(short answer, no) —does the introduction of civilization produce another algorithm, one in which the goal is to satisfy human desires and intentions more than a biological imperative?— It sure looks as though at some point we stop reproducing more out of security and simply consume more out of luxury. I think the domestication of man produces far more productive results, and that we have an endless appetite for consumption. I don’t see anything other than that. If any human behavior can be expressed as an attempt at acquisition, consumption, and persistence, then that behavior provides us with decidable causality. And we need not try to invent falsehoods to comfort ourselves that anything else is going on here. We enjoy each other because operation at low cost and entertainment at low cost are good algorithms. Enjoyment is the body’s reward for saving, obtaining, consuming, or inventorying calories. Our emotions are all reducible to changes in property. All of them. It’s …. kind of painful to understand it. But we do get to enjoy the ride our genes take us on.
Theme: Agency
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Executive Roles and Character
Aug 17, 2016 12:17pmSALES (PRESIDENT/CEO) – I like Sales and Revenue jobs – but it’s hard to control relationships upon which sales depend. One needs to be more intuitive and ‘likeable’, gather and distribute information, rather than creative. (I have to be likeable and share information) PROFIT AND LOSS (CTO/OPERATIONS) – I love P&L jobs – I have control over them. One needs to be better at problem solving, and persuasive. Creativity is necessary and rewarding. (I have to be right and creative) BALANCE SHEETS (MBA/FINANCE) – I hate Balance Sheet jobs. – I never feel like I can control them. One needs to keep a lot of details in memory, and resort them, and report on them. And most creativity is … limited. (I have to be diligent, and not wrong.) This is how I tell people why I prefer NOT to hold the CEO role, but the problem is finding someone not stupid enough to be the CEO. Normally I don’t like to take the CEO title, but prefer to have a ‘President’ and myself the “Chief Strategy Officer”. In a perfect world you have a three person partnership for customers (president and CEO), inside the company (CTO/Strategy), and suppliers (CFO/MBA). I don’t believe in using CPAs for CFO, and instead use MBA’s for CFO, and CPA’s for VP accounting. In my experience CPA’s cannot accurately report BOTH financial and operational accounting on the same P&L and Balance Sheet, nor do they produce rolling reports that let you see trends. Why? Because this requires a bit of extra work developing posting ‘macros’ (Processes) so that data isn’t pooled (munged), and so that it’s clear whether one is making money from operations, from capital trades, or from financialising the business. Curt Doolittle
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Executive Roles and Character
Aug 17, 2016 12:17pmSALES (PRESIDENT/CEO) – I like Sales and Revenue jobs – but it’s hard to control relationships upon which sales depend. One needs to be more intuitive and ‘likeable’, gather and distribute information, rather than creative. (I have to be likeable and share information) PROFIT AND LOSS (CTO/OPERATIONS) – I love P&L jobs – I have control over them. One needs to be better at problem solving, and persuasive. Creativity is necessary and rewarding. (I have to be right and creative) BALANCE SHEETS (MBA/FINANCE) – I hate Balance Sheet jobs. – I never feel like I can control them. One needs to keep a lot of details in memory, and resort them, and report on them. And most creativity is … limited. (I have to be diligent, and not wrong.) This is how I tell people why I prefer NOT to hold the CEO role, but the problem is finding someone not stupid enough to be the CEO. Normally I don’t like to take the CEO title, but prefer to have a ‘President’ and myself the “Chief Strategy Officer”. In a perfect world you have a three person partnership for customers (president and CEO), inside the company (CTO/Strategy), and suppliers (CFO/MBA). I don’t believe in using CPAs for CFO, and instead use MBA’s for CFO, and CPA’s for VP accounting. In my experience CPA’s cannot accurately report BOTH financial and operational accounting on the same P&L and Balance Sheet, nor do they produce rolling reports that let you see trends. Why? Because this requires a bit of extra work developing posting ‘macros’ (Processes) so that data isn’t pooled (munged), and so that it’s clear whether one is making money from operations, from capital trades, or from financialising the business. Curt Doolittle
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Pro Life and Pro Death
By Eli Harman To be right wing is to be pro-life. That doesn’t mean to be against taking life; sometimes that’s what life demands. But it means to love life and relish it, and live life to its fullest (which quite often will be in a measured and deliberate manner.) The left wing are pro death. They don’t enjoy life. They dread it, they shrink from it. They’re always seeking to evade its responsibilities, to tear down its exemplars and to escape from its demands rather than living in accordance with them. Reckless sensation seeking and novelty seeking, for their own sakes, are their preferred escapes from the sting of persistent failure to live up to life’s demanding requirements for genuine success and satisfaction. They seek recognition for uniqueness rather than for excellence which, being forever beyond their grasp, disgusts and repulses them. They loath those who they would benefit from respecting, honoring and emulating. They defy and rebel against those who they would benefit from following. Their instinct is not to learn, nor improve, but to hamstring those who exceed them. Their creed is to never obtain by honest means what they can try, and fail, to achieve by dishonest ones; by lying, cheating, and stealing. They continue to live only because they are too chickenshit – too cowardly and weak – to end themselves. But they will doom others without limit or remorse, if they think, by those means, they can dodge accountability a little longer.
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Pro Life and Pro Death
By Eli Harman To be right wing is to be pro-life. That doesn’t mean to be against taking life; sometimes that’s what life demands. But it means to love life and relish it, and live life to its fullest (which quite often will be in a measured and deliberate manner.) The left wing are pro death. They don’t enjoy life. They dread it, they shrink from it. They’re always seeking to evade its responsibilities, to tear down its exemplars and to escape from its demands rather than living in accordance with them. Reckless sensation seeking and novelty seeking, for their own sakes, are their preferred escapes from the sting of persistent failure to live up to life’s demanding requirements for genuine success and satisfaction. They seek recognition for uniqueness rather than for excellence which, being forever beyond their grasp, disgusts and repulses them. They loath those who they would benefit from respecting, honoring and emulating. They defy and rebel against those who they would benefit from following. Their instinct is not to learn, nor improve, but to hamstring those who exceed them. Their creed is to never obtain by honest means what they can try, and fail, to achieve by dishonest ones; by lying, cheating, and stealing. They continue to live only because they are too chickenshit – too cowardly and weak – to end themselves. But they will doom others without limit or remorse, if they think, by those means, they can dodge accountability a little longer.
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Illusion of Consumer Goods, The Reality Of Undersocialization
To get status signals and attention in a country where everyone is desperately lonely, lives an an illusion of their own making created out of consumer goods, and lacks any kind of validation from others because everyone else is doing the same thing. Yes, that’s really the reason.
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Illusion of Consumer Goods, The Reality Of Undersocialization
To get status signals and attention in a country where everyone is desperately lonely, lives an an illusion of their own making created out of consumer goods, and lacks any kind of validation from others because everyone else is doing the same thing. Yes, that’s really the reason.
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Do We Choose Our Rulers?
Actually, it depends on the organization’s SIZE, and method of adapting. – For very large organizations, it’s that no one wills change of leader sufficiently, because of the cost of change. – For medium organizations, people choose the leader possible for the group to preserve its power. – For small organizations, it’s absolutely true that people choose leaders. Choice of leadership is a game: it’s the best one we can get among those that enough people want, not the leader we want. Leadership is necessary if for no other reason than to maintain group solidarity while providing decidability, although consensus building is why we prefer to use them. leaders prevent defection. I could go on about this, but leaders exist because we need them to. We choose the ones we CAN choose, and we change or resist change dependent upon the cost of doing so. In markets we need only negative leaders (judges), but it is very hard to defect and survive. In the production of commons we need positive leaders (deciders), but it is very hard to defect and survive. In commercial organizations we need both judges and deciders, but we have the opportunity to defect, and we are constantly aware of the choices. This is then, the same reason we are compensated, not for production, but for our value in the ORGANIZATION of production. As far as I know, this well researched, well understood, and effectively a law of organization. Economics in everything. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute (ps: any moral argument is suspect. if the argument is not reduced to costs, someone is likely trying to fool you.)
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Do We Choose Our Rulers?
Actually, it depends on the organization’s SIZE, and method of adapting. – For very large organizations, it’s that no one wills change of leader sufficiently, because of the cost of change. – For medium organizations, people choose the leader possible for the group to preserve its power. – For small organizations, it’s absolutely true that people choose leaders. Choice of leadership is a game: it’s the best one we can get among those that enough people want, not the leader we want. Leadership is necessary if for no other reason than to maintain group solidarity while providing decidability, although consensus building is why we prefer to use them. leaders prevent defection. I could go on about this, but leaders exist because we need them to. We choose the ones we CAN choose, and we change or resist change dependent upon the cost of doing so. In markets we need only negative leaders (judges), but it is very hard to defect and survive. In the production of commons we need positive leaders (deciders), but it is very hard to defect and survive. In commercial organizations we need both judges and deciders, but we have the opportunity to defect, and we are constantly aware of the choices. This is then, the same reason we are compensated, not for production, but for our value in the ORGANIZATION of production. As far as I know, this well researched, well understood, and effectively a law of organization. Economics in everything. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute (ps: any moral argument is suspect. if the argument is not reduced to costs, someone is likely trying to fool you.)
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Modernity: Converting From Physical To Neuronal Stress
***Modernity limits the accumulation of damage to our cells, but it increases intellectual and emotional stresses dramatically. Neurons have taken the damage in the information era, that physical stresses have in prior eras.**** The Anglo world is as ‘crazy’ as the medieval. The difference is that the current ‘crazy’ is even worse for us than the previous forms of crazy. (thanks Ricky Saini for reminding me of this post. I’d forgotten about it, and it’s worth repeating.)