Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • Humans are the Most Unequal Creatures on Earth

    (interesting)

    [H]UMANS divide (a)Perception, (b)Consideration, (c)Knowledge, (d)Labor, and (e) reproduction – and we negotiate through words and provide ‘facts’ or ‘data’ through acts of voluntary exchange.

    We operate as a fascinating computational system. Just as a transistor flips to make a connection that was not previously available, and signals downstream its change in state, we signal through voluntary exchange our change in state, and in doing so we capture and distribute information about our perceptions.

    We were cognizant of the division of reproductive labor, overly obsessed with the division of labor once we discovered it, and only in the past few generations have come to understand the importance of the division of knowledge determined by intellectual ability, and now we have begun to understand the division of perception and consideration is also genetically determined.
    We got stock in the error of equality. Yet, we are perhaps one of the most unequal, if not THE MOST UNEQUAL creatures in existence – because we have greater capacity for inequality.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev,

  • Individualism is a Privilege Earned

    [I] have a problem with causing suffering as punishment or for personal gratification. I have no problem with torture for the purpose of gathering information – particularly non-destructive torture. I certainly have no problem with killing, and I think we don’t do nearly enough of it. It’s cheap, effective, and provides exceptional incentives.

    Moreover, In individual societies we must limit punishment to the individual. In traditional societies, to the family, to primitive societies to the tribe, to corporeally organized to the state, and to religiously organized societies to all members.
    If you act as your own agent, for your own personal gain, then you have merely committed a crime. If you act on behalf of others you have committed a conspiracy.

    For these reasons we must hold groups accountable for the actions of their members, because actors acting on their behalf are their agents, and only those members possess the knowledge and incentives to contain the actions of their members.
    Individualism is a privilege earned by members of a society for suppression of the actions its members.
    Punish the group for the actions of the individuals and they will contain their group members – that’s what we do.

  • Individualism is a Privilege Earned

    [I] have a problem with causing suffering as punishment or for personal gratification. I have no problem with torture for the purpose of gathering information – particularly non-destructive torture. I certainly have no problem with killing, and I think we don’t do nearly enough of it. It’s cheap, effective, and provides exceptional incentives.

    Moreover, In individual societies we must limit punishment to the individual. In traditional societies, to the family, to primitive societies to the tribe, to corporeally organized to the state, and to religiously organized societies to all members.
    If you act as your own agent, for your own personal gain, then you have merely committed a crime. If you act on behalf of others you have committed a conspiracy.

    For these reasons we must hold groups accountable for the actions of their members, because actors acting on their behalf are their agents, and only those members possess the knowledge and incentives to contain the actions of their members.
    Individualism is a privilege earned by members of a society for suppression of the actions its members.
    Punish the group for the actions of the individuals and they will contain their group members – that’s what we do.

  • Michael Phillip On The Incentives of Monarchy


    [T]hough subject to normal human failings, the long time horizons of monarchy is one of its distinct advantages. As economist Mancur Olson pointed out that, the longer the time horizon of the ruler, the more their interests tended to converge with those of their subjects. One tends to be somewhat more careful and accommodating the longer you and your children are going to be living with the consequences of your decisions. Of the three major Axis powers, the two monarchies (the Kingdom of Italy and the Empire of Japan) found it easier to exit from fighting precisely because they were monarchies; there was someone with sufficient authority to say enough. Nazi Germany had to wait until Hitler was dead (and assassination proved to be a less reliable alternative).

  • Michael Phillip On The Incentives of Monarchy


    [T]hough subject to normal human failings, the long time horizons of monarchy is one of its distinct advantages. As economist Mancur Olson pointed out that, the longer the time horizon of the ruler, the more their interests tended to converge with those of their subjects. One tends to be somewhat more careful and accommodating the longer you and your children are going to be living with the consequences of your decisions. Of the three major Axis powers, the two monarchies (the Kingdom of Italy and the Empire of Japan) found it easier to exit from fighting precisely because they were monarchies; there was someone with sufficient authority to say enough. Nazi Germany had to wait until Hitler was dead (and assassination proved to be a less reliable alternative).

  • An Author’s Intentions Are Meaningless

    [I]t really doesn’t matter what an author says or intends. What matters is whether its true or not- and I do not mean internally consistent, I mean externally correspondent. In the sense that logical conclusions can be and must be drawn from any set of statements. and that the author’s ‘way of thinking’ is either correspondent with reality or not. Most of the time, it’s not. That’s what separates pseudoscience, rationalism, mysticism from truth telling (science).

    When we roll a bag of conceptual marbles down the hill, we do not control them – reality does. When we roll our sentences into the public it does not matter what we say or how we say it but whether what we say is true and truthful.

    Nothing marx, freud and rothbard say for example, is truthfully expressed. So we cannot judge an author by his own terms, but on whether his arguments are operationally possible in reality, regardless of what he means, intends, or portends.
    Meaning is a great way to lie. Which is useful in myths and religious dogma. It was useful in pseudosciences. It was useful in the fallacy of psychologizing. It was useful by the postmoderns. It is useful in all public speech. But it is just a perfect vehicle for lying.

    I run into this all the time, when criticizing certain authors. My favorite is still the typical economist’s reply that ‘we don’t concern ourselves with that’.

    Which makes me crazy because they do affect that which they claim to ignore, without admitting that it is precisely what they ignore that allows them to justify their work.

    Marx is better though. Best. Liar.Ever.

  • An Author’s Intentions Are Meaningless

    [I]t really doesn’t matter what an author says or intends. What matters is whether its true or not- and I do not mean internally consistent, I mean externally correspondent. In the sense that logical conclusions can be and must be drawn from any set of statements. and that the author’s ‘way of thinking’ is either correspondent with reality or not. Most of the time, it’s not. That’s what separates pseudoscience, rationalism, mysticism from truth telling (science).

    When we roll a bag of conceptual marbles down the hill, we do not control them – reality does. When we roll our sentences into the public it does not matter what we say or how we say it but whether what we say is true and truthful.

    Nothing marx, freud and rothbard say for example, is truthfully expressed. So we cannot judge an author by his own terms, but on whether his arguments are operationally possible in reality, regardless of what he means, intends, or portends.
    Meaning is a great way to lie. Which is useful in myths and religious dogma. It was useful in pseudosciences. It was useful in the fallacy of psychologizing. It was useful by the postmoderns. It is useful in all public speech. But it is just a perfect vehicle for lying.

    I run into this all the time, when criticizing certain authors. My favorite is still the typical economist’s reply that ‘we don’t concern ourselves with that’.

    Which makes me crazy because they do affect that which they claim to ignore, without admitting that it is precisely what they ignore that allows them to justify their work.

    Marx is better though. Best. Liar.Ever.

  • Truth Under Propertarianism

    (getting very close now)

    [T]he Question:

    How do we warranty that we speak the truth, given any subset of properties of reality? Testimonial truth is a promise, a warranty. But a warranty of what? All knowledge is theoretical; and all non-tautological, non-trivial premises and propositions are theoretical. Therefore how to we know our theories can be warrantied?


    We can warranty that our statement somewhere in this spectrum:

    0) Sensible (intuitively possible)
    1) Meaningfully expressible ( as an hypothesis )
    2) Internally consistent and falsifiable (logically consistent – rational)
    3) Externally correspondent and Falsifiable ( physically testable – correlative)
    4) Existentially possible (operationally construct-able/observable)
    5) Voluntarily choose-able (voluntary exchange / rational choice)
    6) Market-survivable (criticism – theory )
    7) Market irrefutable (law)
    8) Irrefutable under original experience (Perceivable Truth)
    9) Ultimately parsimonious description (Analytic Truth)
    10) Informationally complete and tautologically identical (Platonic Truth – Imaginary)

    And we can state what criteria any proposition tested on this spectrum satisfied. And we can conversely state whether a proposition is required to satisfy each criteria.

    All disciplines are subject to this list, and to testimony. All that differs is whether the properties are necessary for application of the theory to the context (scale) at hand.

    Only such statements made under this warranty, are classifiable as moral: consisting of Truthful, fully informed, productive, voluntary exchange free of negative externality.

    OUR WARRANTY IS:

    I. A statement is stated *TRUTHFULLY*: satisfying the criteria for such a warranty to be made.
    II. A statement is *TRUE*: Assuming that we eliminated the barriers of time, space, scale, and observability, we warranty that one would come to the same conclusion if equally truthful in his actions.
    We can never state whether a statement is “Absolutely True”, as in satisfying Platonic truth. And rarely can we state that we have satisfied analytic truth, and only at human scale can we testify that we have satisfied Perceivable Truth – original experience. But we can always state whether we have stated something truthfully.

    The question is only *whether we truly desire to*.


    CRITICISM OF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

    Things can’t ‘be’ true, we can only speak/write truthfully.

    We have been obsessed with science and math rather than seeing them as simple subsets of the more complex problem. And in the west, we took truth telling for granted, when it is the first principle upon which all other western advances were made.

    (Next. Information Differences Necessary in Verbal Expression)

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine.

  • Truth Under Propertarianism

    (getting very close now)

    [T]he Question:

    How do we warranty that we speak the truth, given any subset of properties of reality? Testimonial truth is a promise, a warranty. But a warranty of what? All knowledge is theoretical; and all non-tautological, non-trivial premises and propositions are theoretical. Therefore how to we know our theories can be warrantied?


    We can warranty that our statement somewhere in this spectrum:

    0) Sensible (intuitively possible)
    1) Meaningfully expressible ( as an hypothesis )
    2) Internally consistent and falsifiable (logically consistent – rational)
    3) Externally correspondent and Falsifiable ( physically testable – correlative)
    4) Existentially possible (operationally construct-able/observable)
    5) Voluntarily choose-able (voluntary exchange / rational choice)
    6) Market-survivable (criticism – theory )
    7) Market irrefutable (law)
    8) Irrefutable under original experience (Perceivable Truth)
    9) Ultimately parsimonious description (Analytic Truth)
    10) Informationally complete and tautologically identical (Platonic Truth – Imaginary)

    And we can state what criteria any proposition tested on this spectrum satisfied. And we can conversely state whether a proposition is required to satisfy each criteria.

    All disciplines are subject to this list, and to testimony. All that differs is whether the properties are necessary for application of the theory to the context (scale) at hand.

    Only such statements made under this warranty, are classifiable as moral: consisting of Truthful, fully informed, productive, voluntary exchange free of negative externality.

    OUR WARRANTY IS:

    I. A statement is stated *TRUTHFULLY*: satisfying the criteria for such a warranty to be made.
    II. A statement is *TRUE*: Assuming that we eliminated the barriers of time, space, scale, and observability, we warranty that one would come to the same conclusion if equally truthful in his actions.
    We can never state whether a statement is “Absolutely True”, as in satisfying Platonic truth. And rarely can we state that we have satisfied analytic truth, and only at human scale can we testify that we have satisfied Perceivable Truth – original experience. But we can always state whether we have stated something truthfully.

    The question is only *whether we truly desire to*.


    CRITICISM OF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

    Things can’t ‘be’ true, we can only speak/write truthfully.

    We have been obsessed with science and math rather than seeing them as simple subsets of the more complex problem. And in the west, we took truth telling for granted, when it is the first principle upon which all other western advances were made.

    (Next. Information Differences Necessary in Verbal Expression)

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine.

  • Another Nail In Rothbard’s Abuses of Praxeology

    [P]raxeology: is Mises’ failed attempt at discovering Operationalism in economics, as it was discovered in psychology (Operationism), Intuitionism (mathematics) and Operationalism (physics). Regardless of field it is reducible to the statement that we cannot know whether we are discussing (or whether one testifies to) the imaginary or the existential unless it can be described as a set of operations – even if limited to measurements.

    All knowledge is theoretical because all premises other than the reductio are theoretical. The construction of a theory is immaterial. It is whether we can operationalize that theory that determines whether we can claim it is stated truthfully. This is how scientists function and have functioned – and is the reason for their success.

    And the discipline of Science is misunderstood: it is the only known technique for speaking truthfully regardless of subject matter. If one cannot speak scientifically, then one is not speaking truthfully – only analogically – in allegory and metaphors. Only operationally demonstrable statements refer to the existential. All others are allegorical, not existential. They may be meaningful, and meaning may be helpful – but they are not TRUE.

    Mises was unfortunately not enough of a scientist or mathematician, and was too much fascinated by German verbalism to make the leap that Anglos and Netherlander’s did. He would have been easily corrected by someone like myself earlier, if he had not been so firmly associated with Rothbard and his reputation damaged so severely by that association.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine