Curt Doolittle

Theme: Agency

  • ARE WE TOO PRIMITIVE A SPECIES TO COMPETE? Smaller brains, greater aggression an

    ARE WE TOO PRIMITIVE A SPECIES TO COMPETE?

    Smaller brains, greater aggression and greater reproduction defeat larger brains and lower aggression and lower reproduction?

    Is this a permanent equilibrium? Or is this one of those processes that is deterministic, and that eventually all the calm, smart people are outbred and conquered by the aggressive impulsive dumb people?

    You know, he was wrong about a lot of things, but Gould said that there was no material advantage to intelligence unless in increased reproduction.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-07-10 07:42:00 UTC

  • SUCCESS? 1) Develop a long-term model that you can use to make endless decisions

    SUCCESS?

    1) Develop a long-term model that you can use to make endless decisions with.

    2) Decide, instruct and act decisively and consistently in accordance with that model. Big decisions are not as impactful as the thousand decisions everyone makes every day.

    3) Reduce your model to a mantra or phrase that all staff can use to make concurrent decisions in the multitudinous tie breakers that face all of us when choosing between relatively equal outcomes. Otherwise they will act in their own interests, or with false economy on those thousand little decisions every day.

    4) Generate opportunities that you can act on far in advance when they are very cheap. (Act on what is important but not urgent.) Make lots of cheap early bets. Plant lots of seeds.

    5) In the face of complexity, choose the solution that covers most bets while accomplishing the central objective, not the most efficient or optimum solution.

    6) Revise your model whenever possible to accommodate new learning.

    7) Act as truthfully, morally and ethically as possible with your peers and subordinates, and as ruthlessly as possible with competitors. A good reputation produces discounts on all actions and transactions.

    8) Attract, Build, and Keep Key Talent. Dispose of weak talent.

    9) Be extremely jealous of your think-time, and make sure you get plenty of it.

    10) Investors are creditors, not friends.

    11) Work in the interests of your customers and staff and they will take care of your investors. You can’t do it any other way.

    12) Work more than anyone else does. Because hard work is all that makes a marginal difference.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-07-07 11:03:00 UTC

  • TECH’S DARK SECRET – FOUNDERS AREN”T NORMAL PEOPLE –“A recent study by Dr. Mich

    TECH’S DARK SECRET – FOUNDERS AREN”T NORMAL PEOPLE

    –“A recent study by Dr. Michael Freeman, a clinical professor at UCSF and an entrepreneur as well, was one of the first of its kind to link higher rates of mental health issues to entrepreneurship.

    “Of the 242 entrepreneurs surveyed, 49% reported having a mental-health condition. Depression was the No. 1 reported condition among them and was present in 30% of all entrepreneurs, followed by ADHD (29%) and anxiety problems (27%). That’s a much higher percentage than the US population at large, where only about 7% identify as depressed.

    “More surprising was the incidence of mental health in the families of entrepreneurs: 72% said they either had mental-health problems themselves or in their immediate family.

    “A founder who has no history of mental illness from a family with no history either “is the exception, not the rule,” Freeman said.”–

    http://www.michaelafreemanmd.com/Research_files/Are%20Entrepreneurs%20Touched%20with%20Fire%20(pre-pub%20n)%204-17-15.pdf

    Source date (UTC): 2015-07-01 15:51:00 UTC

  • Dear brain. I do not want to work on indeterminism vs determinism (free will) to

    Dear brain. I do not want to work on indeterminism vs determinism (free will) today. As much as you want me to write about it, the argument is quite simple: when we hypothesize, or intuit a response, the information is incomplete and as evidence shows, highly susceptible to error. So you can say that we exist in the universe, and that there are limits to our constructible concepts. But I would argue that those limits are produced by the limits of our ability to act, and as such any expansion of those limits is not meaningful for us. So the universe may be roughly deterministic at a macro level, and there may be a limited domain of cognition and action for man within that universe, but inside of those limits we have the free will necessary to act at the scale we are capable of acting within. And no other limit would be logical for an organism to evolve.

    But no matter how much you nag me, I am not in the mood to write about that subject. (yes, I know, you are stuck on it and want to get it out.) But I am much more interested in limits to perception and calculation. And even if you make me forget what I was going to write, I will remember it later, and write about it then. 🙂 So today, I am going to wrestle with explaining that to people. (If you will please just let me remember the example I was going to use… dammit…).

    Source date (UTC): 2015-07-01 00:30:00 UTC

  • Fear of Outsiders: Against Psychologism

    1) Fear of outsiders is not ‘a thing’ but a universal human reaction. Or at least it is outside of northern europeans. It is not an irrational fear. It is a rational fear. That is why humans bear the intuition. It is an instance of the disgust response. 2) The Fear of Catholics and Jews was warranted. Any student of intellectual and legal history will have trouble arguing otherwise. Prohibition was an example of the reaction to catholic immigration. Jews have had an equally negative effect in a number of areas. YOu can say in both cases that we have endured those negatives. But it is very hard to say that between the catholics and jews that rule of law persists. (you may not like it, but it is what it is.)

    3) High trust society resists lower trust cultures. And we pay the price for integrating lower trust cultures with traditional families into high trust culture with absolute nuclear families. It is what it is. Trust decreases, civic participation decreases, economic velocity decreases. (and yes that’s the case, although it’s very contentious, I am pretty sure I can hold that argument against any economist living). So it is a rational instinct (we evolved it for a reason) and a rational fear (empirically the consequences have been catastrophic since 1963). And we require both empirical and operational means of testing such statements to the contrary. (Human perception being one of frog-boiling intertemporal incompetence.)

  • Fear of Outsiders: Against Psychologism

    1) Fear of outsiders is not ‘a thing’ but a universal human reaction. Or at least it is outside of northern europeans. It is not an irrational fear. It is a rational fear. That is why humans bear the intuition. It is an instance of the disgust response. 2) The Fear of Catholics and Jews was warranted. Any student of intellectual and legal history will have trouble arguing otherwise. Prohibition was an example of the reaction to catholic immigration. Jews have had an equally negative effect in a number of areas. YOu can say in both cases that we have endured those negatives. But it is very hard to say that between the catholics and jews that rule of law persists. (you may not like it, but it is what it is.)

    3) High trust society resists lower trust cultures. And we pay the price for integrating lower trust cultures with traditional families into high trust culture with absolute nuclear families. It is what it is. Trust decreases, civic participation decreases, economic velocity decreases. (and yes that’s the case, although it’s very contentious, I am pretty sure I can hold that argument against any economist living). So it is a rational instinct (we evolved it for a reason) and a rational fear (empirically the consequences have been catastrophic since 1963). And we require both empirical and operational means of testing such statements to the contrary. (Human perception being one of frog-boiling intertemporal incompetence.)

  • FEAR OF OUTSIDERS: AGAINST PSYCHOLOGISM 1) Fear of outsiders is not ‘a thing’ bu

    FEAR OF OUTSIDERS: AGAINST PSYCHOLOGISM

    1) Fear of outsiders is not ‘a thing’ but a universal human reaction. Or at least it is outside of northern europeans. It is not an irrational fear. It is a rational fear. That is why humans bear the intuition. It is an instance of the disgust response.

    2) The Fear of Catholics and Jews was warranted. Any student of intellectual and legal history will have trouble arguing otherwise. Prohibition was an example of the reaction to catholic immigration. Jews have had an equally negative effect in a number of areas. YOu can say in both cases that we have endured those negatives. But it is very hard to say that between the catholics and jews that rule of law persists. (you may not like it, but it is what it is.)

    3) High trust society resists lower trust cultures. And we pay the price for integrating lower trust cultures with traditional families into high trust culture with absolute nuclear families. It is what it is. Trust decreases, civic participation decreases, economic velocity decreases. (and yes that’s the case, although it’s very contentious, I am pretty sure I can hold that argument against any economist living).

    So it is a rational instinct (we evolved it for a reason) a rational fear (empirically the consequences have been catastrophic since 1963). And we require both empirical and operational means of testing such statements to the contrary. (Human perception being one of frog-boiling intertemporal incompetence.)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-30 09:50:00 UTC

  • AND THE SOUL? IS THAT PROPERTY? Q&A: “Curt, What do you say about soul? And its

    AND THE SOUL? IS THAT PROPERTY?

    Q&A: “Curt, What do you say about soul? And its relation to property?” – Mahmoud B.

    PROPERTY

    Your indisputable Property is that which you act to obtain without forcing involuntary transfers upon others. Meaning: without {violence,theft, fraud, suggestion, obscurantism, omission, indirection (externality), free riding, socializing losses and privatizing commons, conspiracy, conversion, immigration, war, conquest, and genocide.}

    You may act to construct your life.

    You may act to construct your kin.

    You may act to construct cooperative relations.

    You may act to construct your reputation.

    You may act to construct private property

    You may act to construct common physical property.

    You may act to construct normative property (by forging opportunity)

    You may act to construct institutional property (by bearing costs of such things as military service, jury duty, emergency services, and ‘policing’ the preservation of life and property.)

    Your soul, if you believe in such things, and act as if you believe in such things, is, like reputation, something you must constantly bear costs to maintain.

    As such since you have born costs for both physical and normative constructs, and have done so morally – without the imposition of costs upon others – they are by definition your property.

    EXISTENCE

    Now, the manner in which your soul may or may not exist is somewhat challenging, because it can only knowingly exist as an analogy: a form of anthropomorphization of the record of one’s actions recorded in memories of people, physical marks on reality, and the long term consequences of events in the physical world.

    In this sense your ‘soul’ good or ill, does persist, just as the interaction of molecule of water affects all those around it. (the theory that water has memory is a useful analogy.)

    So for those who wish to preserve the traditional behavior and traditional anthropomorphism in a manner that we can say may or may not be scientific, we can suggest that primitive man intuits his soul as his thoughts and actions, just as we intuit the persistence of our genes through reproduction.

    To take it farther, we can (and we will very likely never disprove this so it’s useful for religious folk), we can work with what is called quantum mysticism. That is, that your thoughts take place in physical space and time and affect the universe around you. So even your thoughts affect the universe.

    The thing is, the concept of a soul (an accounting of your life) is a useful one. It seems to produce good outcomes.

    You should not take this argument as terribly firm support for monotheism, but as a purely normative exercise in the economically beneficial results of providing an intuitive means of behavioral accounting in which individuals can resist cooperating with others on matters of ill intent under the correct presumption that the consequences of thought and action are kaleidic and infinite, and that one cannot be forced for any reason into immoral actions (those that impose costs upon others property.) Not all of us are above 125 in intelligence, and we require such analogies for both pedagogical purposes and for use by those who cannot grasp either rational or scientific arguments. The same is true for ethics. We need virtue (imitative), rule, and outcome based ethics, because we have young and simple, adult but not wise, and wise and experienced people in the world. We are unequal. As unequals we need unequal tools.

    I hope this helps you. As far as I know this argument will survive all current criticism. Existentially, your soul does exist as a record of your actions in the universe, and primitive man could not articulate such ideas. If you want to get into reincarnation then I cna’t help you. Neither can the Dali Lama. He knows it’s a great argument because it is untestable.

    As you may see, I am trying to provide a means of reformation to the main religions while at the same time undermining those parts of religion that are false, lies, or harmful. But I am not hostile to religion: myth and ritual. Personal religion is a good thing (having been near death at least three times myself).

    I hope that this answered your question.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-30 06:11:00 UTC

  • Definition of Class: Reproductive Value

    (profound) (complete decidability) (objective morality)  [S]ocial class refers a rough division of humans into a distribution by their reproductive value. There is a competition between the classes, as there is a competition between all living organisms – and there must be for evolution continue and the species to persist. The competition between the classes is dysgenic at the bottom and eugenic at the top. In other words, classes are the result of evolution in action. And the question of whether an action is eugenic or dysgenic provides us with complete moral decidability in the broadest possible ethical and moral questions facing mankind. There are no moral dilemmas.  There are no morally undecidable questions. It’s just anti-monotheistic, anti-democratic, anti-dysgenic to say so.

    But then, I don’t get to say nice things. My job is true things. Or isn’t that the function of philosophy?

  • What You Do With “Smart” Matters A Lot

    [Y]ou can invest your neuronal development in increasing the explanatory power of very narrow concepts, or invest your neuronal development in increasing the explanatory power of very broad concepts. There are THREE reasons why we produce many very smart people in narrow niches, and very few very smart people in broad concepts.

    1) First, the return on narrow specializations is cheaper and quicker, and the return on broad specializations is very expensive and takes much, much, longer – if any returns exist at all. It’s very difficult to produce a Toynbee or a Durant. 2) Second, our education and our economies are organized to produce craftsmen for the industrial era – specialists, made possible and necessary by the entry of proles into the labor force, made possible by the harnessing of hydrocarbons. 3) Third, our education system no longer produces aristocratic learning for aristocrats who must govern. Even our aristocratic universities (religious schools) teach the religion of the proles (equality, democracy, pseudoscience, and deception). Instead of teaching politics, ethics, morality, finance and law, so that we may rationally organize our production and rationally adjudicate our differences, with the least risk, loss, and friction in both production and adjudication. So I am daily saddened by the tragedy of the many very smart people I meet who fail to produce their potential, and the many proles who fail by attempting to exceed their capabilities and capacities – due to the false promises of their priesthood. The only choice one has is independent study: to read. By reading ‘know thyself’. By knowing thyself (relative to the abilities of others) to find a niche to profit from, and to gain wisdom to understand the broader arena of human affairs. It is very easy to choose between that which is good to read, and that which is not: read the works of aristocracy. They are scientific in that they were empirical. They are the only equals man has made. See “The Importance of Being Well Read No Matter What Your IQ”. http://www.propertarianism.com/…/the-purpose-of-being-well…/ BECAUSE YOUR PRIESTHOOD: YOU ACADEMICS, PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND TEACHERS FAILED YOU – and they failed you in pursuit of selfish money and power. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine