Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • Ten Thoughts on Money

    Q&A: –“Curt, have you written much on money?”– I’ve written a bit , here and there, mostly on:

    1) the fact that fiat money is equal to shares in the state/economy, not notes or money. Moreover, I’ve tried to impress upon people that colloquial money (various mediums of exchange in sufficient volume to produce market price signals) and all its forms, differ substantially from money proper. And I’ve tried to correct mises and the bitcoin community on their uses of these terms – because it’s fraudulent to compare these media as having the same properties. They don’t’. 2) it’s not clear that people have any right to the appreciation of fiat money, nor whether they have a right to its store of value for any extended period of time (longer than a business cycle). 3) We should use multiple currencies for multiple purposes so that rates of inflationary dilution are purpose-specific. 4) There is no need to continue distribution of liquidity through the banking system as we did when there was hard currency. We can directly issue liquidity to consumers and cause spending without giving profits or power to the banking and finance system. This forces business and industry to fight for consumers, rather than fight for access to credit. 5) Money is information and the more kinds of money the more kinds of information we have that is less subject to distortion. I could write a book on this subject alone. 6) In theory money is neutral, in practice it is not. Not because prices are not eventually equilibrated, but because this process of equilibration works through the economy disruptively and without uniformity. 7) Lending should be regulated to the same degree as law, and debt should not be resellable because a price (value) is subjectively constructed and non-transferrable, and non-insurable. 8 ) Law has been abused to work in the favor of hazard-creation by lenders, and this should be inverted, and bankruptcy protection increased so that lenders have an extremely difficult time collecting and instead take fewer risks and take less responsibility for distributing liquidity. 9) intergenerational redistribution must be stopped, and the singaporean model adopted so that the future is calculable. Furthermore, this money cannot be touched by creditors or the state, or anyone else for that matter. 10 ) I would prefer that the government collected fees on all financial transactions rather than income taxes. I believe fees are necessary for the production of insurance of last resort, and those discretionary commons that make us competitive. Those are the major topics.

  • Ten Thoughts on Money

    Q&A: –“Curt, have you written much on money?”– I’ve written a bit , here and there, mostly on:

    1) the fact that fiat money is equal to shares in the state/economy, not notes or money. Moreover, I’ve tried to impress upon people that colloquial money (various mediums of exchange in sufficient volume to produce market price signals) and all its forms, differ substantially from money proper. And I’ve tried to correct mises and the bitcoin community on their uses of these terms – because it’s fraudulent to compare these media as having the same properties. They don’t’. 2) it’s not clear that people have any right to the appreciation of fiat money, nor whether they have a right to its store of value for any extended period of time (longer than a business cycle). 3) We should use multiple currencies for multiple purposes so that rates of inflationary dilution are purpose-specific. 4) There is no need to continue distribution of liquidity through the banking system as we did when there was hard currency. We can directly issue liquidity to consumers and cause spending without giving profits or power to the banking and finance system. This forces business and industry to fight for consumers, rather than fight for access to credit. 5) Money is information and the more kinds of money the more kinds of information we have that is less subject to distortion. I could write a book on this subject alone. 6) In theory money is neutral, in practice it is not. Not because prices are not eventually equilibrated, but because this process of equilibration works through the economy disruptively and without uniformity. 7) Lending should be regulated to the same degree as law, and debt should not be resellable because a price (value) is subjectively constructed and non-transferrable, and non-insurable. 8 ) Law has been abused to work in the favor of hazard-creation by lenders, and this should be inverted, and bankruptcy protection increased so that lenders have an extremely difficult time collecting and instead take fewer risks and take less responsibility for distributing liquidity. 9) intergenerational redistribution must be stopped, and the singaporean model adopted so that the future is calculable. Furthermore, this money cannot be touched by creditors or the state, or anyone else for that matter. 10 ) I would prefer that the government collected fees on all financial transactions rather than income taxes. I believe fees are necessary for the production of insurance of last resort, and those discretionary commons that make us competitive. Those are the major topics.

  • Why Do Central Banks Use Intermediaries?

    IMPORTANT: WHY DO CENTRAL BANKS USE INTERMEDIARIES? —“Question: why do central banks continue to do stimulus through intermediaries like banks when they can wire the money directly to consumers? Eg. by issuing them with prepaid cards to spend?”— Ayelam I am not an econometrician but I suspect I’ll hold my own against any living econometric economist on this subject: The answer consists of the following components: (1) The distribution of physical money through the banks was a necessity. (2 )There was no other distribution channel available until perhaps 20 years ago at the earliest. (I remember how hard it was to get people to use credit cards). (3) Digital money is actually not a very old technology and we have just recently begun to understand it.Governments move very slowly and this will disrupt the entire economy in (good) ways that will totally fuck the institutional investors that fund DC campaigns with ill-gotten gains unearned, since they merely distribute a costless good to the highest bidder for a commission. They are auctioneers. That is all. (4) The banker/crediting agency investigates the probability and insures the probability that the debt will be repaid. This INSURER function is actually what bankers do: insure the shareholders (citizens) that their fiat money (shares) are used judiciously. This argument has increasingly become specious because we have such accurate actuarial data now that we can predict the performance of a bucket of consumers with nearly perfect accuracy. 4A) It benefits the various rent seekers and politicians if all fiscal(spending) stimulus to the economy is provided by government to government suppliers just as all monetary stimulus is distributed through the financial sectors. What would happen to the construction of high cost government projects when consumers were able to say “but I could have used that money here at home?”. (5) There is a (mistaken) belief that the time value of productivity for the purpose of consumption (consumer income) needs interest for calculation purposes just as business and industry need interest for economic calculation purposes. This is a long conversation but I don’t see how consumption is any kind of entrepreneurial risk. it’s the cause of entrepreneurial risk. (6) The very idea was kind of poisoned by the MMT crowd. Particularly – we do not know the impact it would have on interest rates. And at present interest rates are the metric that the world uses to control the ‘price’ of money(which is not driven by cost of production), by regulating its ‘manufacture’ by states. Without interest rates we need another measure. This measure has been in dispute for many years, with some favoring some sort of purchasing power metric, and others favoring some productivity metric, and others some ‘growth’ metric. But if money loses its intertemporal predictability then economic calculation of contracts over any period of time increases and with that, the cost of all production, and therefore all prices, increases rapidly. (remember that money = influence that saves time and is therefore a store of time-in-production. Fiat money issued as credit money is a risk that the time will be more than saved over the interim period. (7) The moral hazard of distributing directly to consumers is frightening because unlike market activity, where people blame employers and the economy when activity shrinks and so does their income, we are fearful that people will change from living paycheck to variable paycheck, to living from monetary distribution to monetary distribution but retaliate politically against the government in the case of shrinking. Thereby all but making total communism a deterministic outcome – which is why some of the left advocate for it. (8) With the advent of leftist influence on the judiciary, it is no longer a social science bound by natural laws. So we have no means of putting such a policy into the constitution such that it’s immutable. Thereby eliminating the hazards articulated above. (9) I was nobody in 2008-2009 when I was talking about it, but as far as I know Galbraith was the only mainstream guy who articulated this problem correctly, and he correctly advocated the direct payment of mortgage debt. It would have price stabilized the world economy. But it would have fucked (undeserving) institutional debt-holders the same way greek debt holders were fucked. (His death was untimely) And conservatives (wrongly) thought it created a moral hazard (which would have been solved by giving people credit lines who had acted properly, and credit lines to those people over the next x years who were able to buy a house. ) I’ve also recommended limiting mortgages to 15 years in order to limit this problem further. Why? all increases in salary are eventually absorbed by housing prices and redistributed to long term property holders (indirect retirement savings accounts ). (10) So net net, we can buy or nationalize the ( worst )credit card company (mastercard), and distribute liquidity directly to consumers, as long as we put constitutional safeguards in place, and as long as the amount is dependent upon the overall economy. And let industry and business determine the interest rate, which should drop dramaticlaly if we reidstribute to consumers. Because the truth is that fiat currency is such an advantage that a people cannot compete without it. Competing currencies and commodities exist but they are not anywhere near as price stabilized as fiat money CAN be. So we are always going to have it. Probably digital will replace it and it will have to because the abuse of it has gotten out of hand. What real purpose does government debt serve over simply printing money and paying with it? You pay the price of interest in order to delay the equilibrial neutrality of money working through the economy. In other words, the faster new money moves the faster prices in the existing cycle of production adjust. Fast adjustment is bad if it interferes with production ( planning ) cycles. So instead we pay interest and sell government debt so that we inflate away the interest at about the same rate that prices adjust in the economy. If you understand it, then it seems ridiculous. A clever network of lies not really different from religion.

  • Why Do Central Banks Use Intermediaries?

    IMPORTANT: WHY DO CENTRAL BANKS USE INTERMEDIARIES? —“Question: why do central banks continue to do stimulus through intermediaries like banks when they can wire the money directly to consumers? Eg. by issuing them with prepaid cards to spend?”— Ayelam I am not an econometrician but I suspect I’ll hold my own against any living econometric economist on this subject: The answer consists of the following components: (1) The distribution of physical money through the banks was a necessity. (2 )There was no other distribution channel available until perhaps 20 years ago at the earliest. (I remember how hard it was to get people to use credit cards). (3) Digital money is actually not a very old technology and we have just recently begun to understand it.Governments move very slowly and this will disrupt the entire economy in (good) ways that will totally fuck the institutional investors that fund DC campaigns with ill-gotten gains unearned, since they merely distribute a costless good to the highest bidder for a commission. They are auctioneers. That is all. (4) The banker/crediting agency investigates the probability and insures the probability that the debt will be repaid. This INSURER function is actually what bankers do: insure the shareholders (citizens) that their fiat money (shares) are used judiciously. This argument has increasingly become specious because we have such accurate actuarial data now that we can predict the performance of a bucket of consumers with nearly perfect accuracy. 4A) It benefits the various rent seekers and politicians if all fiscal(spending) stimulus to the economy is provided by government to government suppliers just as all monetary stimulus is distributed through the financial sectors. What would happen to the construction of high cost government projects when consumers were able to say “but I could have used that money here at home?”. (5) There is a (mistaken) belief that the time value of productivity for the purpose of consumption (consumer income) needs interest for calculation purposes just as business and industry need interest for economic calculation purposes. This is a long conversation but I don’t see how consumption is any kind of entrepreneurial risk. it’s the cause of entrepreneurial risk. (6) The very idea was kind of poisoned by the MMT crowd. Particularly – we do not know the impact it would have on interest rates. And at present interest rates are the metric that the world uses to control the ‘price’ of money(which is not driven by cost of production), by regulating its ‘manufacture’ by states. Without interest rates we need another measure. This measure has been in dispute for many years, with some favoring some sort of purchasing power metric, and others favoring some productivity metric, and others some ‘growth’ metric. But if money loses its intertemporal predictability then economic calculation of contracts over any period of time increases and with that, the cost of all production, and therefore all prices, increases rapidly. (remember that money = influence that saves time and is therefore a store of time-in-production. Fiat money issued as credit money is a risk that the time will be more than saved over the interim period. (7) The moral hazard of distributing directly to consumers is frightening because unlike market activity, where people blame employers and the economy when activity shrinks and so does their income, we are fearful that people will change from living paycheck to variable paycheck, to living from monetary distribution to monetary distribution but retaliate politically against the government in the case of shrinking. Thereby all but making total communism a deterministic outcome – which is why some of the left advocate for it. (8) With the advent of leftist influence on the judiciary, it is no longer a social science bound by natural laws. So we have no means of putting such a policy into the constitution such that it’s immutable. Thereby eliminating the hazards articulated above. (9) I was nobody in 2008-2009 when I was talking about it, but as far as I know Galbraith was the only mainstream guy who articulated this problem correctly, and he correctly advocated the direct payment of mortgage debt. It would have price stabilized the world economy. But it would have fucked (undeserving) institutional debt-holders the same way greek debt holders were fucked. (His death was untimely) And conservatives (wrongly) thought it created a moral hazard (which would have been solved by giving people credit lines who had acted properly, and credit lines to those people over the next x years who were able to buy a house. ) I’ve also recommended limiting mortgages to 15 years in order to limit this problem further. Why? all increases in salary are eventually absorbed by housing prices and redistributed to long term property holders (indirect retirement savings accounts ). (10) So net net, we can buy or nationalize the ( worst )credit card company (mastercard), and distribute liquidity directly to consumers, as long as we put constitutional safeguards in place, and as long as the amount is dependent upon the overall economy. And let industry and business determine the interest rate, which should drop dramaticlaly if we reidstribute to consumers. Because the truth is that fiat currency is such an advantage that a people cannot compete without it. Competing currencies and commodities exist but they are not anywhere near as price stabilized as fiat money CAN be. So we are always going to have it. Probably digital will replace it and it will have to because the abuse of it has gotten out of hand. What real purpose does government debt serve over simply printing money and paying with it? You pay the price of interest in order to delay the equilibrial neutrality of money working through the economy. In other words, the faster new money moves the faster prices in the existing cycle of production adjust. Fast adjustment is bad if it interferes with production ( planning ) cycles. So instead we pay interest and sell government debt so that we inflate away the interest at about the same rate that prices adjust in the economy. If you understand it, then it seems ridiculous. A clever network of lies not really different from religion.

  • Exchanging Opportunity for Parasitism for Opportunity for Homesteading.

    Proximity decreases opportunity costs. We can also argue that as a consequence of reduced opportunity costs we can create opportunities otherwise impossible. And as a consequence, we compete to discover and homestead those opportunities. We make this density possibly by the high cost of forgoing opportunities for imposing costs. Thereby preserving cooperation despite an equal decrease in the opportunity for parasitism. As such we exchange the increased cost of forgoing opportunity for parasitism for the decreased costs of opportunity for homesteading opportunities.

    This concept is missing from the literature. We focus too much upon money that provides numerous additional discounts. And we focus too little operationally on the creation of conditions that make trade and money possible. This oversight is related to the other errors of the enlightenment

  • Exchanging Opportunity for Parasitism for Opportunity for Homesteading.

    Proximity decreases opportunity costs. We can also argue that as a consequence of reduced opportunity costs we can create opportunities otherwise impossible. And as a consequence, we compete to discover and homestead those opportunities. We make this density possibly by the high cost of forgoing opportunities for imposing costs. Thereby preserving cooperation despite an equal decrease in the opportunity for parasitism. As such we exchange the increased cost of forgoing opportunity for parasitism for the decreased costs of opportunity for homesteading opportunities.

    This concept is missing from the literature. We focus too much upon money that provides numerous additional discounts. And we focus too little operationally on the creation of conditions that make trade and money possible. This oversight is related to the other errors of the enlightenment

  • Another way to look at compensation is that we are rewarded by our degree of unh

    Another way to look at compensation is that we are rewarded by our degree of unhappiness in the service of others. This is why happiness goes down in most highly compensated jobs. Why people in lower paying helping and service jobs are happier than people in highly compensated competitive jobs. And why there is greater exit from highly paid competitive careers than there is from the lower compensated helpful careers.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-10-07 06:31:00 UTC

  • Adding Depth To Taleb’s Insight That Minority Rule Is Superior To Majority.

    (Shhh. Its all in the incentives.) Nassim, (edited for clarity) I’ll fortify your thought experiment a bit. To the best of my knowledge the general argument that reflects the evidence is this: 1) The slower the rotation of elites, the more consistent the policies, the least ‘virtue signaling expenditure’, the least waste, and the least fragility. Consistent policy allows long-term low-cost investment in commons. Preserves knowledge in the administrators. 2) The longer term the incentives the more capital will be accumulated in all its forms. So, Monarchies have the best intertemporal incentives, houses of ‘lords’ so to speak the next best, Westminster/German model parliaments the next, and democratically elected representatives in the American model the worst incentives. Germans seem to produce consistent policies, yet can still be removed from office. 3) Minorities face higher consequences if deposed from power than members of a majority, and they are easier to depose, so they have both incentive to rule well (reduce cost of defense), and to maintain rule(preserve their investments). (The HAN, RUSSIANS/Muscovites), and the TEUTONS/Germanics understood this. The Europeans no longer do. They lost this sentiment in the world wars. Aside from Jefferson’s attempt to codify natural law in an extant document and order, America has been a very bad influence on the world since its revolution.) 4) The more thorough the rule of law, the higher the trust, the faster the economic velocity. So, Rule of law (common, judge-discovered, natural law) is more important in producing good policy than the form of government if the aristocracy (martial class) is large enough. If a professional bureaucracy can form prior to the expansion of the franchise, then Continental Law can function as well as Common Law with a smaller aristocracy (martial class). 5) So, most civilizations fail to defeat i) Malthus, ii) Rent Seekers(corruption), iii) Familism(corruption) for any one of these reasons: (a) inability to form a military/martial/nobility class capable of enforcing rule of law and profiting from its enforcement (Nobility). (b) inability to concentrate wealth without ever-expanding corruption (Homogeneity), (c) inability to direct proceeds to the production of commons(universalism), (d) inability to create a class capable of sustained policy development (minority control) So it’s not so much that it’s minority rule, but that it’s CONSISTENT rule, with intertemporal incentives, while still able to ‘throw the bums out’, with rule of law limiting their actions, and suppressing corruption. And minority rule tends to be more consistent. (And monarchies were more tolerant.) Net: incentives of representative governments constantly trying to hold to their positions produce the worst policy because they have the worst of all incentives: urgency and unaccountability. Reversal: If you are in a heterogeneous, tribal, familial, civilization, lacking a militia (universal military), and a large enough middle class to demand and require rule of law, and if you have its opposite (universal theocracy), and if you do not have harsh winters to reduce the size of the underclasses without invoking moral hazard, you will have a very difficult time creating prosperity compared to a homogenous, outbred, militial civilization, with harsh winters, and putative rule of law. Nobility makes an administrative class, makes a middle class makes a working class, makes an over-reproductive underclass, and rents expand by all classes until the civilization is fragile or stagnant and cannot respond to shocks or competitors. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb
    October 1 at 5:15pm ·
    WHY THE MINORITY RULE DICTATES MORALS IN SOCIETIES, A PROBABILITISTIC ARGUMENT (addition) A probabilistic argument in favor of the minority rule dictating societal values is as follows. Wherever you look across societies and histories, you tend to find the same general moral laws prevailing, with some, but not significant, variations: do not steal (at least not from within the tribe); do not hunt orphans for pleasure; do not gratuitously beat up passers by for training, use instead a boxing bags (unless you are Spartan and even then you can only kill a limited number of helots for training purposes), and similar interdicts. And we can see these rules evolving over time to become more universal, expanding to a broader set, to progressively include slaves, other tribes, other species (animals, economists), etc. And one property of these laws: they are black-and-white, binary, discrete, and allow no shadow. You cannot steal “a little bit” or murder “moderately”. You cannot keep Kosher and eat “just a little bit” of pork on Sunday barbecues. Now it would be vastly more likely that these values emerged from a minority that the majority. Why? Take the following two theses: – Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule — the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to be emerge independently across populations. – What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be be black-and-white. An example. Consider that an evil person wants to poison the collective by putting some product into soda cans. He has two options. The first is cyanide, which obeys a minority rule: a drop of poison (higher than a small threshold) makes the entire liquid poisonous. The second is a “majority”-style poison; it requires more than half the liquid to be poisonous in order to kill. Now look at the inverse problem, a collection of dead people after a dinner party, and you need to investigate the cause. The local Sherlock Holmes would assert that conditional on the outcome that all people drinking the soda having been killed, the evil man opted for the first not the second option. Simply, the majority rule leads to fluctuations around the average, with a high rate of survival. The black-and-white character of these societal laws can be explained with the following. Assume that under a certain regime, when you mix white and dark blue in various combinations, you don’t get variations of light blue, but dark blue. Such a regime is vastly more likely to produce dark blue than another rule that allows more shades of blue. https://medium.com/…/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictators…

  • Adding Depth To Taleb’s Insight That Minority Rule Is Superior To Majority.

    (Shhh. Its all in the incentives.) Nassim, (edited for clarity) I’ll fortify your thought experiment a bit. To the best of my knowledge the general argument that reflects the evidence is this: 1) The slower the rotation of elites, the more consistent the policies, the least ‘virtue signaling expenditure’, the least waste, and the least fragility. Consistent policy allows long-term low-cost investment in commons. Preserves knowledge in the administrators. 2) The longer term the incentives the more capital will be accumulated in all its forms. So, Monarchies have the best intertemporal incentives, houses of ‘lords’ so to speak the next best, Westminster/German model parliaments the next, and democratically elected representatives in the American model the worst incentives. Germans seem to produce consistent policies, yet can still be removed from office. 3) Minorities face higher consequences if deposed from power than members of a majority, and they are easier to depose, so they have both incentive to rule well (reduce cost of defense), and to maintain rule(preserve their investments). (The HAN, RUSSIANS/Muscovites), and the TEUTONS/Germanics understood this. The Europeans no longer do. They lost this sentiment in the world wars. Aside from Jefferson’s attempt to codify natural law in an extant document and order, America has been a very bad influence on the world since its revolution.) 4) The more thorough the rule of law, the higher the trust, the faster the economic velocity. So, Rule of law (common, judge-discovered, natural law) is more important in producing good policy than the form of government if the aristocracy (martial class) is large enough. If a professional bureaucracy can form prior to the expansion of the franchise, then Continental Law can function as well as Common Law with a smaller aristocracy (martial class). 5) So, most civilizations fail to defeat i) Malthus, ii) Rent Seekers(corruption), iii) Familism(corruption) for any one of these reasons: (a) inability to form a military/martial/nobility class capable of enforcing rule of law and profiting from its enforcement (Nobility). (b) inability to concentrate wealth without ever-expanding corruption (Homogeneity), (c) inability to direct proceeds to the production of commons(universalism), (d) inability to create a class capable of sustained policy development (minority control) So it’s not so much that it’s minority rule, but that it’s CONSISTENT rule, with intertemporal incentives, while still able to ‘throw the bums out’, with rule of law limiting their actions, and suppressing corruption. And minority rule tends to be more consistent. (And monarchies were more tolerant.) Net: incentives of representative governments constantly trying to hold to their positions produce the worst policy because they have the worst of all incentives: urgency and unaccountability. Reversal: If you are in a heterogeneous, tribal, familial, civilization, lacking a militia (universal military), and a large enough middle class to demand and require rule of law, and if you have its opposite (universal theocracy), and if you do not have harsh winters to reduce the size of the underclasses without invoking moral hazard, you will have a very difficult time creating prosperity compared to a homogenous, outbred, militial civilization, with harsh winters, and putative rule of law. Nobility makes an administrative class, makes a middle class makes a working class, makes an over-reproductive underclass, and rents expand by all classes until the civilization is fragile or stagnant and cannot respond to shocks or competitors. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb
    October 1 at 5:15pm ·
    WHY THE MINORITY RULE DICTATES MORALS IN SOCIETIES, A PROBABILITISTIC ARGUMENT (addition) A probabilistic argument in favor of the minority rule dictating societal values is as follows. Wherever you look across societies and histories, you tend to find the same general moral laws prevailing, with some, but not significant, variations: do not steal (at least not from within the tribe); do not hunt orphans for pleasure; do not gratuitously beat up passers by for training, use instead a boxing bags (unless you are Spartan and even then you can only kill a limited number of helots for training purposes), and similar interdicts. And we can see these rules evolving over time to become more universal, expanding to a broader set, to progressively include slaves, other tribes, other species (animals, economists), etc. And one property of these laws: they are black-and-white, binary, discrete, and allow no shadow. You cannot steal “a little bit” or murder “moderately”. You cannot keep Kosher and eat “just a little bit” of pork on Sunday barbecues. Now it would be vastly more likely that these values emerged from a minority that the majority. Why? Take the following two theses: – Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule — the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to be emerge independently across populations. – What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be be black-and-white. An example. Consider that an evil person wants to poison the collective by putting some product into soda cans. He has two options. The first is cyanide, which obeys a minority rule: a drop of poison (higher than a small threshold) makes the entire liquid poisonous. The second is a “majority”-style poison; it requires more than half the liquid to be poisonous in order to kill. Now look at the inverse problem, a collection of dead people after a dinner party, and you need to investigate the cause. The local Sherlock Holmes would assert that conditional on the outcome that all people drinking the soda having been killed, the evil man opted for the first not the second option. Simply, the majority rule leads to fluctuations around the average, with a high rate of survival. The black-and-white character of these societal laws can be explained with the following. Assume that under a certain regime, when you mix white and dark blue in various combinations, you don’t get variations of light blue, but dark blue. Such a regime is vastly more likely to produce dark blue than another rule that allows more shades of blue. https://medium.com/…/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictators…

  • Emotions: They’re Just “Treats And Scoldings” For Being A Good Labrador Retrievers On Behalf Of Our Genes.

    All our emotions are explicable as rewards or punishments for the discovery of, pursuit of, obtaining of, hoarding of, consumption of, resources of every conceivable kind. That’s it. The universe is a simple place with simple rules of operation. Man is a simple creature with simple rules of operation. We seek to acquire, preserve, and consume, that which is to our advantage.

    It’s just that we’re pretty amazing in the scope of things we can use to our advantage. We haven’t discovered anything new to eat on this planet in 200 years. Think about that. It’s a big planet when there are just a few tens of millions of us. We haven’t found a new basic chemical reaction in quite a while. We haven’t found a basic metallurgical reaction in quite a while. We are pretty good at searching and finding. Actually, we’re scary good at it. To the point where the basic problem of scientific investigation today is just the cost of basic research given the energy requirements for many of our investigations. It’s the accumulation of logical, mechanical, and cooperative tools that we create from basic resources, that make it possible for us to envision so many new possibilities. It’s so awesome. But our emotions are just drugs: rewards and punishments for being a good labrador retriever for our genes.