Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • LATECOMER: THE KILLING (series) Binge watching the Killing series. Takes place i

    LATECOMER: THE KILLING (series)

    Binge watching the Killing series. Takes place in Seattle. It really is beautiful. Funny tho: the location scouts work pretty hard at finding skeevy sections of Seattle. Because there really aren’t any. Seattle never had mass immigration or underclass industrialization. And where the hell do they find the black people? There aren’t any black people in seattle? It’s the second whitest city in america. They have a murder in Discovery Park, then shoot the scene in what I think is Issaquah? They get the light right (it’s blue grey in seattle all the time). The camera work is excellent. I keep saying “fk, I wouldn’t have thought of that, that’s good.”

    The directing is excellent. I love long shots. The use of long shots rather than filler dialog lets actors actually act rather than wrestle with crap lines.

    But what gets me is how good the casting is. The casting is awesome. It’s interesting. So the combination of long shots and good casting is just – I don’t know, it’s more than refreshing. It’s satisfying – elegant even.

    I really don’t understand why casting is so bad in some movies and series. Casting is a discipline. A craft. It isn’t rocket science. But it certainly isn’t intuitive. Actors should not pitch to amateurs. It’s insulting And I see movie after movie with terrible casting. I wish I understood the process better but you know, it’s really frustrating to watch a series die because of weak casting.

    Anyway, I can’t watch most series – too exasperating. This one is up in my top five. It’s a work of art. Not just Because Seattle is home, but because like Seattle, it’s elegant and smart.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 15:24:00 UTC

  • INVOLUNTARY TRANSFER AS LOGICAL CONTRADICTION —“When a disagreement arises, if

    INVOLUNTARY TRANSFER AS LOGICAL CONTRADICTION

    —“When a disagreement arises, if you can discover an involuntary transfer implied in the other person’s argument, that would be equal to a logical contradiction in a debate. But restitution is also involuntary so not all involuntary transfers are bad – if they correct such a contradiction.”— Steve Pender

    Priceless.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 13:15:00 UTC

  • I love men in Ukraine. All you have to do is show the smallest amount of recogni

    I love men in Ukraine. All you have to do is show the smallest amount of recognition and respect that you will treat them as equals and all bravado disappears. I understand them. American bravado never stops, the class and race warfare never stop. I am so glad that I had the chance to live this way. And to ‘un-learn’ some americanisms.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 11:24:00 UTC

  • Unfortunately, libertarians tend not to be well read outside of their dogma, and

    Unfortunately, libertarians tend not to be well read outside of their dogma, and are thus uninformed.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 10:03:00 UTC

  • Worst. President. In. History

    Worst. President. In. History.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 10:01:00 UTC

  • THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE ON PHILOSOPHY It turns out that I’m not alone in

    THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE ON PHILOSOPHY

    It turns out that I’m not alone in this thought: computer science, which is operational (algorithmic) and constructivist(computable), has been replacing and will replace mathematics as the primary method of argument, and classical mathematics as well as Cantorian sets, will remain ‘verbal toolkits’ for the purpose of approximation (lower precision) which allow human minds to think in approximations (deductions) which can later be operationalized. That approach is what intuitionist mathematics recommends for example: discover necessary axioms then prove them.

    Does the operational constraint (algorithmic and computable) in computer science explain why philosophical thought leadership at least on the right and libertarian spectra is coming out of the computer science wing? Is that why austrian economics makes such sense to computer scientists? Or is it merely the skew in IQ distributions as talent follows money, leading to the saturation of technology with smart folk? Or is it a combination of both?

    Programming is pretty much like logic: an art of clear communication that can be conducted many ways. But databases are a bit more like philosophy of science: they must be constructed to correspond with reality. And both programming and databases force you to account for whether information is present for the purpose of making a choice – which is the problem of decidability (sufficiency of information presence) in all fields. Decidability is a serious problem as we create general rules with lower information density. We desperately want to create general rules in which the information is present for deduction. Because this limits the effort of cognition to something we can manage with our feeble minds.

    I learned physics first, computer science second, austrian economics third, and contemporary keynesian economics last. Austrian principles are intuitively constructionist (consisting of a sequence of human actions). And the ethics of voluntary transfer (the requirement that transfers are constructed of voluntary exchanges) are an operationalist’s method of testing each original/primitive/minimum activity (exchange) as ‘computable’ (decidable).

    I suppose that I have the luxury of a century of computing that Mises didn’t have, and the luxury of cognitive science and experimental psychology that Rothbard and Hoppe didn’t have. And I suppose as an operationalist (scientist) I have a higher demand for truth than did Mises, Rothbard or Hoppe. And as a software developer, I have learned that the human mind is an undisciplined creature and it is very difficult to demonstrate that we know what we claim to when we are forced to. Writing advanced software is terribly humbling. Engineering is terribly humbling. If only economics and law were as humbling as software and engineering. But teachers, lawyers and economists (at least those who recommend policy) are insulated from the failure of their models. Whereas in computer science and engineering, large sums of money can be lost, business opportunities lost, and people can die, and there is no one else to blame.

    So I don’t know if what I’ve done is all that smart – we stand on the shoulders of giants – but it was pretty hard to get to this point: where all of philosophy, all of the logics, and all fields, are reducible to a single problem of constructing theories (general rules) consisting of arbitrary precision of some sort or other (including or excluding properties of reality), while preserving the sufficiency of information for use in deduction (the confidence that our general rules allow us to conduct comparisons).

    In any event, it appears that far from being merely engineering, that the practice of software development, particularly in those cases where we deal with human machine interactions, is not subordinate to mathematics precisely because (now that over the past decade we have produced algorithmic equivalents) it is operational and therefore provable.

    And those of us working in ethics, myself in particular, can make use of this insight: that you cannot make a truth claim unless you can operationally construct the argument.

    That austrian economics is ‘correct’ in that it’s operationally moral.

    That praxeology failed because it is a fallacy as mises and rothbard defined it in pseudoscientific and false philosophical terms. Even if we give Kantian arguments some childish validity, we can say that they are useful only by analogy, not by construction and operation.

    Whereas, we can provide a superior explanation of economics, of the logic of cooperation, of the logic of human choice, and the necessity of human acquisition, by the simple acknowledgment of the necessit of property for incentives and economic calculation, the necessary morality of voluntary transfer and exchange, and the empirical analysis of emergent economic phenomenon, from which, like intuitionist mathematics, we explain as rational human actions.

    Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 06:25:00 UTC

  • ELI ON THE VIRTUE OF VIOLENCE AND NECESSITY OF AGGRESSION —“What I think I can

    ELI ON THE VIRTUE OF VIOLENCE AND NECESSITY OF AGGRESSION

    —“What I think I can enforce – and benefit from enforcing – is a prohibition against negative sum aggression (involuntary transfers) and a mandate for positive sum aggression (the suppression of free-riding.)

    Even private property is a form of aggression. Fencing off unowned land, formerly free for use by all, and announcing that – henceforth – trespass will be punished by violence, is inherently an aggressive act. Property is a social construct. Using violence to uphold a social construct is aggression.

    This is not an argument against private property, this is an argument for aggression.”— Eli Harman

    Aggression and violence are value neutral. The only question that matters is whether one is constructing property rights – the prohibition on free riding – such that we have the incentive and ability to develop a division of knowledge and labor. That division of labor compresses time, and increases productivity, such that through constant competition we can cooperate for the purpose of constantly decreasing prices – costs to us.

    Aggression and violence in the construction of property rights is not only a virtue it is arguably the highest most productive virtue than man can pursue.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 15:07:00 UTC

  • Curt Doolittle shared a post

    Curt Doolittle shared a post.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 15:01:00 UTC

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS: MOMMY TRAINING AND MORE American women need classes in ba

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS: MOMMY TRAINING AND MORE

    American women need classes in baby care and child rearing. (Really. hospitals often require it.). And pretty often in cooking. But here in Kiev, where it seems like every woman in her twenties that I know, if not teens, has a small child, they have this novel way of training: they help each other, and they help other women in their families. Sort of ‘hands on training’. Same for cooking. I mean, all the girls can cook, and they don’t think of it as a chore. It’s like breathing.

    Kids get LOTS of attention. So they aren’t trying to get attention all the time. It seems that slavic children (and adults) appear to be less aggressive and impulsive. Which isn’t true of Georgians and other black haired tribes to the south and east. I need to get some data on it. Because I’m skeptical that it’s something else. But it seems pretty much the case.

    Mysticism, or, I don’t know what to call it, but all the orthodox countries have it, and russians more so: this strange fatalism or belief ‘things work out this way’ as if they never heard of catallactic and self organizing processes. Or in the Russian case: the fear of not knowing something requires ignorance be replaced by confidence in pseudoscience. (I wonder how crazy this culture was before the communists just wiped out church mysticism.).

    I dunno. But you know, if you have to live a lifestyle, the whole extended family thing is pretty awesome. And I think it is MUCH BETTER FOR MEN than the ANF which statistically, in a migratory industrial population, leaves you old, lonely, poor, and increasingly suicidal.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 15:00:00 UTC

  • EVERY DISCIPLINE CAME CLOSE, BUT NONE SOLVED IT : TRUTH —“Truth is replaced by

    EVERY DISCIPLINE CAME CLOSE, BUT NONE SOLVED IT : TRUTH

    —“Truth is replaced by (algorithmic) proof as a primitive notion, and

    Existence requires constructibility.”—

    It’s interesting (telling?) that Bridgman did his work on Operationalism (in psychology, where I first came across it, it’s “Operationism”), because he understood that the only reason that Physics had not discovered Einstein’s relativity earlier, and the profession had spent years on fallacies, was because they didn’t practice operationalism: articulating (constructions) of all their ideas so that when they extended an abstract idea, they revisited all its underlying assumptions.

    Now, Operationalism is practiced in Psychology as a matter of course, and in as much of physical science as is possible without unnecessary constraint. But the problem remains extant in most disciplines where it has been addressed somehow or other by the mathematicians including Brouwer on in Intuitionist Mathematics, and from Poincare on in Constructivist Mathematics, and the logicians through Kripke and Goedel, and much less intelligently, Mises in Economics, and with less success in law, from the antebellum period through the present on Textualism, Originalism, and Strict Constructionism. And the concept is completely missing from ethics.

    Which is strange because **operationalism is an ethical not logical constraint** on our thinking. We cannot make honest truth claims without it, but that does not constrain us from making approximate deductions – explorations. Exploration is approximate by definition.

    So, I am once again at the realization that the failure of the greeks to solve the problem of free riding, property rights and voluntary exchange, and therefore ethics is the cause of so much of our intellectual failure over the centuries. The answer was sort of sitting there in law but no one seems to have really done much with it.

    And so uniting all the logics and all the branches of philosophy into a single contiguous, consistent system has been impossible. But it’s not impossible..

    It was just sitting there. I dunno. At this point it looks obvious. But that’s because I ran into the ‘economic calculation’ argument, and property rights. And when I did, everything else slowly fell into place. Because they are necessary rather than preferential statements. I think they may be the most important insight into logic that has ever occurred.

    I just don’t understand why it took us so long. Maybe we had to cook individualism sufficiently? I don’t know yet. That seems like the answer.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 14:45:00 UTC