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INFLUENCES

I love bibliographies of major works. On my site I collect reading lists and the biographies of the authors that I respect most.

Today, I’m working on restructuring my chapter order to be less about libertarianism, and to accommodate the improvements in my arguments over the past year. So I am working through Hiadt’s bibliographies trying to see if there is anything that I haven’t read.

And, you know, there really isn’t. Which scares me. lol. Although, it really makes sense because we’re very close in age, and went through our intellectual development during the same period, and information that counteracts the progressive fantasy just sort of exploded during the last thirty years. I just was later in my development because I was distracted by ‘business’ when younger and it’s really only over the past ten years that I have been able to devote such concentrated time to my work.

When you get down to it, my major (almost exclusive) influences have been: (Poincare + Brouwer + Taleb + Popper) + Hayek + Duchesne + Stephen Hicks + Kahneman + (Hoppe + Haidt). Haidt and Hoppe the most influential.

I made the mistake of trying to solve the problem Haidt did with computer science (artificial intelligence) because at the time I was in school, psychology was still in the postmodern catastrophe that was progressivism. It was gut classes for stupid people. But at that point in time, despite the fact taht I understood the problem was one of emotions and objects, I couldn’t solve it. Haidt did.

But it worked out as a benefit because computer science is an operational methodology and taught me how to think without the nonsensical platonic categories that are universal to that ‘lost’ discipline we call philosophy. You can say fuzzy things in philosophy, logic and math but you cannot actually operationalize them with a computer, and a computer is just a very fast way of conducting human operations (switches).

I did finally understand that voluntary exchange, property, inventory, substitution and acquisitiveness are the means of creating an artificial intelligence, but I have less interest in that field than I do in formal institutions of cooperation. So this is where I’m spending my time.

Anyway, collecting these biographies has been fascinating because if you collect enough of them you see that very few works by very few authors have any material impact in social and political science.

It’s been a 2500 year journey to try to solve the problem of cooperation. But we are getting very close to it.