dont try to be smarter than I am. It wont work. And it costs us money.

    Without intending to I have integrated Austrian thought so deeply that I pretty much see the world as nothing but incentives.

    You collectively still rely on the error of induction. But the past has little bearing on the future unless past incentives are also current incentives.

    This little twist: merging incentives theory with anti-inductivist critical rationalism, defeats induction and inductive intuition at all times.

    And thats your problem. You think you’re rational but your’e not, because induction is false. It is the result of evolution – a cognitive bias.

    And intuition is also inductive. Its how we evolved to make associations. But induction, whether intuitive, rational, or empirical, is still false.

    And even if you try to model it, Empiricism isn’t enough. Its only enough if you measure incentives. Because the past was a product of past incentives and the present is a product of present incentives and empirical data that is divorced from that relationship is worth precisely zero. The past does not predict the future unless incentives are the same. In that sense incentives, and not the past, are all that matter.

    FURTHERMORE.

    And this may be more relevant to you. People are only moral when their interests are marginally indifferent. We would like to think otherwise. But there isn’t any evidence at all to support that desire.

    Morality is a cost. All moral actions carry costs. Those costs are opportunity costs

    If you are in business with people who have different economic and financial incentives you must treat them as if morality is merely a form of manners, but not a promise of future conduct.

    So please stop trying to be smarter than I am. Cause its not because I am particularly smart. Its because you are not particularly wise.

    Idiots.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-09 03:15:00 UTC

  • US adults are dumber than the average human Not quite honest. But the underlying

    US adults are dumber than the average human

    Not quite honest. But the underlying report suggests why our labor force cannot be carried by a shrinking minority.

    http://nypost.com/2013/10/08/us-adults-are-dumber-than-the-average-human/

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-09 02:27:00 UTC

  • AND LIBERTARIANS HAVE BEEN AFTER THIS FOR DECADES I was there. We hired the fina

    http://on.ft.com/GIPUyrCONSERVATIVES AND LIBERTARIANS HAVE BEEN AFTER THIS FOR DECADES

    I was there. We hired the financial class to fight the state. We just didn’t count on this much immigration.

    So the bullet is in the gun. But we WANT to pull the trigger. Because america and americans will be fine.

    But government will be forever discredited.

    And that is a priceless achievement.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 17:22:00 UTC

  • Last week, one of our lawyers, spent thirty minutes telling us how we could obey

    Last week, one of our lawyers, spent thirty minutes telling us how we could obey the law and screw our shareholders. Our legal system has lost all concept of property rights and involuntary transfer. Its time to blow it up and start all over. I don’t want to know what’s legal. I want to know what is right and just, as well as legal.

    WTF is wrong with people. F–K.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 16:36:00 UTC

  • Always preserve some unsettled point of conflict in any deal for the very end, s

    Always preserve some unsettled point of conflict in any deal for the very end, so that you can blow up a deal once the momentum has taken root and the intellectual investment has been made, and everyone is committed. This allows you to crush minor points of petty theft that tend to occur by the participants in the negotiation and at the eleventh hour use their desire to profit from invested time and energy to veto a large set of sketchy provisions.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 16:17:00 UTC

  • DEAR ASCENTIUM FOLK (karma) The investment banker, Erik Anderson, of WestRiver C

    DEAR ASCENTIUM FOLK

    (karma)

    The investment banker, Erik Anderson, of WestRiver Capital, that destroyed your beautiful company, and even once we’d rescued it from him with the ultimate Hail Mary, pulled all the money out that we’d worked two years to get, and drove it into near insolvency, has been terminated by the parent company, removed from the board, and removed from his duties.

    Can’t recreate that one. The window passed. But sometimes there is at least some sense of justice in the world. It’s cathartic to me, at least. And I’m not shy about it. He’s every example of what Americans deservedly hate about the financial sector. And yet another example of why the financialization of our economy was a cultural and economic disaster.

    Maybe there is a special cell in hell. 😉

    Just sayin’.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 15:37:00 UTC

  • (…am i the only guy who finds jealousy incredibly unattractive and annoying? s

    (…am i the only guy who finds jealousy incredibly unattractive and annoying? sigh. )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 11:34:00 UTC

  • (quick thought) (serious) (important) DARK ENLIGHTENMENT AND CONSERVATISM VS LIB

    (quick thought) (serious) (important)

    DARK ENLIGHTENMENT AND CONSERVATISM VS LIBERTARIANISM AND INCENTIVES

    More on this later, but I see the problem that we are going to have with the conservatives and their fancy with biology.

    If we remember that the conservative aristocratic method of thinking is very much one of reproduction and family. It’s tribal. It’s cognizant of BREEDING. A word that has been dropped, but was very common in aristocratic egalitarian history. Breeding was an important consideration both in the family and on the farm. Darwin just explained why. But BREEDING has always been part of our history.

    The conservatives have latched onto epigenetic transmission. And I think it’s a rat hole. Even if it’s true, it tells us only that we can evolve FASTER. But it doesn’t tell us much about what changes and how much. Worse, it’s very hard to logically construct a reason why any such change is more significant than the formal and informal institutions that we can construct. Certainly literacy and law are faster means of adaptation than epigenetic transmission every would be.

    So this is why our ideas are even more important. INCENTIVES. Our analysis of property rights and our praxeological analysis of incentives, tells us what institutions we can and cannot build because of incentives rather than relying on norms or intuitions.

    But conservatives reject outright, as either specious or ‘evil’ any presumption that rational arguments such as incentives, are superior to intuitive arguments. (That’s crazy, I agree. But thats how they think.) And they are partly right because the vast majority of people rely on moral intuitions. its ONLY libertarians who rely on MORAL REASONING. If that sinks in. It will partly explain our failure to spread our arguments in the population.

    So what I am not quite settled on – even given that Propertarianism makes all political, ethical and moral arguments commensurable, is how to construct an argument that conservatives will adopt, even if it suits their purposes, because rational arguments are NOT intuitive arguments and only intuitive arguments are ‘appreciated’ by conservatives.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 07:50:00 UTC

  • CHINESE MONETARY THOUGHTS I HEARD FROM A MOUSE We all know that the Chinese have

    CHINESE MONETARY THOUGHTS I HEARD FROM A MOUSE

    We all know that the Chinese have been running around the world buying up all possible resources.

    But interestingly enough it turns out that they’re buying them in dollars and dollar denominated accounts, and securing them against their holding of US bonds.

    Now you can look at this a couple of ways.

    First, It could be that that buyers have greater faith in the dollar than the Renminbi. And so the price for assets is lower if paid in dollars.

    Second, it could be that the Chinese expect our dollar to explode and that if it does, they will leave the rest of the world holding the bag.

    Third, it could be that by spreading US debt around the world, it becomes possible to use the entire debt structure as an economic alliance against what the USA must do at some point, which is destroy the value of the dollar.

    Or. Of course. All of the above. Now, ‘nice folk’ don’t think in these kind of terms. But you know, I do, and I know that there are other people in the world who think like me. And it’s not ‘nice folk’ I’m worried about.

    It’s people like me.

    (Thank you Roman and Michael. )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 09:28:00 UTC