Curt Doolittle

Theme: Agency

  • UKRAINIAN WISDOM (fun)(true) “There is nothing so useful in the home as a guilty

    UKRAINIAN WISDOM

    (fun)(true)

    “There is nothing so useful in the home as a guilty husband.”

    The degree of labor extraction a woman can obtain from a man is determined by BOTH her ability to identify and exploit opportunities for guilt, AND her ability to trade care, affection and sex. The economics of this indicates that over time, in any relationship, a woman will seek to reduce her costs and rely upon guilt as often as possible.

    The only male defense then, is to **never feel guilty**. Which is what happens in most relationships. Both parties reduce their efforts until they justify reducing their efforts, and therefore they cause the loss of hope for any reward, and they remain together purely out of the problem of opportunity costs: they aren’t marketable any longer.

    We can scientifically demonstrate that women have much higher expectations of men than men of women. I kind of wonder if this is some female genetic bias: that the reason they feel attracted to men is the promise extraction of labor. And males the promise of extraction of sex.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-08 05:12:00 UTC

  • UKRAINIAN LOGIC Man: “He loves her more than she loves him, I think.” Woman: “Of

    UKRAINIAN LOGIC

    Man: “He loves her more than she loves him, I think.”

    Woman: “Of course. He is a man. He must worship his wife.”

    Man: “You look beautiful tonight!”

    Woman: Scowl. “Does that mean I do not always look beautiful?”

    My mom did me a great favor, which was to teach me to compliment women in particular, on something small that they had DONE (rather than their bodies obviously), and that’s turned out to be a very useful habit to get into. Guys like it a lot too. So I compliment the hell out of men on whatever I can. Because almost nobody does. It’s like throwing rose petals into the air. It just makes the world a better place.

    I really don’t notice men paying much rude attention to women here. I’m sure it happens but maybe not around the kind of people I associate with. Men and women just talk to each other. And there is a lot of glance-look-flirt subtlety (which is incomprehensible to me). And it’s all pretty honest and direct and free of all that. Women are incredibly forward. I had one woman grab my by the hair and forcibly kiss me. Another just told me her husband was out for the weekend and invited me over. (um..no thanks.) But most of the women just ask you to dance, or start pleasant conversations. Some are a little too demure. And I get in a little trouble because I’m extremely friendly and playful but really not interested in other than just fun.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-07 10:29:00 UTC

  • “HOMO MORALICUS” – ETHICAL AND MORAL STATUS MACHINES Did you ever notice that we

    “HOMO MORALICUS” – ETHICAL AND MORAL STATUS MACHINES

    Did you ever notice that we human beings don’t need formal logic, mathematics, special tools and equipment, to determine if we think that something is unethical or immoral?

    Did you every notice that we don’t need logic, science, tools, equipment or sophisticated devices to perceive changes in our status relative to one another? We are masters of the must subtle change.

    Unlike the social world, we need a lot of tools to be able to grasp the real world, and to reduce it’s complexity to some analogy to experience. But we don’t need any such tools to perceive vastly complex status cues and cheating or contribution to the social commons.

    Man is a moral animal. We evolved to sense moral and immoral behavior as contributing to or extractive from, our ability to reproduce. And it was an evolutionary necessity that we develop these moral and social intuitions – otherwise we could not distinguish parasitic from cooperative actions. And we would not survive.

    Can we sense the economy? No. We have invented the most amazing tool EVER- prices. Prices allow us to sense what we need to do to sustain ourselves by serving others.

    We will willingly pay very high costs to stop others from cheating. We will willingly pay very high costs to preserve our status – even resorting to committing suicide rather than experience that loss.

    We place higher priority on these things than we do on economics.

    Why?

    Because it’s reproductively more important that we do.

    Man is a moral creature BEFORE he is an economic creature.

    And anyone who states otherwise is very likely trying to cover for or justify, some criminal, immoral or unethical action.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-02 10:17:00 UTC

  • AUTISM MEANS 40% MORE BRAIN ACTIVITY AT REST. My mother, my grandmother, teacher

    http://scienceblog.com/70048/study-shows-autistic-brains-create-more-information-at-rest/YES. AUTISM MEANS 40% MORE BRAIN ACTIVITY AT REST.

    My mother, my grandmother, teachers, everyone would say “just relax and rest your mind”.

    I would say “um… I can’t shut it off. Ever.” It was so exasperating. I thought adults were incredibly stupid, with insipid advice.

    The only way to keep the machine happy is to work it to death. It’d drive me to exhaustion (and has) if I didn’t feed it something to work on.

    The internal world is like an enormous magnet that ONLY SOCIAL CONTACT is a counter.

    I love people. They’re anchors to reality.

    I wonder what it’s like for totally autistic people – they can never get out… ever. I have a lot of trouble getting in and out (Something my mother, Allora and Amanda were masters of.)

    But you can view fate as gift or curse. I can manage it most of the time, so I consider it a gift.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-31 17:16:00 UTC

  • INTOLERANCE DEMONSTRATES A LACK OF MORAL COURAGE –“social intolerance, kills no

    INTOLERANCE DEMONSTRATES A LACK OF MORAL COURAGE

    –“social intolerance, kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. […] And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought. A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.”– JS Mill

    COUNTER PROPOSITION (One of my favorite quotes)

    “Whenever we say we are being tolerant, we must ask whether our tolerance is a matter of convenience or conviction. Tolerance is costly. It is an investment in the commons. If being tolerant is easy, it’s most likely that it’s a convenience – we’re just failing to pay the cost of maintaining the moral commons.}

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-26 04:39:00 UTC

  • LIFE LESSONS : A YEAR AND A HALF OF RECUPERATION AND EXPLORATION The capitalist

    LIFE LESSONS : A YEAR AND A HALF OF RECUPERATION AND EXPLORATION

    The capitalist in me does not like very much what I’ve learned.

    The scientist in me forces me to accept it.

    The economist in me is surprised at what I have learned.

    The philosopher in me is fascinated.

    The male in me is overjoyed.

    The enlightenment experiment with government is almost over. It will die with the boomers, like the socialist experiment has died. But so will the anglo form of capitalism. It was very good while it lasted.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 10:39:00 UTC

  • SPHERES OF BEHAVIORAL ACCEPTABILITY (what we ignore and punish) In your imaginat

    SPHERES OF BEHAVIORAL ACCEPTABILITY

    (what we ignore and punish)

    In your imagination

    In your bathroom

    In your bedroom

    at your dining table

    In front of your mother

    In front of your neighborhood

    In front your city square.

    On national television

    In front of (your equivalent of) ‘the pope’

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-19 14:03:00 UTC

  • Over the past five or six years I’ve wondered how to measure the ability of huma

    Over the past five or six years I’ve wondered how to measure the ability of human beings to identify relations. We know that it’s hard work and there is a limit. We know that we must be able to construct those relations in a fairly short period of time. But, how do we measure it?

    I didn’t think it was possible. But now I think it might be.

    Sure, IQ is still a loose proxy. But it describes our relative differences, it does not tell us enough (that I am aware of) about how to weigh the different types of content other than verbal and mathematical. While I don’t discount empathic intelligence, I dont think it tells us much of value, about our minds, even if it’s utilitarian in practice.

    The question I’m struggling with is, that given our sort of fascination with ideal types, and given the clear necessity for logics (instrumentation) and our clear inability to think in increasingly complex numbers of dimensions without the help of cartesian or three dimensional models, and given our need to name functions (sets of operations) there is some sort of limit that I cannot put my arms quite around. But I am fairly certain if I struggle with that I will be able to eventually answer.

    We have IQ, and response time. We know that it only takes about 300 words to articulate all human experiences. We know that we can load terms, phrases, sentences, explanations and narratives, almost infinitely. But we also know that at some point we lose the ability to reconstruct or deconstruct those terms. So how do we measure that?

    What is the objective, experiential difference between concepts?

    I know that figuring out that property was the sort of unit of commensurability helps get to a solution. But what is that solution?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-19 09:44:00 UTC

  • We humans are notoriously challenged with multi-dimensional problems. We evolved

    We humans are notoriously challenged with multi-dimensional problems. We evolved to run to intercept something running from us, and avoid something running at us – and we further evolved, to throw a rock, spear or arrow at something moving in relation to us. That is a very complex calculation to perform.

    It’s pretty interesting to go through the analysis of why we can only visualize three to five things, and only really remember five to seven, without hard work and mastering certain tricks.

    Our emotions for example seem very complex to us, but they ‘re constructed by as few as three different axis.

    Our personalities probably consist of no more than five or six major determinants, although numbers of properties is often discussed in the thirties.

    So if the number of axis that affect our philosophy is more than two or three it’s no wonder that we have trouble mentally reconciling them. Because it’s possible that we cannot usefully reduce these axis any further.

    But we try anyway. We strive for the simplistic ideal type at all times. But we fail. We sometimes under pressure consider a spectrum. And at others under confusion consider two or three axis (say, like the Nolan chart). But beyond the three dimensional we tend to fail.

    AXIS 1 (mind)

    [reality]

    sensation

    memory

    perception (awareness? awareness of change in state?)

    searching

    imagination

    AXIS 3 (instrumentation)

    identity (categorizing, naming – including numbering)

    logic (language of justification, argument or maybe persuasion?).

    relation (mathematics: logic of constant relations – ie: axiomatic)

    causality (physics: logic of constant causal relations – ie:determinism)

    organization (economics: logic of inconstant relations)

    AXIS 3 (truth)

    inconsistency

    internal consistency

    external consistency (correspondence)

    truth (internal and external correspondence)

    identity

    AXIS 4 (action and population)

    observation (accretion)

    action (choice)

    cooperation. (contract)

    spontaneous cooperation (market)

    unconscious cooperation (metaphysical value judgements)

    AXIS 5 (incentive)

    ignorance

    preference

    priority

    obligation

    necessity

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-16 11:18:00 UTC

  • POLITICAL BIASES AS REFLECTIONS OF THE VALUE OF THE OPINIONS OF OTHERS. Just lik

    POLITICAL BIASES AS REFLECTIONS OF THE VALUE OF THE OPINIONS OF OTHERS.

    Just like Engineers and Creatives think in different universes, libertarians and communalists think in different universes.

    For a libertarian (most of whom are very bright) other people’s opinions and knowledge aren’t very useful. Neither are social rewards. Or signals.

    For a communalist, (most of whom are around average) other people’s opinions and knowledge, are comforting, helpful, useful and necessary.

    This difference in the perception of the value of others thinking, and therefore the SIGNAL value of the approval of others, explains the political biases of the different groups.

    Likewise the dunning-kreuger curve demonstrates why the very lowest classes feel that the world actively conspires against them, because in fact, their opinions, approval, signals aren’t of any value except to satisfy the confirmation bias of peers as a defense against self loathing.

    We seem to think these differences are choices.

    They aren’t. They’re incentives. They’re logical. They’re necessary.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-14 17:04:00 UTC