Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • What Is The Libertarian Position On The Phoebus Cartel?

    The libertarian position is often misinterpreted.  We do not suggest that cartels will not form. Rather, that cartels are not sustainable.   Our position is that they aren’t sustainable, nor are monopolies, without government support.  If they are sustainable, then they’re probably market-efficient, and therefore not a cartel in practice -although its pretty difficult to imagine such a thing.

    The counter argument is that government interference can end cartels more quickly than the market.  Although this is both questionable and comes at a very high price: Phone service was a lot better Before the breakup of ATT, and the attack on MIcrosoft was an attack on the desire of a company to give us for free what others wanted money for.

    (One concern: I am not confident that the land problem has been solved however – or that it matters. But I think it is arguable that the problem of land cannot be solved without war  on one end of the spectrum and restricted reproduction on the other.)

    As others have noted, the Phoebus cartel did disappear quickly. So I assume that you were simply confused by the difference between whether cartels are possible or whether they’re sustainable.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-libertarian-position-on-the-Phoebus-cartel

  • Plato: What Are The Key Takeaways From The Republic?

    Plato, like Confucius (孔夫子), could not solve the problem of politics and resorted to trying to manufacture virtue in a factory, in order to justify totalitarianism. Western Civilization has suffered from him ever since.

    And if it were not for Aristotle correcting him, we might not have been able to recover from it.

    https://www.quora.com/Plato-What-are-the-key-takeaways-from-The-Republic

  • What Will Come After Democracy?

    Some of us have been working on this problem for a very long time. Ever since we realized that democracy (universal enfranchisement without demonstrated merit) was simply the slow road to totalitarianism.

    The arguments vary from increasing totalitarianism (most likely) to American dissolution (most beneficial) to direct monetary democracy( you vote your money to what you want without a corruptible middleman that we call a politician) to a market system where the government is merely constitutional and insurance companies are who we rely upon.  There are many different permutations.  However, most of us believe that the only possible venue will be totalitarianism and civil war, since it is impossible to get people to agree on a new system unless under threat of chaos.

    https://www.quora.com/What-will-come-after-democracy

  • Is Sociology Leftist Propaganda Masquerading As Science?

    THIS IS THE CORRECT ANSWER

    Others have described the phenomenon imprecisely. I will have to try do better until someone does better than I:

    1) Sociology relies on surveys which are almost always false, because of natural properties  innate in human psychology and cognitive processes.   Sociology relies upon experiments, the conditions of which have greater affect on the answers provided than the natural environment in which teh behavior would be demonstrated. So in effect, ANY TEST that you issue will bias towards collectivist results, even if people will ACT upon individual incentives in the actual circumstance. This is pretty obvious really. 

    2) Economics instead, relies upon demonstrated actions independent of tests. This is why economics has become the primary social science: we measure demonstrated actions rather than what people state they would do.

    3) Behavioral psychology tries to reduce the problem of sociological testing by proving the indvalidity of social surveys and tests.  The only valuable survey information appears to be voting records, which if detailed enough, like economic data, demonstrate what people actually do rather than what they say they will do in any given circumstance.

    4) Sociology seems to attract people who are disproportionately subject to various collectivist biases, and the related cognitive biases. (Google ‘Common economic errors’, ‘Common Cognitive Biases’, “Common Social Cognitive Biases’.)   We must remember, that the farther down the IQ scale you are, the more you must rely on the opinions, thoughts, and interpretations of otherse for your information.  Every 15 points of IQ is about one standard deviation.  That means people cannot really talk to each other easily across 15 points of difference and cannot even grasp each other’s world views or contexts, or implied causal relations at 30 points. THe predominance of science is improving this by repeated exposure

    5)  The output of these surveys and experiments produces biased and therefore false information and conclusions, but the people who conduct them have both a subconscious bias, a preferential interest, and a career interest, and a political interest in believing and promoting the false outputs.  There is a market for this false information available in public intellectuals, politicians and organizers. This false information is used for political purposes, under the pretense of academic neutrality, and empirically supported truth – none of which are true either.

    The public cannot understand this, the teachers use it because teachers are from the bottom 15% of graduating classes in intelligence, self select for the nurture bias, which is the source of left wing moral specialization, and must try to form homogeneity of interests among pupils with diverse backgrounds, and require justification for their actions. This is conversely why they cannot teach history or art history any longer, because this would require value judgements that distributed status signals to different members of a group that they seek to treat as  homogenous family in order to control the room.

    Statistically speaking, in any university department sociologists will have the lowest IQ distribution of any of the major disciplines, economists, mathematicians and medical doctors the highest distribution.  (Michigan study).

    For these reasons, the discipline of sociology is in fact, an unscientific tool of propaganda created, maintained, and  used by the lowest IQ distribution in academia as a means of attepting to justify the failed communist, socialist, and now postmodernist ideology that seeks to compete against the natural sorting of people opportuntiy, income and political power behind those groups, families, and individuals with demonstrated meritocratic superiority in the market for goods, services, and military defense.


    Harsh words.
    True words.
    The conservatives are correct.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-sociology-leftist-propaganda-masquerading-as-science

  • What Should Be Humanity’s Goal?

    A homogeneity of interests would lead us to become evolutionarily vulnerable   The question implies it’s a good. When in fact, the question is rather, “humanity as a whole should not have a goal, only an agreed upon means of achieving dispararte goals. To do otherwise is the presumption of knowledge.

    Our only shared goal is to persist.

    https://www.quora.com/What-should-be-humanitys-goal

  • Aren’t Social Conservatives Always On The Wrong Side Of History? Social Conservatives Were Against The Ending Of Slavery. Social Conservatives Were Against Women Gaining The Right To Vote. Social Conservatives Were Against The Civil Rights Movement.

    Conservative means ‘in relation to the status quo, resist non-organic changes by force of law’.  In the USA it means conservative toward european aristocratic egalitarianism, and the nuclear family as an economic unit.

    Conservatives were against slavery (Democrats were for it), and against communism (Democrats were for it, and adopted the platform).

    I”m not sure you can really argue this out either way.  It is becoming clear that the postmodernist movement is both false and dangerous, but the democratic party, and liberals practice it as their social religion the way that conservatives practice the cult of the revolution.

    I can’t really address an issue of this scope here, but conservatives are decisively not always on the wrong side.  The conservative strategy simply requires that you achieve something through merit not by force.  So whatever you wish to accomplish (gay marriage) will be successful once you’ve demonstrated that you’ve ade your case and convinced the majority.  This is how they work.

    https://www.quora.com/Arent-social-conservatives-always-on-the-wrong-side-of-history-Social-conservatives-were-against-the-ending-of-slavery-Social-conservatives-were-against-women-gaining-the-right-to-vote-Social-conservatives-were-against-the-Civil-Rights-Movement

  • How Do Christian Conservatives In The Usa Explain The Very High Teen Birth Rates In The Bible Belt?

    INCREDIBLY FUNNY BUT TERRIBLY BAD ANSWERS : HERE IS THE CORRECT ONE.

    Here is the correct, and entirely impolitic one. It also accounts for poverty and IQ statistics.

    Diversity increases extremes.

    —PART 1 – CAUSATION—
    ECONOMICS OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION

    QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the south?”

    Well, of course I don’t like to say the impolitic truth and then have to fend off the ignorant. Quora is peopled by the demographic that does not rely on data. We know this because almost all questions there can be answered easily with available data. But since all data of meaning requires knowledge of economics and statistics, and ignorance of economics and statistics is pervasive, this prohibits access to comprehension of that data, and prohibits resolution of questions of popular opinion and political doctrine.

    As such, it’s tedious to answer impolitic questions here. That is why few people do it.

    That said, I will do my best:

    FAMILY STRUCTURE

    1) Family structure and family economic structures determine poverty. The nuclear family is highly efficient economic structure. The two income nuclear family is the most efficient economic structure. For a male it is the smallest tribe he can be alpha in, and maintain access to a female as he declines in desirability For a woman she is the alpha female in her tribe of one, and has a monopoly claim on his production for the duration of her childrearing, despite her declining ‘desirability’ during this time. The nuclear family also places asset demands on the male, and therefore delays marriage and mating, both of which increase the skill level, work experience of the members.

    2) Redistribution undermines the family and increases poverty, partly because men in the lower classes are less desirable (and able) than women in the lower classes, because men are more widely distributed in feature and ability than are women, with more men at the very top (nobel prize winners) and more men at the bottom (persistently impulsive criminality). Our Y chromosome is where nature experiements, and our wider male distribution affects mating under monogamy, and less so under polygyny, because under polygyny, a smaller number of more desirable males can be shared amongst a larger number of marginally more desirable females.

    3) Racial groups are more or less ‘desirable’ as mates worldwide, not just in the states. This has largely to do, as best as any of us can tell, with a mating preference for females with thinner skin in contrast to mates with thicker skin as a signal that is different from the thicker skin of males. Since the only uniform scale of beauty across all cultures, other than symmetry, is quality of female skin clarity, this is the only selection preference necessary to explain racial preferences, other than the rate at which we appear to have exited Africa and begun the process of near-speciation (racial diversification), and the problem of access to vitamin D in the northern climes. This research is impolitic and the people who pursue it are ostracized from academia so it has moved to being conducted under a different guise, or now to china where such things are considered only logical. But the research is available. And it shows that fairer, thinner skin on females with finer features, is more desirable regardless of racial group.

    4) People mate almost entirely within race (<15%) and prefer to associate, work, and live within racial groups. With the consumer marketplace for goods the only shared environment. Extremes can run counter to this fact with crossing occurring at the lower and higher ends of desirability where each individual has better options in mates and often better access to social class by crossing racial boundaries.

    5) Even where racial admixture occurs, it places downward pressure on extra-group status and opportunity (desirability). In other words, racially mixed children maintain the lower of their racial preferences. Altough in black and hispanic communities and families children are still ranked in preference by skin color because it grants access to status both mating and social.

    ECONOMICS
    6) Impulsivity (the ability to resist impulses) varies between the races, with the east asians the least impulsive distribution, and the subsaharan african population the most impulsive. Impulsivity is a positive reproductive strategy unless external (climate) pressures punish survival. Impulsivity places a high penalty on learning ability which favors long periods of ‘frustration’ and concentration.

    7) Impulsivity affects both trustworthiness and creditworthiness. Nuclear families have higher more stable incomes, and are more creditworthy, as well as more economically efficient. As such high densities of nuclear families will produce higher wealth. Higher wealth will generate greater opportunity. Greater opportunity within a geography will increase demand for housing in that geography. Housing in that geography will increase in price. People who live in more impulsive, less efficient groups will of course, be unable to gain access to that geography and its opportunities.

    8) For these reasons (Which I assume I should use graphs to illustrate) the reason that poverty and single motherhood are so prevalent in the south is that 74% of black mothers, and a high percentage of hispanic mothers are unmarried. And they live in close communities reliant on support from extended family members, with populations too high to integrate into more successful communities. White single motherhood is on the increase in the lower classes, and teh USA, Ireland and New Zealand, where the postmodernist and feminist movements have been most successful, have the highest rates of single motherhood among whites, and the countries of southern europe who remain familially integral the lowest: Italy, Greece, Spain and Luxembourg.

    TRUST AND OPPORTUNITY
    All humans are faced with opportunities for both cooperation and conflict at all times. We must choose how to apply our limited time effort and resources to a limited number of opportunities.

    All opportunities other than exchanges of commodities purely on price, consist of a network of cost and benefit tradeoffs. All cost and benefit tradeoff’s are simple.

    We trade (cooperate) on all sorts of terms, but economic status, social status, values, language, culture(mythology, habits) are significant terms. Every variation in every property that is not identical in interest is a negative.

    Status signals (status and reputation) have higher value in-group than across groups. Therefore status pressure to encourage each of us to adhere to agreements is of higher value in-group.

    Therefore we trust and cooperate in-group at lower cost and risk than across group.

    This is why people break into racial, cultural, socioeconomic, educational, generational, occupational groups. Because it’s the lowest risk pool of people with the lowest cost of cooperation, even if it’s less productive it may also be the only pool available to you where you can find someone willing to pay the higher cost of cooperating with you across groups.

    Political discourse assumes we want to help each other and we do. The problem is the logic of that statement -it’s meaningless when we CAN help everyone, we must still choose the best return on our help. And we do. And that is how it is. Anything else is irrational.

    SOUTHERN RELIGIOSITY
    Race is the reason for ‘everything’ in the south, including religiosity. Although southern religiosity we must understand is a rebellion against the state, after the north conquered the south. Race is the reason for everything in america. People are born, live, reproduce, associate, work with, and speak to, people within their racial groups except where they participate in the marketplace together.

    RATES OF POVERTY BY RACE
    Page on Carseyinstitute…

    RATES OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD BY RACE
    LINK: KIDS COUNT Data Center…

    There is no end of data on this subject.


    —PART II—
    CORRELATION NOT CAUSATION

    States are, in general, rational economic alliances, usually run by an oligarchy, and usually the oligarchy grants monopolistic privileges to key industries in order to fund them sufficiently that they can compete outside of the local market where returns are highest.  We call this corporatism.  It is a rational system. Unfortunately, the natural incentive of all monopolies, and of course, a political bureaucracy is by definition a monopoly, are self interested and will prey upon their populations to the limits at which they can maintain power.

    Religions are ARATIONAL (not irrational) and they are a means of setting the moral limits to the actions of the state. Religions are resistance movements. Mystical religions consist of rational ends, but stated irrationally.  The only religion that is compatible with the state rather than an opposition to it is polytheistic, or what we today would call ‘history worship.”  The state will attempt to control religious doctrine to the best of its ability. In some cases it succeeds – theocracy results.  This is usually bad, because while oligarchic monopolies are self interested and predatory, they are also economically productive.  Theocratic bureaucracies are self interested and predatory but economically unproductive, and they manufacture ignorance in volume.

    The south is religious as a means of opposing the state. First, in response to the conquest by the north. Second as a resistance to the north.  Third as a resistance to racial integration.  Fourth as a resistance the feminist and postmodern attack on the family using redistribution and law. 

    I will leave it to you whether the use of arational methods to resist the state is effective (it is) or and whether or not it is right (it appears that the feminist, socialist, and postmondern movements have systemically increased poverty by destruction of the nuclear family.)

    —PART III – CONCLUSION—

    There is a correlation between southern religiosity and single motherhood, but there is no causal relationship.

    I hope that this was helpful and informative.

    Curt Doolittle

    https://www.quora.com/How-do-Christian-conservatives-in-the-USA-explain-the-very-high-teen-birth-rates-in-the-Bible-Belt

  • What Restaurants In Bellevue, Wa Are Good For Large Groups?

    I’ve hosted something or other at most of the restaurants with space. Starting from downtown and working outward:  If you have a very large group, Maggianos has the best facilities and parking, service and food. I don’t think anyone else is nearly as good for scale. For the next step down in size, but up in quality, El Gaucho.  Most of the restaurants can be booked out.  Best food is pretty clearly Seastar, but they have constrained space – although they can take over the conference room on the first floor and that will suit a decent crowd. The facilities at twisted cork (or whatever it is called now) are awesome, and the kitchen is fairly good, and it’s locally owned so you can get attention and care. I would recommend the Bellevue Club, and … what’s the other one…. right downtown..  Can’t remember the name.  Barking Frog if you can get it.   Pomegranate in Bellevue is the top caterer on the eastside in my opinion, although Seattle has plenty to offer. So you could get a hotel (cheap) then hire Pomegranate. I won’t recommend the hotels – they’re universally bad. Outside of town the winery is popular (but good luck with that) and my favorite facility that I always recommend is Newcastle golf course. Especially for brunches. But booking it out is something that you have to compete with

    I can’t recommend downscale, because I don’t use it.

    Hope that helps.

    https://www.quora.com/What-restaurants-in-Bellevue-WA-are-good-for-large-groups

  • Has There Been A Decline In Civility In America?

    YES.  See “Coming Apart”, and the surveys on trust, and the measurements of civic participation of all forms. 

    As diversity increases, government increases, and civility, and civil participation decrease. 

    It has to.  Signals require that does.

    https://www.quora.com/Has-there-been-a-decline-in-civility-in-America

  • How Many Of You Are Libertarian?

    You will be surprised by this, but, roughly speaking, a quarter of the population expresses surveyed preferences that are libertarian, a quarter conservative, a quarter liberal, and a quarter anti-libertarian.

    Power could be maintained in the USA with fiscally conservative, and slowly enacted socially liberal policies (which is what happens anyway, after a lot of distraction and infighting.)

    That this roughly reflects the gender distribution in the population, and a fairly even distribution between the genders, would actually make common sense. (It does). 

    What has altered the political landscape, and continues to, is the number of single women and single mothers in the voting pool has increased substantially since 1960.  At present, it’s arguable, that all other things being equal, single women and mothers decide elections. 

    That is one of the reasons that candidates now must be somewhat attractive. Because for single women, and single mothers, the attractiveness of a candidate is a meaningful reason for their vote. If a candidate is both attractive, and well spoken, and supports redistribution and equalitarianism – redistribution outside of the nuclear family, the vote is all but ensured.

    For most poeple who understand these demographic issues, it’s saddening, because american politics, and the politics of all democracies, are just form of  entertainment that is a vast waste of time and energy that is determined by a small number of axis of influence: the homogeneity (good) vs diversity (bad) in a population. The structure of the family unit from individual, to family, to extended family, clan and tribe.  The size of the population (big is bad, small is good.)   In other words, you will get a ‘Denmark’ if you have a small homogenous country of nuclear families, because in the nuclear family both genders have equal reproductive interests.

    I suspect that this is one of the most profound things you can learn – certainly on Quora.

    https://www.quora.com/How-many-of-you-are-libertarian