Curt Doolittle

Theme: Grammar

  • WE CANNOT THINK WITHOUT METAPHYSICAL BIASES Given that Don Finnegan has just hit

    WE CANNOT THINK WITHOUT METAPHYSICAL BIASES

    Given that Don Finnegan has just hit a nerve by reminding me about Friedman’s perspective on Irish Law, I’m going to throw something out here that may not be as obvious and important as it seems.

    As usual it might take me a bit to get there. But I think it’s worth the journey.

    1) MAN MUST SENSE

    2) MAN MUST PERCEIVE

    3) MAN MUST REMEMBER

    4) MAN MUST CALCULATE (PLAN)

    5) MAN MUST CHOOSE.

    6) MAN MUST ACT ON HIS CHOICE, AND HAS NOT EMPIRICALLY DEMONSTRATED HIS CHOICE UNTIL HE HAS ACTED.

    7) MAN MUST CHOOSE WITH INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION, BECAUSE OUTWITTING NATURE IS HIS ONLY CHANCE FOR PROFIT.

    It is impossible to make guesses without some basis for decision. And every civilization constructs a set of narratives that contain those metaphysical means of decision making. Those rules or guidelines, or recommendations not only make decisions possible, and rational, in the presence of insufficient informaiton, but the biases contained in those metaphysical assumptions allow us to FUND by micropayments, of all kinds, our norms. We create a reality with them. And we cooperate at the metaphysical level. (We have to.) We couldn’t think otherwise.

    The truth is that in almost no circumstance can humans make decisions as a group without shared metaphysical assumptions. Sure, without property man cannot form a division of knowledge and labor. But without metaphysical value judgements groups cannot cooperate at all.

    We have a healthy literature of cultural differences in cognition. Cultural differences in verbal and spatial intelligence, and cultural and genetic differences in the distribution of intelligence. The east and west differ between emphasis on verb and noun, on connectivity versus particularism. On constitution versus Shape.

    Most importantly, they differ ON BALANCE VERSUS TRANSFORMATION: “The purpose of man is to bend nature to his will, and to leave the world better for having lived in it”. That is the western metaphysics. Almost everything can be reduced to that statement of individual action. “Truth and debate mean the rapid resolution of differences by conflict” (See Donald Kagan); versus deception and delay until matters resolve themselves in the eastern sense (See Kissinger and Huntington.)

    And for example Jewish civilization and western civilization vary between the rebellious ethics of the bazaar and ghetto (Rothbardian ethics) and the land owning ethics and morality of the aristocratic egalitarians in the high trust society. These are metaphysical group assumptions that constitute the primary means of decision making for each group given it’s evolutionary strategy.

    LIBERTARIAN ERRORS

    For example, in the we often talk about Bouridans’ ass. The problem when you must choose between two orange vendors both offering equal oranges at equal prices. How do you choose? The only thing interesting about any exchange is this very question. Why? Because in large, any commodity is chosen not on price, or on consumption value, but on signal value, and the signal we most often pay for is contribution to our commons.

    ie: price is meaningless, since it is rarely what is purchased. We largely pay for signals and norms, and we pay for our factions and our preferences. And therefore all the Misesian and Rothbardian ordinal arguments to price are meaningless outside of commodities trading, and nothing at all to do with social order AT ALL PERIOD. In, fact, it is quite easy to case Rothbard and Mises as continuing the cultural tradition of intentionally ignoring the normative economy of land holders as a means of rebelling against it.

    When I first heard this argument from Dr Herbner, I was kind of stupefied that Misesians thought clearing preferences was ordinal predicated on price rather than a network (technically a graph) predicated largely on signals on norms, where price was merely the first marginal criteria. IN fact, the only way to argue for the ordinal versus the graph, was to argue AGAINST payment for norms, which puts Mises, Rothbard and Hayek into perspective. (And is why I criticize Mises and Rothbard. It’s why they failed.)

    IN OTHER WORDS

    WE DID NOT KONW OUR METAPHYSICS NOR WRITE IT DOWN. As such we have been largely defenseless against jewish rhetoric, and franco-germanic counter-englightenment figures, desperate to restore the church under the authority of the educational institution. Desperate to wrest control of society back into obscurant language and moral mysticism, and away from the hands of the engineers, scientists, lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs and consumers who create and maintain the society we live in.

    Conservatives are largely right. But WE HAVE FAILED TO ARTICULATE FREEDOM AND LIBERTY in rational terms with MORAL DEPTH sufficient for they and their numbers to adopt in favor of the west.

    We can be free amongst a majority of conservatives. But we cannot be free amongst a majority of statists. The state and democracy are just communism and are antithetical to liberty, private property, common law, personal sovereignty.

    PROGRESSIVE LIBERTARIANISM IS TO LIBERTY WHAT THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL WAS TO CLASSICAL LIBERALISM.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-03 15:07:00 UTC

  • S.E.P. ENTRY IS A TRAVESTY OF CONFUSION– There is no correspondence with NECESS

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/–THIS S.E.P. ENTRY IS A TRAVESTY OF CONFUSION–

    There is no correspondence with NECESSITY in this article. We are silent on the most important topic of our times: that is, that liberty is necessarily dependent upon property rights, and that is all.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-03 09:58:00 UTC

  • Given the difficulty in constructing and maintaining lies, and the value of obsc

    Given the difficulty in constructing and maintaining lies, and the value of obscurant language in constructing the least detectable and most successful lies, what book would you recommend that could best, through study, teach one to lie?

    Now, having made that estimation, what book has empirically demonstrated the greatest ability to teach people to lie?

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-26 19:12:00 UTC

  • DANIEL KEUHN : OBFUSCATORY LANGUAGE —“The greatest hesitation I have about the

    http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/donald-kuehn-none-of-them-along-the-line-know-what-any-of-its-worth-noted.htmlCONTRA DANIEL KEUHN : OBFUSCATORY LANGUAGE

    —“The greatest hesitation I have about the market economy is the wedge between demand and the willingness to pay that is the ability to pay.” —

    Curtd said…

    Hmm…

    (a) What is incorrectly allocated in the structure of production that allows people to desire to consume, but have nothing to exchange?

    (b) It is probably true that if we bypassed the financial system, and inflated the currency, by directly, say, crediting people’s debit cards – as long as it was done equally, that this would increase activity in the economy by redistributing savings and investment that are not moving, to consumers who desire to spend. We’ve been talking about this for a couple of decades now.

    (c) But why is there structural misallocation in the first place, and what misallocations are we creating this way?

    — We are creating poor single parent households. Would this activity increase the rate of creation of single parent households?

    — We are clearly failing at education of our work force compared to the Germans

    — We are clearly transforming old age savings into academic institution equity, and long term student debt, without performing any useful education other than sortition.

    — We are clearly immigrating vast numbers of low wage workers rather than employing our young and old at higher cost, and therefore creating two dependent classes.

    — We are clearly destroying the system of intergenerational cooperation of savings and borrowing, and the information system that goes with it.

    — We are clearly depending upon future anticipated growth, based upon a five hundred years of the spread of anglo absolute nuclear families, accounting, law, money and prices around the world by forcible conquest and unforced competition.

    (d) Instead: WHAT TROUBLES ME IS THE MISALLOCATION OF ACTION, CAPITAL, CREDIT, and POLICY THAT PREVENTS PEOPLE WHO DESIRE TO PAY FROM EARNING SOMETHING TO PAY FOR IT.

    One can use the artful word ‘wedge’ as a means of obfuscation: As OBSCURANT LANGUAGE, in order to obfuscate the underlying CAUSAL RELATIONS. This is what it means to speak as a leftist: using obscurant, and therefore, unscientific language. 🙂

    At least the right’s religious people speak in analogy not obfuscation. 🙂 The left’s religious people simply use obfuscatory language, and artificially select short time horizons so that they can ignore externalities. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 19:17:00 UTC

  • DOOLITTLE’S FACEBOOK MARKDOWN LANGUAGE Use the HIGHLIGHT flag for THOUGHT pieces

    DOOLITTLE’S FACEBOOK MARKDOWN LANGUAGE

    Use the HIGHLIGHT flag for THOUGHT pieces, and for silly stuff – don’t.

    USE ALL CAPS FOR TITLES

    (lower case parenthesis for tags)

    _Underscore For Book Titles_

    “Quotes For Article Titles”

    RE:”…for quoting comments…”

    —For block quotes—

    **for emphasis of an idea in a sentence**

    And INLINE ALL CAPS for key TERMS that can be visually scanned.

    And use … when you’ve cut from a quote,

    And [when you] have replaced words in a quote for clarity.

    STYLE

    My preference is for Oxford commas because my long sentences require clarity, so “a, b, and c” is preferable to a, b and c.

    There is a big difference between comma , semicolon ; and period.

    Your vocabulary should suit your audience. But that requires a lot of verbose, and imprecise language that is very easy to misinterpret.

    NOTE TO SELF: OPEN PERSONAL ISSUES IN WRITING

    (I am generally trying to convey a different causal sequence or emphasis on causal properties than we do in normal language. It is this articulation of causal dimensions that people find illuminating in my work. But it makes for very long sentences. I’ve found that over time, just through repetition I can usually simplify it down. And then when I use that chain of causes, repeatedly, people begin to grasp it fairly easily, with the same repetition. Hayek is very, very good at this problem and I struggle to emulate him whenever possible. There is a certain verbal tempo to his work, and that tempo facilitates articulating multiple causal axis while retaining comprehensibility. My short term memory is not as good as his was, and I do not necessarily think in words in the first place, so it is harder for me to construct sentences as well, but I work at it. )

    (My vocabulary, despite all my work at it, still scores as largely academic. But honestly I can’t take it down any further. I have to work on sentence structure and the organization of concepts instead. And that seems to be working if I just keep at it.)

    (Unfortunately, again, my programming history is a little closer to how I think, and reinforced my thinking, and was terribly damaging to my writing, which is a blend of spoken word and programmatic argument. So I tend to use periods, not as verbal cues, but as “end-concept” markers. And I should use more semicolons, and more periods, and shorter sentences. And I’m having a problem breaking those tendencies. Partly because I type at something like 100wpm, and don’t think about it. )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-20 10:24:00 UTC

  • PROPERTARIAN COMMENSURABILITY 1) Words make experiences commensurable. 2) Number

    PROPERTARIAN COMMENSURABILITY

    1) Words make experiences commensurable.

    2) Numbers make the imperceptible commensurable.

    3) Money makes subjective value commensurable.

    4) PROPERTY MAKES MORALS COMMENSURABLE.

    5) Reproductive strategy makes morals rational and non-arbitrary.

    The problem is, you have to define property as people actually use it, as they demonstrate by their actions.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-19 15:47:00 UTC

  • MORE ON MATHEMATICAL PLATONISM (For me. Pls ignore.) “Famously, Tarski (1936) pr

    MORE ON MATHEMATICAL PLATONISM

    (For me. Pls ignore.)

    “Famously, Tarski (1936) proved that no classical formal language could contain its own truth predicate, due to Liar’s paradox. As such, if we want to include a truth predicate, we are committed to a hierarchy of languages. Moreover, if consisting only of formal languages, this hierarchy does not collapse: at no level will a language Lm provide a truth predicate for a language Ln, where n ≥ m.”

    CD: Yes, but I can see that this is starting to go south already, confusing sets with semantics…

    “If one is not committed to strict formalism, there are far less

    problems with Tarskian truth. In particular, the hierarchy of

    languages can be collapsed. There are two ways of doing this. One

    can either move from formal to informal languages – where Tarski’s

    undefinability result does not hold in the strict sense – at some

    point in the hierarchy, or one can hold some level in the hierarchy

    to be of the language-to-world type. Philosophically these two

    strategies are largely equivalent, since we seem to have no way of

    describing the world outside language. This makes the job a lot

    easier for the non-formalist. Rather than try to explain a

    problematic relation between mathematical languages and mathematical reality, we can concentrate on characterizing the

    connection between our formal and pre-formal mathematical

    languages.”

    “What proof is to formal mathematics, truth is to pre-formal. We

    deal with mathematical proofs syntactically, but at the same time

    we as human beings think about them semantically.

    CD: Yes.

    “We cannot deny pre-formal thinking, and its need for semantical truth. However, this alone is not enough to show a substantial difference between truth and proof. Even though the existence of pre-formal mathematics cannot be reasonably contested, there is always the possibility that when it comes to truth, it is essentially superfluous; whatever we can achieve with truth, we could also achieve with proof alone.”

    CD: First, there is a very great difference between truth and proof if mathematics is platonistic and set based. But if it is marginally indifferent and non-platonic then there is no difference. So that’s my concern. But the question I have is, what externalities are produced? It’s a moral question. I know that’s hard to grasp. But a biologist who plays with viruses and a mathematician that teaches platonism both export risks onto others.

    “The second problem that the lack of reference causes for

    formalism is one that does not require semantical arguments, or

    indeed any sophisticated philosophical devices.”

    CD: I do not see that as a problem. Nor do I see the need for, or desire for, formalism.

    “It could be plausibly claimed that human thinking as we know it could not exist without some mathematical knowledge.

    CD: yes, this is correct. But the reason is not stated here.

    “But if mathematics has absolutely no reference, what reason do we have for picking one theory over another? It must be remembered here that this reference does not have to mean anything resembling a Platonic universe of mathematical ideas. Simply put, if we believe that 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 2 + 2 = 3, we must believe in some kind of reference. (It must be noted that I do not mean to use “some” as a hedge word here. My point throughout this work is that the relevant dichotomy is reference against no reference, rather than no reference against Platonist reference.)”

    CD: Yes, but if you wrote the argument as human actions in operational language you would not have this problem – which is purely linguistic. And obscurely so.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-26 14:25:00 UTC

  • NOTES ON MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY “…Mathematics is an established, going concern.

    NOTES ON MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY

    “…Mathematics is an established, going concern. Philosophy is as shaky

    as can be.”

    CD: This seems quaint, as it is meant to seem quaint by the author to illustrate the point. However, the problem of philosophy is one of “intermediacy”, rather than ends. To incorporate new discoveries and ideas into our system of thought. To develop some means of conceptual commensurability. WHile in the past, all domains were at some point parts of philosophy, the success of philosophy has been at casting off those domains. At present, the only remaining domain philosophy addresses is that of the commensurable integration of knew ideas into our body of knowledge. For this reason, philosophy, like money in the calculation plans, makes the moral and ethical world of action commensurable despite the disciplinary differences in method and goal. It may be that all philosophy does is protect us from catastrophic errors that may cause us harm, rather than provide any particular innovation. But the works of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Smith, Hume, Jefferson and Darwin are evidence enough that at times, our entire systems of thought must be reordered, and new values attached to causes and consequences. Or by contrast, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Freud, Heidegger and Rorty, who have tried to do the opposite: To restore immoral obscurantism as a revolt against modern empirical thought.

    “a distinct history in which philosophical theories of mathematics have not been required to conform to the practice of mathematics”

    CD: True, but I’m not doing that at all. In Propertarian ethics, I place no constraint on the practice of mathematics. We constrain only what can be SAID about mathematics, for ethical and MORAL reasons. I think that this is the problem that the various Revisionists have tried but failed to address: that philosophy is a social science, and mathematics is a pattern science, but when mathematicians speak of their discipline in public, or to students, or in writing, they are entering the public domain. In all manner of life we place limits on private activity if it has public consequences. In particular, we constrain the conceptual, verbal and physical creations of moral hazards. My criticism of mathematics on Propertarian grounds is not how math is practiced, it is the justification used in mathematics to explain it’s platonism-of-convenience, which in turn, as a matter of public discourse, creates the hazard of mystical platonism.

    So if the only constraint is that you must not communicate moral hazards, and that this merely alters the language of your justifications, then this is an internal cost that you may not morally export onto others just because it is convenient to do so.

    “One of the most important forms of revisionism in philosophy of mathematics of the latter part of 20th century has been extreme (strict) formalism (nominalism), and its ontological conclusion, Hartry Field’s (1980) fictionalism. According to it mathematical objects do not exist, and the formal axiomatic systems that form the core of mathematics do not refer to anything outside them. In other words, for the extreme formalist rules of proof and axioms

    are all there is to mathematics.”

    …

    “One main purpose of this work is to show that we do not. In this work that is called the problem of theory choice, and I will try to show it to be the most fundamental problem with strict formalist philosophy of mathematics. Simply put, I will argue that when taken to its logical conclusion, extreme formalism implies completely arbitrary mathematics: we would have no reason to prefer one set of axioms and rules of proof over another. That is a staggering conclusion, but we will see it is the only one that can be plausibly made if we reject all outer reference from mathematics. Fortunately it never comes to that, since mathematics without any outer reference does not make sense. We need to explain why we prefer some rules of proof and some axioms to others, and without any concept of reference this cannot be done. In this work I will argue that without any outer reference, mathematics as we know it could simply not be possible: it could not have developed, and it could not be learnt or practised. Sophisticated formal theories are the pinnacle of mathematics but, philosophically, they cannot be studied separately from all the non-formal background behind them.”

    CD: Agreed. It is impossible to escape correspondence between method and reality. But lets see where the author takes this…

    “In contemporary philosophy of science there is a visible emphasis on what may be called the sociological aspect. Rather than following the Carnapian ideal of neatly structured formal scientific theories, we are now more convinced that the actual practice of science should also have its mark in the philosophy of science. Overall, this is a healthy development, even though it has sparked off less than healthy theories where philosophy of science has become a bastardized form of sociology of science.”

    CD: I am a bit troubled by the difference between philosophy of science as a pursuit of truth and the sociology of science as moral and practical counsel. If they are not materially different then this statement makes sense. If instead, that philosophical pursuit of truth is substantially different from the moral and ethical pursuit of social inquiry then I think that this is a failure to understand the function of philosophy as commensurable and ethical, rather than consisting of metaphysical truths.

    “We seem to have a great deal of humility toward the methods and practices of

    physicists, but in mathematics we reserve a different, much more powerful and revisionist, role to philosophy. It is hard to see the reasons behind the difference in approaches. Perhaps it is because most philosophers of mathematics are more familiar with mathematics than philosophers of physics are with their subject. Modern physics requires, as well as a great deal of expertise, access to a lot of expensive equipment. Mathematics, for the most part, only requires the expertise. In this way most philosophers cannot understand the nature of modern physical inquiry as well as the nature of mathematical inquiry.”

    CD: I think the author is mistaken, just as philosophers are mistaken. The philosophical criticism of mathematics is precisely over its abandonment of correspondence and our failure to state the method of correspondence. I see philosophical criticism in the Revisionist and Intuitionist movements as moral objections to the recreation of magic and those criticisms, even if poorly conducted, poorly articulated, are correct. I don’t want to claim that Propertarianism solves this problem I simply think that propertarianism makes it possible to determine the cause of conflict between philosophers and the platonism of classical mathematics. That philosophers mistakenly see their discipline as the pursuit of truth rather than commensurability of systems of recipes is the causal problem. The criticism of the morality of mathematical platonism stands.

    “While ontologically minimal, extreme formalism makes mathematics impossible as a human endeavour – which is much more alarming than any intricate philosophical problems. In a nutshell, I will argue that if extreme formalism were correct, mathematics could not have developed in the first place – nor could it be practised today. It must not be forgotten that mathematics is a human endeavour just like all other sciences. If something is essential to mathematics as a human endeavour, we would seem to have good reason to believe it is also a factor in the philosophy of mathematics – or at least something we should expect a theory in philosophy of mathematics not to conflict with.”

    CD:I’m not sure where he’s going with this. I agree with the argument that there must be some sort of correspondence in mathematics, and I have argued that this correspondence is reducible to the practical limits of the human mind, which mathematics serves to compensate for. And I think that’s a sufficient argument when combined with commensurability and moral constraint. But perhaps I will learn more from the rest of the paper.

    Right now, I must go to the office and do my other job. 🙂

    https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/19432/truthpro.pdf?sequence=2

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-26 03:39:00 UTC

  • Troy Camplin Is there a reference that you can point me to that has say a mathem

    Troy Camplin

    Is there a reference that you can point me to that has say a mathematical proof on one end of a triangle, and a poem on another and a romance novel on the third?

    Someone must have done thus back when thesauruses and the permutations of narrative types were being worked out.

    How does experiential and factual communication map to all the forms we use to communicate?

    Sort of a Nolan chart for written communication. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-03 08:23:00 UTC

  • FUN COINCIDENCE Coursera has a course, starting monday, in Mathematical Philosop

    FUN COINCIDENCE

    Coursera has a course, starting monday, in Mathematical Philosophy addressing precisely the questions I’m asking – Although, from what I gather, it is an example of everything that is I believe is wrong with the discipline of logic. 🙂 “Know thy enemy” and all that sort of thing. Anyway. I thought that it would be fun to take. And to have whole bunch of people and some young professors to bounce ideas off of. I’m pretty sure I understand the domain now. It only took me two weeks I think. But I’m pretty sure that the infinite set problem is a trivial statement about constructing statements, not a meaningful statement about reality.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-29 07:28:00 UTC