Curt Doolittle

Theme: Education

  • PERSONAL SKYPE CHATS ON LIBERTARIAN PHILOSOPHY AND PROPERTARIANISM. I know that

    PERSONAL SKYPE CHATS ON LIBERTARIAN PHILOSOPHY AND PROPERTARIANISM.

    I know that my work is a somewhat radical innovation. And I know that I can be challenging to understand. But I am better at argument in person than I am as a writer, because I can usually tailor the argument to your frame of reference one-on-one.

    If you have something you want to discuss. I’m always happy to chat with you over Skype as long as you can make a list of a one or more questions that you want to cover. We don’t have to follow the questions but I find that it’s a better use of time if people think about what they want to ask in advance.

    Caveat is that I’m in the Eastern European time zone (GMT +2), and that you have to give me an hour long window rather than a specific time. (Like many aspies, I am not very cognizant of the passage of time when I am working – and I’m pretty much always working.)

    If I am successful in my work then we will have a universal language, logic and grammar of objective morality based upon good science, rather than be the objects of intellectual ridicule that we are today. And the progressive, socialist, and postmoderns will have nowhere to run. And conservatives will have a formal moral language to use rather than their historicism and psychology.

    We have the right answers but we have the wrong arguments. I’m trying to fix that. 🙂

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-04 07:05:00 UTC

  • YOUR CHILDREN WELL. (ie: not the way we do it – at all)

    http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/unschooling_and_karl_popperTEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL. (ie: not the way we do it – at all)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-14 17:56:00 UTC

  • “You see, …. *I’m* the enemy. Because I like to think, I like to read. I’m int

    –“You see, …. *I’m* the enemy. Because I like to think, I like to read. I’m into freedom of speech, freedom of choice. I’m the kind of guy who would sit in the greasy spoon and think “Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the big rack of Barbecued spare ribs with the side order of gravy fries?” I *want* high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese alright? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinatti in a non-smoking section. I wanna run around naked with green jell-o all over my body reading a Playboy magazine. Why? Because maybe I feel the need to okay pal? I’ve *seen* the future, you know what it is. It’s made by a 47 year-old virgin in gray pajamas soaking in a bubble bath, drinking a broccoli milkshake…”– Edgar Friendly

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-01 13:37:00 UTC

  • GEEK ERA *STUDY* OF A WORK – HUNTING FOR NECESSARY ARGUMENTS. Reading is differe

    GEEK ERA *STUDY* OF A WORK – HUNTING FOR NECESSARY ARGUMENTS.

    Reading is different from studying. Studying means to me, not understanding the author’s arguments so much as understanding what his various arguments could imply.

    0) I read the TOC and random paragraphs in the interesting chapters.

    1) If it’s worth reading in depth, I read it once – really, just to understand the author’s theory.

    2) I convert it to text – usually from pdf to text file. A couple chapters at a time. I can almost always find it on line. If I can’t then I literally scan it a chapter at a time by hand.

    3) I edit the text file so that it’s suitable for spoken works.

    4) I convert it to computer generated speech.

    5) I listen to it, usually three or four times. Sometimes more.

    I ‘study’ the work until I can’t find a single idea in there left to benefit from.

    The truth is, that most authors’ theories can be deduced from the TOC and the book jacket. Just as most books are really better stated as a ‘paper’ than a book. They’re simple.

    A lot of work is predicated upon theories that are nonsensical. And I simply can’t put up with reading them. Others are biased (Fukuyama’s) but I can see through the bias. Some are simply wrong, or failed attempts as pseudoscience (Mises praxeology and Rothbard’s ethics), some are obscurantist pseudo-scientific masks for ignorance (Freud), some obscurantist and fraudulent (Heidegger), some mystical (religion), and as such, I consider most of them ‘evil’ and I just ignore them.

    History tends to be a little less victim of stupidity than philosophy. And as Durant said, the answers to questions of man are in history, not in philosophy. There are no answers there.

    Very few works are substantial enough (like Hayek’s) to actually STUDY. Some works are just so large (histories) that I find I have to listen to them a few times before I’ve exhausted the possibilities that the author has made possible.

    I guess one of the things that helps us study others is that, we write to understand and communicate to others our understanding. Books are experiments. I know some people seem to have much higher reading comprehension to me, because they’re trying to understand the author’s point of view. And I sort of don’t work that way. Instead, I simply am looking for theories. For arguments. Not justifications. But NECESSARY arguments.

    NECESSARY is very different from JUSTIFICATIONARY.

    And if you HUNT for NECESSARY arguments you will find very few of them. And when you do, it’s like finding buried treasure.

    There are very few necessary arguments.

    And fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange is one of them.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-01 12:47:00 UTC

  • “EDUCATION MAKES MEN CUNNING, BUT NOT MORAL” I wonder why conservatives understa

    “EDUCATION MAKES MEN CUNNING, BUT NOT MORAL”

    I wonder why conservatives understand morality so much better than libertarians, while libertarians understand economics so much better than conservatives.

    People who give priority to liberty seem to demonstrate a higher demand for stimulation. We’re the minority. The Info-vores.

    We love our arguments. Our philosophy. Our cunning….

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-27 04:03:00 UTC

  • FB is a really wonderful venue for arguing with the interested and informed clas

    FB is a really wonderful venue for arguing with the interested and informed classes. It’s not a very good venue for very complicated ideas though.

    But if you want to try to figure out how to take very complicated ideas (like the immorality of ‘convenient’ platonism) then the only way to do it is through a lot of trial and error. And the “interested and informed” are an excellent test of your ability to reduce an argument to tolerable terms.

    So while you can’t improve your theory here, you can improve your ability to present your theory.

    Fun stuff.

    🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-26 12:37:00 UTC

  • INFANTILIZED AND OBSOLESCENT “My biggest criticism of the American public educat

    INFANTILIZED AND OBSOLESCENT

    “My biggest criticism of the American public education system is it’s a 13-year preparation for industrial jobs that disappeared 20 years ago. An American 18 year old is neither educated nor trained. Most go on to another four years of a university where the primary focus is extending adolescence.” — Eric Field

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-24 10:03:00 UTC

  • ECONOMISTS IN CHINA –“For most academics not in China, it is difficult for them

    http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/02/the-life-of-a-western-economist-in-china.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.BTYhY3GZ.dpufWESTERN ECONOMISTS IN CHINA

    –“For most academics not in China, it is difficult for them to understand the level of scrutiny and monitoring we face on regular basis. Most professors have students assigned to monitor them and security officials approaching many people to report on our behavior. Our email is widely acknowledged, even by students, as being read. While there are some overt obvious forms of intimidation as I have detailed, much of it is also the “deal you can’t refuse” variety. There are no overt threats but the message is clear.”–

    See more at:

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 09:18:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    If Someone Tells You To Go To College To Get Ahead, Say ‘Watch This, Then We Can Talk’

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-20 16:34:00 UTC

  • THE VALUE OF ARGUING WITH THE TINFOIL HAT CROWD It is ABSOLUTELY valuable to arg

    THE VALUE OF ARGUING WITH THE TINFOIL HAT CROWD

    It is ABSOLUTELY valuable to argue with the Tinfoil Hat crowd, so that you can master the common rhetorical fallacies without relying on normative assumptions for defense. Normative assumptions are just another paradigmatic frame.

    As you move into more and more intellectual and academic debate, you realize that the only difference between the Yahoo-news-group idiots, the postmodern social science idiots, the scientistic idiots, and the public intellectual idiots is the density of the tinfoil. The nature of the individuals assumptions simply mature from:

    a) schizophrenic bias, to

    b) confirmation bias, to

    c) nihilistic bias, to

    d) pseudoscientific bias, to

    e) methodological bias, to

    f) paradigmatic bias.

    Almost no one gets to skeptical empiricism in the Popperian, and certainly not in the Poincaré models. You can end up like Paul Krugman and ignore the fact that what you’re deducing from your measurements about monetary policy is merely noise, when the military expansion of anglo rules of trade is the signal.

    You can end up like John Ralws and Sam Harris and confuse analogy with causality, then compounding your confusion by making the error of aggregation.

    The best defense I have made against these errors is to focus on defining and reconciling spectrums – the golden mean. You can make an assumptive line between two ideal types pretty easily – the least work path. But it’s much harder to make errors if you define the different spectrums and see how they intersect with one another. It is much harder to reconcile sets of definitions in ordered spectra with each other.

    And it is much easier with a rich language than an allegorical language. It is even easier in operational language.

    Or at least. As easy as it can be.

    WHICH IS WHY I”M ALWAYS WRITING LISTS (ordered sets).

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-04 04:39:00 UTC