Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • LAW DEGREE STILL PAYS – EVEN IF IT ISN”T WHAT IT WAS, ITS STILL WORTH IT

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2250585A LAW DEGREE STILL PAYS – EVEN IF IT ISN”T WHAT IT WAS, ITS STILL WORTH IT

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-04 05:29:00 UTC

  • DOES AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN DO TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AND REMAIN FEMININE (IN ANY OC

    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2013/07/on-being-an-attractive-woman-and-being-taken-seriously-in-philosophy.htmlWHAT DOES AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN DO TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AND REMAIN FEMININE (IN ANY OCCUPATION) WITHOUT DRESSING ‘DOWN’ or DOWDY?

    Other commenters left very strange advice, to what common people on the street would consider a very strange question. 🙂

    Confusing separate issues:

    1) The rather strange idea that you’re different from any other woman. The fact is, you’re MORE DESIRABLE so you’re going to attract more attention, and more ENTHUSIASTIC attention.

    2) Femininity is attractive to males and that won’t stop – if it does, extinction is a possible consequence. 🙂

    3) The rather strange idea that you want to SIGNAL femininity to yourself, or to others, but not produce an equivalent RESPONSE.

    4) The rather strange idea that the problem is something in society rather than in your understanding and behavior – a strangeness that is pretty common in the feminist movement.

    5) What do you SIGNAL to males, in ADDITION to your physical attraction, femininity, and intelligence? Does that include ACCESSIBILITY? AVAILABILITY?

    6) How do all the other capable and beautiful and feminine women in the world handle this issue? Do they complain about the fact that if they SIGNAL desirability that they produce the appropriate ACTION in the population?

    As an practitioner of economic philosophy, incentives are what we deal with (in addition to prices.) And any micro-economist or behavioral economist would say this: you want X,Y,and Z benefits without paying A,B,and C, costs. In your case, it’s likely that you want to attract attention, including the heightened self image that comes from attracting attention, but you don’t want to pay the cost of rejecting the unwanted attention. (In the extreme interpretation, ethically, this means that you’re a thief, or fraud, so to speak. 🙂

    And it isn’t necessary (and it’s probably counter-productive) to ask this question of successful women in business (there are plenty). Or politics (the entertainment industry for unattractive people.) Instead, there are ready research subjects everywhere. If you were to go to high end restaurants and clubs in any major city, on the west coast, but more so in Europe, and certainly in eastern Europe, and ask the attractive female waitresses and bartenders how they deal with SIGNALING femininity, desirability, without signaling accessibility or availability, they’ll tell you – the same craft that women have used since the dawn of time. It’s how you interact with others. You do not need to dress dowdy. You might consider wearing a rock of an engagement ring – fake stone included. You do have to learn how to live as a human being in a world that is unfortunately peopled by human beings. And the honest thing to do in any social circumstance is not to advertise something then say it’s not for sale – so to speak. Or to wish that the world was not peopled by a pair of genders that have competing reproductive strategies because of asymmetry of costs and desires.

    But then, trying to commit micro thefts – get discounts as we call it in economics – is as natural a human behavior as being attracted to more fit genes. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-04 04:48:00 UTC

  • ON THE SHALLOWNESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT On Maverick Philosopher (blog) Bill

    ON THE SHALLOWNESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT

    On Maverick Philosopher (blog) Bill Vallicella argues that Philosophical problems are deep by listing the common philosophical questions: “What is (the nature of) X? What is knowledge? What is consciousness? What is the self? What is free will? What is causation? What are properties? What is motion? Time? Existence?” And then he goes on to describe how these questions are ‘deep’ and complex.

    However, notice that the are all stated as ‘is’ questions: metaphysical questions made nonsensical by the magical word ‘is’. Yet, if these questions were asked in operational, scientific, language, they would be stated as “when we use the term knowledge, what examples do we refer to, and what do they have in common?” Or “When we use the term ‘time’, what experience do we refer to?” Or “given that we experience something we call the passage of time, what causes us to possess this experience.”

    Nothing ‘is’. We experience things that we manufacture independent of the physical world. We experience things directly. We experience things through the narrative of others – in many forms. We experience things through instrumentation and measurement. Experiences are changes in state of physical sensations, and of the physical sensation of changes in memory.

    Properties are patterns that increase or decrease inclusion in a concept. A concept is a set of related patterns. EAch of which is a set of related patterns – all of which is represented by sets of physical neural relations. And all of which are created through one of the experiences above. And as such our concepts are limited to those things which we can reduce to some complex set of experiences.

    All of the phenomenon Vallicella lists are trivial concepts before science and impossible concepts before philosophy, because the instrumentation available to the physical sciences is greater than our ability to perceive our inner workings without science.

    The interesting question of consciousness, (Having had many episodes of losing consciousness and regaining it myself) is that it slowly emerges from complex layers of stimuli. But what is obvious to the person experiencing it, is that the part we call ‘me’ seems to coalesce, but once it does, and we are ‘aware’ of the passage of internal time, it ‘feels’ consistent with ‘the experience of being me’ prior to the availability of either external sensations, or memories. The ‘me’ personality feels emotionally consistent regardless of state. (At least in me it does. And that ‘me’ sense has been the same since childhood.) Then as memory starts to come back, we become the complex creatures that we are, because of our memories. Until we are able to process information around us in physical reality.

    This tells us most of what is useful. (And it probably explains why psychedelic drugs appear to help people with psychological disorders obtained from behavior (experiences), but not disorders obtained from physical defects (say, schizophrenia). That’s because the ‘i’ can be separated from the experience of a traumatic memory, long enough to objectively correct the emotional relationships caused by the memory (or memories).

    That diversion aside, the problem plaguing philosophy is the same one that has plagued it since Kant: the desire to find something mystical there, that does not exist, most of the time, by the artful use of language to construct paradoxical puzzles that are computationally difficult for humans to solve because they are framed as problems with a solution, but in fact are nothing more than arbitrary artifacts of imprecise language that remains from our mystical past – largely religious dialog.

    The cure for most philosophical puzzles is the use of operational language.

    Like most puzzles, philosophy’s metaphysical questions consist largely of parlor games created by very bright people who may or may not have been aware of what it was that they were doing. Infinite sets, and all that derives from them included.

    Philosophy is, at least today, useful in understanding the evolution of human thought – primarily so that we do not repeat past errors – and for assisting us in interpreting the findings of the physical and economic sciences.

    That’s it. Science and Economics Won.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-03 17:07:00 UTC

  • AND PROPERTY ARE SYNONYMS – LOVE IS AN INCENTIVE, NOT A NECESSARY REQUIREMENT –

    http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7337MARRIAGE AND PROPERTY ARE SYNONYMS – LOVE IS AN INCENTIVE, NOT A NECESSARY REQUIREMENT – ROMANTIC NOTIONS TO THE CONTRARY

    The are only two things that distinguish marriage from any other arbitrary relationship for the purpose of securing affection, sex, companionship, love, care-taking, cost-reduction-of-cohabitatin, and a division of labor in child rearing.

    1) PROPERTY: When you marry, you form a corporation with shared assets, and a two person board of directors, from which the state must divide assets upon the disbanding of the corporation. Prior to the institution of private property, you could just marry and un-marry by saying so in public. In fact, the western Celts practiced serial marriage this way until the 19th century, and the European jews until the middle ages. In most primitives societies, women were literally property, but in Europe the church granted women property rights back in the 1200’s. So the need to resolve property disputes increased as the complexity and amount of property increased, and the productivity of individuals, and therefore their ability to obtain and use property increased.

    2) KINSHIP: We have evolved laws to avoid conflict by stating that the other shareholder has certain powers (of attorney) to act as Voluntary Kin in periods of duress, and it that takes precedence over other involuntary Kinship ties: blood relatives. In this sense when we marry we sell ourselves to the corporation as an asset.

    THE STATE AS MONOPOLY

    The state is the arbiter of property disputes – that’s what a state is: a territorial monopoly on the use of violence; and in particular for the use of violence in the resolution of disputes. The moment that you enter into a marriage that produces common property, you force the state into your marriage because only the state can resolve conflicts over property.

    Anyone can form a corporation. A ship captain, a priest, or certain state officials. The formation’s not a state matter. It’s just an exchange like any other exchange. But the state must break it. And if the state must break it then it must of necessity develop criteria for doing so in order to apply a decision that meets the standard of consistent “law” rather than arbitrary judicial decision.

    However, there is no reason that the state must be the arbiter or such disputes. There is no reason churches cannot perform divorces, in which the assets divisions have the force of law. Unfortunately this wold produce two canons of law, and leave the state responsible for resolving appeals, so it would simply result in the state centralizing decision making power again.

    THE OPTION TO MAINTAIN PRIVATE PROPERTY

    However, an easier solution is that if when we marry we do NOT create a corporation and place ourselves and all our assets into it, but instead, maintain each individual’s property separately, and specifically state ownership percentages on anything else that is split now or future, then the only legal issue is the power of attorney to act as one another in financial matters, and to act as primary kin in the event one is incapacitated.

    HISTORY

    The civic and political problem is only that our laws developed as monopolies under control of the state – and even then, largely because the church did not perform divorces and the state wished to intercede in the civil space in order to advance the interests of the feminist political movement on the one hand, and react to the reality that women were becoming active in the work force, earning income, and acquiring real property in sufficient numbers that they required legal peerage to protect them from abuse by rent-seeking males.

    So there is no reason that we must have a monopoly of marriage terms. And there is only one reason that the state should be involved in dissolutions: common property. That is, property of the corporation called the marriage being distributed to various parties in the event of a disbandment of the corporation.

    CRITERIA FOR THREE TYPES OF MARRIAGE

    Further, there is no reason marriages cannot consist of multiple forms, regardless of who makes them.

    1) Corporate Property and Power of Kin

    2) Several property and Power of Kin

    3) Corporate Property without power of kin

    Several Property without power of kin is the normal state of human beings. So that’s the definition of not being married. But one can be in a state of marriage as long as one has either the power of kin (genetic assets) or power of common property (material assets).

    ITS ALL ABOUT PROPERTY

    Love and romance have nothing to do with marriage. You may get married BECAUSE of love and romance and all the other factors. But marriage is a change in control of property – including the self – by authorizing non-kin to act as Kin, and to either pool property or not.

    That it is hard to see the binding power of a marriage having any meaning whatsoever without the pooling of assets is enough of a logical constraint that we can define marriage as a property institution, and nothing more.

    That fact may be painful to admit to ourselves. But marriage is a contract over of property rights, with one of the assets being each other. It is, and always will be. ‘Cause nothing else makes much sense. ‘Cause nothing else enforces fidelity like the loss property.

    Humbling. I know.

    ->Comment in response to this post at Talking Philosophy:

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-03 05:07:00 UTC

  • IF PROACTIVE VIOLENCE IS THE SOURCE, CAUSE, AND PERPETUATION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS

    IF PROACTIVE VIOLENCE IS THE SOURCE, CAUSE, AND PERPETUATION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS

    Then what does that say about violence?

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 17:22:00 UTC

  • THE SPECTRA OF MORAL PERSUASIONS: OBSERVATIONAL vs EXPERIENTIAL (sketch) Compare

    THE SPECTRA OF MORAL PERSUASIONS: OBSERVATIONAL vs EXPERIENTIAL

    (sketch)

    Compare the rational (observational) deception spectrum:

    :>IGNORANCE->AWARENESS->FACTS->SYMPATHY(observational)->CONSEQUENTIALIST CALCULATION(outcomes)->FRAUD{…}->PROPAGANDA->DOCTRINE->(VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive for inclusion in opportunity)->(INVOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive against exclusion from opportunity])->(ORGANIZATIONAL CONQUEST)>|:

    with the emotional (experiential) deception spectrum:

    :|>IGNORANCE->AWARENESS->NARRATIVE->SYMPATHY(experiential)->EMPATHY->LOADING->FRAMING->PROPAGANDA->DOCTRINE->(VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive for inclusion in opportunity)->(INVOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive against exclusion from opportunity])->(ORGANIZATIONAL CONQUEST)>|:

    And we get:

    >IGNORANCE->AWARENESS->…

    followed by the choice between:

    Rational Deception: …FACTS->SYMPATHY(observational)->CONSEQUENTIALIST CALCULATION(outcomes)->FRAUD{…}->…

    and/or:

    Emotional Deception: …NARRATIVE->SYMPATHY(experiential)->EMPATHY->LOADING->FRAMING->…

    Culminating in:

    ….PROPAGANDA->DOCTRINE->(VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive for inclusion in opportunity)->(INVOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive against exclusion from opportunity])->(ORGANIZATIONAL CONQUEST)>|:

    THOUGHTS

    It’s no wonder we resort to everything other than voluntary, fully informed, warrantied exchange to obtain what we want, whenever possible. There are simply so many options available for us to use to obtain what we want by deception. 🙂

    While it’s possible to persuade (coerce) people using the three means of coercion: argument, violence, and exchange; It’s not really possible to demonstrate that the use of violence is a deceptive means of coercion. Its immoral, certainly, in the sense that it’s involuntary. But it’s not a form of deception.

    Violence is the most honest human expression possible. There is no lack of clarity about it. No room for misinterpretation. No attempt at cost-savings or cooperation. Violence is as honest as you can get. But honesty isn’t in itself a good. It’s only a good in the context of cooperation. Using violence isn’t cooperation. It’s the opposite. It’s abandoning effort at cooperation.

    Propertarianism: Morality reconstructed.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 13:40:00 UTC

  • THERE IS NO REASON THAT VIRTUE, RULE AND CONSEQUENTIALIST ETHICS CAN’T CONTAIN T

    THERE IS NO REASON THAT VIRTUE, RULE AND CONSEQUENTIALIST ETHICS CAN’T CONTAIN THE SAME INFORMATION, AND PRODUCE THE SAME RESULTS

    In fact, that’s probably the only measure of any ethical statement.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 04:07:00 UTC

  • YOU VLADIMIR Even if was for purely domestic political reasons, It’s still a goo

    http://bloom.bg/15z0hMPTHANK YOU VLADIMIR

    Even if was for purely domestic political reasons, It’s still a good thing.

    Put the USA back in its box. So that the american government can give higher priority to citizens than the empire.

    And perhaps, break into parts, rather than continue the tyranny.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 04:05:00 UTC

  • HOW MANY GREAT BOOKS ARE THERE? I think Adler’s list was too short, and it was a

    HOW MANY GREAT BOOKS ARE THERE?

    I think Adler’s list was too short, and it was an apologia for democracy. The aristocratic list I’ve been keeping is somewhere around 200, but it has a broader range of interest and it requires more books to alter the direction of the enlightenment than to confirm it with selected confirmation biases.

    But lets say that the list requires 250 books, just to pick a number. And lets say that every 15 points of IQ requires a DIFFERENT book in order to communicate the basic principles to each audience. You’d need say, 5 books total, or perhaps 6 including the original idea. So, that’s a library of 1500 books.

    Now, I’m talking non-fiction here. And you can add fiction to that list, and I have, and I was surprised how few survived scrutiny.

    Any given person would need to read 250 books targeted to his or her reading level, and then the great literature in order to ‘taste’ every time period. (without the narrative it is very difficult to grasp the past in any meaningful way.)

    Even if you only read one book a month that would only take twenty years. If you read two books a month, that would take you only ten years. If we taught reading, writing, math and basic physics through age seven, and then the great books, I’m not really sure there is a lot of wiggle room in education.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 03:30:00 UTC

  • NEW MORAL PRINCIPLE FOR THE POST INDUSTRIAL ERA? What was the last moral princip

    NEW MORAL PRINCIPLE FOR THE POST INDUSTRIAL ERA?

    What was the last moral principle that humans discovered? Think about that for a bit. Because I have been. And, I think I understand the evolution of NECESSARY moral principles as well or better than anyone.

    And, while I’m not positive (because I haven’t read every word ever written in this world) I think I might have discovered the first new NECESSARY moral principle of the post-agrarian era.

    When I first wrote about it a few years ago, I didn’t think about it as novel. It was just a necessary constraint for suppressing fraud at scale. And I think it transitions an existing MORAL principle to an ETHICAL principle. (In the sense that Moral principles are those where your actions are entirely anonymous, and ethical actions are where your actions are not anonymous but you possess asymmetric knowledge.) So the ethical constraint enforces the moral objective.

    We tend to view norms as sacrosanct. But while instinctual morality remains constant (at least within kin) descriptive morality (morality in practice) varies with the structure of the reproductive unit and the structure of the means of production. Our ‘savage’ ancestors would not practice our moral codes nor we theirs. Mostly because the ‘momentum’ of production that we call ‘scarcity-productivity’ is so much higher now that we can afford to take risks that they couldn’t.

    We are’t so much morally superior by choice as we are superior by advent of technologies of cooperation and production. And those material advantages allow us to treat increasing numbers of people as kin – by raising our standard of violence in pursuit of calories. to the point now where we rarely need violence for material matters, and most violence occurs over mates or status – which in practice may be the same thing.

    At this point in our development, we have forbidden all violence, theft and fraud, and we suppress it well, by forcing all competition into the market for goods and services. HOwever, our ORGANIZATIONS are terribly immoral both in private and public senses. The private are subject to competition so their immorality is just suppressed quickly, and they cannot calcify the way government does, into predatory bureaucracies and survive for long. Whereas the government can devolve in to predatory bureaucracy almost from the formation of a bureaucratic organization.

    To make matters worse, we can privatize almost everything that a government does and cure most of the problem. But we cannot privatize everything, because when we say ‘privatize’ we mean tat we o pen it to competition. But in any competition there are losers, and you cannot build the commons willingly if there is a chance that any given participant will ‘lose’. And that is why, whether my libertarian friends like it or not, some form of ‘government’ will always exist: to produce commons in lieu of competition (loss).

    As such, what can we do to prevent corruption in the commons? What is the one institutional, ethical principle that we could adhere to in order to prevent all the forms of theft of commons that occur in every bureaucracy?

    Humans engage in violence – largely for status and mate seeking reasons. Humans engage in Theft, largely for petty entertainment, or drug use. Humans engage in fraud for many reasons, but usually as a means of income. Humans engage in fraud by omission as a matter of course. And Humans free-ride whenever and wherever possible outside of ascetic protestantism. IN fact, that is what differentiates ascetic protestantism – the prohibition on free riding.

    Where there is an organization that they can seek rents, humans engage in rent seeking (‘limited monopoly’, ‘loyalty fees’, ‘charity’, privatization of gains,socialization of losses) whenever possible.

    Where they are In organizations, humans engage in interpersonal corruption, rent seeking, privatization of gains, and systemic corruption.

    Where they are in control of organizations they engage in systemic theft, systemic fraud, war and conquest.

    Humans have an ethical portfolio with just one, one-note song we call competition in the free market. But they have a symphony of immoral options available to them. So it’s no surprise that when we give people incentives to act to steal, that they do so.

    We are fascinatingly creative creatures really.

    Curt Doolittle

    (c a l c u l a t i o n: maintaining causal relations by prohibiting pooling and laundering.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 03:12:00 UTC