Curt Doolittle

Theme: Measurement

  • Saturate The Environment with Truthfulness and People Will Act Truthfully

    (By: Curt Doolittle, Johannes Meixner and Andy Curzon) [W]e learn actions by doing. But we learn metaphysics by observation: our most effective learning-by-doing comes from recognizing patterns and habits of others in the environment. Things we take for granted as static, rather than open to our modification.

    So I tend to see something like programming as a skill that must be learned by doing. Some people are incapable no matter how many times they try to do something. Some people must do something many, many times. Others must do things a few times. Others just once or twice. Some of us can master concepts purely by imagining doing them a few times, and some of us by imagining the art of imagining doing them instantly. (We are very RARE.) We know that this progression roughy mirrors standard deviations of IQ around a ‘human minimum’ of around 106 (the start of Smart Fraction abilities: verbal articulation of ideas). And that makes sense when you realize that verbalizing complex ideas is in itself, the art of imagining operations in sequence. WHERE DOES THIS LEAD? – Saturate the environment with truth and people will act truthfully. – Saturate the environment with error the people will act erroneously. – Saturate the environment with deception and the people will act deceptively. – Saturate the environment with violence, and people will act violently. Because that is what it means to adapt to the environment.. – Education was the first means of public broadcasting. – Reading was the next, but it was voluntary. – Radio was next and could be done without effort. – Television was next and it was a serotonin-producing drug, that made saturation effortless. – Today the curious can see confirmation and alliance in almost any alternate reality that they can imagine. In Advanced countries people live in their isolation chambers, listening to echoes. Saturation is the best teaching. But how do we ensure people are saturated by truths rather than falsehoods? We make untruthful speech a crime when placed into the commons. Deprive the environment of negativity, and people will not act negatively. And within one or two generations we will saturate people with truth. And as such we: – Saturate the environment with truth and people will act truthfully. – Saturate the environment with trust and people will act trustworthily. – Saturate the environment with confidence and people will act confidently. – Saturate the environment with certainty and people will act certainly. – Saturate the environment with assurance, and people will act assuredly. – Saturate the environment with anything, and people will act likewise. So you see…. “after all, we’re all alike.” Education need not be interpersonal if it is environmental. The Propertarian Institute The Philosophy of Aristocracy Kiev, Ukraine.

  • WHAT I’M WORKING ON NOW: THE LANGUAGE OF CRITICISM While physicists have been us

    WHAT I’M WORKING ON NOW: THE LANGUAGE OF CRITICISM

    While physicists have been using the model of “information” for decades, and while Hayek gave us the same idea in economics and social science, the use of the ‘information’ model of thought has not permeated the social science, nor the psychology of decision making.

    What I am trying to develop is the language and argument structure within Propertarianism and Testimonialism that tests whether sufficient information exists, or whether additional information is needed to provide decidability.

    Why? Because the general trend in history is that people choose to believe something (act proactively) rather than they justify their beliefs in order to seize opportunity.

    In other words, people follow incentives.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-28 04:43:00 UTC

  • TESTIMONIALISM (COMPLETED CRITICAL RATIONALISM) (second draft) (full cycle) (sti

    TESTIMONIALISM (COMPLETED CRITICAL RATIONALISM)

    (second draft) (full cycle) (still needs third section)

    [W]e both perceive, and remember stimuli, and construct and remember relations from that stimuli, and construct and remember layers upon layers of those relations.

    The acts of planning, calculating, hypothesizing, searching, freely-associating, daydreaming, dreaming, and subconscious association attempt to imagine relations between the entire spectrum of memories we can store.

    Once some (useful?) association is made (found) we must criticize it: determine if it withstands the scrutiny of other relations.

    We determine if our imaginary relations survive (are truth candidates) by the act of testing those imagined relations to see if they fail or not – and therefore are worthy of our investment or not. We constantly compare the usefulness of the imagined relation with the cost of that imagined relation.

    The return on those relations determines how excited we ‘feel’ about those relations and the energy expenditure we can risk in pursuit of those relations.

    Returns can be both subjective and objective. Return can vary from mere satisfaction of curiosity, to personal gain, to a novel invention, to the total transformation of the world of man.

    As the complexity of relations increases, the means by which we test our imagined relations increases. While we are sometimes able to test our imagined relations by means of introspection, at some point we lack sufficient information to perform such tests, and must resort to both more structured methods of testing, and restore to gaining additional information to see if the imagined relation survives criticism.

    We perform this expansion of criticism until our estimation of the combination of risk,cost and reward favors conducting the final experiment of acting, rather than conducting either further criticism, or abandoning it as providing insufficient return.

    [T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which (a)philosophical science, (b)the social sciences, and (c)the physical sciences, use to launder existential impossibility, limitlessness, error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, deception, and (objective) immorality (in the domain of the social sciences) from our testimony (speech).

    This laundering is achieved by a set of methodological criticisms addressing increasing levels of complexity of which philosophical science consists of the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another a subset of those criticisms.

    Those criticisms consist of tests of: Identity, Internal Consistency, External Correspondence, Existential Possibility (Operationalism), Full Accounting (against selection bias), Parsimony (limits), and voluntary transfer (objective morality).”

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-27 06:56:00 UTC

  • Q&A: Does your methodology work backwards from a presumption? (Sigh. Critique is Everywhere.)

    A Question From Benjamin Uraminski

    Curt, your underlying methodology seems to work backward from a presupposed solution, similar to an algebra problem. In this instance, it having already been decided upon that everything is inherently sexual so that the missing variables which reinforce the preconceived notion appear obvious to one who holds those beliefs.

    I notice this particular Freudian-esque and neo-Darwinist methodology, that everything is inherently sexual, a lot in the modernist thought patterns.

    To draw another analogy: how is this inherently different than the methodology of a paranoid, believing that everyone is out to get him, interpreting the facts his sense-perceptions supply to him, to reinforce the preconceived notion that, everyone is, in fact, out to get him?

    [W]ell, Ben, I am going to assume that you’re asking a serious question. 🙂 Even if you fall into psychologizing (authoritarianism, ridicule, gossip, ad hominem) rather than criticizing the argument itself.

    Either the argument possess explanatory power, and survives criticism or it Doesn’t. In the case of both Testimonialism and Propertarianism that is going to be very hard. And to criticize aristocratic egalitarianism will require only that you justify deceit and favor dysgenic reproduction. Which is a preference, I admit.

    As for ‘working backward’ the answer is that I started with the very real problem of cooperation (See Axelrod et al), and constructed Propertarianism from rational incentives in in the face of opportunity costs. And like a good analytic I used every available bit of scientific evidence I could find to criticize it. When I understood that Haidt had pretty much identified the causes, and that I could map them to conflicts over the allocation of property rights, then it wasn’t difficult to use the work in his bibliography to develop the rest of Propertarianism: I expressed moral statements in the AMORAL language of economics.

    As for psychology, the reason it seems like psychology is that it replaces authoritarian psychologizing(pseudoscientific) with a much more sophisticated and nuanced means of describing human thoughts as incentives rather than experiences. So to some degree (by accident) I do think that Propertarianism and Testimonialism fully replace authoritarian/totalitarian/equalitarian psychology, by extending economics (observations of demonstrated preference) to include the first principles of economics: incentives to cooperate. And in doing so I explain demonstrated political preferences in voting as a division of moral perception knowledge and labor. This is pretty profound really. And one of the best tests of it, is that the explanatory power appears to unite all fields of inquiry under a very simple set of premises starting with the need to acquire.

    As for your analogy to Algebra, the differences is that numbers cannot make layer upon layer of intertemporally perishable normative contracts any more than hydrogen and oxygen can choose not to bond, where people can. As such we can exchange what appear to be violations of those first principles if in the aggregate we benefit.

    As for methodology, which methodology are you talking about?
    Testimonial truth?
    Propertarianism?
    Aristocratic Egalitarianism?

    I am pretty sure Testimonialism will survive as the definition of truth proper from which all others are derived. That’s probably one of the most important insights into truth in the past century. It completes Critical Rationalism / Critical Preference.

    To defeat Propertarianism would require some very substantial and what appears unlikely changes to the history of man’s development. (as we say, the framework of social science is evolutionary biology).

    To defeat aristocratic egalitarianism is a matter of preference, although I argue that if one built a high trust truthful polity, that they would all evolve into aristocratic egalitarian polities over time.

    So these arguments are defeat-able, but they’re defeat-able on fairly sophisticated grounds.

    But then again, Marx built an enormous edifice on a lie (dialectical materialism) and a falsehood (labor theory of value). So maybe I made similar mistakes.

    But like Marx, those mistakes will require ratio-scientific arguments not pseudoscientific (psychological gossip and shaming).

    (Sorry for throwing the tease in there but I couldn’t resist.)

  • Q&A: Does your methodology work backwards from a presumption? (Sigh. Critique is Everywhere.)

    A Question From Benjamin Uraminski

    Curt, your underlying methodology seems to work backward from a presupposed solution, similar to an algebra problem. In this instance, it having already been decided upon that everything is inherently sexual so that the missing variables which reinforce the preconceived notion appear obvious to one who holds those beliefs.

    I notice this particular Freudian-esque and neo-Darwinist methodology, that everything is inherently sexual, a lot in the modernist thought patterns.

    To draw another analogy: how is this inherently different than the methodology of a paranoid, believing that everyone is out to get him, interpreting the facts his sense-perceptions supply to him, to reinforce the preconceived notion that, everyone is, in fact, out to get him?

    [W]ell, Ben, I am going to assume that you’re asking a serious question. 🙂 Even if you fall into psychologizing (authoritarianism, ridicule, gossip, ad hominem) rather than criticizing the argument itself.

    Either the argument possess explanatory power, and survives criticism or it Doesn’t. In the case of both Testimonialism and Propertarianism that is going to be very hard. And to criticize aristocratic egalitarianism will require only that you justify deceit and favor dysgenic reproduction. Which is a preference, I admit.

    As for ‘working backward’ the answer is that I started with the very real problem of cooperation (See Axelrod et al), and constructed Propertarianism from rational incentives in in the face of opportunity costs. And like a good analytic I used every available bit of scientific evidence I could find to criticize it. When I understood that Haidt had pretty much identified the causes, and that I could map them to conflicts over the allocation of property rights, then it wasn’t difficult to use the work in his bibliography to develop the rest of Propertarianism: I expressed moral statements in the AMORAL language of economics.

    As for psychology, the reason it seems like psychology is that it replaces authoritarian psychologizing(pseudoscientific) with a much more sophisticated and nuanced means of describing human thoughts as incentives rather than experiences. So to some degree (by accident) I do think that Propertarianism and Testimonialism fully replace authoritarian/totalitarian/equalitarian psychology, by extending economics (observations of demonstrated preference) to include the first principles of economics: incentives to cooperate. And in doing so I explain demonstrated political preferences in voting as a division of moral perception knowledge and labor. This is pretty profound really. And one of the best tests of it, is that the explanatory power appears to unite all fields of inquiry under a very simple set of premises starting with the need to acquire.

    As for your analogy to Algebra, the differences is that numbers cannot make layer upon layer of intertemporally perishable normative contracts any more than hydrogen and oxygen can choose not to bond, where people can. As such we can exchange what appear to be violations of those first principles if in the aggregate we benefit.

    As for methodology, which methodology are you talking about?
    Testimonial truth?
    Propertarianism?
    Aristocratic Egalitarianism?

    I am pretty sure Testimonialism will survive as the definition of truth proper from which all others are derived. That’s probably one of the most important insights into truth in the past century. It completes Critical Rationalism / Critical Preference.

    To defeat Propertarianism would require some very substantial and what appears unlikely changes to the history of man’s development. (as we say, the framework of social science is evolutionary biology).

    To defeat aristocratic egalitarianism is a matter of preference, although I argue that if one built a high trust truthful polity, that they would all evolve into aristocratic egalitarian polities over time.

    So these arguments are defeat-able, but they’re defeat-able on fairly sophisticated grounds.

    But then again, Marx built an enormous edifice on a lie (dialectical materialism) and a falsehood (labor theory of value). So maybe I made similar mistakes.

    But like Marx, those mistakes will require ratio-scientific arguments not pseudoscientific (psychological gossip and shaming).

    (Sorry for throwing the tease in there but I couldn’t resist.)

  • TRUST IS NOT A SENTIMENTAL CULTURAL ATTRIBUTE (worth repeating) —“Trust is not

    TRUST IS NOT A SENTIMENTAL CULTURAL ATTRIBUTE

    (worth repeating)

    —“Trust is not sentimental value. It is a measure of the complexity of economic and social relations that can be constructed given the transaction costs that impede them.”—

    Put that in your repertoire and smoke it. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-23 06:08:00 UTC

  • Truth: Why is Propertarianism Different?

    [B]ecause while a number of other philosophers have come to the conclusion that all we must do is tell the truth, no other philosopher has told you how you can tell the truth: by speaking truthfully: by providing the warranty that you have performed due diligence on any speech that you place into the informational and normative commons. And by describing precisely how you can perform that due diligence.

  • Truth: Why is Propertarianism Different?

    [B]ecause while a number of other philosophers have come to the conclusion that all we must do is tell the truth, no other philosopher has told you how you can tell the truth: by speaking truthfully: by providing the warranty that you have performed due diligence on any speech that you place into the informational and normative commons. And by describing precisely how you can perform that due diligence.

  • STATISTICS DON”T LIE? QUITE THE OPPOSITE And quite the contrary: statistics are

    STATISTICS DON”T LIE? QUITE THE OPPOSITE

    And quite the contrary: statistics are not operational statements, but mere correlations in which the operations must be assumed or deduced by the application of the observer’s cognitive bias. In other words, statistics are easily used as pseudoscientific pseudo-moral statements with which to activate the observer’s cognitive biases.

    So, it would be more accurate to say that non-operationally stated, all statistics are lies.

    That is the empirical evidence anyway. Statistics are largely used to lie.

    All of Keynesian economics is statistical. Because if it was stated operationally none of us would tolerate the policy that is produced by it.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-20 07:03:00 UTC

  • NUMBERS ARE NAMES OF ANALOGIES, NOT REFERENTS I can make up a name but it points

    NUMBERS ARE NAMES OF ANALOGIES, NOT REFERENTS

    I can make up a name but it points to nothing other than itself.

    I can make names that correspond to counts of something or other.

    (bait)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-17 03:14:00 UTC