Curt Doolittle

Theme: Agency

  • Conflict: Prospective and Retrospective Happiness in the anonymity of the market

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=2491Unresolvable Conflict: Prospective and Retrospective Happiness in the anonymity of the market society.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-04-12 23:50:00 UTC

  • it further implies that political freedom is a ‘good’ – when, it’s evident from

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=2467″And it further implies that political freedom is a ‘good’ – when, it’s evident from the record of history that personal freedom is absolutely a good, but political freedom is simply a necessary evil in order to prevent the government from forming a predatory bureaucracy, and treating the population as it’s property.”

    Source date (UTC): 2011-04-04 11:48:00 UTC

  • The Hierarchy Of Human Cognitive Biases

    I am not really sure that I should talk about theses biases as a hierarchy, because I think that the different cognitive biases we rely upon to make our multitudinous decisions every day is actually a map: an unordered but weighted network of relations. But if we express them as a spectrum from the most fundamental and physical, to the most social, to the most abstract, we end up with a hierarchy of increasing complexity. The HIERARCHY OF COGNITIVE BIASES :

      All these cognitive functions work with us every day, and the only tools that we have to manage them with are LAW, CREDIT POLICY, and PUBLIC RHETORIC. All of which are weak pressures against the cognitive tidal wave of cognitive biases. If I were not such a busy man I would hire a dozen grad students to put some math together on this for me. I hope this is useful to someone other than me. It is the catalog of expressions of the fractal mathematics of human behavior. Curt Doolittle.

    • The Nature Of Man?

      The nature of man is to reap the rewards of a market economy, while spending his efforts on avoiding any and all PARTICIPATION in the economy. In other words, the vast majority of people would prefer to live in countries with advanced market economies, largely because of the quality of life that can be obtained due to the lower price of goods and services. On the other hand, they also want bureaucratic jobs, government jobs, union jobs, and any other kind of employment that insulates them from the unique and necessary property of the market economy: taking risks with one’s resources in an effort to fill the needs of others.

    • The Liberal Gene

      Researchers have determined that genetics could matter when it comes to some adults’ political leanings. According to scientists at UC San Diego and Harvard University, “ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4.” That and how many friends you had during high school. The study was led by UCSD’s James Fowler and focused on 2,000 subjects from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Scientists matched the subjects’ genetic information with “maps” of their social networks. According to researchers, they determined that people “with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults.” However, the, subjects were only more likely to have leanings to the left if they were also socially active during adolescence. “It is the crucial interaction of two factors — the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence — that is associated with being more liberal,” according to the study. “These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience,” said Fowler, who is a professor of political science and medical genetics. The researchers also said their findings held true no matter what the ethnicity, culture, sex or age of the subjects were. Source: Scientists Find ‘Liberal Gene’ | NBC San Diego

      Some of the comments were humorous.

      “So, we now have scientific proof that liberalism is a birth defect?”   “That explains their total lack of logical thinking, they can’t help themselves. Probably explains why they’re so needy too. Do you think there will ever be a cure?”   “Does this discovery bring us closer to a cure?”

      We need both conservatives and liberals. Really. We need people who, out of ignorance or passion want to improve the existing order. We need people who out of understanding and investment, require that improvements to the order be meritocratic, and maintain group persistence, and are not simply attempts at taking power for power’s sake. The western dichotomy between church and state, between liberal and conservative, has been a very powerful combination. Our errors derive largely from the consequence of relying overmuch on our rather primitive rhetorical political process, the consequences of leaving the gold standard and adopting fiat money against conservative sentiments, and the opportunity to behave unwisely amidst the decline of the west, and prior to the rise of the east, and our foolish abandonment of the monarchical system, without understanding it’s strengths. But we need liberals. We just dont need them to have too much power.

    • A Life Lesson – A Change In Approach – And A Thank You

      Every day I read around twenty academic papers, a book, and something on the order of 300 blog postings on economics and politics, and a little philosophy. I have my own aggregator on www.roundtable.capitalismv3.com, various news readers, and I use the site Rtable.net for everything related to economics. I have a high tolerance for information, a passion for the subject. And I maintain this pace while running a not insignificant mid-market company of hundreds of people, and maintaining a bi-coastal existence at the same time. I visit a variety of sites, comment on a dozen, copy the comments to a text file, then edit them and put them on my blog, usually expanding them, fixing some of the language and grammar. Because while I read and write a great deal, I write far too fast and often carelessly. I’ve come to this set of conclusions:

        These ratios are about the same, depending only upon the number of assumptions, preferences, or errors involved. An eloquent writer can discount by half or more. An analytical writer like myself will use every word and then some. I started working like this twenty years ago. Before the web. Back when there were modems and bulletin boards. I learned early, in newsgroups, and on CompuServe, then on email lists and web forums how to conduct a thorough debate online under hostile circumstances and win. Because of this strategy, I rarely lose. Winning efficiently is accomplished by answering all the possible objections in your post, and leaving no stone unturned. I have literally thousands of these text files going back for decades, as a record of my intellectual development. (( I started out as a classical liberal in the Jeffersonian sense, became increasingly conservative, then libertarian, than anarchist, and now decidedly conservative libertarian. )) But this debating technique is designed to win, not to collaborate. That is because a radical does not collaborate, but fight. Otherwise he would not be a radical. And as a radical, I’m invested in this debate. I see it as a battle for the species. I learned a lot from Mises, Rothbard and Friedman: fight tooth and nail. And I learned what not to do from Hayek: be tepid – he only let Keynesian ideas roam freely, and to our painful detriment. Unfortunately, the comment forum is not the debate forum. It is simply a forum for affirming the sentiments of the article’s author. Debates happen between blogs, not within them. That’s tantamount to stealing thunder. And I too often, quite by accident, steal thunder, or at the very least, only distract from the context. And it’s annoying. My writing, which was much more literary in my youth, has been reformed by two very dominant experiences. The first, is this assertive debating online. The second, and somewhat unfortunate, is formed by the transformation of my thinking from the literary to that of discreet logical sets, by the act of spending years writing software programs. Writing software is somewhere between math and poetry. I have subconsciously merged the two experiences of debate and programming. And despite my attempts to change, I still write, effectively, the literary equivalent of programming code. My writing is structured as a program. And as such does not account for human short term memory. I leave too many associations unstated, because they are obviously deduced from the set of statement that i put to paper, and I am trying, believe it or not, for brevity despite my desire to describe an argument in a sequence of first-concepts. Someone very kind, from another blog, chastised me today. And so I’m going to have to try to change my habitual behavior. I’ll leave my authoritative voice for my blog. And resort to socratic questions in comment sections. And point to my blog where necessary. Old habits die hard. But using a methodology for the wrong application is just plain silly. (Thanks Lauren)

      • The Difference Between The Liberal And Conservative Mind?

        From Education And Its Discontents

        About three years ago, a scientific study was undertaken to examine some of the differences between the conservative and the liberal mind. One of the conclusions emerging from the study was that liberal people tend to be able to handle ambiguity and nuance better than conservative people, processing new information that might challenge some of their beliefs, incorporating that information and even altering their thinking on a subject as a result. Conservative minds, on the other hand, tend to adhere to beliefs and convictions despite evidence that call them into question.

        From what I can gather from the postings, I’m not sure this test demonstrates what the authors of both the study and the articles assume. COGNITIVE DIFFERENCES Conservatives have a longer (lower) time preference. (This is why they are happier than liberals, and tend to be wealthier.) Because they have a longer time preference:


        1. They are less likely to attempt to ‘serve or satisfy’ the immediate requests of others: lower empathy, longer (lower) time preference, greater pattern reliance (tendency to see the world through natural law.)
        2. They are more likely to try to identify patterns and begin acting in anticipation, rather than simply reacting.
        3. Unless we know the male-female ratio and ages, we don’t know if this test is simply an empathy or dominance test.

        The same test would need to be run with time preference survey questions, and the male-female statistics would have to be included. The more interesting question is, why liberals — people with shorter (higher) time preference, and greater empathy — tend to be less happy and less successful in life? RESISTANCE TO CHANGE The reason conservatives are change resistant, is because: a) they are inter-temporally pattern sensitive they are very reliant on forecasting, and significant pattern changes mean high cost of reorganizing patterns. b) In natural law, and in Greek philosophy, and in the western mythic narrative, human HUBRIS is the primary warning. ie: they are skeptical. c) Government is the repository of a great deal of power, and the most dangerous human hubris, and is most susceptible to the fashionable short term sentiments of human beings. d) Conservatism, because it is the repository of the militial and commercial sentiments in western civilization is meritocratic in the sense that they accept established rules, and will operate within them, and see others who do not make the sacrifice of operating by the same rules, and in particular, those who use the artifice of government to circumvent ‘the rules of the game’, as either immoral or thieves or both. This is a different strategy from charity. Redistribution and charity are conservative sentiments, but they allow conservatives to ‘fund’ instances of charity that have ‘good’ behaviors, most of which are extending time preference. They see people who use government to forcibly redistribute without requiring extending time preference, as either profiting from corruption, theft of the fruits of their effort for personal political gain, or simply a moral corruptoin of society that shortens time preferences. Understanding the conservatives sentiment requires understanding that conservatives KNOW that they passed on many opportunities for self satisfaction. To a large degree, conservatives do not disfavor redistribution. They disfavor the means and uses of redistribution favored by people with shorter, higher time preferences, because they see it as theft of their sacrifices. And not all people who vote conservatively have longer time preferences. There are plenty of people in the financial sector who are not conservative, just voting with conservatives to exploit the monetary opportunity of doing so. The fact that they take advantage of conservative policies does not mean that they are either conservative or have a longer time preferences. It simply means the are voting for longer time preference in order to exploit the opportunity for a shorter time preference. In effect, this is fraudulent behavior and one of the problems with democracy itself.THE NATIONAL CONTEXT The country is center-right (conservative leaning) and will always be so. This is for demographic reasons that have largely to do with the dominant class and culture of the people who occupy that particular geography. Structurally, conservatives have opposed both good and bad change. The impact of women, catholic, and Jewish votes, as well as the rapid third world immigration did accomplish exactly what they stated it would do. Whether that is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a matter of economics and preference. The conservative sentiment is to resist change until they see risk abandoned, then to adopt the new state of affairs as the ‘conservative’ position. To a conservative who sees the rules established by the constitution (a classical liberal) or a conservative who adheres to the western tradition (a conservative) or a religious conservative, or a small business owner or craftsman (an economic conservative), or an investor (a financial conservative)the threat to the established political order, to which they feel they have made sacrifices and taken risks, these political ‘innovations’ are not ‘goods’. They are ‘bads’. Because of the two party system, there are conservatives in both parties. People tend to be conservative or liberal on different issues. They self identify as liberal or conservative, for a set of reasons. And left-right political nonsense is almost always meaningless, because all elections are decided by a fractional portion the independents in the middle. The change in US voting patterns is almost entirely to the rise in young single mothers, immigrants and breeding rates of different social classes. Independents and conservatives are in roughly equal proportion, making up over eighty percent of the population. With liberals making up less than twenty. Despite our desire to the contrary, political sentiment is NOT rational: it is inherited from one’s parents, and is largely a function of class, history and occupation. IN CLOSING Given the interpretation of this questionably meaningful study, it’s easy to see that this is another example of why conservatives believe that hubris is alive and well. 🙂

        UNDERSTANDING TIME PREFERENCE

        • Time preference is the tendency to seek shorter or longer outcomes. In the literature short time preference is called ‘High’ and long time preference is called ‘Low’, because at the time when economists were inventing Marginalism, they thought about satisfying preferences marginally, by stacking people’s preferences. in the ‘stack of preferences held by the individual’, something could be described as higher in the list or lower in the list.
        • Because time passage increases complexity logarithmically, long time preference must rely on what cannot be observed directly – general rules and principles using historical allegory.
        • In general terms, Long time preference is a FORECASTING method of human interaction, not a SATISFACTION method of human interaction.
        • Time preferences are incommensurable. Or more simply, long waves and short waves don’t allow us to think both short and long term very well. Planning by combining long and short time frames is either difficult or impossible.
        • Different social classes have different time preferences. Since longer time preferences require greater complexity, and complex goods are of greater scarcity, then classes are divided by those with higher mean IQ’s, longer time preferences, and who engage in production involving and affecting a larger number of people, over longer periods of time.
        • Since it must rely upon what cannot be observed correctly it often appears less EMPATHIC and EGALITARIAN. When in fact, it is the difference between having a priority for short term or long term satisfaction. We would not successfully raise children if women were not empathic and sensitive to cues from children. Children cannot survive a mother who does not feel the need to satisfy them. Conversely, tribes would not survive if the males were not working on the problem of whether the local territory could continue to support them.
        • In large part, the division of labor increases production. The division of knowledge increases production. And since different outcomes take different amount of time, and some outcomes take a very long time, and since planning becomes very difficult for human minds when we mix a large number of time frames, humans participate in a vast division of TIME, with some producing short term goods and some long term goods, and together we tend to specialize.
        • The shorter time preference strategy is to accumulate small successes at low cost and to navigate to a satisfactory end. The longer time preference strategy is to forgo short term satisfaction in order to accomplish a long term end. This is why conservative societies survive longer: they are capable of surviving duress without loss of social cohesion.
        • Urbanites and Ruralas have different time preferences, largely because there are more opportunities for inexpensive gain when people are in more dense population. This is why cities are inseparable from markets. A city is market, otherwise it would not be a city. Each would not survive in the others environment.

      • CONTROVERSIAL REALITY : A CONTRARIAN’S VIEW OF THE AGENCY, BUSINESS AND SOCIETY

        AdAge and The Decline In Car Driving Among The Young The advertising industry’s most important publication, Ad Age, recently posted an article entitled “Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture?” wherein the author describes the decline in driving among the young, and the readership leaves comment after comment positing reasons for the change, most of which belie political sentiments. This kind of economic commentary can be found daily on any economics blog. And it’s fascinating to see the difference between the interpretations of different subcultures of the same data. Economists make fewer errors in their reasoning. Reporters try to create sensationalism and readership by appealing to the common errors that people tend to make, most importantly the error of confirmation bias : seeking what you agree with and ignoring what you don’t. Humans demonstrate a cognitive bias wherein they overestimate their own ‘normalcy’, or how likely people are to think like them. This is particularly true of people in the agency business for a variety of reasons – and thinking otherwise might not necessarily be beneficial to one’s career in the agency business. This business is a ‘magnet’ for group-thinkers, because the profession requires that you think about ‘groups’ for a living. THE REALITIES OF CITIES Most people in history were confined to 20 mile arduous around their home. Cities are, and always have been, notoriously dirty and noisy, often crime ridden, and push people into small spaces from which they desire ‘vacations’. (The Un-Heavenly City by Banfield.) In a recent conversation I had with a Chinese intellectual I was surprised at how little he understood the ‘toxicity’ of human beings living in density. It’s hard on them. (Selection in urban environments comes from disease resistance. – Plagues and Peoples by McNeil) People like density because it decreases opportunity costs – everything is close-by and because it’s dense, businesses and services are better capitalized and better funded because they have a higher opportunity of being funded – as long as they don’t require much space, or as long as what they sell is expensive enough to pay the cost of that density. But because of the expense of that proximity, raising children is for the poor who have no other choice but to live in kennels where the cost per human is low, and the wealthy who can afford to make the choice, not the middle class, who must live elsewhere. Therefore, Cars and Suburbia Are Synonymous. Because costs of a the quality of residences decrease with distance from urban centers, allowing more space at lower cost. Most urban downtown cores are surrounded by slums. Paris, Vienna, NY, Chicago and most impressively LA. Most dense urban areas outside of the west are almost entirely slums. London seems to have done a better job of controlling it’s development than most other cities. The reason for this is simply a tragedy of the commons that occurs when people move into very high density. It’s fixable with serious political effort, but there is a high cost of projecting that effort. WHY PEOPLE DRIVE CARS People drive cars because 1) Increasing opportunities for experience (we all this ‘the sense of freedom’) 2) Increased opportunities for mating outside of one’s group (this is obvious) 3) Permitting distance between home and job once jobs industrialized 4) Permitting the easy transpiration of ‘stuff’ to one’s residence 5) Ease of childrearing, especially once women enter the work force. 6) Increasing Leisure Time not spent traveling. 7) Status – because status will always be with us, because it determines access to mates, jobs, opportunities, knowledge and experiences, and because people are imitative and need a way of knowing what to imitate in order to get attention, opportunities, and mates. CHANGES IN DRIVING BEHAVIOR The actual reasons for the shift In Driving: 1) Cheap credit inflated residential prices, mortgages and rents. Wages were stickier, so young people whose primary social function is mate-seeking chose urban locations in exchange for car ownership and geographic freedom. This phenomenon will change once they find mates and seek suburban life for their children, as well as increase their household incomes by marring. So in other words, preferences will not change, just demographic distributions. (Just like political preferences.) 2) Unemployment over the past two years has decreased the tolerance for high fixed costs and younger people are abandoning or delaying the luxury of driving. They are just delaying it, and will reverse it when possible. 3) It’s a lot less ‘boring’ to stay at home when you have so many forms of entertainment available. 4) People live in increasing density, so that the need to travel in order to ‘sample’ enough people to identify friends and potential mates is lower, and to some degree is simply easier on the web. 5) Increased Populations Of Immigrant Urban Poor and their children who are most likely to consume public services, and least likely to have risk capital available for automobiles. These aren’t in any order, but I’ll leave it to the reader to determine the impact of adding 30M people over a 20 year period. PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION Public transportation has a statistically insignificant to statistically minor impact on commuting everywhere except New York City. In fact, NYC is so dominant, that it skews the entire country. If you remove NYC from the analysis then the dominance of car culture is obvious. By contrast, many rail systems (Portland Oregon for example) are catastrophic losses, and suffer from insufficient ridership to cover the costs. In europe people do not own homes, they rent and save. National cultures are also more homogenous. People are gregarious in homogenous societies and isolationist in heterogeneous societies. Contrary to what is commonly believed. Diversity decreases willingness for public investment. Everywhere. in general, if a people can afford the independence of a car, in any culture, they adopt it. That is what the statistics illustrate, and there is no evidence that that preference will change unless the cost of urban homes decreases per square foot and the cost of personal transpiration increases dramatically. Why? Because at any point, either TIME or MONEY is more important. At the point where time is more scarce than money, a car becomes your preferred method of transport. At the point where you have a family and must transport them, and STUFF a car becomes your preferred method of transport. No matter what your income bracket. People do not change their lifestyle, political or class biases, except that they become more conservative as they age. There is no shift going on that is not purely economic and demographic in origins. Agencies who are supposed to promote goods and services can only create loyalty inducing narratives for people if they understand why people make decisions. And bringing your biases to the table only makes it increasingly difficult to create messages and campaigns that resonate with consumers – because consumers increasingly resonate with the truth. Good advertising is the truth spoken succinctly and creatively.

      • Do Not Assume Freedom Is A Desire Of The Majority. Security Is. But But Freedom.

        People do not seek freedom. They seek the security that is provided by the prosperity of the creative class in a free society. But they do not seek freedom. They seek security.

        [callout]the classical liberal fantasy that rhetorical debate can convince a majority to favor freedom over security is simply a conservative utopian fantasy. It will never occur. Ever. Period.[/callout]

        And the classical liberal fantasy that rhetorical debate can convince a majority to favor freedom over security is simply a conservative utopian fantasy. It will never occur. Ever. Period. Once an argument is understood — in that it possesses explanatory power, is non-contradictory, and solves a pertinent practical political problem — one can seek consensus. And as long as that consensus appeals to a majority, then a democratic polity can adopt the policies that support the argument. However, the classical liberal ideal of freedom cannot be supported within a democracy, and no such rational arguments can prevail, for the sole reason that freedom is the desire of the minority – the creative class. And instead, safety is the objective of the majority. And the majority will always pursue safety rather than liberty. If the freedom-desiring minority loses it’s willingness to use violence to preserve it’s freedom, it will possess neither freedom, nor prosperity. And the rest of the civilization will calcify upon being deprived of the mental fertility of its creative, and therefore, most productive classes. This is the history of civilization. Fertility followed by calcification, followed by conquest and poverty. The answer is not violence, nor is the answer argument. The answer is sufficient argument so that the creative classes will apply violence, for the purpose of obtaining and maintaining the political power needed to secure the minority liberty against the predatory majority’s exploitation of the creative class in order to obtain security.

        [callout]We can be free, or we can be exploited, or we can be oppressed or we can be enslaved, or we can be murdered. Choose your position on that spectrum.[/callout]

        We can be free, or we can be exploited, or we can be oppressed or we can be enslaved, or we can be murdered. Choose your position on that spectrum. Because your actions in the use of violence will determine it. Talk is cheap, and demonstrably ineffective.

      • Another silly season: A sure sign of recession or recovery? Divorces and breakup

        Another silly season: A sure sign of recession or recovery? Divorces and breakups. Yet another animal spirit, cognitive dissonance, epistemic failure from our inability to isolate environmental signals. People breaking up is an illustration of the change in sentiments. Seems like it’s the season. Next signals to look for? Coalescence around a new hierarchy of status symbols. Emergence of new myths.

        Source date (UTC): 2010-06-12 13:14:00 UTC