—“Many modern Christians do not understand that such self-righteousness is a luxury good. They do not pay the costs of their virtue signaling, so they can afford to ignore the effects of changing public policies in order to signal.”—Ulysses Aaron Cartwright
Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 21:01:00 UTC
—“Russians also celebrate Trump’s unfiltered stream-of-consciousness diatribes as signaling a welcome end to America’s hypocrisy and condescension.”—Foreign Policy
Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 20:58:00 UTC
Q&A: DEFINE ‘AGENCY’
—“CURT: Could you point me to any of your existing writing that develops your use of the term ‘agency’? I’m thinking more in legal terms (agent/agency), and wondering if that understanding is sufficient or if you have something different in mind.”— Andrew
It’s not complicated. It’s:
**agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices**
Think of it as a soft version of ‘free will’.
When I use the term, and when most of us use it in the context of different abilities, we refer largely to the delta between fully deliberate, fully rational, fully informed, unbiased, decision making.
Conversely, a lack of agency occurs as various impulses, cognitive biases, disinformation, and error accumulate until the person in question is no longer what we consider reasonable or sentient.
So when we say ‘women lack agency’ we are referring to the impulses that affect them because of their reproductive roles, which bias them against the tribe (males), and limit their decision making in matters of the tribe (politics).
(it is very hard for women to think clearly compared to men unless it is about a subject that is reproductively important for a woman and her offspring survival. In this sense most women are political equivalent of color-blind, in the same way that most men are nesting-blind, or empathically blind. The analogy that a woman’s mind is like a version of Windows that keeps popping up modal dialogs sporadically and constantly. For men. We open a window and we don’t see another one until we open another one and close this one. We also think about a very small subset of (high risk) problems and women do exactly the opposite: think about a host of low risk problems. Why? we hunt.They take care of children. I can hunt next week. Children must be taken care of right now and today. it’s not complicated.)
Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 19:07:00 UTC
DEFINITION: NATURE
That which exists and changes state according to available operations imposed by the physical laws of the universe, independent of the mind or actions of man. In other words, existence free of imagination, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, psueoscience and deceit.
Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 16:10:00 UTC
a definition of “natural as in natural law. Nature (existence and operational predisposition within existence) is an archaic term, so I answered what I thought you meant. But I think you mean that the verbal relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘natural law’ is other than etymological. Natural Law = reciprocity. We use the term ‘nature’ pretty widely. But in origin it has both a positive and negative meaning. Like most things the negative is more precise: that which was not created by intent. Originally used as ‘a man’s nature’, and referring to his character and breeding just as we learn by domesticating the personality and fitness of animals.
The use of the term Natural Law generally refers to the attempt to bind states to the necessity of not imposing upon that which would inhibit cooperation and prosperity. In later generations this would be reduced to reciprocity in property rights. In the current period I use it to refer to reciprocity in property in toto, and suggest that this condition is only possible under sovereignty. And that sovereignty is only possible by militial reciprocity.
Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 16:09:00 UTC
( I can finally ‘think in React’ after a month. I must be gettin’ old. Damn this is fun. )
Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 14:32:00 UTC
DEFINITION: SCIENCE:
“The elimination of imaginary information from our statements of observation.”
Science: via-negativa: the elimination of imagination, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, or deceit.
The rest is ample curiosity, patience, discipline, hard work, and tool-making – whether those tools are cognitive and logical, or physical and measurable.
As the scale of our inquiry decreases to the small, or increases to the large, or peers into the past, or into the future, or into the fast, or into the slow, we must reduce that which we cannot perceive and compare to that which we can perceive and compare.
That process is largely a constituted in the development of logical and physical instrumentation by which we can sense and perceive and compare that which we cannot without the assistance of logical or physical instrumentation.
In other words, Science consists in that discipline under which we struggle to distill the truth from the results of free association within our imaginations (and the imaginations of others).
Curt Doolittle
Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 14:06:00 UTC
Aristotle invented what we call science today:” the elimination of imaginary information from our statements of observation.”
It took through the Machiavelli to develop it in social science. It took until Bacon to develop it in general use. It took until darwin and maxwell to remove most of the remaining uses. I’m just removing it from psychology, sociology, group evolutionary strategy, and law. The problem for most thinkers in the past was the conflation of mathematics and platonism, and the conflation of reason and supernaturalism. Once deflated we are left with states, transformations, and the operations required to conduct those transformations: recipes. All else is some version of history, literature, and mythology. The reason we require myth, literature, and history, is because it takes very little cognitive power or knowledge to understand myth (cartoonish hyperbole for the purpose of reducing experience), literature (analogy to experience), and history (reduction of complexity beyond direct experience).
It doesn’t matter what similar errors they made – they were men of their time. it matters that between Augustine, Plato, and Aristotle, we obtained theological, platonic, and scientific traditions, which roughly match the cognitive abilities of our classes. We can easily categorize all thought as deflationary and true, conflationary and analogical, or conflationary and false (deceptive).
What matters is that one cannot argue truthfully only meaningfully across them, and decidability is ALWAYS provided by the scientific.
So, we have decidabile and true on one end, meainginful and allegorical in the middle, and deceitful and supernatural on the opposite end.
Decidable/True — Meaningful/Allegorical — Deceitful/False
deduciblity —————- inference —————– misdirection
Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 13:22:00 UTC
( It just occurred to me that I learned how to do basic operational encryption in second grade. And I learned how to program (taught myself from very simple books) before I learned algebra, and that this ‘operational’ framing was what troubled me when I got into mathematics, because it seemed like I was just guessing all the time, and I felt that was intuitively ‘wrong’. And that it’s that intuition,along with my intuition against induction, that my little autistic subconscious seized upon. … It’s fascinating to look back at the causes of one’s psychology. I mean. How much of my life was framed by reading a book on ‘secret messages’ in second grade? How much more was framed by the fact that I saw complex mazes, and then drew 18×24″ mazes in painful detail? How much more by learning to draw in perspective, then imagining and drawing the timber-structures – drawing the skeletons of victorian homes? How much by soldering together a primitive digital computer when I was 13? How much by my recognition that something was wrong with physics when i learned the light-slit experiment. How much by the classes in electronic engineering … and the ridiculous simplicity of it as reducible to ohms law – and that everything interesting was in the materials science of conductors and insulators, or programming the software, but not in the engineering itself? …. I’m perfect aware that my reading of encyclopedias informed by later study of the history of art, and later history of economics, and recent interest in the history of thought, and current history of western man’s ‘unique difference’: sovereignty. )
Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 09:41:00 UTC
PROGRAMMING IS AS IMPORTANT AS MATHEMATICS
—“Programming should be part of basic education if for no other reason than to promote humility. Trying to write a program is like being Phil Connors in Groundhog Day – you fail at life, again and again and again… until you realize and accept responsibility for ALL the errors of your ways. In that way, being a good programmer is more about emotional resiliency than brilliant problem solving.”—Siraaj Khandkar
Programming teaches you how little you know, and how precise you have to be. It teaches you just how often you don’t knw what you’re talking about, and neither do the other people you’re talking to, but because you’re all using words and ideas you don’t understand, but are using words and ideas that others do understand, you’re able to use conceptual tools like any other complex tool you don’t understand, but can still use for the purpose at hand.
THE SERIES
… Perception,
… … Identity,
… … … Arithmetic,
… … … … Mathematics,
… … … … … Logic,
… … … … … … Programming(grammar),
… … … … … … … Contract(reciprocity),
… … … … … … … … Argument(rhetoric),
… … … … … … … … … Communication (essay),
… … … … … … … … … … Illustrating (literature),
… … … … … … … … … … … Hyperbolic Illustration (mythology),
… … … … … … … … … … … … Symbolic (arts).
Source date (UTC): 2017-02-13 09:05:00 UTC