Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • The Testimonial Civilization is the New End of History (Sorry Francis)

    Butch Longhorn at The Propertarian Forum “Gets It Right” https://propertarianforum.wordpress.com/2015/05/28/huntington-vs-fukuyama/

  • Ethics Isn’t Complicated

    “Why don’t I kill you?”

    [I]t’s actually a profound statement. Rather than asking how we act under the assumption of cooperation, we ask under what conditions do we rationally choose to cooperate?

  • Ethics Isn’t Complicated

    “Why don’t I kill you?”

    [I]t’s actually a profound statement. Rather than asking how we act under the assumption of cooperation, we ask under what conditions do we rationally choose to cooperate?

  • Bryan Caplan Goes All “Critique” on Trolls

    Caplan’s a good guy. But using Psychological Critique to criticize Trolls is so painfully ironic that I cant bear it.
    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/06/the_psychology_3.html

    —————-
    [B]rian,

    Or we could just adopt the strategy of analyzing incentives, and continue the longstanding criticism of psychology as a pseudoscience. And that all use of psychological criticism is merely ‘Critique’ (Gossip for the purpose of shaming and rallying.) It is a sophisticated deceit, but a deceit none the less.

    Trolls want attention. They found a way to get attention. They vent frustration. It’s not complicated. Why is it that they aren’t getting attention. And how can we provide negative incentives for their behavior?

    Critique is unscientific. Psychologizing is use of critique.

  • Bryan Caplan Goes All “Critique” on Trolls

    Caplan’s a good guy. But using Psychological Critique to criticize Trolls is so painfully ironic that I cant bear it.
    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/06/the_psychology_3.html

    —————-
    [B]rian,

    Or we could just adopt the strategy of analyzing incentives, and continue the longstanding criticism of psychology as a pseudoscience. And that all use of psychological criticism is merely ‘Critique’ (Gossip for the purpose of shaming and rallying.) It is a sophisticated deceit, but a deceit none the less.

    Trolls want attention. They found a way to get attention. They vent frustration. It’s not complicated. Why is it that they aren’t getting attention. And how can we provide negative incentives for their behavior?

    Critique is unscientific. Psychologizing is use of critique.

  • Yes. We *Can* Demand People Warranty Their Statements for Truthfulness.

    CURT—“Why can’t we demand that people warranty the truthfulness of their statements?”—

    RICHARD—“because truth is determined, if at all, by debate and testing, and what cannot be stated while untested is unlikely to receive the scrutiny needed to determine its truth or falsity.”—

    [T]his is not true. TRUTHFULNESS, in all walks of life, not only in the physical sciences, is the result of performance of due diligence: criticism of our testimony. The act of laundering imagination, fantasy, bias, error and deception from our testimony. Justification is false. There are no non-trivial complete premises. We can criticize our extant understanding as thoroughly as possible, but we can never know if we are informationally complete.

    Testimony is unnatural to man. Which is why westerner’s are unique in its construction as a norm: it’s prohibitively expensive.
    Analytic truth (the case you use in your statement above), is impossible to know for other than tautological and trivial statements.

    —”No, I was on about the truth of assumptions about the external facts.

    But mere honesty is not truthfulness in any case.

    My guess is that you have no clear idea even of what analytic truth means, Curt. “—-

    —-David McDonagh mcdonagh_d@yahoo.co.uk

    1) Honesty exists (and can only exist) as warranty that one’s testimony is free of deceit – but not free of imagination, ignorance, bias, and error.

    2) Truthfulness exists (and can only exist) as warranty that one’s testimony is free of deceit, and that one has performed due diligence against imagination, bias and error.

    3) Truth (Analytic Truth) exists (and can only exist) as a definition of a Truthful statement that complete.

    4) Tautology exists (and can only exist) two statements that are identical in informational content for a given precision (context).

    REGARDING SNARKY DAVIDISM
    –”…what analytic truth means”–

    What meaning people normatively derive from the term, and what meaning (content) is necessary for the term to correspond to the testimony given using it, are two different things. So, on order to put forth a substantive criticism – you would actually have to put forward a criticism. 😉

    But in an effort to assist you in your journey: the word ‘is’ must refer to existence if one is not engaging in conflation; and ‘truth’ can only exist as testimony (promise). Any other use of the term ‘true’ is an analogy that we must test for internal consistency given the context of its use.

    “The ball is red” = “Having observed the ball, I promise you that if you observe the ball, you will also perceive that it appears red.”
    This is the only existentially possible operational definition. “The ball Is red” is an expression of verbal brevity.
    OR more generally “is” = “I promise that subject to the same observations you will percieve what I testify that you will”

    So:
    –” I was on about the truth of assumptions about the external facts.”–
    is an excellent example of how the term truth is misused.

    Translates to (and can only translate to):
    “I was talking about the degree of criticism I had performed in my due diligence of my premises, and therefore the scope of diligence I must perform upon my deductions from those premises”.

    As far as I know I am one of the best people living and working on this subject.

    Cheers.

    DEFINITIONS: TRUTH, TRUTHFULNESS, AND HONESTY http://www.propertarianism.com/2015/05/29/definitions-truth/ DUE DILIGENCE 

    NECESSARY FOR WARRANTY OF TRUTHFULNESS http://www.propertarianism.com/…/due-diligence-necessary-f…/

  • Yes. We *Can* Demand People Warranty Their Statements for Truthfulness.

    CURT—“Why can’t we demand that people warranty the truthfulness of their statements?”—

    RICHARD—“because truth is determined, if at all, by debate and testing, and what cannot be stated while untested is unlikely to receive the scrutiny needed to determine its truth or falsity.”—

    [T]his is not true. TRUTHFULNESS, in all walks of life, not only in the physical sciences, is the result of performance of due diligence: criticism of our testimony. The act of laundering imagination, fantasy, bias, error and deception from our testimony. Justification is false. There are no non-trivial complete premises. We can criticize our extant understanding as thoroughly as possible, but we can never know if we are informationally complete.

    Testimony is unnatural to man. Which is why westerner’s are unique in its construction as a norm: it’s prohibitively expensive.
    Analytic truth (the case you use in your statement above), is impossible to know for other than tautological and trivial statements.

    —”No, I was on about the truth of assumptions about the external facts.

    But mere honesty is not truthfulness in any case.

    My guess is that you have no clear idea even of what analytic truth means, Curt. “—-

    —-David McDonagh mcdonagh_d@yahoo.co.uk

    1) Honesty exists (and can only exist) as warranty that one’s testimony is free of deceit – but not free of imagination, ignorance, bias, and error.

    2) Truthfulness exists (and can only exist) as warranty that one’s testimony is free of deceit, and that one has performed due diligence against imagination, bias and error.

    3) Truth (Analytic Truth) exists (and can only exist) as a definition of a Truthful statement that complete.

    4) Tautology exists (and can only exist) two statements that are identical in informational content for a given precision (context).

    REGARDING SNARKY DAVIDISM
    –”…what analytic truth means”–

    What meaning people normatively derive from the term, and what meaning (content) is necessary for the term to correspond to the testimony given using it, are two different things. So, on order to put forth a substantive criticism – you would actually have to put forward a criticism. 😉

    But in an effort to assist you in your journey: the word ‘is’ must refer to existence if one is not engaging in conflation; and ‘truth’ can only exist as testimony (promise). Any other use of the term ‘true’ is an analogy that we must test for internal consistency given the context of its use.

    “The ball is red” = “Having observed the ball, I promise you that if you observe the ball, you will also perceive that it appears red.”
    This is the only existentially possible operational definition. “The ball Is red” is an expression of verbal brevity.
    OR more generally “is” = “I promise that subject to the same observations you will percieve what I testify that you will”

    So:
    –” I was on about the truth of assumptions about the external facts.”–
    is an excellent example of how the term truth is misused.

    Translates to (and can only translate to):
    “I was talking about the degree of criticism I had performed in my due diligence of my premises, and therefore the scope of diligence I must perform upon my deductions from those premises”.

    As far as I know I am one of the best people living and working on this subject.

    Cheers.

    DEFINITIONS: TRUTH, TRUTHFULNESS, AND HONESTY http://www.propertarianism.com/2015/05/29/definitions-truth/ DUE DILIGENCE 

    NECESSARY FOR WARRANTY OF TRUTHFULNESS http://www.propertarianism.com/…/due-diligence-necessary-f…/

  • Propertarianism Completes The Wilsonian Synthesis.

    [P]hilosophy, Science, Morality, Law, Politics and Aesthetics are all unified. (I didn’t have such grand ambitions really. I just wanted to create a rational language of politics. )

  • Propertarianism Completes The Wilsonian Synthesis.

    [P]hilosophy, Science, Morality, Law, Politics and Aesthetics are all unified. (I didn’t have such grand ambitions really. I just wanted to create a rational language of politics. )

  • Scientific and Libertarian vs Mythical and Authoritarian: The Burden of Thought.

    (religious trigger warning) [K]ant understood the central value of the west was truth speaking.  But Kant was still a Christian – arguing in unscientific language of morality. He was not able to make the leap from truth to jury, law, science and economics. We face the same problem with Today’s Christians. Traditionalists often hold proper sensibilities and express them in the language of belief, rather than the language of institutions, incentives, law, and economics – the art of cooperation rather than totalitarianism that requires submission in all the monotheistic religions, and which demands we abandon truth in favor of useful analogy. What traditionalism requires is submission – and in exchange one gains freedom from the burden of perpetual calculation of events. The value of religion – still measurable today – is that it is increasingly valuable as intelligence decreases. And decreasingly valuable as intelligence increases. Religious authority obviates need for reason.  Truth, science and reason obviate the need for authority. So we really have two choices: we can have two systems of thought: scientific and mythical, while insisting that the mythical contain moral content only, with full knowledge that the scientific method is aristocratic and libertarian in construction and the mythical narrative is proletarian and authoritarian in construction. Or, we can suppress the reproduction of the lower classes and merely pay them off until there are so few left that their cost is below noise level. (Spoken as a Catholic myself.) Source: Curt Doolittle