Curt Doolittle

Theme: Decidability

  • “Pascal’s wager in personal choice, Occam’s razor in scientific investigation, D

    “Pascal’s wager in personal choice, Occam’s razor in scientific investigation, Dollar Cost Averaging in investment, Bayesian choice in computer science, and the law of the excluded middle in logic and mathematics all recommend precisely the same principle: When we are absent sufficient information or sufficient time, or sufficient resources, pragmatic decisions are still possible.”

    -Curt Doolittle

    Brett Sterling just posted this. And when I re-read it, it made me realize, that I’d forgotten to finish the explanation why.

    By choosing (purchasing) the lowest cost option we do not maximize gains or success or precision, but we minimize losses or failures, or under-over estimation.

    Why? Because the universe is cheap. It hasn’t the choice to take an option on higher, later, rewards to conserve energy. It conserves energy by taking the lowest cost solution that causes persistence.

    Why is this important? Because philosophy (morality, personal choice) pursues the good, and the optimum, but generally ignores costs.

    Adding costs to philosophy is analogous to removing immortality from the gods of our myths.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-11 08:04:00 UTC

  • The NAP is a half truth because it is an incomplete sentence. If you fully expan

    The NAP is a half truth because it is an incomplete sentence. If you fully expand the sentence you will falsify NAP.

    “the method of decidability by which we avoid conflict and insure cooperation is to restrict our actions to those that do not aggress against…. (what)?”

    You see. the reason libertarians disagree is because they can’t define ‘what’. So they use ‘Principle’ as a means of avoiding answering the question. Why? Because if you answer the question of ‘what’ you find that you end up with classical liberalism not with libertarianism or anarchism. Why? BEcause otherwise it is impossible to form, hold, and preserve a polity in competition with other polities.

    Try it. You can’t do it. I know more about the libertarian fallacy than anyone living. And the way to test (praxeological test) the NAP or libertarian ideology is to ask the sequence of steps necessary for the formation, holding, and persistence from competition of such a polity.

    In other words, *create a model*. And the reason people don’t do that, and the reason there are not ‘advanced literatures’ on libertarianism, is because it’s not possible. Period. End of story.

    There are no conditions under which the formation of an anarchic polity is possible. The best one can do is rule of law by natural law and severely limit mandatory investment in the commons to that which we call a minimal state. Even then, open immigration and the NAP fail – the litmus test is blackmail. And that’s even before we get to trade policy and immigration, and financialization, and the problem of free riding on the commons of competing polities, and the fact that such libertarian polities always attract such malcontents that they drive out the good, and draw the ire of ‘traditional’ polities.

    I put a stake in rothbard’s heart but that vampire of nonsense that foolish young men seem so attracted to, always seems to find an artery-of-idiocy to bite into.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-10 13:32:00 UTC

  • The reason I found libertarianism interesting was commensurability. That’s all.

    The reason I found libertarianism interesting was commensurability. That’s all. When I first heard Hoppe I understood that he combined commensurability with strict construction. I knew something was wrong (and it was – and it took me a very long time to figure out what it was). But I knew that he had in front of him the answer to commensurability. (Even if I would not phrase it correctly at the time.) And that meant the possibility that law, property, and economics could produce a social science.

    I call myself a conservative libertarian today out of convenience. But what I mean is a Sovereign. The difference is that I’m not asking permission. I’m taking it. I don’t need incentive to be fair. I need incentive not to kill or enslave and take what I want. And fairness is the only reason not to kill or enslave and take what I want.

    Sovereignty either exists in fact or it doesn’t. Liberty only exists by permission – so technically it’s impossible. Freedom is a nice word for a serf that isn’t bound to the land or a craft. There is only one source of what we mean when we say ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’, and that is Sovereignty. And there is only one possible method of producing Sovereignty; a militia of sufficient numbers that an alternative order is impossible.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-05 13:19:00 UTC

  • “Von Mises explained why economics is not explainable by math. Values are ordina

    —“Von Mises explained why economics is not explainable by math. Values are ordinal and not cardinal.”—

    Well, values arent’ even ordinal (as he and Rothbard demonstrate in their of repeated error of reducing choice to price), but values are triangulated among many sets of ordinal preferences. Which is pretty much the lesson of estimation over the past twenty years.

    Or better stated, positional names (numbers) can only represent constant relations. Whereas ordinal position can explain relative position (lists). Whereas triangulated names (graphs), represent current relations.

    This is one of the principle errors in mises’ work. (among many). Just as Mises applies the monopoly of price (commodity trades) to values, Rothbard applies the monopoly of price to ethics. Both of these are simply reductio versions of preserving separatism and avoiding the cost of paying for the institution that makes prices, trade, and ethics possible.

    Our brains sum many possible relative relations in many possible dimensions.

    The problem is that the process is not open to introspection. We have to deflate each dimension to understand our own judgements.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-05 12:03:00 UTC

  • I would say that ZFC constitutes a proof of the limits of mathematics. I would s

    I would say that ZFC constitutes a proof of the limits of mathematics.

    I would say that the construction of all of mathematics from operations is trivial. Which is its strength.

    I would say that the the development of techniques of deduction (proofs of possibility) given constant relations made possible by positional names is one of the high points of human intellectual achievement.

    I would say that those that are capable of applied mathematics in the discovery of patterns in reality is an art that never ceases to amaze me. if for no other reason, than like chess, it requires extraordinary state memory (modeling), extraordinary discipline, and the exercise of talent without much chance of material reward.

    I mean, the only people I am absolutely awed by when I meet them are applied and theoretical mathematicians. And I know that in the very least, they have far superior short term memories and modeling capabilities.

    And while I seem to have a talent for deflation (causality), I could never compete with that category of mind.

    I am fairly happy playing second fiddle to their art.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-02 18:04:00 UTC

  • I think Zachary Davidson is objecting to my PROCESS, which consists of iterative

    I think Zachary Davidson is objecting to my PROCESS, which consists of iterative attempts to construct proofs of existential possibility or impossibility, and to attract criticism, and to repeat, until by using a competition between the proofs of possibility and impossibility, and criticism, only the possible (truth candidates remain). And that’s just how science works through iterative exploration.

    Because all he is criticizing is my use of contrasts and measurements to quash ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism and deceit.

    And he is criticizing that effort in order to preserve the utility of lying on the one hand and the use of lie and ritual to produce chemical reward, and the addiction behavior that is produced by self deception, and then avoidance of the combination of un-anchoring, cost of abandoning intuition (the animal), relief from the burden of reason, relief from the burden of learning, relief from the burden of adaptation, relief from the burden of constant reorganization of cooperation.

    I mean. He works hard to preserve the lie and the feeling of success he gets from the lie, in contrast to his competitive success in reality. In other words, he wants to find escape from evidence of his reproductive disutility, and reward for it. He wants to make a failing a virtue.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-02 12:17:00 UTC

  • “You’re saying all mathematical statements are true or false but the liar parado

    —“You’re saying all mathematical statements are true or false but the liar paradox is one example of an ordinary language sentence which hasn’t got a truth-value, right? Well, stated that way, I’d say you’re right about all of that, but are you also saying that the liar sentence expresses a proposition? That might be the part where it starts to get problematic.”—

    Good question.

    In short, we can ask a question, or we can assert an opinion, conflate the two, or we can speak nonsense. And only humans (so far) can ask, assert, conflate, and fail at all of them. But out of convenience, we subtract from the real to produce the ideal, and speak of the speech as if it can act on its own.

    Just to illustrate that the test we are performing (context) limits both what we are saying and what we can say. From the most decidable to the least:

    1 – The mathematical category of statements, (tautological) single category. (relative measure)

    2 – The ideal category of statements, (logical) multiple categories. (relative meaning)

    3 – The operational category of statements (existential possibility)

    (sequential possibility )

    4 – The correspondent (empirical) category of statements. all categories. ( full correspondence )

    5 – The rational category of statements ( an actor making rational choices) (‘praxeological’)

    6 – The ‘moral’ category of statements ( test of reciprocity)

    7 – The fully accounted category of statements (tests of scope)

    8 – The valued (loaded) category of statements. (full correspondence and loaded with subjective value)

    9 – The deceptive category of statements (suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism, and outright lying.

    We can speak a statement in any one or more of these (cumulative) contexts.

    So for example, statements are not true or false or unknowable, but the people who speak them speak truthfully, falsely, or undecidedly. So performatively (as you have mentioned) only people can make statements.

    However, to make our lives easier, we eliminate unnecessary dimensions of existence unused in our scope of inquiry, and we conflate terms across those dimensions of existence, and we very often don’t even understand ourselves what we are saying. (ie; a number consists of a function for producing a positional name, from an ordered series of symbols in some set of dimensions. Or, only people can act and therefore only people can assert, and therefore no assertions are true or false, the person speaking speaks truth or falsehood. etc.)

    This matters primarily because no dimensional subset in logic closed without appeal to the consequence dimensional subset. In other words, only reality provides full means of decidability.

    Or translated differently, there just as there is little action value in game theory and little action value in more than single regression analysis, there is little value after first order logic, since decidability is provided by appeal to additional information in additional dimensions rather than its own. Which is, as far as I know, the principal lesson of analytic philosophy and the study of logic, of the 20th century.

    Or as I might restate it, we regress into deeper idealism through methodological specialization than is empirically demonstrable in value returned. Then we export these ‘ideals’ as pseudosciences to the rest of the population. This leading to wonderful consequences like the copenhagen consensus. Or the many worlds hypothesis, or String Theory. Or keynesian economics. Or the (exceedingly frustrating) nonsense the public seems to fascinate over as a substitute for numerology, astrology, magic, and the rigorous hard work required

    FOUNDATIONS OF LOGIC

    The foundations of logic like those of mathematics are terribly simple as subsets of reality. But by doubling down in the 19th and 20th centuries all we have found is that we say rather nonsensical terms like ‘the axiom of choice’ or ‘limits’ rather than ‘undecidable without appeal to information provided by existential context’. After all, math is just the discipline of scale independent measurement, and the deduction that is possible given the precision of constant relations using identical unitary measures. Logic is nothing more than than set operations. Algorithms are nothing more than sequential operations restoring time. Operations are nothing more than algorithms restoring physical transformation, time and cost. etc.

    As a consequence, I find most of this kind of terminological discourse … silly hermeneutics. As Poincare stated ‘that isn’t math its philosophy’. Or as I would say, ‘with platonism we depart science and join theology. It may be secular theology in that it is ideal rather than supernatural, but it is theology none the less’.

    it is one thing to say ‘by convention in math (or logic or whatever dimension we speak of) we use this colloquialism (half truth) as a matter of convenience. It is not ‘true’ as in scientifically true. It is just the best approximation given the brevity we exercise in simplifying our work.

    There exists only one possible ‘True’: the most parsimonious and correspondent testimony one can speak in the available language in the given context. Everything else is a convention.

    Ergo, if you do not know the operational construction of the terms that you use, you do not know of what you speak. That does not mean you cannot speak truth any more than monkey cannot accidentally type one of the Sonnets.

    This is why the operationalist movement in math we call Intuitionism failed.

    Anyway. Well formed (grammatically correct) statements in math may or may not be decidable but our intention is to produce decidable statements. In symbolic logic, well formed (grammatically correct) statements may or may not be decidable. in logic (language), well formed (grammatically correct) statements are difficult to construct because of the categorical difference between constant relations (ideals in math), constant categories (ideals in formal logic), and inconstant categories (ordinary language). Furthermore the process of DEDUCTION using premises (or logical summation) limits us to utility of true statements. Ergo for that purpose statements can only evaluate to true or not-true (including false and undecidable). While for the purpose of INDUCTION (transfer of meaning by seeding free association, or the construction of possibility by the same means) seeks only possibility or impossibility not truth or falsehood.

    Now. I have written far too much already, so I won’t try to increase the precision of what I’ve written, but hopefully the answer is the same:

    How can you claim to make a truth proposition and demand precise language when your premises are mere demonstrably falsehoods used by convention?

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-02 10:58:00 UTC

  • NON PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY #1: “WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING”. This

    NON PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY #1: “WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING”.

    This is an illogical question – another pseudo-rational word game. A conflation of the ideal and the real. In order to ask this question, something must exist – namely the person asking the question – and we must be able to identify some ‘nothing’ to refer to. The word nothing, as far as I know, can only mean ‘nothing exists of consequence’ not the absence of existence. So, as far as I know, ‘nothing’ is impossible. In other words, nothing still requires existence (persistence) of whatever you call ‘nothing’ in contrast to ‘something’. I can’t imagine any ‘nothing’ that isn’t ‘something’ or a category of something within something. I can imagine various combinations of ignorance, error and falsehood. But I can’t imagine something that both exists (a referent of nothing) and does not exist at the same time. In other words, this is another problem of nonsense language. If operationally stated we find: “If I can perceive persistence, then why does that which I perceive persist? And so far we are at least close enough to an answer that we can say something always persists, the question is reducible to (a) what is its lifecycle? And (b) is that lifecycle unique, iterative, or a subset of a larger lifecycle?

    I keep a catalog of the kinds of bias and error man man suffers from in each era of his evolution of his knowledge. And if we subtract the theories reliant upon the errors and biases man suffers from, and leave only those theories that reflect constant simple observable laws of the universe, then the universe is merely constructed from a portfolio of positive and negative forces that act upon one another, and is constructed of a regular geometry of those forces little different from the ordinary universe we perceive at human scale, with the remote possibility that some of those forces propagate at speeds different from (both faster and slower) than the electromagnetic spectrum that we are currently able to react to and act upon.

    The error (evil) of platonism (Idealism) exists everywhere, just like the other forms of fictionalism. But just as categories must be tested by logic, and logic tested by correspondence, and correspondence tested by operations, and operations tested by full accounting, fictionalism cannot survive tests of operational construction. Whether that fictionalism be the supernatural(pseudo mythical), the ideal (pseudo-real), the pseudo-rational, or the pseudo-scientific. The reason all those forms of fictionalism exist, is simply the failure to fully test the available dimensions against ignorance, error, bias and deceit.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-27 20:00:00 UTC

  • Once you provide a means of decidability regardless of preference or good, the p

    Once you provide a means of decidability regardless of preference or good, the problem is then falsifying it. That’s what it means to say a ‘law’: I can’t falsify this and I can testify to it.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-27 09:28:00 UTC

  • RELIGIONS: SEPARATING THE OPERATIONS FROM THE CONTENT I understand the value of

    RELIGIONS: SEPARATING THE OPERATIONS FROM THE CONTENT

    I understand the value of Myth(Decidability), Ritual (Mass), and Mindfulness (prayer).

    But do you understand that there is nothing in what you call ‘christianity’ that cannot be produced by truthful means, rather than lies?

    So my opinion is, like a woman, or a child, you cannot separate the OPERATIONS: teaching myths for the purpose of shared decidability, performing rituals for the purpose of shared trust reinforcing thost patterns of decidability, and performing contemplative disciplines for the purpose of adapting to those patterns of decidability – from the CONTENT of those operations.

    But that it is the OPERATIONS, regardless of the CONTENT that produce the ‘goods’ that result from performing those operations.

    So as far as I know, you are ‘owned’ by your inability to deflate the operations, the content, and the training from those operations. And you treat the content as material, when it is the operations that are material regardless of the content.

    It is trivially easy to reform our church. It is trivially easy to reform the operations in our churches. And trivially easy to reform the mythos of our churches. That is because the good that is in our churches is the use of Myth, Ritual, and Mindfulness to produce that High Trust of the European Peoples.

    And we do not need the lies of the semites, who do not practice this high trust. We do not need the mental disease of the semites, to demand submission – that is the antithesis of our european peoples.

    We have plenty of myths and decidability, we can always use the Feast (Church/Mass) ritual of Toast (preaching), Oath (Creed), Feast (bread) as an opportunity for creating common decidability and common trust.

    And we can always use the some combination of self-analysis (Stoicism), internal dialog with archetypes (prayer), mindless repetitive chanting, and mental discipline (meditation) to adapt ourselves to the order we create by those means of decidability.

    The difference is that we will need to return to the era when the men who lead such civic ceremonies are worthy of our audience.

    Where the decidability provided by the content is materially transcendent, heroic, good, true, and beautiful – in the european heroic ethic not the semitic tyrannical.

    Where the Feast Ritual heralds western man’s achievements in the real world, not the lies of the semitic world that imprisons men in ignorance.

    We can reform our church.

    But the first step is realizing that you err. That you value the content rather than the operations. But that you are wrong. It is the operations regardless of the content that makes a religion valuable.

    And most importantly: there is no content on earth superior to the european scientific, technical legal, political, economic, cultural and historical.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-24 08:06:00 UTC