Curt Doolittle

Theme: Measurement

  • THERE IS ONLY ONE. ALL ELSE IS FALLACY. 1) There is only one means of expressing

    THERE IS ONLY ONE. ALL ELSE IS FALLACY.

    1) There is only one means of expressing the truth: operationally. All else is fallacy: they are mere analogies.

    2) There is only one set of numbers: the natural numbers. All else is a fallacy: they are mere functions.

    3) There is only one cause of prohibited action, and property rights: the prohibition on free riding (involuntary transfer, imposition of costs). All else is fallacy. Justification of argument, and nothing more.

    4) There is only one test of moral action: fully informed, voluntary, productive exchange, backed by warranty. All else is a fallacy: justification for theft and nothing more.

    5) There is only one law and that is property. All else is a fallacy: they are mere commands.

    6) There is only one moral form of government: anarchy. All else is fallacy: they are mere justifications for the failure of sufficient articulation of property and property rights.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-06 11:39:00 UTC

  • We Can Now Objectively And Scientifically Judge Good Philosophers And Bad Philosophers

    (suggestions wanted) [I]f we acknowledge that democracy is a failure, and all philosophers who attempted to justify democracy failures, and all philosophers who attempted to expand democracy into socialism and postmodernism failures, we are left with instrumentalists (empiricists) and reactionaries of various fields. Philosophy as a discipline, must face the uncomfortable fact, that (a) the metaphysical program failed and was solved by cognitive science, and (b) the democratic program failed and was solved by economists (c) therefore the political program failed, and was solved by heterodox philosophers (d) the ethical problem failed and was solved by economists and heterodox philosophers. The reason for this is obvious: the incentives in Academia to attempt to replace the church’s mysticism with some sort of collectivist democratic rationalism, had it’s predictable influence. Philosophers can produce good neutral and bad influences. Unfortunately, the greater body of philosophers that have been influential since the american revolution, have been more destructive than beneficial. We can never forgive Marx and Freud, any more than we can forgive Kant and Rousseau. “Thou Shalt Not Harm” not only applies to doctors, but to philosophers, and to all of us. I give great weight to computer science because unlike the logic of language and unlike abstract and mathematical logic, computer science does not drop the property of operationalism in real time from its reasoning. As such it has higher correspondence with actionable reality than mathematics, and farm more so than formal logic. And if we seek to make informal logic of any value we must learn from computer science and return the property of operationalism to philosophical discourse. Because without it, it certainly appears to consist almost entirely of nonsense built upon linguistic deception. == 99. Aristotle 99. Niccolo Machiavelli 99. Adam Smith 99. Max Weber 99. Emile Durkheim 99. David Hume 99. John Locke 99. G.W.F. Hegel 99. Friedrich Nietzsche (lesser candidates) 99. Robert Michels 99. Steven Pinker 99. Jonathan Haidt == 99. Rene Descartes 99. Alan Turing 99. Karl Popper 99. Gottlob Frege 99. W.V.O. Quine 99. Saul Kripke THE BAD PHILOSOPHERS 99. Immanuel Kant 99. Ludwig Wittgenstein 99. Karl Marx 99. Soren Kierkegaard 99. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 20. John Rawls 99. Martin Heidegger 99. Jacques Derrida 99. Michelle Foucault 99. Jean-François Lyotard 99. Jean Baudrillard 99. Murray Rothbard THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL’S BAD PHILOSOPHERS Max Horkheimer Theodor W. Adorno Herbert Marcuse Friedrich Pollock Erich Fromm Otto Kirchheimer Leo Löwenthal Franz Leopold Neumann Siegfried Kracauer Alfred Sohn-Rethel Walter Benjamin Jürgen Habermas Claus Offe Axel Honneth Oskar Negt Alfred Schmidt Albrecht Wellmer

  • The Measure of A Philosopher: Beneficially Novel, Good, Bad(wrong), And Dangerous

    (Discussion on Bleeding Heart Libertarians: The Measure of an Economist or a Philosopher) All, [A] good economists provides us with insights into the state of affairs we live in. A novel economists provides us with new general rules (a theory). A good philosopher explains or re-explains the changes in the world to us in current language. A novel philosopher provides us with a new general rule (a theory). It is not better to be good or novel. It is most important that one not be dangerous. Freud, Marx and Cantor reintroduced mysticism in the form of obscurantism. Russell compounded that new mysticism. The postmoderns have been terribly damaging to institutions, morality and language. Rothbard did more damage than good. Most of his history is quite good. His ethics were a catastrophe and set us back by decades. A disaster I have been struggling to correct. So one can be novel, one can be good, one can be wrong and one can be destructive. I don’t care much about the first three. The fourth quadrant is what I worry about most. Because bad and dangerous philosophy turns out to spread far faster than good and beneficially novel philosophy. Just like bad news spreads faster than good. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute. Kiev.

  • The Measure of A Philosopher: Beneficially Novel, Good, Bad(wrong), And Dangerous

    (Discussion on Bleeding Heart Libertarians: The Measure of an Economist or a Philosopher) All, [A] good economists provides us with insights into the state of affairs we live in. A novel economists provides us with new general rules (a theory). A good philosopher explains or re-explains the changes in the world to us in current language. A novel philosopher provides us with a new general rule (a theory). It is not better to be good or novel. It is most important that one not be dangerous. Freud, Marx and Cantor reintroduced mysticism in the form of obscurantism. Russell compounded that new mysticism. The postmoderns have been terribly damaging to institutions, morality and language. Rothbard did more damage than good. Most of his history is quite good. His ethics were a catastrophe and set us back by decades. A disaster I have been struggling to correct. So one can be novel, one can be good, one can be wrong and one can be destructive. I don’t care much about the first three. The fourth quadrant is what I worry about most. Because bad and dangerous philosophy turns out to spread far faster than good and beneficially novel philosophy. Just like bad news spreads faster than good. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute. Kiev.

  • I bet we can empirically measure brutalist vs humanist on a scale that directly

    I bet we can empirically measure brutalist vs humanist on a scale that directly corresponds to your desirability as a mate.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-27 04:08:00 UTC

  • OPERATIONALISM, TRUTH AND HONESTY (a little deep for FB, but worth reading) (sho

    OPERATIONALISM, TRUTH AND HONESTY

    (a little deep for FB, but worth reading) (should be getting easier to understand)

    I’m going to ‘correct’ this statement by Brouwer, and say that the (law of the excluded middle) LEM was abstracted from contexts of correspondent precision, to general statements, independent of context and therefore of arbitrary precision. (The same criticism applies to the AOC: axiom of choice.)

    —“Intuitionistic logic can be succinctly described as classical logic without the Aristotelian law of excluded middle (LEM): (A ∨ ¬A) or the classical law of double negation elimination (¬ ¬A → A), but with the law of contradiction (A → B) → ((A → ¬B) → ¬A) and ex falso quodlibet: (¬A → (A → B)). Brouwer [1908] observed that LEM was abstracted from finite situations, then extended without justification to statements about infinite collections.”— S.E.P.

    The fact that these philosophers and mathematicians failed to see the implication of their work on intuitionism and operationalism as one of arbitrary precision, is as humorous or ironic, as it is that advocates of praxeology (operationalism in economics) rely passionately on apriorism. In hindsight (since I only intuited this problem and did not immediately understand it) this is all absurdly obvious. But the work to remove ‘spiritual and platonistic’ language from our vocabulary and our thoughts is still in need of a great deal of work. As an Operationalist, when I hear people rely upon Continental and Cosmopolitan arguments, I hear exactly what an atheist hears when he listens to religious arguments: really weak and ill founded analogy and nothing more.

    The insight that we find from studying the loss of precision (context) in the construction of general rules in mathematics, and therefore the loss of LEM and AOC, can be applied to economics, where we lost constant relations. We can no longer predict constant relations out of a causally dense, kaleidic system, open to black swans. But that does not prevent us from using analysis of events to describe general cases, and from those general cases, attempt to state those cases in operational language. And once stated in operational language to determine whether or not they possess the status of laws (subject to manipulation, shocks and black swans, but as general rules, subject to the limits of non-contradiction).

    In my attempt to reform ethics and politics, I am fighting an extraordinarily difficult battle that essentially boils down to ‘your linguistic conveniences and contrivances, which provide such utility, and as such which you understand as knowledge of use, are, like religious analogies, producers of profound social and economic external consequences, because those analogies are as devoid of knowledge of construction as are religious arguments.”

    Math works. Religion ‘works’ too. That something ‘works’ does not mean you understand its construction, or the external consequences of your employment of analogy rather than description. That mathematics, other than the natural numbers, consists entirely of functions, not numbers, is a matter of convention, not reality.

    if you cannot state something in operational language you do not understand it. If you do not understand it you cannot make truth claims about it. Its impossible. Period. You can state an hypothesis. But you cannot claim it is true. And once aware of this fact, you cannot claim you are making an honest statement either.

    This is the insight that I want to bring to praxeology and economics. To restore ethics and morality to economics and politics by the requirement for operational language. To require fully informed, warrantied, productive, voluntary exchange free of negative externality (free riding), rather than the construction of laws (commands), constructed of moralistic deceptions.

    Because cooperation is either mutually beneficial or it is parasitism, and that is a contradiction. Cooperation is either fully informed, warrantied, productive exchange free of negative externality (free riding) or it is by law of contradiction, not cooperation but parasitism, conquest, or destruction.

    And one need not abandon his wealth of violence, nor refrain from violence when he is the subject of non cooperation: parasitism, conquest, or destruction.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    Kiev Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-24 03:16:00 UTC

  • IN DEFENSE OF EMPIRICISM, OPERATIONALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM. Theories must some

    IN DEFENSE OF EMPIRICISM, OPERATIONALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM.

    Theories must somehow be made extant (constructed). What action renders them extant? If falsification hardens theories, why must they be hardened? What is the purpose of talking about that which we imagine, if not to test it? Why do we need truth except to test correspondence with reality?

    I intuit a problem. I imagine a theory. I describe it in words. I imagine a test of that theory. I construct a test of that theory using instrumentation. I test that theory by taking actions to do so. I observe the results of those actions with and without instrumentation. (repeat).

    This process requires observation (empiricism), instruments(instrumentalism), operations(operationalism). But in all cases, we start with intuition (pre-cognitive) and imagination (cognitive), and in all cases, all observations of actions in the real world must be reduced to an analogy to experience such that we can apprehend it with our senses. With practice we can learn to habituate general rules that we in turn can apprehend, because of habituation of individual cases. But in all cases, we apprehend only what we can apprehend with our senses.

    Likewise we lack the ability to compare and contrast complex information, and as such we must rely on instrumentation (numbers, symbols, transformations (operations) to assist us in our thinking.

    Note that In the preceding three paragraphs I rely upon actions, not platonism or obscurantism (the use of ‘is’).

    Falsification forces us to overcome the cognitive bias of confirmation (a biological necessity for the conservation of energy). Operationalism forces us to overcome the cognitive bias of conflating imagination and action such that we know whether or not we understand the means of constructing (acting) such that the concepts we rely upon are understood, and therefore our claims are ‘true’ – or whether they are conveniently not understood and therefore our claims CANNOT be true and are therefore ‘false’.

    One cannot attest to unconstructed imagination and make a true statement, any more than one can attest to the truth of a theory that has not been subject to falsification.

    As far as I know it is impossible to refute this argument, and it is, at least in sketch, a refutation of Kant’s appeal to the authority of apriorism. And that refutation is supported by the relatively recent findings of cognitive science and experimental psychology.

    This bundle of ideas meaning that the failure of the previous generation in which popper was a member, was an insufficient disregard for remnants of religion and platonist philosophy, entrapment in the russellian program’s attempt at claiming philosophy as science, and an insufficient regard for the operational methods of science.

    If one cannot state one’s concepts in operational language, one does not understand them. And as failing to understand them, cannot levy truth claims about them. Knowledge of use != Knowledge of construction. I may ACT with knowledge of use, but I may not make truth claims without knowledge of construction.

    This constraint for operational language places higher demands on speakers in the same way that falsification places higher demand on speakers.

    Cheers

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-24 00:51:00 UTC

  • YOURSELF OF APRIORISM AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY – JOIN THE 21ST CENTURY The que

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Outer-Limits-Reason-Mathematics/dp/0262019353CURE YOURSELF OF APRIORISM AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY – JOIN THE 21ST CENTURY

    The quest for liberty shouldn’t be a prisoner of magical thinking.

    Three great works on the current knowledge of the human mind and its limitations.

    1 – CONSCIOUSNESS

    http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes-Thoughts-ebook/dp/B00DMCVXO0/

    2 – THE OUTER LIMITS OF REASON

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Outer-Limits-Reason-Mathematics/dp/0262019353

    3 – NATURAL HISTORY OF HUMAN THINKING

    http://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Human-Thinking-ebook/dp/B00GG0C9WK/

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-16 07:48:00 UTC

  • ETHICAL REALISM: OPERATIONALISM, INSTRUMENTALISM, INTUITIONISM, EMPIRICISM *Or,

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/PROPERTARIAN ETHICAL REALISM: OPERATIONALISM, INSTRUMENTALISM, INTUITIONISM, EMPIRICISM

    *Or, how to cure yourself of continental and cosmopolitan obscurantism*

    We can only know enough to act, with the information at our disposal. We can only attest to the truth of statements that we can demonstrate operationally. By articulating a set of statements operationally, as actions in sequence, in time, we expose each statement to subjective tests of truth and rationality. As such, unless we have knowledge of construction, stated in operational language, for all concepts upon which we rely, we cannot honestly make truth claims. That this constraint is already held in the ethics of science, but not in ethics or politics, is the reason why false economic, political, legal, moral, and ethical arguments proliferate. There is no reason extant why we cannot constraint political speech to the same standards of truth as witness in court, or scientific testimony – other than to directly license deception. Our long semi-supernatural history with mathematics has provided false legitimacy to logic and argument for centuries. Operationalism ends this fallacy, and enables us to constrain politics just as we have constrained science, to a requirement for honest statements. It was not possible to levy this constraint until we understood that the unit of commensurability in all moral actions is that of property and fully informed, voluntary exchange. However, with that knowledge nothing prevents us from making universally moral and ethical statements, nor requiring individuals to speak in operational language in order to prevent deception and theft by obscurantist means.

    EMPIRICISM (VS RATIONALISM)

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/

    OPERATIONALISM

    Only if we can describe a sequence of actions can we claim to know what it is that we say, and as such make truth claims about our statements.

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/

    KNOWLEDGE OF USE VS KNOWLEDGE OF CONSTRUCTION

    Operationalism requires that we demonstrate knowledge of construction (causality) while knowledge of use merely demonstrates correlation

    http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/02/15/knowledge-knowlege-of-construction-vs-knowledge-of-use/

    CRITICAL RATIONALISM

    We may make many true statements in the construction of our theories, but whether or not we have made the most parsimonious statements with the greatest explanatory power that is ultimately possible (“The Absolute Truth”) is not available to us. There are no quantifiable measurable denominators to knowledge. The exploration of theories is not tautological, and therefore not logically closed.

    http://www.iep.utm.edu/cr-ratio/

    MATHEMATICAL INTUITIONISM

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism/

    LOGICAL INTUITIONISM

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-intuitionistic/

    ETHICAL INTUITIONISM

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_intuitionism

    NATURALISM

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/

    REALISM

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/

    SCIENTIFIC REALISM

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

    THE LIMITS OF REASON

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17841838-the-outer-limits-of-reason

    OBSCURANTISM

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscurantism

    THE PRETENSE OF KNOWLEDGE

    http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-16 06:26:00 UTC

  • THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD OF ARISTOCRACY Aristocracy loves tests. Test of culture Te

    THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD OF ARISTOCRACY

    Aristocracy loves tests.

    Test of culture

    Test of intelligence

    Test of fitness

    Test of combat

    Test of commerce

    Aristocracy seeks to test itself.

    Each experiment is a test of one’s excellences.

    And only through constant testing do we improve.

    An only through constant testing do we know anything about the world.

    The more tests one survives, the more honor he collects.

    Aristocracy is a scientific political system.

    Why do you think aristocrats invented science?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-14 06:55:00 UTC