Curt Doolittle

Theme: Agency

  • SUPERIORITY EVERYWHERE: 80% NATURE 20% NURTURE It’s so slow it’s like water tort

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000810?np=yGENETIC SUPERIORITY EVERYWHERE: 80% NATURE 20% NURTURE

    It’s so slow it’s like water torture, but each day we chip away at the progressive fantasy of the blank slate.

    (Now, if I’d just gotten the TALL genes, instead of the Breton genes… lol)

    MORE ON IQ:

    1) More than half of the difference between expert and normal readers is genetic.

    2) Expert readers show the same genetic effects as normal readers.

    3) Less than a fifth of the expert-normal difference is due to shared environment.

    4) Passive models of training regimes imposed on children address ‘what could be’.

    5) Active models of selected environments will foster the acquisition of expertise.

    Abstract

    Rather than investigating the extent to which training can improve performance under experimental conditions (‘what could be’), we ask about the origins of expertise as it exists in the world (‘what is’). We used the twin method to investigate the genetic and environmental origins of exceptional performance in reading, a skill that is a major focus of educational training in the early school years. Selecting reading experts as the top 5% from a sample of 10,000 12-year-old twins assessed on a battery of reading tests, three findings stand out. First, we found that genetic factors account for more than half of the difference in performance between expert and normal readers. Second, our results suggest that reading expertise is the quantitative extreme of the same genetic and environmental factors that affect reading performance for normal readers. Third, growing up in the same family and attending the same schools account for less than a fifth of the difference between expert and normal readers. We discuss implications and interpretations (‘what is inherited is DNA sequence variation’; ‘the abnormal is normal’). Finally, although there is no necessary relationship between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’, the most far-reaching issues about the acquisition of expertise lie at the interface between them (‘the nature of nurture: from a passive model of imposed environments to an active model of shaped experience’).

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-17 10:24:00 UTC

  • (PERSONAL: NOTE: EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION) Someone smarter than I am will have t

    (PERSONAL: NOTE: EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION)

    Someone smarter than I am will have to take on the burden of creating a symbolic logic of action in disequilibrium. But I suspect that we already have it, in the scientific method. And that the attempts to conjoin formal logic of certainty with critical rationalism in science are operationally distinct fields.

    That isn’t saying it’s not possible. Its saying that we haven’t done it, and that Quine’s criticism of Popper is false.

    On the other hand, it is entirely possible that I don’t understand something, since I don’t have a lot of respect for formal logic as having application to actions. And, as a political economist, and philosopher of action, my priorities are different. SInce I don’t respect it, I haven’t spent much time studying it.

    It reminds me of war games and chess. They are, to some degree Ludic fallacies. Wars are won by precisely those criteria that war games and chess present as constants: informational asymmetry: deception, misinformation, and incomplete information, combined with differences in velocity and the concentration of forces. I gave up on both those enterprises for the same reason: as structured they are puzzles not problems.

    There is a difference between puzzles and problems. I view formal logic as an interesting puzzle, but political economy as a material problem.

    This is just a preference after all. I’m not making a moral argument. I’m simply taking the position that the physical sciences and formal logic are easier to solve than economic problems. The universe equilibrates. But human beings are RED QUEENS: we are always trying to outrun it by outwitting it, and that means we must seek to create disequilibria.

    That is a different way of saying that we must constantly battle ‘the dark forces of time and ignorance’ in order to stay alive on the universe’s treadmill by seeking and creating disequliibria both with nature and with each other.

    Certainty then, in any sense, despite the ease that would bring to our minds, by obviating the constant need for problem solving, would in fact, result in our extinction.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-14 11:17:00 UTC

  • THE PROBLEMATIC QUESTION: With the death of the nuclear family as an economicall

    THE PROBLEMATIC QUESTION:

    With the death of the nuclear family as an economically productive necessity, and reproduction under complete control of the female, and in a technological environment where survivability is high, life is long, and overpopulation places extraordinary stress on the planet, does a woman have the right to reproduce at the expense of others, and in particular at the reproductive sacrifice of others?

    Like Camus’ first question of philosophy, this is the first question of redistributive government.

    (The first question of politics is why don’t I kill you and take your stuff? The first question of philosophy is why don’t you commit suicide?)

    Painful question. But one must answer it. Otherwise all redistributive questions are meaningless.

    🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-11 05:53:00 UTC

  • NON RATIONAL IDEAS “If you persist in the illusion that either the enlightenment

    NON RATIONAL IDEAS

    “If you persist in the illusion that either the enlightenment vision of equality of ability limited only by will, or the postmodern vision of equality limited only by environment, then you are, in fact, non-rational, unscientific. “

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-10 09:25:00 UTC

  • What Was Your First Epiphany?

    GREAT QUESTION.  HERE ARE A FEW OF LIFE’S REVELATIONS

    At the age of 6 when in one day I thought reading was an impossibly complicated idea, and then three days later, after just tortuously tryig to read books, because I was embarassed that a girl in my class could, that almost like a light switch, I started being able to read.  Doing hard stuff is hard. You just have to suffer a bit for the reward.  Best lesson in life.

    At age 7 when I understood that foreign languages weren’t ciphers (codes) but completely different words with completely different meanings, sometimes with completely different characters with completely different sounds. And thinking I was a completely hopeless idiot for thinking that they were systems of codes. 

    At the age of  9 when I understood that most adults really have no idea what’s going on, or what they’re doing, but they’re responsible for us, and we know even less than they do, so we children have to help them be successful, otherwise the whole world will fall apart into chaos.

    At the age of 12 when I understood that it was now possible to possess an original thought, and that I must remember to treat children of that age with patient respect.

    At the age of 14 when I understood that induction didn’t exist, and couldn’t exist, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand who could think so.

    At the age of 15 when I understood that mythical religion was actually a valuable thing given that you can’t explain anything very complicated to almost anyone – but religion is really easy to understand. It’s good enough for government work so to speak.

    At the age of 16 when I realized girls don’t think ANYTHING like us guys, and that it’s a hopeless, unbridgeable difference that you just have to deal with.

    At the age of 17 when I realized that despite wanting a career in science, that we don’t really understand that much more about the universe than did newton, and that experimentation was really expensive, and that I had better ways to spend my life than trying to solve that problem by spending most of my time trying to raise money for experiments that had very little chance of success. I’m not that patient.

    At the age of 19 when I realized that there is nothing in a university education that you can’t get out of books on your own, and that all universities do is sort people. They don’t really teach you anything. So allow them to sort you, and then just read what you want and need to.

    At the age of 22 when I realized that people aren’t bad to each other on purpose: they are actually clueless, and worse, there isn’t any way for the clueless to determine the difference between those who are slightly less clueless and someone who actually understands something that you should listen to.

    At the age of 24 when I realized that each of us has particular talents, and can’t all work the same way. So I let other people worry about details and I work on really big problems further out in time that they can’t work on. Cooperation is also a division of labor in time with people who cant understand each other’s jobs.

    At the age of 25 when I realized that it doesn’t matter how smart I am, if the guy I”m competing with has twenty years of experience.  It’s not brains. It’s just knowledge. And knowledge is much faster than reason.

    At the age of 26 when my health failed, that I was indeed mortal – very.

    At the age of 29 when I realized that entrepreneurship is largely a willingness to endure deprivation, pain and hardship more than other people are willing to, and its not so much about being all that smart and creative. It’s just hard work to do hard things, and that’s more than most people are willing to do.

    At the age of 30 when I realized that success and money aren’t really very useful if people are afraid of you, don’t like  you or don’t trust you. Money doesn’t keep you company and doesn’t get you access to people you want to keep you company. Ruthlessness is overrated. It’s much more profitable to have people love you.

    At age 31 when I realized that people will love you if you try to help them. So I started trying to help every single person I talked to in some way no matter how small. It is much better than spending most of your life trying to convince people to do something differently.  And they love you for it.

    At the age of 32 when I realized that reason, logic, fact and science are pretty unnatural to man, and that western civilization developed them for totally accidental reasons.  They just happen to work pretty good, and so we keep them.  But no one actually WANTS facts. They’re almost always unpleasant.

    At the age of 35 when I understood that there are maybe 1500 total ‘ideas’ in the human conceptual lexicon, but that each one of them is subject to errors in relation to every other. So the minds and libraries of the world are pretty much full of errors, with the few things that aren’t errors pretty hard to find among them.  Humans are smarter than everything else, but we’re actually pretty dumb. It takes a whole lot of us a long time to figure out even the simplest thing.

    At the age of 40 when I realized that I had made a my only really regretful mistake by not studying philosophy and going into it as a profession because I didn’t know how to earn a living at it. (You don’t. Philosophy is an avocation, not a vocation. It just happens to make you pretty successful no matter what you do.)

    At the age of 50 when I realized that after many years of hard work, I had solved a significant problem in the history of thought, but it was entirely due to all the people smarter than I am who came before me, and my achievement was just luck, timing and spending more time on it than anyone else. It was humbling.

    At 53, after two bouts of cancer, three related illnesses from a compromised immune system, divorce and a down economy, that I might actually want to slow down, and get my writing done before I run out of options on the durability of my northern european genes.

    Just a few of them. There are plenty of others. There will be plenty more I assume.

    https://www.quora.com/What-was-your-first-epiphany

  • What Was Your First Epiphany?

    GREAT QUESTION.  HERE ARE A FEW OF LIFE’S REVELATIONS

    At the age of 6 when in one day I thought reading was an impossibly complicated idea, and then three days later, after just tortuously tryig to read books, because I was embarassed that a girl in my class could, that almost like a light switch, I started being able to read.  Doing hard stuff is hard. You just have to suffer a bit for the reward.  Best lesson in life.

    At age 7 when I understood that foreign languages weren’t ciphers (codes) but completely different words with completely different meanings, sometimes with completely different characters with completely different sounds. And thinking I was a completely hopeless idiot for thinking that they were systems of codes. 

    At the age of  9 when I understood that most adults really have no idea what’s going on, or what they’re doing, but they’re responsible for us, and we know even less than they do, so we children have to help them be successful, otherwise the whole world will fall apart into chaos.

    At the age of 12 when I understood that it was now possible to possess an original thought, and that I must remember to treat children of that age with patient respect.

    At the age of 14 when I understood that induction didn’t exist, and couldn’t exist, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand who could think so.

    At the age of 15 when I understood that mythical religion was actually a valuable thing given that you can’t explain anything very complicated to almost anyone – but religion is really easy to understand. It’s good enough for government work so to speak.

    At the age of 16 when I realized girls don’t think ANYTHING like us guys, and that it’s a hopeless, unbridgeable difference that you just have to deal with.

    At the age of 17 when I realized that despite wanting a career in science, that we don’t really understand that much more about the universe than did newton, and that experimentation was really expensive, and that I had better ways to spend my life than trying to solve that problem by spending most of my time trying to raise money for experiments that had very little chance of success. I’m not that patient.

    At the age of 19 when I realized that there is nothing in a university education that you can’t get out of books on your own, and that all universities do is sort people. They don’t really teach you anything. So allow them to sort you, and then just read what you want and need to.

    At the age of 22 when I realized that people aren’t bad to each other on purpose: they are actually clueless, and worse, there isn’t any way for the clueless to determine the difference between those who are slightly less clueless and someone who actually understands something that you should listen to.

    At the age of 24 when I realized that each of us has particular talents, and can’t all work the same way. So I let other people worry about details and I work on really big problems further out in time that they can’t work on. Cooperation is also a division of labor in time with people who cant understand each other’s jobs.

    At the age of 25 when I realized that it doesn’t matter how smart I am, if the guy I”m competing with has twenty years of experience.  It’s not brains. It’s just knowledge. And knowledge is much faster than reason.

    At the age of 26 when my health failed, that I was indeed mortal – very.

    At the age of 29 when I realized that entrepreneurship is largely a willingness to endure deprivation, pain and hardship more than other people are willing to, and its not so much about being all that smart and creative. It’s just hard work to do hard things, and that’s more than most people are willing to do.

    At the age of 30 when I realized that success and money aren’t really very useful if people are afraid of you, don’t like  you or don’t trust you. Money doesn’t keep you company and doesn’t get you access to people you want to keep you company. Ruthlessness is overrated. It’s much more profitable to have people love you.

    At age 31 when I realized that people will love you if you try to help them. So I started trying to help every single person I talked to in some way no matter how small. It is much better than spending most of your life trying to convince people to do something differently.  And they love you for it.

    At the age of 32 when I realized that reason, logic, fact and science are pretty unnatural to man, and that western civilization developed them for totally accidental reasons.  They just happen to work pretty good, and so we keep them.  But no one actually WANTS facts. They’re almost always unpleasant.

    At the age of 35 when I understood that there are maybe 1500 total ‘ideas’ in the human conceptual lexicon, but that each one of them is subject to errors in relation to every other. So the minds and libraries of the world are pretty much full of errors, with the few things that aren’t errors pretty hard to find among them.  Humans are smarter than everything else, but we’re actually pretty dumb. It takes a whole lot of us a long time to figure out even the simplest thing.

    At the age of 40 when I realized that I had made a my only really regretful mistake by not studying philosophy and going into it as a profession because I didn’t know how to earn a living at it. (You don’t. Philosophy is an avocation, not a vocation. It just happens to make you pretty successful no matter what you do.)

    At the age of 50 when I realized that after many years of hard work, I had solved a significant problem in the history of thought, but it was entirely due to all the people smarter than I am who came before me, and my achievement was just luck, timing and spending more time on it than anyone else. It was humbling.

    At 53, after two bouts of cancer, three related illnesses from a compromised immune system, divorce and a down economy, that I might actually want to slow down, and get my writing done before I run out of options on the durability of my northern european genes.

    Just a few of them. There are plenty of others. There will be plenty more I assume.

    https://www.quora.com/What-was-your-first-epiphany

  • PRAXEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION I don’t think philosophical pro

    PRAXEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION

    I don’t think philosophical problems are all that difficult. Any philosophical problem that is terribly difficult, is only difficult if you’re trying to justify a falsehood. 🙂 Praxeological analysis makes it VERY hard to justify a falsehood. As such, if you can’t describe something as human action, either you don’t understand it, or you’re trying to justify a falsehood. Most falsehoods are just attempts at theft by some sort of justification or deception. Otherwise we wouldn’t bother.

    Occam’s razor and all that… 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 08:50:00 UTC

  • DOMINANCE IN THE FACE OF IGNORANCE – REASON IS DISCOUNTED BY TIME 1) Dominance i

    DOMINANCE IN THE FACE OF IGNORANCE – REASON IS DISCOUNTED BY TIME

    1) Dominance is both useful and necessary in the face of ignorance. Nurture is extremely slow and expensive. A parent is not sacrificing when nurturing as he or she is perpetuating his or her genes. Everyone else pays a cost. They are sacrificing something else that they could do in order to nurture. So they are selective with their investments. And most of us make small bets on many different options in the hope that we find a few investments worth making.

    2) It is helpful to possess 6 or 7 points of IQ difference in communication (1/2 standard deviation). It is valuable to possess as much as 15 points, in order to translate complex concepts into digestible form (one standard deviation). But at 30 points (two standard deviations) we are effectively different species, and communication begins to be impossible on anything other than sensory grounds. Compassion is possible across the gulf, but argument is not.

    3) Since demonstrated intelligence consists of four basic properties 1) g, (an aggregate), 2) short term memory, 3) general knowledge, and 4) biases and wants, and because general knowledge conveys patterns that IQ alone could not identify on its own, accumulating vast knowledge will compensate considerably for (g) – (the Flynn effect of scientific knowledge for example.) The only way to accumulate this knowledge given our pervasive ignorance is through skeptical empiricism (science), or what this group refers to as critical rationalism (which is a weak term compared to skeptical empiricism, and why Taleb is an improvement on, via expansion, Popper and Kuhn.)

    4) It is a work of ‘fraud’ to claim that it is a moral obligation for anyone to invest time in anyone else without compensation in exchange. It’s just a another form of theft. Only with exchange do we know we have not wasted our time and the world’s resources. And only with voluntary exchange do we know that no one is stealing from another. Only with exchange do we know we are not contributing to ill manners. In debate we exchange our efforts in the hope that we will learn, the same way boxers practice fighting in the ring, fencers on the pisté, or orators on the stage. And that is compensation enough – it is a cheap price of entry for the richest competition man has yet made outside of war.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 07:24:00 UTC

  • “YOU HAVE YOUNG EYES” Thanks. Nice thing to say. I look at other men my age and

    “YOU HAVE YOUNG EYES”

    Thanks. Nice thing to say.

    I look at other men my age and they look and think “old”. I have more in common with those in their twenties and thirties than with my peers. Because I see life as open to possibility as they do. And as worthy of risk taking as they do.

    There is a whole class of us that will never be old. We will just have older and weaker bodies. And my body certainly has racked up enough wear that even my Norman genes cant cope.

    Your view of the world is a choice you make. And you can choose to acquiesce to the wear and tear on your cells, or to preciously make use of them to gain the greatest number of experiences in life.

    And my choice is to keep experimenting with life to the last breath.

    Damn the torpedoes.

    🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 05:44:00 UTC

  • How Dedicated Should An Entrepreneur Be To Their Start-up, How Much Is Too Much?

    Sacrifice time, sleep, security, health, wealth, relationships – everything.
    The only limit is your ability to do something or not. These sacrifices must be balanced against the rewards.  So, there is only whether a) you CAN endure sacrifices and b) whether the sacrifices you make are worth the return to YOU.

    https://www.quora.com/How-dedicated-should-an-entrepreneur-be-to-their-start-up-how-much-is-too-much