WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
Philosophy is in large part little more than public prayer for the over-educated, under-informed, and insufficiently intelligent; a profitable street-swindle for academics; and a convenient vehicle of deceit for public intellectuals. Thankfully politicians are now too ignorant and illiterate to use it, and voters too dim to grasp it.
Yes you can quote me on that.
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-21 13:10:00 UTC
PROPERTARIANISM AS IMPROVEMENT ON THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT
Hayek’s: new era of mysticism (in science).
Mencius’s: age of propaganda (in politics).
Doolittle’s: age of pseudoscience (in philosophy)
Truthfully: the age of deceit.
From Mencius (Curtis Yarivn)
—“The basic premise of [The Dark Enlightenment] is that all the competing 20th-century systems of government, including the Western democracies which came out on top and which rule us to this day, are best classified as Orwellian. They maintain their legitimacy by shaping public opinion. They shape public opinion by sculpting the information presented to the public. As part of that public, you peruse the world through a lens poured by your government. ….
Thus the red pill: any stimulus or stimulant, pharmaceutical or literary, that fundamentally compromises said system of deception. That sounds very medical, but let’s be clear: you are not taking our pill as a public service. At least with our present crude packaging, the remedy is not accessible to any politically significant percentage of citizens. Rather, you are dosing up because you’d rather be high. Despite the agony of ingestion, it’s just too much fun to see your old reality from the outside. This, rather than “society,” is why you will return to UR again and again.”—
HOWEVER: WE HAVE A CURE
The thing is, that we cure this ‘age of deceit’ through (a) operationalis (operational language and e-prime, (b) truth telling and warranty of truth telling, (c) making the informational commons into defensible property. Or more positively, outlawing lying in the commons.
If we did that the entire edifice of lies would collapse in a decade.
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-20 06:52:00 UTC
[N]assim (re: violence) I’d like to add an economist’s point of view: that the use of the term ‘violence’ is obscurant. (In my lexicon that is equivalent to pseudoscientific). Humans engage in a vast spectrum of parasitism whenever possible, and in production only when easy or necessary. Parasitism can be performed by violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by obscurantism, imposed cost by indirection, free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, conspiracy to extort, by normative conversion, by immigration, asymmetric reproduction, conquest, and genocide. Conversely, mutually beneficial, productive, warrantied, fully informed, cooperation by voluntary exchange is, by contrast, a very narrow field of human activity in a vast spectrum of parasitism. Over the centuries we have increasingly abstracted assets (that which we seek to consume by parasitism), from the physical to, fragments of a value chain, to mere numerical promises (accounts), so that violence is almost useless as a means of obtaining wealth. However, the volume of predation and parasitism performed by violence, is currently performed by various forms of pseudo-scientific and pseudo-moral fraud instead of violence. But the parasitism remains. Humans are open to coercion by only three technologies: Gossip(religion and morality), remuneration(trade, credit, tax and redistribution), or threat of violence(law,military). Although at any times some people specialize in some axis of coercion (public intellectuals:gossip, government:violence, corporations:purchasing influence.) So if we have exchanged parasitism via violence, for parasitism via pseudoscientific fraud (which is one aspect of what I believe you are investigating), then the form of parasitism has changed, but not the parasitism itself. We might argue that some form of parasitic equilibrium is actually some sort of Pareto optimum. But that is very different from saying that parasitism no longer exists, or has decreased. So as far as I am able to tell, net change in parasitism is zero, or perhaps as some people argue, we have seen a dramatic increase. It is just that we have created sufficient technology that our parasitism by pseudoscience does not injure production as much as parasitism by violence does. Furthermore, all the great syntopical historians have, as far as I know, come to the same conclusion: that since 1945, the Pax Americana is only paralleled by the Pax Romana. I argue rather frequently (as do many historians) that all economic measures since 1600 are little more than the reflection of the distribution of consumer capitalism, accounting, and rule of law around the world at the point of British gunships. So to address violence instead of parasitism, is to blind one’s self to the rest of the spectrum of human criminality in order to congratulate one’s self on having invented a more effective form of crime. Affections. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine. Source: Curt Doolittle – Nassim Nicholas Taleb (re: violence) I’d like…
[N]assim (re: violence) I’d like to add an economist’s point of view: that the use of the term ‘violence’ is obscurant. (In my lexicon that is equivalent to pseudoscientific). Humans engage in a vast spectrum of parasitism whenever possible, and in production only when easy or necessary. Parasitism can be performed by violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by obscurantism, imposed cost by indirection, free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, conspiracy to extort, by normative conversion, by immigration, asymmetric reproduction, conquest, and genocide. Conversely, mutually beneficial, productive, warrantied, fully informed, cooperation by voluntary exchange is, by contrast, a very narrow field of human activity in a vast spectrum of parasitism. Over the centuries we have increasingly abstracted assets (that which we seek to consume by parasitism), from the physical to, fragments of a value chain, to mere numerical promises (accounts), so that violence is almost useless as a means of obtaining wealth. However, the volume of predation and parasitism performed by violence, is currently performed by various forms of pseudo-scientific and pseudo-moral fraud instead of violence. But the parasitism remains. Humans are open to coercion by only three technologies: Gossip(religion and morality), remuneration(trade, credit, tax and redistribution), or threat of violence(law,military). Although at any times some people specialize in some axis of coercion (public intellectuals:gossip, government:violence, corporations:purchasing influence.) So if we have exchanged parasitism via violence, for parasitism via pseudoscientific fraud (which is one aspect of what I believe you are investigating), then the form of parasitism has changed, but not the parasitism itself. We might argue that some form of parasitic equilibrium is actually some sort of Pareto optimum. But that is very different from saying that parasitism no longer exists, or has decreased. So as far as I am able to tell, net change in parasitism is zero, or perhaps as some people argue, we have seen a dramatic increase. It is just that we have created sufficient technology that our parasitism by pseudoscience does not injure production as much as parasitism by violence does. Furthermore, all the great syntopical historians have, as far as I know, come to the same conclusion: that since 1945, the Pax Americana is only paralleled by the Pax Romana. I argue rather frequently (as do many historians) that all economic measures since 1600 are little more than the reflection of the distribution of consumer capitalism, accounting, and rule of law around the world at the point of British gunships. So to address violence instead of parasitism, is to blind one’s self to the rest of the spectrum of human criminality in order to congratulate one’s self on having invented a more effective form of crime. Affections. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine. Source: Curt Doolittle – Nassim Nicholas Taleb (re: violence) I’d like…
LEFTISTS ARE IGNORANT
—“Never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.”— Danusha Goska, in American Thinker
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-19 09:12:00 UTC
(emotionally satisfying rant of the day)
—“Imagine if Obama were just as TOUGH on ISIS Muslim savages as he is on lawful gun owners, and high income earners.”—–
Some nonsense that ends up in my inbox is still entertaining. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-19 04:31:00 UTC
http://crookedtimber.org/2015/05/18/the-political-is-personal/IMMORAL JUSTIFICATION OF MAINSTREAM MACRO BY CREATIVE DEFINITION
(I am on a roll today)
John,
This might come across as offensive, but we all have jobs to do in defense and preservation of the informational commons, and this is mine.
1) Fascism was a ‘good’. A necessary means of combating communism. Persisting in the denigration of authors who supported it is merely conflating a utility in time of stress with a truth of social science. Fascism was a good. By any measure.
2) Hayek completed his journey by correctly identifying the common law as the source of liberty, which is how he perceived western exceptionalism. Most of his work an be seen as a series of investigations in various fields into solving the problem of the social sciences. It took him most of his life but he got there. Prior works can only be seen in this light. Most of his work is partly correct. His movement across fields is evidence that he ran into dead ends in all of them.
3) The jury is out on social democracy, and at present, despite the rather obvious self interest of the state and academy, those of us who work the subject are fairly certain that democracy is little more than a temporary luxury for the redistribution of a civilizations windfall, rather than a system that constructs liberty and prosperity.
4) Mises failed to solve the problem of economics because he failed, like everyone else in his generation, to solve the problem of operationalism. (Mises:economics, Brouwer:math, Hayek:Law, Bridgman:physics. And countless others in philosophy.) Everyone failed.
They failed, and Hayek’s prediction that the 20th century would be seen in retrospect as an era of mysticism appears to be true. He didn’t get it quite right, because pseudoscience and mysticism perform the same obscurantist functions differently. But it is becoming clear that the 20th century (macro included) will be seen as an era of pseudoscience, and most of us will be cast as fools because of it.
Hayek is not to be disrespected for having failed if so many thinkers failed in every other field of human inquiry. I made this mistake myself by crucifying Mises for a time. They were men of their time. They could sense something was wrong, but they were not able to solve it. Strangely enough, Brouwer and Bridgman do so, but not thoroughly enough to grasp that the problem was material in morality, epistemology, law, economics, and politics. Helpful in physical science. and only tepidly meaningful in mathematics. Its both telling and interesting that psychology – a pseudoscientific field totally absent any empirical content – saved itself by adopting Operationalism – and in doing so produced all the innovative content that it has in just twenty years – nearly overturning the century of pseudoscience.
Economics requires this reformation as well. Mises could sense but not construct it. In simple terms Keynesian macro is the the study of how much we can ‘lie’ in order to achieve a suspected good by increasing consumption despite the negative externalities for mankind by doing so. So objectively, mainstream macro is very much the study of immoral politics The operational view, and the moral study of economics (Austrian) is predicated on attempting to improve voluntary transfers so that all lying is eliminated from human cooperation.
They were great minds working desperately hard against an existential threat to man. But they failed. That does not mean we have to.
Neither does it mean that we should consider luxuries not of our own construction, as measures of our merit. They are not. If anything we merely consume twenty thousand years of western development in a century.
So, economics is the study of human cooperation. We can perform that study toward immoral ends (dysgenia, consumption, and lying), or we can perform that study toward moral ends (eugenia, accumulation, and truth).
There is only one ‘law’ of human cooperation: that is that the only moral criteria that one can imposed costs upon another, is by productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, free of negative externality. Under no other condition is cooperation rational. That single statement explains all moral biases.
The purpose of economics is to complete the sequence of training the human mind to understand cause and effect at different levels of complexity. Perception(existence), counting(scale), arithmetic, mathematics(ratio), geometry(space), calculus(relative motion), economics(equilibria), relativity(frames).
Only with this understanding can man understand and apply this general rule to human affairs such that we can calculate all worlds determined by an action, and choose between them. But only once we have determined the full circuit of consequences in each.
Only with this understanding can man apply this general rule to human affairs so that we can use monetary prices to sense and compare complex phenomenon at a given point in time.
Only with this understanding can we make policy decisions that allow us to justify takings and givings as producing a common good.
But only if we include all costs: Genetic, Territorial, Institutional, Normative, Pedagogical (Knowledge), Material, can we say we have accounted for all costs.
Otherwise, we are just engaged in an obscurant means of justifying our preferences.
5) You (John) have an extremely Australian view of the world, and your definition of economics and your interpretation of what ‘economics is reducible to’ is a justification of that Australian view. That Australian view is, like that of the English, Canadian and Americans: a North Sea islander’s view: one who is insulated by the seas from the pressures common to territorial peoples. If your tradition and genetics originated in the steppe or the levant you would hold very different views.
So it appears (obvious) that your perception is a cognitive bias that you are seeking to justify, not a scientific truth that describes necessary properties of human cooperation. It is terribly apparent to me (as I would assume it was to any intellectual historian) that you are confusing a luxury of circumstance with a ‘good’ that one should aspire to.
So as far as I can tell your selected definition is one that justifies your conclusion. It’s creative accounting so to speak by selective ‘ben franklin’ accounting of costs and benefits.
By carefully defining a preconception as a good, we can justify anything.
And that is what your two laws do.
6) The alternative argument I would like to put forward. “Every forced transfer, is a lost opportunity for mutually beneficial exchange.”
We do need a means of constructing commons. Physical and institutional commons are a unique western competitive advantage, second only to our most valuable commons: truth-telling. But why is it that commons must be constructed monopolistically? Why is not government constructed to facilitate exchanges, rather commands?
There isn’t an answer justifies that question that does not violate the only law of human cooperation: that cooperation must be rational.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-18 13:40:00 UTC
http://www.thelocal.se/20150513/hans-rosling-im-an-ambassador-for-the-world-in-sweden-connectsweden-tlccuDISHONEST, IDIOT OR GENETICALLY DEFECTIVE?
He is a typical product of defective north sea genes, which were very useful in the ice age and thereafter, but where status seeking by pathological altruism is suicidal when competing with more aggressive and parasitic tribes.
2 mins · Like
Curt Doolittle To call the man an idiot is to call a woman with solipsistic feminine intuition an idiot. We justify our genetic biases all life long. He is justifying his. He is no more wise or informed than his genes allow him to be. So, he’s just wrong, and morally blind because he is genetically predisposed to moral blindness.
All his world travels manage to do is demonstrate the ferocity of his genetic bias, in the face of overwhelming evidence against his bias.
He’s a poster child for the reason democracy is impossible.
#propertarianism
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-18 07:22:00 UTC
http://www.aei.org/publication/are-middle-class-americans-significantly-better-off-today-than-in-1980/INCOME MEASURES ARE A PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC DISTRACTION
The question is better served by how we spend our time, what we consume, and what we worry about, than any measure of income. Income is a poor proxy for measuring inter-temporal changes in consumption, and is only a useful measure of temporal asymmetry.
What is for example, the cost of not fearing the soviet union, the change in crime in Boston and new York?
Conversely, what is the cost of increase in political friction due to immigration? What is the cost of the conflict over Obamacare? What is the cost of maintaining the post-war empire (probably neutral). What is the cost of outsourcing? What is the cost of failing to reform education?
Income is the least important of these measures. And that is precisely why it’s the topic of conversation: because it is the least important but the most emotionally loaded topic. It is an elaborate pseudoscientific distraction for purely political purposes.
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-14 06:00:00 UTC
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/department-of-huh-yourself-british.htmlCOMMISERATING ON THE MAINSTREAM’S ECONOMICS OF DECEPTION
—MARKO—
When you’re having a good time , sometimes you can chug away on a bottle of hard liquor for a surprisingly long time. Maybe even more than one bottle with even more good times. If you keep at it , however , eventually you’ll stop. You’ll either pass out , or puke , or die , or some combination thereof. There’s no external “shock” involved – this is all endogenous to your drinking “economy”.
It’s the same with debt as with booze , and with debt , we call the resulting euphoria “increased aggregate demand” and/or “soaring asset prices”. Most consumers in the UK , and in the US , have long since puked or passed out on debt , and are not about to take on much more , and even if they’re willing , they’re often cut off by their elders (lenders).
The lack of a housing recovery should be a pretty obvious clue , as you need housing debt to finance a housing recovery. The fact that large , luxury homes have been the only segment providing support to new home sales should be a clue about who is “constrained” and who is not.
The relatively early and quite vigorous recovery in auto sales should also be a clue. Why did auto sales recover so well , compared to housing and other consumer spending ? Because we engineered subprime 2.0 in the auto lending business by exempting dealers from the new consumer lending regs , to the great consternation of Liz Warren. More debt equals more demand for autos , but since incomes haven’t gone up , it also means more eventual defaults from the debt drunks.
The entire global demand regime has been built on rising leverage instead of on broadly rising incomes , and that regime has now exhausted itself. Uniquely , economists seem unable to grasp this most important , and obvious , fact.
You guys are just weird.
Marko
—CURT—
Marko:
Love the ‘drunk’ analogy.
That economists are unable to grasp this state of affairs is my position as well. Although some of it is institutional bias, the rest is methodological bias: Macro is a correlative method, as opposed to micro, which is a causal method. Keynesian econ studies how much we can ‘lie’ to encourage economic velocity, Austrian econ studies how we can improve our truthful cooperation with one another to encourage economic velocity. You don’t learn much about a correlative and descriptive model, unless you are able to express it as an operational sequence. And to some degree, while this operational description is unnecessary in the physical sciences because we do not know the first principles of the universe, is misapplied for convenient obfuscatory political reasons in to the social sciences where we *do* know the first principles of human decision making – we are each of us an exceptional instrument for testing the rationality of incentives.
They aren’t weird. They’re incorrectly incentivized, and insufficiently chastised for what technically, is using untested (uncriticized) pseudoscience for the purpose of engaging in deceit, for the purpose of achieving full employment.
Now, once we get that this is an elaborate system of ‘lying’ not seen since the invention of scriptural monotheism, it’s clear why the ‘cult’ cannot grasp reality.
That isn’t to say most economists are bad people, any more than priests were and are, bad people. It’s that they bought the nonsense, found a place in the church of the academy, and practice its rituals: correlative non-causal justification of deceit for ostensibly moral ends.
The truth is enough. Too bad that’s hard to grasp.
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/department-of-huh-yourself-british.html?
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-14 02:07:00 UTC