Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • Notes On The Libertarian Reformation (Revised and Edited)

    [D]raft of the principles of the libertarian reformation. 1) Our generation’s challenge is not socialism, it’s the state religion of anti-scientific, anti-rational Postmodernism. (The religion of progressivism.) The dogma, literature, and ideological bias of the libertarian movement is a generation behind. Emphasis on past heroes is not constructive or valuable. It is indicative of the failure to produce successful solutions to the communalist adaptation to the failure of socialism in theory and practice: Postmodernism. 2) Government per se, is not a ‘bad’. What’s ‘bad’ is the corporeal state, monopoly, bureaucracy, majority rule, and legislative law. When we fail to make this distinction we are in fact, ‘wrong’. A government that consists of a monopolistically articulated set of property rights and the terms of dispute resolution, operating under the common law, and a group of people whose purpose is to facilitate investments in the commons by voluntary contract, but who cannot make legislative law, is in fact, a government. And it is a good government. It may not be necessary government among people with homogenous preferences and beliefs. But it is somewhere between necessary and beneficial government for people with heterogeneous preferences and beliefs. It is however, not a bad government. A monopoly set of property rights is necessary for the rational resolution of disputes, with the lowest friction possible. 3) Property is unnatural to man. Tribal human settlement is matrilineal, egalitarian, malthusian and poor. Mate selection is determined by sexual favors within the group, and raiding, capturing and killing for women outside the group whenever there was a shortage of women. 4) Property rights and paternalism were an innovation made possible by the domestication of animals and the ability of males to accumulate wealth outside of the matrilineal order. Property rather than sexual favors was such an advantage that it inverted the relationship between the sexes and determined mate selection. (The feminists are correct.) 5) Property rights were created by a minority who granted equality of property rights to one another in exchange for service in warfare. The source of property rights is the organized application of violence to create those property rights. Because property rights are the desire of the minority. However, property rights created such an increase in prosperity and consumption that others sought to join the ranks of property owners. 6) The redistributive state that was voted into power by women, has reversed the innovation of private property and in concert with feminists, is eroding the nuclear family, and the male ability to collect property. The institutions of marriage, nuclear family, and private property cannot survive when a democratic majority can deprive men of private property rights, and their ability to control mating and reproduction. 7 ) Rothbardian Libertarian ethics are ‘insufficient’.The high trust society forbids involuntary transfers by externality and asymmetry of information, and enforces this demand with a requirement for warranty. The ethics of the high trust society forbid all involuntary transfers except through competition in the market. They also boycott although they do not forbid, profit without demonstrated addition of value. 8 ) Rothbardian ethics are wrong (and bad): The market incentives alone are not high enough to overcome corruption, and create the high trust society without these two additional moral prohibitions instituted both formally and as norms: norms are a commons. They are property. Conservatives are right. “Externality and Symmetry Enforced By Warranty” are ethical constraints necessary for markets to function as the only permissible involuntary transfer: by competition in the market. 9 ) Libertarians do not exist in sufficient numbers. And it is not possible to enfranchise the conservatives (classical liberals) with Rothbardian ‘ghetto’ ethics. Without conservatives, who have the broader set of moral biases, and demand for adherence to norms, the libertarian bias is morally objectionable to too large a population, and libertarians are too small in number to accumulate and hold the power necessary to determine property rights in a geography. It’s important to understand that Rothbardian ethics are ‘wrong’ because they are insufficient to achieve what they claim to.

  • ‘Rights’ and Fuzzy Language: You Demand Rights. You Can’t ‘Have’ Them Without an Exchange.

    (Contrary to Searle’s nonsense. More in line with Bentham’s nonsense. Minor improvement to Hoppe. ) [Y]ou DEMAND contractual RIGHTS in EXCHANGE for entering into a CONTRACT with others for some specific terms – and in the libertarian bias we demand absolute private property rights, and the right of first possession by transformation and homesteading. Other people agree to NONE, SOME or ALL of those demands, in exchange for their specific terms. Non-aggressing on some terms, and preserving the opportunity to aggress on others. One cannot ‘have rights’ without the presence of others to grant them in exchange.

      But without the consent of others, one cannot ‘have or possess’ them. [T]he majority of the world cultures and subcultures evolved an allocation of each’s portfolio of property rights between the private and the commons on one axis, and between a) normative (habits, manners, ethics and morals), b) real (land, built capital, portable property, and c) artificial (intellectual property, limited monopoly privileges) on the other axis. Those DEMANDS do you very little good without the ability to enforce your demands. In the case of private property, the coalition of statists is powerful enough to deny you demands, and force you to adhere to THEIR definition of property rights. Might doesn’t make best. Might doesn’t make right. Might makes possible whatever property rights you have demanded. So you must possess the might to institute the property rights you desire.

    • The Causal Problem Of Government Is The Same Causal Problem Of Ethics: The Incorrect Assumption Of The Value Of Monopoly

      [W]hy on earth, would you assume, that ethical principles must assume we agree upon ends? Seriously? Why is it that the study of ethics assumes that there are optimum ends for all? That’s, really, ABSURD on it’s face, isn’t it? I mean. That’s ridiculous. Why not that ethics agree upon means, but not ends? Is ‘group think’ or ‘group-ness’ such an instinct? I think not. I think it is fear of making the wrong decision about which group to belong to. Or simply a cover for theft… We have spent millennia now trying to apply the rules of the family and extended family and tribe to the market, and to justify takings, and thefts and redistributions so that there can be a monopoly of ethical statements. But that’s not necessary. The market doesn’t require that at all. We cooperate on means, but not ends. We don’t even largely know wo we’re cooperating with. The same is true in banking. We don’t know what use our money is put to. We cooperate with people in exchange for interest. The market, and banking, are institutions that help us cooperate on means even if not on ends. [I]f we instead of monopolies imposing homogeneity via law (commands), our institutions relied upon the voluntary exchange of property (contracts) between GROUPS with different property rights internal to the groups, but consistent across the groups, then Law and monopoly are means of one class forcing another class. Democracy is an attempt to legitimize forcing transfers between classes. But why can’t our classes conduct exchanges? There isn’t any reason.

    • Genies Can’t Be Put Back Into Bottles

      [C]lassical Liberalism cannot be restored with women in the voting pool. Property rights can’t be restored with women voting. It’s not possible. Marriage cannot be restored with high participation rates of women in the work force. Birth rates can’t be restored with women in high participation in the work place. Intergenerational saving can’t be restored because of social programs and tax rates for intergenerational redistribution – boomers spent their income and their grandchildren’s. Immigration can’t be reversed so cultural identity, and civic participation can’t be recreated. Growth can’t be restored with the globalization of the work force. We have consumed much of the low hanging fruit of industrialization and work force participation. Progressives are philosophically wrong, historically and empirically wrong, and conservatives and libertarians are living under the illusion of putting the genie back into the bottle. But, we have developed new institutions before. We’re going to have to do it again. But those institutions will not include universally homogenous property rights. They can’t. Because property rights correspond to the moral intuitions of those that make use of them, and males and females have competing reproductive strategies and corresponding moral codes. In male terms, women are immoral, and vice-versa. Marriage was a truce that worked during agrarianism. That truce is over. We’re back at war. And women have the numbers on their side. Property is the product of the organized application of violence by a minority willing to create it. Property isn’t a moral preference of the majority. The majority are free riders and rent seekers. It’s human nature writ large.

    • Read Engels Again: But There Are Better Primary Sources and The Natural State Is Plastic

      Eh.. [G]ist is right. Primary sources are better. Our knowledge is better today. But we are shaking off centuries of bias about our natural state, only to discover that humans organize according to production units counterbalanced by the competition between male and female reproductive competition. Not much more to it than that. We have a lot more detail, but in the end, if our survival depends upon it, we alter our informal and formal institutions to support our economic (productive and consumptive) demands. Now, it’s certainly true that we often adopt BAD ways of doing things. And it’s certainly true that we resist adopting GOOD things when they disrupt (reorder) our existing formal and informal institutions. But cultures that adopt BAD things, or resist GOOD things are almost always “out gunned, out germ-ed, and out steeled” by cultures that make superior decisions. Temporary destructive innovations like mongol and arab mounted raiding techniques paired with lack of supporting formal institutions, or the forcible adoption of socialism by the bolsheviks, the maoists, and the Cambodians as examples of what works as a promise in the short term, but fails in actuality the long.

    • What Was Your First Epiphany?

      GREAT QUESTION.  HERE ARE A FEW OF LIFE’S REVELATIONS

      At the age of 6 when in one day I thought reading was an impossibly complicated idea, and then three days later, after just tortuously tryig to read books, because I was embarassed that a girl in my class could, that almost like a light switch, I started being able to read.  Doing hard stuff is hard. You just have to suffer a bit for the reward.  Best lesson in life.

      At age 7 when I understood that foreign languages weren’t ciphers (codes) but completely different words with completely different meanings, sometimes with completely different characters with completely different sounds. And thinking I was a completely hopeless idiot for thinking that they were systems of codes. 

      At the age of  9 when I understood that most adults really have no idea what’s going on, or what they’re doing, but they’re responsible for us, and we know even less than they do, so we children have to help them be successful, otherwise the whole world will fall apart into chaos.

      At the age of 12 when I understood that it was now possible to possess an original thought, and that I must remember to treat children of that age with patient respect.

      At the age of 14 when I understood that induction didn’t exist, and couldn’t exist, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand who could think so.

      At the age of 15 when I understood that mythical religion was actually a valuable thing given that you can’t explain anything very complicated to almost anyone – but religion is really easy to understand. It’s good enough for government work so to speak.

      At the age of 16 when I realized girls don’t think ANYTHING like us guys, and that it’s a hopeless, unbridgeable difference that you just have to deal with.

      At the age of 17 when I realized that despite wanting a career in science, that we don’t really understand that much more about the universe than did newton, and that experimentation was really expensive, and that I had better ways to spend my life than trying to solve that problem by spending most of my time trying to raise money for experiments that had very little chance of success. I’m not that patient.

      At the age of 19 when I realized that there is nothing in a university education that you can’t get out of books on your own, and that all universities do is sort people. They don’t really teach you anything. So allow them to sort you, and then just read what you want and need to.

      At the age of 22 when I realized that people aren’t bad to each other on purpose: they are actually clueless, and worse, there isn’t any way for the clueless to determine the difference between those who are slightly less clueless and someone who actually understands something that you should listen to.

      At the age of 24 when I realized that each of us has particular talents, and can’t all work the same way. So I let other people worry about details and I work on really big problems further out in time that they can’t work on. Cooperation is also a division of labor in time with people who cant understand each other’s jobs.

      At the age of 25 when I realized that it doesn’t matter how smart I am, if the guy I”m competing with has twenty years of experience.  It’s not brains. It’s just knowledge. And knowledge is much faster than reason.

      At the age of 26 when my health failed, that I was indeed mortal – very.

      At the age of 29 when I realized that entrepreneurship is largely a willingness to endure deprivation, pain and hardship more than other people are willing to, and its not so much about being all that smart and creative. It’s just hard work to do hard things, and that’s more than most people are willing to do.

      At the age of 30 when I realized that success and money aren’t really very useful if people are afraid of you, don’t like  you or don’t trust you. Money doesn’t keep you company and doesn’t get you access to people you want to keep you company. Ruthlessness is overrated. It’s much more profitable to have people love you.

      At age 31 when I realized that people will love you if you try to help them. So I started trying to help every single person I talked to in some way no matter how small. It is much better than spending most of your life trying to convince people to do something differently.  And they love you for it.

      At the age of 32 when I realized that reason, logic, fact and science are pretty unnatural to man, and that western civilization developed them for totally accidental reasons.  They just happen to work pretty good, and so we keep them.  But no one actually WANTS facts. They’re almost always unpleasant.

      At the age of 35 when I understood that there are maybe 1500 total ‘ideas’ in the human conceptual lexicon, but that each one of them is subject to errors in relation to every other. So the minds and libraries of the world are pretty much full of errors, with the few things that aren’t errors pretty hard to find among them.  Humans are smarter than everything else, but we’re actually pretty dumb. It takes a whole lot of us a long time to figure out even the simplest thing.

      At the age of 40 when I realized that I had made a my only really regretful mistake by not studying philosophy and going into it as a profession because I didn’t know how to earn a living at it. (You don’t. Philosophy is an avocation, not a vocation. It just happens to make you pretty successful no matter what you do.)

      At the age of 50 when I realized that after many years of hard work, I had solved a significant problem in the history of thought, but it was entirely due to all the people smarter than I am who came before me, and my achievement was just luck, timing and spending more time on it than anyone else. It was humbling.

      At 53, after two bouts of cancer, three related illnesses from a compromised immune system, divorce and a down economy, that I might actually want to slow down, and get my writing done before I run out of options on the durability of my northern european genes.

      Just a few of them. There are plenty of others. There will be plenty more I assume.

      https://www.quora.com/What-was-your-first-epiphany

    • What Was Your First Epiphany?

      GREAT QUESTION.  HERE ARE A FEW OF LIFE’S REVELATIONS

      At the age of 6 when in one day I thought reading was an impossibly complicated idea, and then three days later, after just tortuously tryig to read books, because I was embarassed that a girl in my class could, that almost like a light switch, I started being able to read.  Doing hard stuff is hard. You just have to suffer a bit for the reward.  Best lesson in life.

      At age 7 when I understood that foreign languages weren’t ciphers (codes) but completely different words with completely different meanings, sometimes with completely different characters with completely different sounds. And thinking I was a completely hopeless idiot for thinking that they were systems of codes. 

      At the age of  9 when I understood that most adults really have no idea what’s going on, or what they’re doing, but they’re responsible for us, and we know even less than they do, so we children have to help them be successful, otherwise the whole world will fall apart into chaos.

      At the age of 12 when I understood that it was now possible to possess an original thought, and that I must remember to treat children of that age with patient respect.

      At the age of 14 when I understood that induction didn’t exist, and couldn’t exist, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand who could think so.

      At the age of 15 when I understood that mythical religion was actually a valuable thing given that you can’t explain anything very complicated to almost anyone – but religion is really easy to understand. It’s good enough for government work so to speak.

      At the age of 16 when I realized girls don’t think ANYTHING like us guys, and that it’s a hopeless, unbridgeable difference that you just have to deal with.

      At the age of 17 when I realized that despite wanting a career in science, that we don’t really understand that much more about the universe than did newton, and that experimentation was really expensive, and that I had better ways to spend my life than trying to solve that problem by spending most of my time trying to raise money for experiments that had very little chance of success. I’m not that patient.

      At the age of 19 when I realized that there is nothing in a university education that you can’t get out of books on your own, and that all universities do is sort people. They don’t really teach you anything. So allow them to sort you, and then just read what you want and need to.

      At the age of 22 when I realized that people aren’t bad to each other on purpose: they are actually clueless, and worse, there isn’t any way for the clueless to determine the difference between those who are slightly less clueless and someone who actually understands something that you should listen to.

      At the age of 24 when I realized that each of us has particular talents, and can’t all work the same way. So I let other people worry about details and I work on really big problems further out in time that they can’t work on. Cooperation is also a division of labor in time with people who cant understand each other’s jobs.

      At the age of 25 when I realized that it doesn’t matter how smart I am, if the guy I”m competing with has twenty years of experience.  It’s not brains. It’s just knowledge. And knowledge is much faster than reason.

      At the age of 26 when my health failed, that I was indeed mortal – very.

      At the age of 29 when I realized that entrepreneurship is largely a willingness to endure deprivation, pain and hardship more than other people are willing to, and its not so much about being all that smart and creative. It’s just hard work to do hard things, and that’s more than most people are willing to do.

      At the age of 30 when I realized that success and money aren’t really very useful if people are afraid of you, don’t like  you or don’t trust you. Money doesn’t keep you company and doesn’t get you access to people you want to keep you company. Ruthlessness is overrated. It’s much more profitable to have people love you.

      At age 31 when I realized that people will love you if you try to help them. So I started trying to help every single person I talked to in some way no matter how small. It is much better than spending most of your life trying to convince people to do something differently.  And they love you for it.

      At the age of 32 when I realized that reason, logic, fact and science are pretty unnatural to man, and that western civilization developed them for totally accidental reasons.  They just happen to work pretty good, and so we keep them.  But no one actually WANTS facts. They’re almost always unpleasant.

      At the age of 35 when I understood that there are maybe 1500 total ‘ideas’ in the human conceptual lexicon, but that each one of them is subject to errors in relation to every other. So the minds and libraries of the world are pretty much full of errors, with the few things that aren’t errors pretty hard to find among them.  Humans are smarter than everything else, but we’re actually pretty dumb. It takes a whole lot of us a long time to figure out even the simplest thing.

      At the age of 40 when I realized that I had made a my only really regretful mistake by not studying philosophy and going into it as a profession because I didn’t know how to earn a living at it. (You don’t. Philosophy is an avocation, not a vocation. It just happens to make you pretty successful no matter what you do.)

      At the age of 50 when I realized that after many years of hard work, I had solved a significant problem in the history of thought, but it was entirely due to all the people smarter than I am who came before me, and my achievement was just luck, timing and spending more time on it than anyone else. It was humbling.

      At 53, after two bouts of cancer, three related illnesses from a compromised immune system, divorce and a down economy, that I might actually want to slow down, and get my writing done before I run out of options on the durability of my northern european genes.

      Just a few of them. There are plenty of others. There will be plenty more I assume.

      https://www.quora.com/What-was-your-first-epiphany

    • Can Computers Write Creative Programs That Solve Problems?

      ANSWERING YOUR QUESTION IN THE CONTEXT THAT YOU MEAN IT.

      In the context that I think you mean, creativity refers to the application of one pattern of relations to a different circumstance thereby solving a previouslly unsolved problem, and a problem whose solution is not already present in the domain of solutions expressed by the program code.  This set of associations is what produces ‘aha’ moments in humans: when ‘clouds’ of related ideas are connected.

      In this sense, I think the consensus is, that there is no reason we can’t build computers that can do this.  The problem is currently size, expense, and the structure of symbols’memories’ that we put into computers.  So, like interstellar flight, we are really just trying to find an affordable way to do it.  We CAN send someone to mars, or something to another star. It’s just absurdly expensive compared to what we THINK we can do with some innovation. So we’re waiting until its cheaper.

      I don’t have a lot of time right now to be thorough and the information is available elsewhere.  But the simple version is, that if you have a biological organism and start with basic stimuli (a subset of light, sound, vibration, touch, time and memory) that the structure of the physical universe, evolution and experience form a fairly accurate but simplified set of categories in our memories and therefore minds.  We build a set of symbols (patterns) from seemingly disparate stimuli, the same way we ‘see movement’ in the static figures of a flip-book.

      Computers we use today do not start with this atomic level of representation, they start with symbols. And we are just beginning to understand how to symbolically represent  physical reality in commensurable terms, and any computational system requires commensurable terms. Humans have senses,  instincts and preferences which largely form our commensurable terms; all language being an allegory to experience, and all systems of measurement producing allegories to experience.

      For example, money renders all things commensurable by price.  But without prices and money you couldn’t form a division of labor – a market. and we’d still be hunter gatherers or small family farmers.   Likewise  we can’t quite yet design software that symbolically represents reality. (ALthough this project has been underway for more than a century in philosophy, its largely been fruitless.)

      Since language (the written word) is an allegory to experience, that language should (in theory) represent symbols that are commensurable (subject to comparison and evaluation) even if only on ordinal (ordered), not cardinal (numbered) grounds – because humans operate ordinally not cardinally.

      The closest we have to that body of symbolic information that is broad enough in scope to represent enough of the physical world that the errors produced by sybmolic assocation are Turing-testable, is the Google search index.  (And google is fully aware of that). 

      But the computational power to use that data given that its index is not commensurable with other domains, (we think) is approximately equal to the total computing power present on the planet today. And even then, we suppose the mechanical process ‘thinking’ would be very slow.

      (I worked with a group of very bright people on the possibility of raising venture money for solving this problem, given that we are pretty sure how to a) create the programming tool set, b) use existing hardware technology, and c) represent the data in sets of mathematical manifolds, but it is far too early and far too costly to produce this scope of work. And to the venture community it is indistinguishable from snake oil.  So I’m not unfamiliar with the problem set, or the possible technical solutions. And I was willing to put my own money in. So I”m pretty confident.)

      Most solutions today are attempts to model the human brain with digital systems. The general idea is that it’s cheaper to do this with existing hardware than it is with to build dedicated hardware for the purpose.  And even with that technique, most recent estimates I’ve seen are in the billion dollar range.

      But it’s not that it’s not possible for computers to be ‘creative’.  Its that the minimum threshold for ‘creative association’ is a higher than the intelligence of a domestic dog, and we are still programming in symbols, not patterns, because those symbols incorporate our existing knowledge. And we’re doing that, it looks like, because it’s metaphorically the equivalent of a trip to the stars, and no one is ready to pay for that yet. 

      I think that in this short space, that’s the most accurate statement we can render.  It is a matter of money, not logical possibility either by the symbolic route, or the neural route, or the dedicated hardware neural route.

      Cheers
      Curt

      https://www.quora.com/Can-computers-write-creative-programs-that-solve-problems

    • The Purpose Of Philosophy: in the Analytic, Naturalistic Philosophy of Action

      [T]he purpose of enlightenment program was isolate thought, morality and politics from the superstition of Magian religion. It was to launder superstition in favor of empirical reasoning in The analytic program’s objective was to incorporate the physical sciences into philosophy, but to hold onto the metaphysical program. The naturalistic, praxeological (action) and economic programs are attempting to launder the metaphysical program from philosophy. (Or that’s close enough for our purposes here.)

        [T]he assumption in this line of reasoning, this set of priorities, is that with more knowledge we have more choices to determine how to make ourselves most happy through the accumulation of experiences. The other line of reasoning, is that human beings are able at present to be happy if they seek to obtain The problem is that humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption provided by the first, and demonstrate a preference to expend the intellectual and physical labor of the second. More accurately: they want others to expend the effort on the first, and to reserve for themselves the experiences of the second. We call conflict of ambitions a desire for ‘free riding’. In fact, we can argue that more human calculation is performed for the purpose of pursuing free riding than any other end except sex. Curt Doolittle. Kiev, Ukraine. (NOTE 1: “Calculation, in its broadest sense, refers to any comparison that permits a judgement. So while numeric computation is included in the definition of calculation, but so is ‘Where can I get a peanut butter sandwich?’ and ‘Do I like chocolate or vanilla ice cream more today?’. We use ‘calculation’ to distinguish simplistic processes from reasoning, which has a higher standard of demands – namely substitution and transformation.) (NOTE 2: This approach abandons the metaphysical program.)

      • The Purpose Of Philosophy: in the Analytic, Naturalistic Philosophy of Action

        [T]he purpose of enlightenment program was isolate thought, morality and politics from the superstition of Magian religion. It was to launder superstition in favor of empirical reasoning in The analytic program’s objective was to incorporate the physical sciences into philosophy, but to hold onto the metaphysical program. The naturalistic, praxeological (action) and economic programs are attempting to launder the metaphysical program from philosophy. (Or that’s close enough for our purposes here.)

          [T]he assumption in this line of reasoning, this set of priorities, is that with more knowledge we have more choices to determine how to make ourselves most happy through the accumulation of experiences. The other line of reasoning, is that human beings are able at present to be happy if they seek to obtain The problem is that humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption provided by the first, and demonstrate a preference to expend the intellectual and physical labor of the second. More accurately: they want others to expend the effort on the first, and to reserve for themselves the experiences of the second. We call conflict of ambitions a desire for ‘free riding’. In fact, we can argue that more human calculation is performed for the purpose of pursuing free riding than any other end except sex. Curt Doolittle. Kiev, Ukraine. (NOTE 1: “Calculation, in its broadest sense, refers to any comparison that permits a judgement. So while numeric computation is included in the definition of calculation, but so is ‘Where can I get a peanut butter sandwich?’ and ‘Do I like chocolate or vanilla ice cream more today?’. We use ‘calculation’ to distinguish simplistic processes from reasoning, which has a higher standard of demands – namely substitution and transformation.) (NOTE 2: This approach abandons the metaphysical program.)