Source: Facebook

  • DIDN”T REALLY EXPECT ANYTHING IN RUSSIA TO WORK, DID YOU? (rant) You have to be

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/02/04/journalists-at-sochi-are-live-tweeting-their-hilarious-and-gross-hotel-experiences/YOU DIDN”T REALLY EXPECT ANYTHING IN RUSSIA TO WORK, DID YOU?

    (rant)

    You have to be kidding. It isn’t in the Russian character to be honest with you about the quality of accommodations. Actually, it’s non in character to be honest with you about… well, anything much at all. Unless you are a close friend or relative you’re basically prey.

    Of COURSE the hotels are incomplete and nothing works. Of course everything will be inedible, undrinkable, working intermittently and done with the least care and effort possible? What did you THINK?

    The good of the commons? Are you kidding? Have you seen the commons anywhere other than the protestant west?

    Stupid humans… sigh.

    I’ll be very surprised if there isn’t much more damage done to Putin’s legacy by this escapade than the good he hoped to achieve by attempting to prove that Russia has joined the first world. Not gonna happen. Outside of a few urban professions, everyone in this part of the world does the least work possible for the highest return. It’s only rational for them to do so.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-05 11:35:00 UTC

  • MORAL INTUITIONISM IS A TEST NOT A TRUTH. I agree with moral intuitionalism. How

    MORAL INTUITIONISM IS A TEST NOT A TRUTH.

    I agree with moral intuitionalism. However, that is a statement about our ability to test moral statements. It is not a test of whether moral statements are NECESSARY and therefore TRUE or not.

    You might notice that I don’t rely on NORMATIVE expressions of morality EVER in my arguments.

    Introspection is not only insufficient for the solution to the mind body problem, and the problem of consciousness, but it is also insufficient for analysis of morality.

    In fact, any philosophical argument that relies upon introspection, is, I am fairly certain, a fallacy. (Although I am willing to be proven wrong if someone can provide an example.)

    Truth is a function of correspondence on one hand and internal consistency on the other. Introspection fails both of those tests without the use of instrumentation to test our thoughts.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-05 09:08:00 UTC

  • BIG IS BAD (IN GOVERNMENT AT LEAST) –“I am reminded here of a story that Leopol

    BIG IS BAD (IN GOVERNMENT AT LEAST)

    –“I am reminded here of a story that Leopold Kohr, the great decentralist economist, used to tell, about going to Lichtenstein and wanting to visit the Prime Minister of the country. He went to the castle, rang the bell, and the man who answered the door and ushered him in, whom he assumed to be a servant, turned out to be the Prime Minister himself. And when they were seated in his office, chatting, the phone rang and the minister answered, saying, “Government.” You see? with a tiny country like that government is always there, always responsive, always able to answer the phone and take care of your problem.”–

    (Although I have heard tell, that many other things can be too big. 🙂 Fortunes are not one of them.)


    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-05 08:50:00 UTC

  • (Humor)

    (Humor)


    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-05 08:37:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/the-republican-party-isnt-really-the-anti-science-party/281219/


    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-05 00:07:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/hartfordcourant/obituary.aspx?n=john-david-doolittle&pid=169431391&fhid=4121


    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-04 07:38:00 UTC

  • Curt Doolittle shared a post

    Curt Doolittle shared a post.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-04 07:37:00 UTC

  • THE VALUE OF ARGUING WITH THE TINFOIL HAT CROWD It is ABSOLUTELY valuable to arg

    THE VALUE OF ARGUING WITH THE TINFOIL HAT CROWD

    It is ABSOLUTELY valuable to argue with the Tinfoil Hat crowd, so that you can master the common rhetorical fallacies without relying on normative assumptions for defense. Normative assumptions are just another paradigmatic frame.

    As you move into more and more intellectual and academic debate, you realize that the only difference between the Yahoo-news-group idiots, the postmodern social science idiots, the scientistic idiots, and the public intellectual idiots is the density of the tinfoil. The nature of the individuals assumptions simply mature from:

    a) schizophrenic bias, to

    b) confirmation bias, to

    c) nihilistic bias, to

    d) pseudoscientific bias, to

    e) methodological bias, to

    f) paradigmatic bias.

    Almost no one gets to skeptical empiricism in the Popperian, and certainly not in the Poincaré models. You can end up like Paul Krugman and ignore the fact that what you’re deducing from your measurements about monetary policy is merely noise, when the military expansion of anglo rules of trade is the signal.

    You can end up like John Ralws and Sam Harris and confuse analogy with causality, then compounding your confusion by making the error of aggregation.

    The best defense I have made against these errors is to focus on defining and reconciling spectrums – the golden mean. You can make an assumptive line between two ideal types pretty easily – the least work path. But it’s much harder to make errors if you define the different spectrums and see how they intersect with one another. It is much harder to reconcile sets of definitions in ordered spectra with each other.

    And it is much easier with a rich language than an allegorical language. It is even easier in operational language.

    Or at least. As easy as it can be.

    WHICH IS WHY I”M ALWAYS WRITING LISTS (ordered sets).


    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-04 04:39:00 UTC

  • YOU PERSONALLY EXPERIENCE CORRUPTION IN DAILY LIFE” (map of corruption in europe

    http://ow.ly/tfLeZ”DO YOU PERSONALLY EXPERIENCE CORRUPTION IN DAILY LIFE”

    (map of corruption in europe)


    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-04 03:17:00 UTC

  • IF LABOR IS NO LONGER VALUABLE THEN WHAT DO THE LOWER CLASSES HAVE TO TRADE? SUP

    IF LABOR IS NO LONGER VALUABLE THEN WHAT DO THE LOWER CLASSES HAVE TO TRADE? SUPPRESSION OF FREE RIDING: PROPERTY RIGHTS.

    (a couple of profound ideas here)

    If labor is no longer valuable – at all, then what do the underclasses have to trade?

    Nothing? Well, that’s making a lot of assumptions about the structure of society as if it’s governed by some equivalent of the law of gravity. 😉 So, rather than

    They have suppression of all free riding to trade: obedience to norms; manners, ethics, morals and laws: respect for property rights, and voting to reduce the state, and their utility as consumers to trade.

    But how do we capture those things into something tangible?

    With tokens, so that they exchange their consumption for the production of others. We dont need to distribute money through the financial system any longer. There isnt any need for it. We can directly distribute liquidity to consumers, and bypass the financial system. We can give consumers fiat money or digital currency, and pretty much keep them out of the credit system. This number would need to be a percentage of some revenues such that the citizens possess equal interest in the efficiency of the government, and the need to expand productivity in the economy. Otherwise we create malincentive. But at this point, minimum wage labor is preference not a necessity, and we need not interfere with prices for labor.

    The distribution to citizens is their payment for suppressing free riding in all its forms. If they agree to suppress free riding in all its forms, then they have earned that distribution. If they fail to suppress free riding in all its forms, then they do not earn that payment. This is sufficient incentive both positive and negative to prevent crimes not of passion. And as an incentive, the threat of losing one’s means of sustenance is pretty hard to improve upon. It is better than physical punishment.

    The accumulation of profits is payment for contributing to productivity – for organizing production – now that we know labor is of no value in production, even if problem solving is of value.

    This system of compensating people for their actions is simply transforming the moral code for non-anonymous members engaged in equal production and consumption, into a calculable system for anonymous members engaged in equal suppression of free riding, but unequal organization of production.

    And to do otherwise is to attempt to obtain property rights for free.

    You can’t every achieve equality by any means, but you can certainly pay people from what they earn without cheating them of payment for it. If all of us are producers then we have our production to exchange and equal interest in respect for the necessary properties of production. But if only a few of us are productive (and that is the current state of affairs) why should those people respect the rules of production if they aren’t compensated for it? That’s purely irrational.

    THE OPEN PROBLEM

    Now, the only problem we face is bearing a child that you cannot support is free riding on the backs of others. Immigration is free riding unless you bring your skills with you. The problem of the female obsession with free riding must be solved. And we must have the moral courage to solve it through aggressive punishment of women who bear children that they cannot support, to the same degree we punish males who resort to violence for the purpose of obtaining what they want. A woman who bears a child that she cannot support is, under all conditions, without exception, is blackmail: the choice between an paying a woman for her immoral action, or the harm that will come to an innocent child.

    If we can agree that bearing a child you cannot support is blackmail, or at least a new crime of the same sort. Then it is possible to unite all people in a country with the same interests. Because large scale democratic government simply creates a vehicle for systematic generation of internal conflict given the dissimilarity of ability and interest.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-04 03:13:00 UTC