Theme: Agency

  • AGENCY AND AESTHETICS —“Enlighten the intellect, volition will follow. Aesthet

    AGENCY AND AESTHETICS

    —“Enlighten the intellect, volition will follow. Aesthetics seem to be the means of aligning one’s passions and emotions to reason.”—Rafael LaVerde

    Let me expand on that a bit:

    Remove sources of lack of fitness, lack of character (virtue), lack of resources, sources of normative and institutional resistance, sources of ignorance, error, bias, and deceit – all the impediments to agency – and agency will result. Then selecting a philosophy – a means of decidability – by which one can obtain one’s ends, and an aesthetic that values one’s passions in accordance with that philosophy.


    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-09 17:37:00 UTC

  • EMOTIONS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON BIASES AND AGENCY 1 – Emotions reflect changes i

    EMOTIONS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON BIASES AND AGENCY

    1 – Emotions reflect changes in the states of property-in-toto.

    2 – We use reason (a skill we can improve through practice in deflationary comparisons ) to compare properties, relations, consequences, and valuations.

    3 – We use free association to define properties, relations, consequences, and valuations.

    4 – Our efforts at free association are impossible not to bias, because our experience accumulates in both interest and intensity in response to our biases.

    5 – So it is more correct to say that it is very difficult to learn to think sufficiently deflationarily that our emotions do not influence our reasoning.

    6 – to say that many of our emotions – those that I understand – occur in the reptilian and mamalian brains, and that our cognitive biases occur most often in the human parts of the brain and that the more primitive they are the more difficult they are (often) to circumvent, but the easier they are to understand. Many cognitive biases are difficult to be aware of in the first place, and are more subtle.

    Therefore, in broad terms, the less skill you have, the less will you have, the more solipsistic you are the harder it is to escape the emotions that result from your biases.

    The more skill you have the more will you have the more autistic you are the easier it is to escape the emotions that result from your biases.


    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-09 17:06:00 UTC

  • SOURCES OF IGNORANCE I talk of Agency of late in no small part because like Popp

    SOURCES OF IGNORANCE

    I talk of Agency of late in no small part because like Popper, I grasp that there are not only sources of knowledge, but sources of IGNORANCE.

    Sources of Ignorance = Barriers to Agency.

    The most obvious of which we face today are:

    (a) The failure of the 20th century thinkers to solve the problem of scale via operationalism, and the continued dependence upon idealism and fictionalism. This includes both anglo empirical and german rational schools.

    (b) the Jewish Pseudosciences and the French Pseudo-rationalisms, of the Second Great Lie (Marx/Boaz/Freud) and;

    (c) the Muslim fictionalism, Muslim heaping of undue praise upon Muhammed, Muslim doctrine of finality of Muhammed’s statements, and Muslim grant of respect prior to its being earned – meaning, the preservation of ignorance in the commons.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine


    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-09 13:20:00 UTC

  • My 80 year old mother, reading my work on Agency, understanding it (wow), and ex

    My 80 year old mother, reading my work on Agency, understanding it (wow), and explaining it to her other 80 year old friends, who don’t, in ordinary language.

    (color me awed. damn.)


    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-09 10:39:00 UTC

  • INTUITION, BIAS, PREJUDICE —“Is intuition synonymous with prejudice?”—Skye S

    INTUITION, BIAS, PREJUDICE

    —“Is intuition synonymous with prejudice?”—Skye Stewart

    We have genetics that cause us to possess intuitions and biases — – both of which are pre-cognitive.

    A prejudice consists of a pre-judgement, and therefore a judgement we have made by some degree of free association, reason or contemplation.

    One may develop a prejudice because we also possess a bias, and we may possess a bias because of an intuition, and we may possess an intuition out of genetic necessity or accident, but they are different things, and …

    … oh… shall I say it? Yes?

    Therefore they are not to be CONFLATED.

    lol Sigh. That felt good.


    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-08 22:52:00 UTC

  • AGENCY VS RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY —“Is the concept of agency an answer to the r

    AGENCY VS RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY

    —“Is the concept of agency an answer to the rational choice theory?”—Ray V. Westwood

    Correct. we are all rational actors but the scope of information we can rationally process and the tools we can use to reduce complexity to analogies to experience, varies greatly. So because of time constraints, cost constraints, skill constraints, emotional constraints, and intellectual constraints, we rely upon our intuitions for that which we cannot calculate. However, we carry with us genetic biasses that radically affect our intuitions particularly our intuitions at scale. Without markets we cannot ‘calculate’ between our biases.


    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-08 16:45:00 UTC

  • Or we can just simplify Taleb and say that we evolved to identify opportunities

    Or we can just simplify Taleb and say that we evolved to identify opportunities using very little available information, but it takes an absurd – meaning voluminous and expensive – amount of information before we know enough to determine whether the effect of an outlier cancels out all the possible opportunity that can result from our identification of opportunity using little information. Or to put Taleb’s rule of thumb to it: canceling outliers require logarithmic increases in information before we have any idea of the consequences. Ergo, it is better to be against people act opportunistically in the short term under the assumption of the stability of a long term.


    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-08 15:53:00 UTC

  • FWIW mainstream econ dropped the rational actor hypothesis decades ago. For the

    FWIW mainstream econ dropped the rational actor hypothesis decades ago. For the simple reason we lack the information to act rationally, so we act intuitively, and that means MORALLY.


    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-08 13:43:00 UTC

  • THE DIM AND AGENCY The dim lack sufficient agency with which to obtain additiona

    THE DIM AND AGENCY

    The dim lack sufficient agency with which to obtain additional agency, necessary to transcend their dimness. 😉

    ***When one is incapable of comprehension of a subject and low in trust, he or she relies upon individuals he or she can understand, and who make arguments that justify his or her priors. This means that idiots tend to idiots. And Dunning Kruger is ever present limitation upon their maturity. ***


    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-08 13:29:00 UTC

  • AGENCY AND DEVELOPMENTAL VELOCITY (important) For those of us who were born gene

    AGENCY AND DEVELOPMENTAL VELOCITY

    (important)

    For those of us who were born genetically capable of agency, we take longer to mature because we require so much information in order to render decisions without the context that ‘normals’ have. Meanwhile, normals mature earlier at the expense of agency. And the feminine mature earliest at high cost to agency. I think this is the causal explanation we are looking for. My mother told me I was born an old man who desired to play peter pan. This rather motherly and colloquial observation turns out to have been scientifically correct. info-vores arise because of lack of genetic contextualism. We mature more slowly. But possess greater agency because of it. We could say this another way: that humans are capable of breeding a distribution of rates of maturity to ensure a supply of people who are biased to calculate the full range of short (child rearing) and long (tribal competitiveness) problems.

    ( Aaron Kahland, Caitie Doolittle, Jean Barresi, Elizabeth Doolittle)


    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-06 11:01:00 UTC