Curt Doolittle

Theme: Agency

  • THE SPECTRA OF MORAL PERSUASIONS: OBSERVATIONAL vs EXPERIENTIAL (sketch) Compare

    THE SPECTRA OF MORAL PERSUASIONS: OBSERVATIONAL vs EXPERIENTIAL

    (sketch)

    Compare the rational (observational) deception spectrum:

    :>IGNORANCE->AWARENESS->FACTS->SYMPATHY(observational)->CONSEQUENTIALIST CALCULATION(outcomes)->FRAUD{…}->PROPAGANDA->DOCTRINE->(VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive for inclusion in opportunity)->(INVOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive against exclusion from opportunity])->(ORGANIZATIONAL CONQUEST)>|:

    with the emotional (experiential) deception spectrum:

    :|>IGNORANCE->AWARENESS->NARRATIVE->SYMPATHY(experiential)->EMPATHY->LOADING->FRAMING->PROPAGANDA->DOCTRINE->(VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive for inclusion in opportunity)->(INVOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive against exclusion from opportunity])->(ORGANIZATIONAL CONQUEST)>|:

    And we get:

    >IGNORANCE->AWARENESS->…

    followed by the choice between:

    Rational Deception: …FACTS->SYMPATHY(observational)->CONSEQUENTIALIST CALCULATION(outcomes)->FRAUD{…}->…

    and/or:

    Emotional Deception: …NARRATIVE->SYMPATHY(experiential)->EMPATHY->LOADING->FRAMING->…

    Culminating in:

    ….PROPAGANDA->DOCTRINE->(VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive for inclusion in opportunity)->(INVOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION[incentive against exclusion from opportunity])->(ORGANIZATIONAL CONQUEST)>|:

    THOUGHTS

    It’s no wonder we resort to everything other than voluntary, fully informed, warrantied exchange to obtain what we want, whenever possible. There are simply so many options available for us to use to obtain what we want by deception. 🙂

    While it’s possible to persuade (coerce) people using the three means of coercion: argument, violence, and exchange; It’s not really possible to demonstrate that the use of violence is a deceptive means of coercion. Its immoral, certainly, in the sense that it’s involuntary. But it’s not a form of deception.

    Violence is the most honest human expression possible. There is no lack of clarity about it. No room for misinterpretation. No attempt at cost-savings or cooperation. Violence is as honest as you can get. But honesty isn’t in itself a good. It’s only a good in the context of cooperation. Using violence isn’t cooperation. It’s the opposite. It’s abandoning effort at cooperation.

    Propertarianism: Morality reconstructed.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 13:40:00 UTC

  • ARE DEMANDS FOR EMPATHY ATTEMPTED THEFT? If one must empathize with something in

    ARE DEMANDS FOR EMPATHY ATTEMPTED THEFT?

    If one must empathize with something in order to be coerced into action, isn’t that just theft?

    I have been struggling with this idea on and off for years. But I can’t find anything that anyone else has written about it.

    However, from Freud onward, it’s pervasive.

    Trying to read a book by Woolfe. And it’s like Heidegger: bait you into an empathic reaction so that you can be deceived into involunary consent.

    What’s the difference between giving you a drug that increases your agreeablness (oxytocin), telling a story as an empathic and persuasive narrative, and making an argument about producing one outcome or another?

    Isn’t the only honest and transparent and voluntary choice, the latter?

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-29 09:04:00 UTC

  • What Does It Feel Like To Be Intelligent Enough To Understand How Dumb One Often Is?

    Well, it makes you feel like you’re profoundly stupid actually. And to feel horrified about how much more stupid everyone else is.  But to live in AWE of how we manage to work together using habits, norms, traditions, myths, narratives, writing, property rights, money, prices, accounting, contracts, law, measurements, and the scientific method.  That’s actually as close to magic as I think we’ve come.

    As for the problem of competency, the Dunning-Kreuger graph says it all. 

    • While people vary little in their perception of competence or incompetence, about all competence is actually held by only 20-25% of people.

    This statistic correlates with two other interesting rules of thumb:

    • The Pareto observation that 20% of the population owns 80% of the property. The reason being that they’re the only ones competent to make use of it. 
    • The IQ distribution that suggests that the minimum intelligence necessary to do anything meaningful is what we currently consider 106 or so.  That no more than 10% of the population can actually understand a liberal arts education.




    https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-intelligent-enough-to-understand-how-dumb-one-often-is

  • What Does It Feel Like To Be Intelligent Enough To Understand How Dumb One Often Is?

    Well, it makes you feel like you’re profoundly stupid actually. And to feel horrified about how much more stupid everyone else is.  But to live in AWE of how we manage to work together using habits, norms, traditions, myths, narratives, writing, property rights, money, prices, accounting, contracts, law, measurements, and the scientific method.  That’s actually as close to magic as I think we’ve come.

    As for the problem of competency, the Dunning-Kreuger graph says it all. 

    • While people vary little in their perception of competence or incompetence, about all competence is actually held by only 20-25% of people.

    This statistic correlates with two other interesting rules of thumb:

    • The Pareto observation that 20% of the population owns 80% of the property. The reason being that they’re the only ones competent to make use of it. 
    • The IQ distribution that suggests that the minimum intelligence necessary to do anything meaningful is what we currently consider 106 or so.  That no more than 10% of the population can actually understand a liberal arts education.




    https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-intelligent-enough-to-understand-how-dumb-one-often-is

  • FINAL WORD ON METHOD: AUSTRIAN AND OTHERWISE Any statement about human behavior

    FINAL WORD ON METHOD: AUSTRIAN AND OTHERWISE

    Any statement about human behavior that cannot be expressed as a sequence of human actions open to subjective, sympathetic, testing of the rationality of the individual’s incentives, is in fact, not scientific.

    The reason we like to use correlative aggregates is that they obscure involuntary transfers. The reason we like to use causal, operational language, that describe human actions, is because it makes visible involuntary transfers.

    And while morality APPEARS to differ around the world, because different cultures use different allocations of property rights between the commons, family, Pater, and individual – because the productive and reproductive strategies must be reflected in a group’s property rights – the fact is that human morality, universally, without exception, is determined by a prohibition on involuntary transfer according to those cultural allocations of property. Period. Morality is property. Period. End of discussion.

    This fact illustrates the difference between progressive (mainstream) economics, and conservative (austrian) economics, Progressives want to hide and conservatives want to draw attention to, involuntary transfers. And the reason is that Progressives favor the feminine reproductive strategy of limitless population growth that all other non-sentient creatures demonstrate. And conservatives favor improvement of the tribe in relation to other tribes – which is something only humans do with intent.

    Everything else is just propaganda.

    Apodeictic nonsense included.

    Philosophy is justifying your preferred reproductive strategy and nothing else. The fact that we use language and reason is arbitrary. We are just like any other species, using what is available to us to reproduce. We’e just invented a very complex verbal dance. But its still a dance.

    And that’s all our nonsense is : a dance.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-24 06:09:00 UTC

  • A PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS WORLD OUT HERE IN RURAL AMERICA 🙂 And you wonder why peo

    http://scienceblog.com/64835/want-to-be-safe-move-to-the-city-no-really/IT’S A PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS WORLD OUT HERE IN RURAL AMERICA 🙂

    And you wonder why people are conservative there….. Conservatism is a prohibition on hubris. Rural opportunity costs are high, risk is higher. But most of rural danger come from just fixing your house, and driving a car. 🙂

    “Although the risk of homicide is higher in big cities, the risk of unintentional injury death is 40 percent higher in the most rural areas than in the most urban. And overall, the rate of unintentional injury dwarfs the risk of homicide, with the rate of unintentional injury more than 15 times that of homicide among the entire population. “

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-23 09:59:00 UTC

  • SCIENCE AND THE THEORY OF ACTION : ACTIONS DEMARCATE THE REAL FROM THE UNREAL In

    SCIENCE AND THE THEORY OF ACTION : ACTIONS DEMARCATE THE REAL FROM THE UNREAL

    In praxeology, if statements cannot be expressed as human actions that are open to sympathetic testing of the rationality of incentives then the statements are not ‘scientific’.

    OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS: (Operationalism) Operational definitions are definitions of theoretical constructs that are stated in terms of concrete, observable procedures (Actions). Operational definitions solve the problem of what is not directly observable by connecting unobservable traits or experiences to things that can be observed. Operational definitions make the unobservable observable. ( the concepts or terms used in nonanalytic scientific statements must be definable in terms of identifiable and repeatable operations.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-21 12:34:00 UTC

  • THE MOST SERIOUS COGNITIVE BIAS? It depends on the problem we’re discussing. Pol

    THE MOST SERIOUS COGNITIVE BIAS?

    It depends on the problem we’re discussing.

    Politically, it’s the vanity of the presumption of knowledge:

    a) Projection bias: The tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.

    b) False consensus effect: The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.

    c) Bandwagon effect: The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behaviour.

    d) Confusing Economic and political truth with: preference, morality, signaling, reproductive organization, and reproductive strategy – (That’s all it is.)

    The only property of politics that is ‘true’ is that which is necessity in achieving the goals set forth by assumptions. And the goals set forth can mature with both short or long term consequences.

    Economic opportunity determines productive structure, which determines property rights and formal institutions, which determines reproductive structure – and norms that evolve are a trailing indicator.

    You can choose or not choose, to adopt guns germs and steel. But you cannot choose what happens if you do not adopt them.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-21 07:30:00 UTC

  • Legal Equality is Necessary, Economic Equality is Unattainable, and Genetic Equality is Undesirable – Your Genes Matter

    (Legal Equality is Necessary, Economic Equality is Unattainable, and Genetic Equality is Undesirable – Your Genes Matter) A friend posted an interestingly common white lament, that provides an excellent jumping off point for criticizing postmodern values.

     Lee: I am in the top 1% economic class of the world. This is due purely to an accident of birth and nothing more. …  Whatever intelligence or resolve I may have is due to the genetic lottery. … But these genetic endowments do not mean that I have been randomly placed in the economic hierarchy by the greedy powers that be. My limited intelligence and conscientiousness is actually worth something to my employer. Jeorg: Unless conscientiousness is also genetic. Lee: Yes… It is likely that we have some control. Setting an alarm clock requires forethought … François-René: “is genetic” and “we have some control” are not mutually incompatible. At all.

      [W]e have many genetic predispositions that we override. We do this through incentives via habits, traditions, myths, norms, laws and institutions. But there is a very great difference between redirection, avoidance and suppression through incentives and changing or eliminating genetic dispositions. The statement that you have no right to advantage because of the accident of your birth, is logically interesting because its the down side of western individualist thought. You cannot exist without your familial relations.

    [pullquote]You are a reflection of a long sequence of choices.[/pullquote]

    Does it make sense to you that humans can instinctively identify those traits and reward them? Does it make sense that the evolutionary consequences of not doing so would be detrimental? Even suicidal for a species? It is important in disputes that law treat us equally because it is necessary for the preservation of suppressing violence by forcing all competition into voluntary exchange. Otherwise the institution cannot provide the incentive to suppress our instincts and redirect our efforts. But [pullquote] the western illusion that those values necessary to create incentives for us as an individual economic unit can insulate us from our family, and clan, and the necessary operation of our reproductive evolutionary system is a postmodernist, socialist fiction that assumes economic and legal equality can be extended to genetic equality[/pullquote] – contrary to all evidence and reason. The rawlsian veil of ignorance is a complex rhetorical device for the neurolinguistic programming of the masses precisely to confuse them into the illusion of biological equality and to divorce the individual from his ancestry so that his loyalties are to the state and rather than to his familial genetic heritage. The blank slate, likewise is a device for the same purpose. So are diversity and open immigration. Other civilizations do not make this error. Ours is in numeric decline partly because of it. So no you are not an individual comparable to other individuals except to the blindfolded statue of justice under the law and the gavel. Socially you are the representation of a sequence of choices embeded in genes and are the recipient of more opportunities for influence and reproduction because of it. And dysgenia, and even extinction would of necessity occur if humans acted otherwise. We are in a constant battle against the evolutionary red queen, and against reproductions regression toward the mean. The only solution is assortive mating and the concentration of influence, opportunity, capital and reproduction behind such genes. [O]ne more thing. Time preference, and ‘frustration budget’ are genetically determined. IQ is significantly heritable (it’s complex though), and social classes are organized almost entirely by IQ. Variation in social classes is determined by time preference, frustration budget, or what we tend to call the discipline-impulsiviness spectrum. Variation in the social classes is also determined by attractiveness: symmetry, height, thickness of skin, clarity of skin, and a variety of other factors that suggest genetic fitness. Economic classes vary from social classes because under consumer capitalism, a Watkins or Crick does not produce as many paying customers as the designer of velcro, or fast, consistent, cheeseburgers. Economic outliers are determined by lottery. But that is not to discount the value of lottery. If the lottery reward does not exist, then there is no motivation for high risk. So yes, discipline and looks matter in society because they matter to our genes, and they matter to humanity as a species.

  • BRAIN STUFF: “VERBAL OVERSHADOWING” When talking about something screws up your

    http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03201107INTERESTING BRAIN STUFF: “VERBAL OVERSHADOWING”

    When talking about something screws up your memory of it.

    I sometimes tell people “If I talk about it, it will ruin my thought process”. I’ve noticed this is particularly true if I’m trying to predict some future event. So I actively avoid talking about certain things until I’m ready.

    Same thing happens to authors who talk about their work, or show their work to people. Overshadowing alters your perception of it. Irreversibly.

    We cannot often separate things. The mind has vaporously thin walls.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-17 11:48:00 UTC