Curt Doolittle

Theme: Institution

  • ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES DEFINITION A conspiracy theory is defined by four charact

    ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES

    DEFINITION

    A conspiracy theory is defined by four characteristics: (1) a group (2) acting in secret (3) to alter institutions, usurp power, avoid blame, obscure truth, or gain utility (4) at the expense of the common good.

    COMMON

    At least 50 percent of the population believe in at least one conspiracy theory. The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories. The more highly educated a participant, the less likely they are to believe conspiracy theories.

    Debunking conspiracy theories leads to a “backfire effect.” Efforts to debunk inaccurate political information leave people more convinced that false information is true than they would have otherwise.

    CAUSES

    They feel a lack of control over their lives. If people feel they don’t have control over a situation, they’ll try to make sense of it and find out what happened. Ostracism increases superstition and belief in conspiracies. And it’s not because the isolation is making them insane—it’s really just a search for more meaning in life. The effort of sense-making leads them to connect dots that aren’t necessarily connected in reality. Conversely, feeling a sense of control protects against believing conspiracy theories. If you give people a feeling of control, then they are less inclined to believe those conspiracy theories.

    CONFIRMATION BIAS – SEARCH FOR CONTROL

    Human beings have a very natural tendency to take in information that fits their own perspective of the world. And we tend to reject information or reject evidence that we disagree with. And we do that for a very simple reason. We don’t like it when we feel wrong. We don’t like it when people tell us we’re wrong because that damages our psychological well-being. We don’t like thinking that our view of the world, our perspective of the world is incorrect.

    So what tends to happen is that we look for information; we look for evidence that fits what we already know or what we already believe, and we try to avoid information or evidence that we either disagree with or that we know doesn’t fit with our perspective.

    TESTING FOR MENTAL ILLNESS

    As far as I know, if you use the serial-definition method rather than cold surveys, give the above definition, give examples of those that were true and false, and categorize a selection of conspiracy theories by the following list, you would find most people are less crazy than they appear.

    0) Unlikely or simply false.

    1) Misunderstanding of events to obtain ‘sensible world’

    2) Intentional misrepresentation of events for attention and ‘sensible world’.

    3) external consequences of common interest

    4) conspiracy of common interest (following natural incentives without intention of doing bad)

    5) conspiracy of common interest in self protection.

    6) conspiracy to commit harm in excuse for creating some greater good (military nonsense).

    7) conspiracy to commit harm to achieve personal or group ends.

    8) conspiracy to achieve power for a group.

    —“Incentives drive interest which creates intent. Conspiracies look at the end result and call foul play as opposed to using full accounting and stripping back the effect from the cause.”—Nick Zito

    Curt

    (compiled from various mainstream sources)

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-10 10:17:00 UTC

  • (to boettke) An unwanted voice of dissention from the analytic philosophy of sci

    (to boettke)

    An unwanted voice of dissention from the analytic philosophy of science.

    Not that the philosophy of science (testimony) is other than a bit of hand waving in economics, and not that a rare few might understand this but here is the correct restatement of ‘validity and justification et al’:

    (a) Economics(cooperation in production of good services and information for markets both private and common) is no different from any other science (science meaning application of the scientific method – and yes, there exists a method though poorly understood.)

    (b) “Science” refers to the use of logical and physical instruments to eliminate the full range of falsehoods: ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, partial accounting, suggestion and obscurantism, fictionalism and deceit – from our free associations. In other words, science is a moral and legal discipline just as are weights and measures, in the market for goods, services, information, and theories (ideas).

    (c) The means by which we arrive at or justify a theory (premises) conveys no truth content (warranty of truthfulness) to scientific propositions (See Critical Rationalism and Critical Preference).

    (d) The only truth content (warranty of truthfulness) is provided by the incremental increases in the survival of the theory within the limits proposed by as premises (pre) and scope(post). (Extensive Falsification).

    (e) The function of whichever synonym you choose: praxeology, intuitionism, operationalism, or strict construction – which in economics is performed by the subjective testing of a sequence of rational(voluntary) and reciprocal(moral) choices – is to falsify that an economic proposition is operationally possible, voluntary, and reciprocal (ie: possible and moral).

    (f) To deny this warranty of due diligence (as does the mainstream) is to abandon rule of law in economics, and to abandon the notion of voluntary cooperation, and to abandon moral limits in economics – thereby converting economics from a moral(truthful) to an immoral(deceptive) discipline – ergo, converting from the (austrian) attempt to improve institutions by the compensation for informational asymmetry(truthfulness and trust), to the mainstream attempt to maximize the disinformation necessary to cause the overextension of both consumption and sustainable patterns of specialization and trade, such that booms and busts continue to accumulate in duration and scope.

    (f) To test the truthfulness of a proposition (provide a warranty of due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, selective accounting, suggestion and obscurantism, fictionalism, and deceit) whether in economics or any other discipline requires that we test each dimension of actionable reality available to man – which we reduce to the common terms of consistency, correspondence, possibility, morality, full accounting including limits, and coherence (comprehensibility of the narrative),

    (g) But which more precisely refers to tests of each dimension: 1) categorical: consistency of identity, 2) logical: internal consistency, 3) empirical: externally correspondent, 4) existentially possible: operationally stated, 5) rational consistency: voluntary, 5) moral consistency: reciprocal 6) scope consistency: fully accounted including limits , and 7) coherent: narrated in coherence with all such dimensions.

    (h) if all these steps are performed we can claim we have performed due diligence against the full range of falsehoods in the full range of actionable dimensions regardless of the subject we speak of.

    The problem is, that since economics is reducible to the measurement of cooperation, even if biased toward to the production of goods and services, it is either an extension of rule of law by the natural law of reciprocity, (which is what the Austrian school attempts to confine it to, and the chicago school extends to insurance against shocks), or it is, as is the mainstream, an exercise in deception for the purpose of burning down civilizational capital by means of monetary disinformation (deception) for the purpose of purchasing virtue signals and premiums by the political, financial, and academic classes.

    My opinion, as someone who specializes in this question, is that it is the latter, and the austrians are a lone voice of morality in the cacophony of an immoral and pseudoscientific polity.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-09 15:38:00 UTC

  • So, the question is, *Who and what institutions, disciplines, and professions ar

    So, the question is, *Who and what institutions, disciplines, and professions are perpetuating justificationism?*

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-09 14:47:18 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/895295429276991489

    Reply addressees: @bryan_caplan

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/863077790605877250

    IN REPLY TO:

    @bryan_caplan

    Overfitting explains everything.

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/863077790605877250

  • THE ORIGINAL TEMPLES The very first, original temples, as far as I can tell, wer

    THE ORIGINAL TEMPLES

    The very first, original temples, as far as I can tell, were the equivalent of ‘roadside haunted houses’ (entertainment) that evolved into ‘safe houses’ for meetings between parties that might be in conflict. It turned out that ‘Safe Places’ were a highly desirable commodity. And vacation trips to the amusement park were just as popular in prehistory as they are today.

    Then priests came along and figured out how to make money at it.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-09 10:54:00 UTC

  • REFRAMING RELIGION, REAL, NOT IDEAL OR SUPERNATURAL. My opinion (criticism) is t

    REFRAMING RELIGION, REAL, NOT IDEAL OR SUPERNATURAL.

    My opinion (criticism) is that Peterson is framed and can’t exit it.

    1 – Religion provides a portfolio of enumerable services.

    2 – Those services can be redistributed to non-false institutions.

    3 – Those services can be provided by non false institutions.

    4 – The problem of externalizing self analysis can be solved through a variety of methods.

    5 – My preferred (and rome’s preferred) is that the monarchy past and present represent the family (nation), and that piety to a monarchy is superior to all other methods. *assuming* the monarchy and nobility is as limited as I have stated: to veto of last resort, to funding of arts, letters, and charities, (Excellences), and to facilitation of festivals and holidays. In other words, a secular, familial, religion.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-09 09:57:00 UTC

  • The Priestly Question: On the Restoration of Aristocracy by Special Pleading by

    The Priestly Question: On the Restoration of Aristocracy by Special Pleading

    by James Augustus

    An important insight made by the Reactionaries (literary ‘priestly’ right) that is often over-looked by the martial (upper) and soldiering (mid-to-low) right is the dynamic between power & propaganda, or more accurately, the (totality of existential) dynamics concerning the distribution of rents, discretion (influence) & information.

    And we are often misguided by the fallacy of seeking agreement (through force of reasoned argument & genuine good will) amongst the lower-and-middle priestly classes under the false presumption that power follows propaganda, as opposed to propaganda as the industrial production of weaponized misinformation by priest against the aristocratic, commercial & the suggestible consumer classes.

    And we can blame the priest & Abrahamist, but really it was the mere perusal of rational self-interest given the (incentives) opportunities produced by advent of mass communications & the failure of the aristocracy to adapt to consumer capitalism (a shift of in revenues from rents on feudal holdings to rents on human holdings in exchange for cost of domestication & the product of civilizational order (commons)).

    Europe was just recovering from Abrahamic-monotheism via the Renaissance (rediscovery of Aristotelianism) & the introduction of Empiricism through the Anglo Enlightenment, when we fell to the next wave of deceits & conflations pseudo-science (Abrahamic), pseudo-rationalism (German), literary-moral-fictionalism (French), so we were never able to compete the scientific enlightenment (expand empiricism into the social sciences (law) through the falsification of ‘Man as inherently Moral’ instead of ‘Man as Rational’ (selfishly incentive-driven).

    The purpose of pseudo-science was to resist/destroy empiricism, so that a misguided West could not rule its colonial holdings (84% of the globe) empirically—& we lost the world because of it.

    And when the failures of the pseudo-scientific enlightenment began to accumulate, the response by the Priest was to attack the very notion of objectivity, and therefor measurement, accounting in political economy & scientific narrative.

    So post-modernism is merely the latest iteration of the priestly assault against Aristocracy (markets in everything).

    So to close that thought, we cannot restore the Aristocracy (markets), and by extension the West, by special pleading to the Priestly Class & its subordinates. We cannot restore the west by re-appropriation of the Church.

    The Restoration can only be achieved by our ancient practice of sovereignty by militia, which is to say reintroducing violence into the political process.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-08 22:53:00 UTC

  • DEFENSE AGAINST DISCRETIONARY RULE? The only defense against discretionary rule,

    DEFENSE AGAINST DISCRETIONARY RULE?

    The only defense against discretionary rule, as always, is the natural law, the economic self interest of the independent cult of the court, the general self interest of the militia, and the naked self interest of the monarchy.

    It’s that simple really.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-08 15:16:00 UTC

  • “Post Modernism is a terminal illness spreading at institutional scale.”— Bren

    —“Post Modernism is a terminal illness spreading at institutional scale.”— Brendan Hegarty

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-07 23:18:00 UTC

  • Use of ‘is/are/was/were’ functions as sinning if not fraud in philosophy. We des

    Use of ‘is/are/was/were’ functions as sinning if not fraud in philosophy. We desire to create institutions that provide insurance which by contract or convention we may exercise contractual rights of defense and restitution against impositions of costs upon our mind, body, actions, or property – but not emotions. So there are no human rights. Instead, we have created a list of rights we desire to produce institutions that defend and perform restitution.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-07 21:46:00 UTC

  • (sketch. want to show how marrying the state undermines all marrriage and family

    (sketch. want to show how marrying the state undermines all marrriage and family options by providing a circumvention of the necessary compromise between the genders)

    I have a pre-monogamous philosophy of the family, in that I have no problem paying for and raising another man’s children – none at all, nor another man paying for and raising mine. In fact, as a man, I see the polity as my tribe and all men share responsibility of defending, growing and improving the tribe, and that all the women and children in it belonging to our men, and we divide up the defense, financing, labor, and training of women and children in exchange for the voluntary care and sex of the woman. Of course, in the end, I give greater preference to my children, but this is my form of ‘communalism’. And it requires only that I create the sovereignty that prevents the taking of the proceeds of my production, and thereby prohibiting me from exchanging those proceeds for my caretaking.

    The consequences of this reciprocal insecurity are greater defense of any marriage – the woman in the short term and the man in the longer term.

    As long as I can do this all family choices are available. If not then men are just slaves to the state with no safety in old age from the security of family care. Men mature later, adapt less easily, accumulate cellular damage on behalf of women and children, and die earlier for it, in exchange for higher productivity during their shorter working lives.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-08-07 09:05:00 UTC