Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • THE PERSISTENCE OF MARXISM —“The persistence of Marxism in the West is a funct

    THE PERSISTENCE OF MARXISM

    —“The persistence of Marxism in the West is a function of its persistence in academe. Without that, it would wither and die. Why does it persistent in academe? Because Marxism satisfies three deep cognitive wants for academics:

    (1) It is a complex theoretical system. There is nothing that establishes one’s bona fides as a Very Clever Person more than mastering a complex theoretical system: the denser and more jargon-heavy the prose, the better. And Marx’s writings have plenty of dense, jargon-heavy prose.

    (2) It is a system of grand intent. If one lives the life of the mind, then the grander one’s intellectual projects, the grander one’s cognitive sense of self: Marxism not only “explains” human history and society, it “reveals” the final end point of human and social transformation. What could be grander than such a project?

    (3) It completely de-legitimises commerce. Under Marxism, the only legitimate economic role is to supply labour. All commerce is de-legitimised and all those engaged in it—including all those people who have far more wealth and organisational significance than academics—are de-legitimised, reduced to “exploiters” who are but immoral dust beneath the heels of academics in no way “polluted” by vulgar commerce.”—

    Michael Philip

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-19 06:28:00 UTC

  • IRONY: CONSERVATISM IS A SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE, AND PROGRESSIVISM IS AN UNSCIENT

    IRONY: CONSERVATISM IS A SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE, AND PROGRESSIVISM IS AN UNSCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE.

    —“…while conservatism is arationally structured, and progressivism is rationally structured, it turns out that conservatism as practiced is scientific, and progressive is unscientific (religious).”—

    This is in no small part because conservatism is structured demonstratively and progressivism is structured verbally.

    But the palpable irony, is that conservatism is a scientific method advocated arationally, while progressivism is an unscientific method advocated rationally.

    If humans can engage in such farcical verbal nonsense, on our most important matters, then what does that say about us? That we are just chickens clucking at the wind?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-19 03:45:00 UTC

  • THE PROBLEM OF THE IS-OUGHT GAP IS ONLY TRUE UNDER THE FALLACY OF UNIVERSALISM.

    THE PROBLEM OF THE IS-OUGHT GAP IS ONLY TRUE UNDER THE FALLACY OF UNIVERSALISM.

    We ‘ought’ to develop cooperative institutions, even if we can’t know what we ‘ought’ to accomplish using them.

    —“As Hume has made abundantly clear, there can be no basis in physical nature of any values or norms. The is-ought gap is unbridgeable.”—

    Not quite sure how to say this, but the reason I disagree with Hume is that he means ‘universal theories (“is” statements) exist for physically transformational (physics – say of geology), genetically heuristic (plans and animals), and memory-heuristic (man or AI) entities.

    However (a) the arbitrary precision for any system on that spectrum decreases from the physical-transformational to the memory-heuristic. Meaning that the precision of predictability of any instance decreases as we progress – gasses are hard to predict, and humans are harder to predict than gasses. We can make general statements (theories) about man, but we cannot make specific predictions about any given human. And (b) for sentient creatures, given what “is” both in the universe, and in our physical properties, we can choose from a variety of strategies, but we cannot know which we ‘ought’ to choose, because if we claim an ‘ought’ as a universal strategy for all of man, all choices are to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others, because we are sufficiently unequal to compete on equal terms. So any universal strategy ‘harms’ some body of people.

    However (c), assuming we desire both the best competitive choices for every group AND the best overall strategy for man, we can construct institutions that allow cooperation between heterogeneous moral codes (reproductive and evolutionary strategies), such as the market, because in such institutions we can cooperate on means, if not ends, and that through diverse pursuit of ends we can still ‘advance’.

    Yes it is not possible to select which theory might be right, or which human strategy might be right – those are synonyms. But we can choose what strategy might be wrong: chaos, violence and dysgenia that forbid the accumulation of capital sufficient for our long term prosperity.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-19 02:49:00 UTC

  • Curt Doolittle shared a photo

    Curt Doolittle shared a photo.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-19 02:28:00 UTC

  • Curt Doolittle shared a photo

    Curt Doolittle shared a photo.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-19 02:27:00 UTC

  • INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATISM EXIST? Response to: Does intellectual conservatism exi

    http://anarcho-monarchism.com/2014/06/24/intellectual-conservatism-existDOES INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATISM EXIST?

    Response to: http://anarcho-monarchism.com/2014/06/24/intellectual-conservatism-exist

    Does intellectual conservatism exist? This may be the wrong question.

    I’ll argue that Yes, intellectual conservatism does exist. Although, when you say “intellectual” it is somewhat troublesome, because it’s not sufficiently articulate for the purpose intended. Instead, humans demonstrate the ability to argue( persuade or justify) using a limited number of frameworks – and those frameworks constitute a spectrum of complexity from the simplistically intuitive to the ratio-empirical.

    ARGUMENTATIVE SPECTRUM

    1) EXPRESSIVE (emotional): a type of argument where a person expresses a positive or negative opinion based upon his emotional response to the subject. While used as an argument, it is not. It is merely an opinion or expression.

    2) SENTIMENTAL (biological): a type of argument that relies upon one of the five (or six) human sentiments, and their artifacts as captured in human traditions, morals, or other unarticulated, but nevertheless consistently and universally demonstrated preferences and behaviors.

    3) MORAL (normative) : a type of argument that relies upon a set of assumedly normative rules of whose origin is either (a)socially contractual, (b)biologically natural, (c) economically necessary, or even (d)divine.

    4) HISTORICAL (analogical / correlative):

    5) RATIONAL (internally consistent)

    6) SCIENTIFIC (correlative and directly empirical)

    7) ECONOMIC: (correlative and *indirectly* empirical)

    8) RATIO-EMPIRICAL (Comprehensive, internally consistent and externally correspondent)

    The value of conservatism, as an *ARATIONAL* social system of myths, traditions, habits, and formal institutions, is that such a structure, much like religious faith, is impervious to fashionable changes, and in particular, verbal manipulation by Schumpeterian public intellectuals. In fact, I have argued, and I think successfully, that conservatism as practiced is demonstrably scientific: evidentiary – while progressivism is demonstrably and successfully verbalist. A fact which is somewhat humorous or ironic or depressing depending upon one’s own disposition: in effect while conservatism is arationally structured, and progressivism is rationally structured, it turns out that conservatism as practiced is scientific, and progressive is unscientific (religious).

    THE PROBLEMS OF AN ‘INTELLECTUAL’ CONSERVATISM

    1) Just as we solved the calculus and physics, before we solved economics and social science, conservatism has been unsolved (unarticulated in ratio-scientific terms) because it is a more complicated system than we had anticipated. And such complicated systems of thought are very hard to use in argument. Worse, they are hard to use in political argument because, under a democratic polity, we require numbers, and complicated arguments are the province of a permanent minority. Until conservatism is articulated in ratio-empirical form, and until public intellectuals can reduce those complex statements to simple narratives and memes, conservatism (Anglo-European Aristocratic Egalitarianism) is an advanced form of social order that is nearly impossible for ordinary people to argumentatively defend.

    2) There doesn’t appear to be demand for intellectual argument in conservatism, precisely because conservatives are so dependent upon taught, learned and innate moral intuition. If conservatives cannot ‘feel’ it then they don’t trust it. This turns out to be fairly good when one prevents adding false ideas to conservatism, but it turns out to be fairly difficult to argue conservatism rationally. So therefore, as a majority, conservatism can function and persist in a body of people. But under democratic rule, cultural and political diversity, the need to argue rationally in order to produce laws, and the ability to use law to impose changes upon the body politic, conservative arationalism is a weakness because conservative principles are not sufficiently defensible against (dishonest) framing, loading, overloading, pseudo-rationalism, and pseudoscience. Which is why the 20th century has been so harmful to conservatism: the cosmopolitans were merely superior at using the media to broadcast and repeat as a mantra, nearly any framed, loaded, overloaded, pseudo-rational (postmodern), and pseudoscientific (marxist-socialist) program.

    3) I generally test my ideas in the libertarian (libertine) community precisely because libertarianism (libertinism) is an intellectual ideology: structured as a very rigid, very analytic, moral, legal, and economic argument. Libertarians (libertines) are wrong, which is why their argument fails universally in all political populations. But at least it is possible to conduct conservative argument in moral, legal, and economic terms, and develop one’s arguments there. Most of us find, that even if we produce, as you say ‘intellectual’ philosophy, but I would state as ‘ratio-empirical, moral, analytic, legal, and economic philosophy’, conservatives behave so anti-intellectually, that the advocacy of conservatism in ratio-empirical, analytic, moral, legal, and economic terms, is exasperating.

    SO THE QUESTION MAY BE “WHY ARE CONSERVATIVES SO ANTI-INTELLECTUAL” rather than why are no conservative philosophers extant. I’m here. A few others are. But the conservative community does not demonstrate a demand for ‘intellectual’ arguments.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-19 02:20:00 UTC

  • Do you know why most professors don’t participate in the blogosphere, even if th

    Do you know why most professors don’t participate in the blogosphere, even if they publish ideas in the blogosphere?

    ‘Cause unless you’re engaging in advocacy, particularly political advocacy, and particularly dishonest advocacy (krugman, delong, thoma) it is not worth your time.

    Worse, once you realize that (a) almost all online participants are engaging in a search for confirmation bias, and (b) that almost all humans are incapable of more than sentimental expression, or moral argument, and are permanently prohibited from ratio-scientific reasoning by hard limits to their abilities, and (c) that the deeper the knowledge you possess on any given subject, the more you contradict intuitive arguments -even within your discipline – meaning that

    So you basically can participate online as publisher, or a teacher, or as an advocate; but it’s pretty hard to participate as a persuader – debater. Because almost no one is capable of conducting a debate – either because of limited ability or limited knowledge or both.

    The value of the internet to average people, is not so much one of learning the new, but in their own error reduction within their own cognitive biases. And the rate at which we can reduce errors within our own cognitive biases.

    This does not help us to develop agreement on any form of moral universalims. What it does, however, eventually, is give us an opportunity for proposing compromises across cognitive and moral biases – our reproductive strategies – so that it is easier to obtain consensus across a smaller set of errors within the same distribution of biases.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-17 05:56:00 UTC

  • ON MALES AND POSITIVES STRESS (from elsewhere) A conversation with a female frie

    ON MALES AND POSITIVES STRESS

    (from elsewhere)

    A conversation with a female friend and ballet dancer. Who like many women recommend Yoga or some variation.

    –“hmmm….. You know, it’s sort of like Yoga.

    I’m a man. I can’t ‘hear’ my body – much at all. Not like a woman can. So I don’t get the ‘feelings’ that you would get from these kind of female-enjoyable activities unless there is a lot of motion involved.

    Dancing works, fencing works, running fast works, sports work, and lifting really ‘heavy’ weights with full body motion works.

    But honestly, if you can imagine the lack of stimuli in a sensory deprivation chamber, then that’s what it’s like for me to do any ‘subtle’ form of exercise. It’s literally emotionally painful.

    I have to experience ‘stress’ to feel that ‘calm’ that most women (and beta males) get out of yoga or tai-chee or anything similar. Physical and mental “Stress” without “threat” is my version of physical ‘peace’.

    I wish I could have learned how to express that earlier in my life. I should probably write something on the subject so that other men have the words to express how they feel in rational terms. Because this is the problem for a lot of men.

    Our bodies love stress. We even love threats. We just don’t want threats with meaningful consequences. That is why men like to play ports. And video games. Physical and mental stress without the danger of physical consequences.

    When we can have 3d video games that require full body motion, and where we can run around and safely play ‘war’ from within the safety of our homes, then men will be rescued from the physical and mental harm of post industrial society.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-17 04:21:00 UTC

  • MISES POSITION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY? (reposted from elsewhere) (I think this

    MISES POSITION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY?

    (reposted from elsewhere) (I think this will blow your mind a little bit.)

    THE MOST IMPORTANT ARTICLE YOU WILL READ ON MISES?

    Mises Human Action as Cosmopolitan Stoicism.

    He was almost right. If Rothbard and the Rothbardians had not damaged his legacy so severely, he would not be ostracized by the main stream intellectual community. At present any mention of his name associates a public intellectual, an economist, or philosopher, with the pseudoscientific lunatic fringe.

    Praxeology is a failed attempt at Operationalism, sure – but no one ELSE came close to developing economic operationalism but Mises. I only did it because I have the luxury of a century of additional development in computability (especially Turing), and because it’s clear now that the analytic program (attempt to convert philosophy into a science) has been a failure, and that the success in reforming both science and psychology has almost entirely been because of Operationalism.

    Had Mises joined with Brouwer and Bridgman, the three of them might have saved us from a century of pseudoscience. But without a philosopher of ethics to unify them, Popper in the philosophy of science, Mises in Economics, Brouwer in mathematics, and Bridgman in physics all failed to come to the correct conclusion: that they were not in fact articulating logical constraints – because there is no logical constraint to theory-development. The logical constraint is only in the statement of promise (that you are telling the truth) that such a theory can be expressed existentially, as a sequence of operations (actions) or operational measures of observations. And as such, one’s theory, in any discipline, is free of content that was added by error, imagination, or deception. Man can testify to observation in the execution of recipes – all else is imagination. As such the practice of the sciences (or rather, the practice of *disciplined testimony* which the sciences developed, but which consists of nothing unique to the physical sciences) is a moral one, with ethical constraints.

    As such, praxeology, mathematical intuitionism, operationalism, operationism, Popper’s critical preference, and the scientific method, as well as the discipline of science as currently practiced, are moral constraints, not logical ones. One can intuit a theory by whatever means possible. One can believe whatever he wishes to justify. But one’s promise of testimony to the actions that did or may produce consequences is a moral one, not a logical one.

    As far as I know, the only meaningful reason to study economics for use in ethics and politics, is to justify the rule of law (Nomocracy), under the single rule of property rights, where property rights is as defined under Propertarianism, as property-en-toto (demonstrated property). And where that body of law suppresses sufficient involuntary transfer of property-en-toto, that the formation of a Nomocratic polity is possible. And where the formation and perpetuation of that polity is possible, because transaction costs are sufficiently suppressed that a rational choice for Nomocracy is possible, over a rational choice for statism. And that the normative preference of nomocratic rule over statist rule is maintained by the constant exercise of that body of law in daily life, rather than a phillosophical-rational, religio-moral, pedagogically-instructional, or normatively-habituated means of persistence.

    If we look at his human action as an attempt to develop an economic version of stoicism – a mental discipline – I think it is probably a better frame of reference for his work than as economics or analytic philosophy.

    As such I see him as creating a Cosmopolitan version of stoicism (economic/intellectual character) rather than western (Aryan if you will) stoicism (political/craftsmanship character).

    Both forms of stoicism are early attempts at operationalizing philosophy for disciplinary action as an individual member of a complex division of labor in which we possess fragmentary information.

    Since I quote him endlessly for his analysis of money and fiduciary media, which again, he (“a sequence of human actions” = “operational observations”) correctly uses operational analysis to isolate and articulate the causal rather than normative properties – I am clearly an advocate. But I am not an advocate of the misuse of Mises’ errors – his failed attempt to develop economic operationalism – to justify Rothbardian libertinism – an outright assault on the production of both high trust, and the commons – both of which are the primary competitive advantages constituent in the western indo-european (Aryan if you will) evolutionary strategy.

    I walk by Mises’ childhood home every day. It has tempered my criticism. I see him making natural errors of Cosmopolitanism – as Hayek said “a victim of his upbringing”. Just as the Germans have made endless errors in conflating religion and philosophy to preserve their hierarchy and duty as a group competitive strategy. Just as British (Anglo/Irish/Scots if not the Belgae) have fought to preserve their island universalism despite the necessary suicide that results from universalism outside of their island (or the american island, or the Australian island.)

    I will venture this post is one of the more important things that has been written about Mises in recent history, and my arguments, if not my criticisms will assist us in RESCUING Mises from the lunatic fringe, and RESCUING his work for use in intellectual discourse – as the first attempt at saving Economics through operationalism, the way that science and psychology (if not also mathematics and logic) have been saved by operationalism.

    **I see myself as rescuing ALL of the Misesian/Hoppeian program from the fruitcake fringe: by laundering German, Jewish and British enlightenment fallacies – the attempt to universalize local evolutionary strategy – rather than simply adopt scientific epistemology (operationalism) as the only neutral tool for the use of studying group evolutionary strategies.**

    Although it is, I am sure, somewhat difficult for those religiously devoted to immoral, libertine, Rothbardianism to either understand or accept.

    I am quite sure I do not err in this analysis. A statement which I am aware further taunts libertines. But which my fellow aristocrats (libertarians-proper) both understand and expect from me as a promise. Because the anglo-empirical model of truth telling, quite opposite from the cosmopolitan, is that truth is the name for testimony. And as such I testify that to the best of my knowledge my statement is true. And that I bear the reputational consequences of my promise that this statement is true. This is the polar opposite of the Popperian, Analytic, and Cosmopolitan version of true: that truth is the unknowable province of god alone, and as such we can only ‘do what we can’, and as such are unaccountable for our words.

    This ethic, this definition of truth, as performative – as operational, is what Kant was searching for, but could not find. And it is why both Jewish and German philosophy are dead ends. And it is why english philosophy became lost through its influence by the germans and the cosmopolitans.

    We lost a century of philosophy to cosmopolitan pseudoscience in economics, politics, ethics and logic. Germans lost centuries to pseudo-philosophical religio-moralism. Mises can be seen in context as the most successful – if still failed – attempt to rescue german and cosmopolitan thought from its religious constraints.

    – Cheers.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-17 03:44:00 UTC

  • TO DEVELOP As far as I know, the reasons we desire anti-depressants in so many p

    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-rise-of-all-purpose-antidepressants/FAILURE TO DEVELOP

    As far as I know, the reasons we desire anti-depressants in so many people, are

    (a)a lack of physical exercise (which teaches brain regions to work together), and (b) the use of sugars as a substitute for oxygenation (oxygen causes mild euphoria), and (c) decline in meaningful interpersonal contact (interpersonal relations that require only intuition rather than judgement).

    The problem is in testing this theory. You have to wait for the data because it’s impossible to construct it intentionally. (BTW: this is one of the fallacies of positivism that people attach to empiricism: a human-generated test is MORE suspect than a naturally occurring test.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-17 02:47:00 UTC