–“You’ve said that you see information as a commodity and therefore lies should be punishable fraud. Could you expand on what you mean as a commodity and how you would determine what forms of “lies” (you usually say leftist pseudo-science) should be punished?”— I said I see information as a kind of production that is dumped into the commons, just as pollutants are dumped into the air, land, and water. We don’t care much if you dump clean water into the commons, or clean air into the commons, or even oxygen, and to some degree heat or cold. But why should you be able to pollute the informational commons any more than you can pollute air, land, water, or damage parks, infrastructure, buildings, and monuments? It was one when we all have equal voices in the Thang, Square, Church, or Parliament. But it becomes quite different when you can make use of Altar, Pulpit, Throne, Press, media, and entertainment. It’s very different to tell a white lie, a gray lie, a black lie, and a white, gray, or black propaganda lie. And it’s far worse if you force a legislative lie. Our civilization has been nearly conquered by the Jewish pseudoscientific, pseudo-rational, and outright falsehood movements, by the academy, media, and state, just as the ancients were conquered as much by the lies of Jewish monotheism and it’s distribution by pulpit and state. Likely with equally dark ages to follow. So how do we prevent correct it now, and prevent it in the future? Well, we make it as illegal to lie in politics as it is to commit any other kind of fraud, by removing the right to free speech and replacing it with the right to truthful speech. But why is the problem of truth and falsehood so challenging? The answer is that until approximately now, we didn’t know what ‘truth’ was any more than we knew what ‘justice’ was. What I’ve tried to do is provide a set of warranties of due diligence (which is what scientists do) that if performed means that a proposition may not be true, but it is very difficult for it knowingly to be false. IF we then simply create universal standing for matters of the commons and remove the ability of the state to intervene in matters of the commons, then people will regulate speech in the commons as rigorously as they regulate fraud in the commons. Advertisers are highly regulated, but most of us would suggest we regulate them far further. Some speech is regulated, but we could regulate it further. We used to teach grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and adding warranties of truthfulness is certainly not harder than teaching logic or geometry. And if you cannot state logic or geometry or truthfulness we have a question whether you can say anything other than what you desire, versus what is true. In my grandmother’s generation, it wasn’t uncommon for people to say “I don’t know about such things” because that was a truthful statement. Yet in pursuit of socialism, we have told generations to express opinions as if they were a truth that they understood. This attack on truth in favor of self-expression, in order to empower the incompetent classes, has been central to the anti-aristocratic strategy we incorrectly call ‘socialism’. So in brief there is absolutely no reason we cannot state in comprehensible and observable legal language the requirements for due diligence in truthfulness when speaking of matters in the commons. We do it with creating a hazard (‘fire in a theater’), and we do it with inciting a riot (‘taking advantage of mob instinct’), and we do it with libel and slander, and prior to the outlawing of judicial duels we did it even for insults. It is not clear at all that the world is a better place for our tolerance of insult, libel, slander, advertising representation, political representation, teaching of pseudosciences, and other conflationary public speech. It’s just the opposite. We’ve just endured a century of pseudoscience.
Source: Original Site Post
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Q&A On Alt-Right Strategy
—“Hi Mr. Doolittle, From my (very limited) knowledge of your work, you seem very concerned with legal rights and economic questions (based upon a moral framework), which is a definite departure from many on the Alt-Right who focus primarily on socio-political issues.Do you think it’s a weakness of our movement to avoid discussion of economic & legal rights? From what I’ve seen, most of us favor an overall capitalistic economic structure with the caveat that economic activity should support the nation, both financially and morally (spiritually?), such as through the limiting of pornography and the banning of usury (actual usury, such as predatory lending terms, not merely interest on capital), and limiting the activity of foreign interests in domestic issues. I ask whether you think it’s a weakness that we don’t discuss this because even though there is a general consensus, I dislike having blind spots in my worldview.Lastly, have you read James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution and/or Sam Francis’ follow-up Leviathan and its enemies? If so, what were your thoughts on the theory presented re: the transformation of capitalist society to a managerial society?”— Great questions. I”m going to reframe the first one: –“You seem very concerned with legal rights and economic questions (based upon a moral framework), which is a definite departure from many on the Alt-Right who focus primarily on socio-political issues.”–I’ll restate this as I try to unify science, morality, law, and philosophy into a single discipline that merely requires we speak truthfully in matters of the commons, and I advocate the forcible restructuring of our institutions using the language of institutions: law. What you see in the alt right, despite the alt right’s embrace of science, is the perpetuation of moral language. The question is, if we evolved from supernatural to reason, to rationalism, to science, and in my work “complete scientific realism”, then why would people continue to argue in reasonable and rational terms, and partly scientific terms, when scientific and completely scientific are available? Well, there are four reasons: (a) moral language helps us rally and shame. (b) moral language helps us with catharsis, (c) moral language is intuitionistic even if unscientific, and (d) scientific l language is none of the above. So to simplify that, I’ll say that I use the language of natural law to construct institutions of natural law: exchange, rather than trying to argue that one position is superior to another in order to enforce a monopoly decision that I prefer over the monopoly decisions that others prefer. —“Do you think it’s a weakness of our movement to avoid discussion of economic & legal rights?”— All rights are contractually exchanged, that’s the only way they can exist. Natural rights are those we generally require if we are to avoid conflict with one another, and foster cooperation and competition with one another. Otherwise they’re not contract rights or natural rights, but legislative rights enforced by an insurer of last resort. We do not contract for our rights. In our case the government is an insurer. And the government works to construct LEGISLATIVE rights, not NATURAL RIGHTS. SO in answer to your question, it’s not useful to discuss rights other than those we require. Instead, I’ve stated it differently: that our position can, and must be, that the only reason we do not use our wealth of personal violence, group violence, and organized violence, to construct legal rights in our interests alone at the expense of other’s desired natural rights, is if we all possess natural rights and natural rights alone. So I’ve tried to restore the reality of political philosophy to the state prior to the set of lies we created in order to justify adding women to the franchise, in an equivalent house, rather than in their own separate house of government: that the only reason to forgo our desire to rule in our own self interest, is if we rule by rule of law in one another’s equal interest. And if that is not the case, then we simply license parasitism and our own destruction. The first question of ethics and politics is ‘why don’t I just kill you and take your stuff’. It’s only after we’ve decided that we will cooperate that we enter the question of ethics (how not to disincentivize cooperation), or politics (how not to disincentivize the production of commons.) We value a MERITOCRATIC commons (political), economy (ethics), reproductive (family), structure that is against the interests of those who lack competitive reproductive desirability, competitive productive ability, and productive ability to contribute to the commons. That you phrase the question as moral, and I phrase it as economic is the problem with the alt-right that I am trying to solve by providing a rational and scientific language for the discussion, comparison, and contrast of all epistemic, ethical, political, and group evolutionary strategies. The weakness is that we will not come to terms with the fact that meritocracy and eugenics and our ability to produce wealth and commons are antithetical to democracy, and that without the restoration of the market for commons and a judicial monarchy (inherited), we cannot possess the liberty and meritocracy we desire. Eugenics is incompatible with democracy. The original settlers (my ancestors included) used different language but the American colonies were an experiment in eugenics. The disaster was the Louisiana purchase that requires vast immigration to populate the new territory so that it would not be seized (yet again) by the European powers. The new territory would have extended slavery, and this would have firmly put both taxation (on export goods) and the power of the federal government, in the hands of the agrarians and their international market, at the expense of the new industrialists and the domestic market. Had we retained the original colonies it is possible that we could have retained the eugenic experiment – even with the handicap of the Scotts-Irish in the south. Of course, I have read Burnham and I consider him one of my greater influences – he gave me the moral courage so to speak to abandon my cultural allegiances as a member of the puritan families, the anti-monarchy forces in the English civil wars, and the anti-monarchy movement in the American revolution. I consider all of these to be failures. You can see my entire reading list onPropertarianism.com/reading-list, and you can contact Ramsey because he maintains our library, and we have most of the work in digital format available for readers. Burnham’s observation is not unique, but he was trying to warn us about it. There are a couple of human tendencies that we should be aware of: 1) the models we use like analogies to animals, hydraulic, mechanical, electrical, and now computational (information) change with every era, and we misapply properties of those models to man. Man is an organism that grows and is changed by his growth from conception to old age. We tend to try to hang on to a model and extend the use of that model in our minds to ever greater scope. But they’re just analogies, with information in both physics and social science the current state of our ability to represent the world. 2) tendency to thing obvious trends are special and novel. But if we look at all human organizations they go through the same cycles and Burnham was trying to tell us that. Like Hayek and popper, or perhaps even Simmel, he was trying to describe the problem of political order as an information and decidability problem. So just as monarchies fell because their families lacked sufficient population to produce sufficient technocrats to run things, and just as private companies had to give way to corporations with professional managers, the size and scale of the modern state requires institutions. Whether those institutions could have been provided by market services is a question of maturity. At first, no, but over time yes. He was critical because he did not have a solution. We have all be correct in criticizing socialism. What we haven’t been correct about is in criticizing capitalism and democracy. Yes, we can have a star trek society with an average IQ of 125 or higher. But the Arabs cannot with an average IQ of 85-90 at the best. Neither can the Brazilians with such an enormous underclass in relation to the productivity and quality of their institutions. I hope this gave you some ideas to work with. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute
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Q&A On Alt-Right Strategy
—“Hi Mr. Doolittle, From my (very limited) knowledge of your work, you seem very concerned with legal rights and economic questions (based upon a moral framework), which is a definite departure from many on the Alt-Right who focus primarily on socio-political issues.Do you think it’s a weakness of our movement to avoid discussion of economic & legal rights? From what I’ve seen, most of us favor an overall capitalistic economic structure with the caveat that economic activity should support the nation, both financially and morally (spiritually?), such as through the limiting of pornography and the banning of usury (actual usury, such as predatory lending terms, not merely interest on capital), and limiting the activity of foreign interests in domestic issues. I ask whether you think it’s a weakness that we don’t discuss this because even though there is a general consensus, I dislike having blind spots in my worldview.Lastly, have you read James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution and/or Sam Francis’ follow-up Leviathan and its enemies? If so, what were your thoughts on the theory presented re: the transformation of capitalist society to a managerial society?”— Great questions. I”m going to reframe the first one: –“You seem very concerned with legal rights and economic questions (based upon a moral framework), which is a definite departure from many on the Alt-Right who focus primarily on socio-political issues.”–I’ll restate this as I try to unify science, morality, law, and philosophy into a single discipline that merely requires we speak truthfully in matters of the commons, and I advocate the forcible restructuring of our institutions using the language of institutions: law. What you see in the alt right, despite the alt right’s embrace of science, is the perpetuation of moral language. The question is, if we evolved from supernatural to reason, to rationalism, to science, and in my work “complete scientific realism”, then why would people continue to argue in reasonable and rational terms, and partly scientific terms, when scientific and completely scientific are available? Well, there are four reasons: (a) moral language helps us rally and shame. (b) moral language helps us with catharsis, (c) moral language is intuitionistic even if unscientific, and (d) scientific l language is none of the above. So to simplify that, I’ll say that I use the language of natural law to construct institutions of natural law: exchange, rather than trying to argue that one position is superior to another in order to enforce a monopoly decision that I prefer over the monopoly decisions that others prefer. —“Do you think it’s a weakness of our movement to avoid discussion of economic & legal rights?”— All rights are contractually exchanged, that’s the only way they can exist. Natural rights are those we generally require if we are to avoid conflict with one another, and foster cooperation and competition with one another. Otherwise they’re not contract rights or natural rights, but legislative rights enforced by an insurer of last resort. We do not contract for our rights. In our case the government is an insurer. And the government works to construct LEGISLATIVE rights, not NATURAL RIGHTS. SO in answer to your question, it’s not useful to discuss rights other than those we require. Instead, I’ve stated it differently: that our position can, and must be, that the only reason we do not use our wealth of personal violence, group violence, and organized violence, to construct legal rights in our interests alone at the expense of other’s desired natural rights, is if we all possess natural rights and natural rights alone. So I’ve tried to restore the reality of political philosophy to the state prior to the set of lies we created in order to justify adding women to the franchise, in an equivalent house, rather than in their own separate house of government: that the only reason to forgo our desire to rule in our own self interest, is if we rule by rule of law in one another’s equal interest. And if that is not the case, then we simply license parasitism and our own destruction. The first question of ethics and politics is ‘why don’t I just kill you and take your stuff’. It’s only after we’ve decided that we will cooperate that we enter the question of ethics (how not to disincentivize cooperation), or politics (how not to disincentivize the production of commons.) We value a MERITOCRATIC commons (political), economy (ethics), reproductive (family), structure that is against the interests of those who lack competitive reproductive desirability, competitive productive ability, and productive ability to contribute to the commons. That you phrase the question as moral, and I phrase it as economic is the problem with the alt-right that I am trying to solve by providing a rational and scientific language for the discussion, comparison, and contrast of all epistemic, ethical, political, and group evolutionary strategies. The weakness is that we will not come to terms with the fact that meritocracy and eugenics and our ability to produce wealth and commons are antithetical to democracy, and that without the restoration of the market for commons and a judicial monarchy (inherited), we cannot possess the liberty and meritocracy we desire. Eugenics is incompatible with democracy. The original settlers (my ancestors included) used different language but the American colonies were an experiment in eugenics. The disaster was the Louisiana purchase that requires vast immigration to populate the new territory so that it would not be seized (yet again) by the European powers. The new territory would have extended slavery, and this would have firmly put both taxation (on export goods) and the power of the federal government, in the hands of the agrarians and their international market, at the expense of the new industrialists and the domestic market. Had we retained the original colonies it is possible that we could have retained the eugenic experiment – even with the handicap of the Scotts-Irish in the south. Of course, I have read Burnham and I consider him one of my greater influences – he gave me the moral courage so to speak to abandon my cultural allegiances as a member of the puritan families, the anti-monarchy forces in the English civil wars, and the anti-monarchy movement in the American revolution. I consider all of these to be failures. You can see my entire reading list onPropertarianism.com/reading-list, and you can contact Ramsey because he maintains our library, and we have most of the work in digital format available for readers. Burnham’s observation is not unique, but he was trying to warn us about it. There are a couple of human tendencies that we should be aware of: 1) the models we use like analogies to animals, hydraulic, mechanical, electrical, and now computational (information) change with every era, and we misapply properties of those models to man. Man is an organism that grows and is changed by his growth from conception to old age. We tend to try to hang on to a model and extend the use of that model in our minds to ever greater scope. But they’re just analogies, with information in both physics and social science the current state of our ability to represent the world. 2) tendency to thing obvious trends are special and novel. But if we look at all human organizations they go through the same cycles and Burnham was trying to tell us that. Like Hayek and popper, or perhaps even Simmel, he was trying to describe the problem of political order as an information and decidability problem. So just as monarchies fell because their families lacked sufficient population to produce sufficient technocrats to run things, and just as private companies had to give way to corporations with professional managers, the size and scale of the modern state requires institutions. Whether those institutions could have been provided by market services is a question of maturity. At first, no, but over time yes. He was critical because he did not have a solution. We have all be correct in criticizing socialism. What we haven’t been correct about is in criticizing capitalism and democracy. Yes, we can have a star trek society with an average IQ of 125 or higher. But the Arabs cannot with an average IQ of 85-90 at the best. Neither can the Brazilians with such an enormous underclass in relation to the productivity and quality of their institutions. I hope this gave you some ideas to work with. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute
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Pinker’s Criticism Of Taleb Is Taleb’s Doing But…
Taleb is right, Pinker is wrong, but Taleb makes his arguments to general principles rather than operational explanations. This is why we must have empiricism AND operationalism in scientific assertions. This is why people like Taleb must work top down (empirically) and others like me must work bottom up (operationally). And why opportunities to do both, like Darwin’s, are the product of novel data collection at much larger (logarithmic?) scale. I suspect that because of our status differences Taleb and I could not work together on this, and no one will see our different missions as the same as that of Hayek (long run law) and Mises (medium run finance), or that Taleb and I are working on the same problem that Poincaré, Mises, Hayek, Popper, Brouwer, and Bridgman failed to solve: how to we separate science from pseudoscience, once we are talking about stochastic systems at very great scale? What happened when teh industrial revolution hit, and we needed to move from operational accounting to correlative statistics, yet could not bridge the technological gap of testing our statistical statements like we do our theoretical statements. Especially when there is profound incentive to use financialization to accumulate risk and spend down capital precisely because at such scale operations are imperceptible to us. We boil the frog. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
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Pinker’s Criticism Of Taleb Is Taleb’s Doing But…
Taleb is right, Pinker is wrong, but Taleb makes his arguments to general principles rather than operational explanations. This is why we must have empiricism AND operationalism in scientific assertions. This is why people like Taleb must work top down (empirically) and others like me must work bottom up (operationally). And why opportunities to do both, like Darwin’s, are the product of novel data collection at much larger (logarithmic?) scale. I suspect that because of our status differences Taleb and I could not work together on this, and no one will see our different missions as the same as that of Hayek (long run law) and Mises (medium run finance), or that Taleb and I are working on the same problem that Poincaré, Mises, Hayek, Popper, Brouwer, and Bridgman failed to solve: how to we separate science from pseudoscience, once we are talking about stochastic systems at very great scale? What happened when teh industrial revolution hit, and we needed to move from operational accounting to correlative statistics, yet could not bridge the technological gap of testing our statistical statements like we do our theoretical statements. Especially when there is profound incentive to use financialization to accumulate risk and spend down capital precisely because at such scale operations are imperceptible to us. We boil the frog. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
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“All improvement in cooperation comes from parallel increases in informational q
—“All improvement in cooperation comes from parallel increases in informational quality++ and theft/fraud/conspiracy suppression–.”— Something I posted on twitter in response to this question. Man is a rational actor. He acts in his rational self-interest at all times, choosing immoral and moral actions by intuitive cost vs benefit; and we can find no exceptions other than kin selection – and arguably that is also in one’s self-interest. For this reason we do not make the world a better place, but instead, we create institutions that raise the cost of unhelpful behaviors, and reduce the cost of helpful behaviors. Some of the methods we use to suppress immoral behaviors are obvious (law, restitution, punishment), and some are not (the conversion of property from material goods to partial-title) because they make theft more difficult. Others are difficult to admit to: that the differences between wealthier and poorer societies is generally explained by the relative sizes of the upper and lower genetic classes, meaning that no amount of effort will help some countries prosper because there are just too many people at the bottom to incentivize with the inventiveness and productivity at the top, using organization provided by the middle. So while a one-child policy is necessary in Africa, the Muslim world, and south america it cannot be implemented without the equivalent of the Red Army or the Revolutionary Guard. Which India’s weakness – even literacy has been a problem. So we cannot eliminate a tendency as much as eliminate generations with those tendencies, and provide institutions that preserve positive and suppress negative tendencies. Man evolves locally and fast. But we must help man do so just as we did under agrarianism – which was not a kind process to those who could not transition to it. They are largely gone. Just as the various other incarnations of man are gone. And we eliminated them from the planet, while walking on foot, over a comparatively small number of millennia. If we look back over the past century, most of the harm was done by the communist movement, the facist movement to resist it, and the capitalist movement to eradicate it. The communist movement promised utopian results to backward nations that had not transitioned through the enlightenment. Just as Islam is a utopian movement promising utopian results to backward nations, and using the same strategy as communism except distributed on moral and religoius grounds using weaponized reproduction rather than distributed on economic and political grounds using direct rebellion – a slower path to the same ends: changing the order to one suitable to the underclasses and less suitable to the middle and upper classes. The pseudoscientific communist economic movement(Marx) was accompanied by the pseudoscientific social science movement (boaz) and the pseudoscientific psychological movement (freud), and less harmflly the pseudoscientific mathematical moveent( Cantor). And then when by the pseudoscientific cultural movvement (the frankfurt school). So my prescription for improvement for mankind is that we can continue the suppression of new methods of theft and fraud by defending the informational commons the same way we defend the air, land, and water from pollution, our physical commons, infrastructure and monuments from physical damage, and our rule of law, govenrment from damage, and our religions and traditions from damage: By outlawing pseudoscience. We could not outlaw pseudoscience until very recently because we have only begun to understand truth at scale in the 20th century. But now that we know, we can force upon people a warranty of due diligence in speech inserted into the commons the same way we force a warranty of due diligenc upon people who provide goods and services. Those due diligences are (Painfully Briefly): 1 – categorical consistency (identity and non conflation) 2 – internal consistency (logical) 3 – external correspondence (empirical consistency) 4 – existential possibility (operational language) 5 – ethical consistency (consisting of fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary transfer, limited to externalities of the same.) 6 – scope consistency (defining limits, full accounting, and parsimony) We have many such other requirements in the law, and we use these requirements with academics when publishing. And there is no reason we do not demand these same warranties of political speech, which is far more consequential than academic speech. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute KIev, Ukraine http://www.drewgl.com/posts/4241
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“All improvement in cooperation comes from parallel increases in informational q
—“All improvement in cooperation comes from parallel increases in informational quality++ and theft/fraud/conspiracy suppression–.”— Something I posted on twitter in response to this question. Man is a rational actor. He acts in his rational self-interest at all times, choosing immoral and moral actions by intuitive cost vs benefit; and we can find no exceptions other than kin selection – and arguably that is also in one’s self-interest. For this reason we do not make the world a better place, but instead, we create institutions that raise the cost of unhelpful behaviors, and reduce the cost of helpful behaviors. Some of the methods we use to suppress immoral behaviors are obvious (law, restitution, punishment), and some are not (the conversion of property from material goods to partial-title) because they make theft more difficult. Others are difficult to admit to: that the differences between wealthier and poorer societies is generally explained by the relative sizes of the upper and lower genetic classes, meaning that no amount of effort will help some countries prosper because there are just too many people at the bottom to incentivize with the inventiveness and productivity at the top, using organization provided by the middle. So while a one-child policy is necessary in Africa, the Muslim world, and south america it cannot be implemented without the equivalent of the Red Army or the Revolutionary Guard. Which India’s weakness – even literacy has been a problem. So we cannot eliminate a tendency as much as eliminate generations with those tendencies, and provide institutions that preserve positive and suppress negative tendencies. Man evolves locally and fast. But we must help man do so just as we did under agrarianism – which was not a kind process to those who could not transition to it. They are largely gone. Just as the various other incarnations of man are gone. And we eliminated them from the planet, while walking on foot, over a comparatively small number of millennia. If we look back over the past century, most of the harm was done by the communist movement, the facist movement to resist it, and the capitalist movement to eradicate it. The communist movement promised utopian results to backward nations that had not transitioned through the enlightenment. Just as Islam is a utopian movement promising utopian results to backward nations, and using the same strategy as communism except distributed on moral and religoius grounds using weaponized reproduction rather than distributed on economic and political grounds using direct rebellion – a slower path to the same ends: changing the order to one suitable to the underclasses and less suitable to the middle and upper classes. The pseudoscientific communist economic movement(Marx) was accompanied by the pseudoscientific social science movement (boaz) and the pseudoscientific psychological movement (freud), and less harmflly the pseudoscientific mathematical moveent( Cantor). And then when by the pseudoscientific cultural movvement (the frankfurt school). So my prescription for improvement for mankind is that we can continue the suppression of new methods of theft and fraud by defending the informational commons the same way we defend the air, land, and water from pollution, our physical commons, infrastructure and monuments from physical damage, and our rule of law, govenrment from damage, and our religions and traditions from damage: By outlawing pseudoscience. We could not outlaw pseudoscience until very recently because we have only begun to understand truth at scale in the 20th century. But now that we know, we can force upon people a warranty of due diligence in speech inserted into the commons the same way we force a warranty of due diligenc upon people who provide goods and services. Those due diligences are (Painfully Briefly): 1 – categorical consistency (identity and non conflation) 2 – internal consistency (logical) 3 – external correspondence (empirical consistency) 4 – existential possibility (operational language) 5 – ethical consistency (consisting of fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary transfer, limited to externalities of the same.) 6 – scope consistency (defining limits, full accounting, and parsimony) We have many such other requirements in the law, and we use these requirements with academics when publishing. And there is no reason we do not demand these same warranties of political speech, which is far more consequential than academic speech. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute KIev, Ukraine http://www.drewgl.com/posts/4241
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Garrett Lisi on His Theory of Everything
A Ted Talk that doesn’t suck and doesn’t require magic http://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_everything
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Garrett Lisi on His Theory of Everything
A Ted Talk that doesn’t suck and doesn’t require magic http://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_everything
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Q&a:Curt: Is There Any Morality Beyond Self Interest?
—“Do you believe that morality beyond self-interest is entirely false as a result?”— I don’t believe in anything, because the term is archaic. I can state that it’s a strong truth candidate, because despite extremely exhaustive efforts by highly biased researchers, we cannot find a single instance of moral action that is not in itself selfish through kin selection. Now, when we use the word ‘moral’ we must grasp that there is an objective morality in natural (necessary, consistent, and decidable), and normative morality (local group contracts for different sets of behaviors that produce group benefits from which individuals largely benefit), and individual morality (those subsets of moral choices I choose to follow and not). We conflate these two terms, just as we conflate law (natural law), legislation (contract or command), and regulation (arbitrary edict). But objective and normative, and individual morality are equivalent to natural law (true), legislation (contractual), and regulation (arbitrary choice). When I write I use moral for objective morality of natural law, and norm for normative morality of local normative contract. We can extend this basic principle from not only sentient cooperative groups, but to non-sentient groups, to non sentient individuals, to plants, to bacteria, to the natural elements that make up the physical world, and to our emerging understanding of the physical world: that we must fight entropy if we wish to survive. So it is not only illogical to engage in self-destructive action, but it is physically impossible so to speak, as it would violate physical laws of the universe. Now some creatures appear to do sacrificial things, but this is sacrificial only from the (fallacious) human perspective as individual pleasure-seekers. But from evolution and the physical world’s standpoint, once we have exhausted a BENEFICIAL reproductive role we are no longer valuable to the organism (the algorithm) as a whole. Thankfully humans are almost always beneficial to one another when they are alive and not harming one another. Even then, those who harm, may be benefitting the organism (algorithm) “man”. Now when we say self-interest, selfishness that signals possible parasitism, or non-payment for commons is something all creatures that cooperate retaliate against. So there is a difference between COMPROMISE (rational self-interest) and ABSOLUTE (and therefore irrational) self-interest. What is rational for all of us is to preserve the incentive to cooperate, and to prevent providing incentive to retaliate, yet being defensive enough to discourage offense against us. So in this sense, it is always rational to compromise with those with whom you are compatible, because compromise with those with whom you are compatible is in your self-interest. There are no rules without limits. If we cannot state the limits of any general rule, we state a falsehood because we cannot state a truth. This is why the wise speak in teleological ethics (science/outcomes), the informed but inexperienced and deceitful speak in deontological ethics ( rationalism/rules ), the young, lacking knowlege and experience in virtues (analogy/imitations), and children in punishments and rewards (goods and bads). I hope this provided the answer you sought. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy or Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute