Curt Doolittle

Theme: Operationalism

  • Counter Intuitive Econ Solved By Operational Analysis: The Internet Increases Prices

    —Economists have two standard very simple models of product competition: firms can compete on price or compete on quantity.— —“whether firms compete on price or quantity depends more on which of these they must commit to earliest, not which is easier to change at the last minute. Knowing this, once you heard that it would be easier to change prices at the last minute for products sold on internet, you should have predicted that the internet would increase quantity competition and reduce price competition. Which it in fact has. Economics is general and robust enough to predict things like how selling products on the internet changes competition. But you have to use it right.”— https://shar.es/17xxNn

    [F]irst, I want to point out that the reason the author is able to make his argument is that he has operationally explained the phenomenon as a sequence of decisions and actions in time.  Yet intuitive economics would suggest that price competition would be increased while operational analysis (incentives) would cause competition to be decreased.   This simple example illustrates why operationalism is so important to the testing of hypothesis. [S]econd, the author is trying to make a different point, but I want to riff off it to show that firms compete in commodity and non-commodity spaces. And to some degree economists study commodity activity where noise and signal cancel one another out. But that isn’t how companies think about competition, it’s how distributors do. I have taught the following means of competition by firms: 1) Price, 2) Quantity, 3) Profitability or Debt 4) Rents (firms like polities accumulate renters) 5) Adaptation Costs (innovator’s dilemma). 6) Geographic Housing Costs (salary costs) 7) Segmentation (startups start in niches and expand) Why? Decreasing production cycles, increasing distribution of production, the increasing importance of TALENT and innovation service industries. vs capital or credit in manufacturing and distribution companies. In a highly efficient market, one can sacrifice profits for talent while larger organizations accumulate internal rents. This is most frequently the reason Generally speaking, higher profits incentivize more rents. And while prices are sticky, internal rents are much stickier than prices. Generally speaking, adaptation costs vary dramatically from industry to industry: service firms trade out people and production firms trade out people and capital. The difference being that GAP regulation and tax policy obscure the tail of fixed vs human capital, largely because we can finance against the illusion of fixed capital value while we cannot finance against the obvious lack of control over human capital. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • AUSTRALIAN BANKS CUT BITCOIN Bitcoin. Told ya. Not money. Divisible shares of st

    AUSTRALIAN BANKS CUT BITCOIN

    Bitcoin. Told ya. Not money. Divisible shares of stock.

    Example of why operational names not analogies matter. Behaviour is demonstrated not conveyed by meaning.

    My position was that it wasn’t money. And that it was fraudulent to call it money. Even if in error.

    Great technology – except for its not insured by anyone. If insured by a government, or by banks or as means of transfer, it’s innovative.

    But basically it cuts out any value if insuring the transaction to the insurer. So it produces negative incentives.

    I said the state would break it. And that’s what I see happening.

    In retrospect it was caused by t technological failure to create interfaces and applications usable enough for common people to adopt.

    Payment by phone is the future and the only store of value is a commodity. Preferably money. Real money. Commodity money.

    Shares only retain value as long as owners have faith in the persistence of the company they hold shares in.

    I’ve been writing a piece on money to correct mises’ categories.

    Guess I should finish it.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-01 13:33:00 UTC

  • Q&A: ARE DOOLITTLE’S ETHICS OBJECTIVE? AND ARE THEY NORMATIVE OR DESCRIPTIVE? (f

    Q&A: ARE DOOLITTLE’S ETHICS OBJECTIVE? AND ARE THEY NORMATIVE OR DESCRIPTIVE?

    (from reddit)

    PERSON’S REPLY

    —‘Doolittle’s ethics are descriptive’— AND —‘his morality is objective’—

    CURT’S RESPONSE

    Understanding this requires understanding three concepts:

    1) The necessity of preserving the disproportionate rewards of cooperation, by preserving the incentive to cooperate, by suppression of the imposition of costs, that would eliminate the incentive to cooperate – is purely objective. Humans instinctually evolved to disproportionately retaliate against ‘cheaters’ for this reason – those proto-humans who didn’t are gone, and those who did survived.

    2) Local rents (imposed costs), normative exchanges (norms), evolve in every society (myths, rituals, norms). Some of which are neutral (attending rituals), some of which are objectively moral (caring for orphans of relations) and some of which are objectively immoral (slavery,and its many lighter variants.)

    3) However, whenever there is a conflict between individuals or groups with different norms (contracts moral and immoral), all such conflicts are objectively decidable between them. In other words, groups may construct whatever internal contracts that they choose to, but between groups those contracts do not apply – only objective morality does: the non-imposition of costs stated as the limit of transfers to productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of unproductive, uninformed, unwarranted transfer by externality.

    So this definition of morality is **descriptive** in that it is universally demonstrated by humans as retaliation against thieves, and as groups as disproportionate retaliation against ‘cheaters’; correspondent with demands of evolutionary biology; correspondent with logical necessity, provides universal decidability in matters of retaliation; is a sufficient basis for universal law of conflict resolution (and loosely reflects the history of the western common law); and therefore is a sufficient basis for eliminating demand for an authority to render discretionary judgments in the absence of such decidability.

    Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine (L’viv Ukraine)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-08-26 10:31:00 UTC

  • Economists Start To See The Virtue of Operationalism in Computer Science.

    [M]athematics is a weakness not a strength in the absence of operations. Mathematical logic is dependent upon ‘independence of scale’. But it remains dependent upon existential possibility. And existential possibility is the test provided by operational definitions.  (And yes, despite this bit of brevity I can defend that argument.)

    http://www.env-econ.net/2015/08/coding.html

    Something that is not well understood, even in computer science, is that just as they syllogism, the ratio, the calculus, and statistical relation were innovations in human thought, so was programming an innovation in the process of human thought.

    It is hard to accept the fact that programming may be as important as mathematics, the scientific method, and logical reasoning, grammar and rhetoric.

    For the single reason that unlike statistical relations programs consist of existentially possible operations.

    The 20th century failure of operationalism, intuitionism and praxeology is due to the failure to grasp that justification (confirmation) is not meaningful, and that correlation provides us with a source of inquiry, but only a sequence of operations provide us with evidence of existential possibility. And only parsimony assists us in choosing truth candidates between existentially possible sequences of operations.

    In other words, if statements of social science cannot be reduced to sympathetically testable, rationally decidable sequences of choices, they we have no idea if they CAN be true.

    We train ourselves to be intolerant of inserting information that does not exist, because the entire purpose of science is to eliminate error, bias, wishful thinking and deception from propositions that we construct by means of free association. And that is what statistical analysis helps us do: extend our senses so that we can construct possible free associations from that which we cannot sense without such technological devices.

    Cheers

  • Economists Start To See The Virtue of Operationalism in Computer Science.

    [M]athematics is a weakness not a strength in the absence of operations. Mathematical logic is dependent upon ‘independence of scale’. But it remains dependent upon existential possibility. And existential possibility is the test provided by operational definitions.  (And yes, despite this bit of brevity I can defend that argument.)

    http://www.env-econ.net/2015/08/coding.html

    Something that is not well understood, even in computer science, is that just as they syllogism, the ratio, the calculus, and statistical relation were innovations in human thought, so was programming an innovation in the process of human thought.

    It is hard to accept the fact that programming may be as important as mathematics, the scientific method, and logical reasoning, grammar and rhetoric.

    For the single reason that unlike statistical relations programs consist of existentially possible operations.

    The 20th century failure of operationalism, intuitionism and praxeology is due to the failure to grasp that justification (confirmation) is not meaningful, and that correlation provides us with a source of inquiry, but only a sequence of operations provide us with evidence of existential possibility. And only parsimony assists us in choosing truth candidates between existentially possible sequences of operations.

    In other words, if statements of social science cannot be reduced to sympathetically testable, rationally decidable sequences of choices, they we have no idea if they CAN be true.

    We train ourselves to be intolerant of inserting information that does not exist, because the entire purpose of science is to eliminate error, bias, wishful thinking and deception from propositions that we construct by means of free association. And that is what statistical analysis helps us do: extend our senses so that we can construct possible free associations from that which we cannot sense without such technological devices.

    Cheers

  • NOW WHY IS CURT INTERESTED IN THE PROBLEM OF BURDENSOME TRUTHFUL AND OPERATIONAL

    NOW WHY IS CURT INTERESTED IN THE PROBLEM OF BURDENSOME TRUTHFUL AND OPERATIONAL LANGUAGE RATHER THAN EASIER, MEANINGFUL AND ALLEGORICAL LANGUAGE?

    (important piece)

    Because the latter 19th, and majority of the 20th century, used allegorical language to load, frame, construct narratives, pseudosciences, and outright lies, to overload, and produce suggestion that evoked pathological altruism and altruistic punishment for the purpose of leftist deception.

    Could the postmoderns(mythicists), the socialists(pseudoscientists), the feminists(ralliers), the social ‘scientists’ (liars), the psychologists (shamers), keyensians (innumerists), have been able to destroy western common law, western high trust society, the civic society, the nuclear family, and social science, even truth itself, and create demand for authority had political speech been held to the same standards of truthful speech as we hold scientists to?

    My work in Testimonial Truth is designed to rescue western civilization from postmoderns by legally protecting the informational commons from untruthful public speech. That does not mean one cannot err. It means that in matters of the commons one can be held to the same standards of truth as are the sciences. It means reinstatement of libel, slander, defamation, for false statements. It means extension of truth to the defense of the informational commons by the same means we defend all other commons.

    It means we saturate the population in truth rather than in lies.

    POSITIVISM VS CRITICISM / OBVERSE VS REVERSE

    So the most common objection I receive from the literary and the scientific fields is that, like you, they seek to understand truth as a means of exploration, while in law and in politics, I seek to understand truthfulness as a means of preventing the **externalization** of error, bias, wishful thinking, and deception.

    Science has largely abandoned justificationism in favor of criticism. But public intellectuals (people who preach, advocate, talk) retain justifiactionism. Largely because it is easily used to create moral signals, moral activism, and moral outrage.

    So while expansion of knowledge may be improved by the use of justification in for the purpose of constructing hypotheses, the truth is determined by the survival of those hypotheses from criticism.

    Now I understand that it would place a higher cost on individuals to warranty their public speech in matters of the commons (costs to others) but the entire construction of civilization by constraining others from violence, theft, fraud, extortion, conspiracy, free riding, conversion, immigration, and conquest has cost a great deal.

    In fact, the high trust society, the fact that we even try to speak truthfully, and hold each other accountable for truthful speech, is perhaps the most expensive commons ever created by man.

    That is why no one else does it.

    And why no one else approaches our wealth.

    CLOSING

    It might take a second read to grasp how I constructed my argument from existential, empirical, and necessary rather than allegorical and ‘meaningful’ terminology.

    It is extremely burdensome to write in this fashion, but by that burden we test our understanding of the subject matter. If we cannot articulate our ideas under such constraints we cannot warranty the truthfulness of our statements.

    And so we take a discount on the effort of warrantying our statements for truthfulness, and place the cost of the externalities cause by our laziness (discounting) on the rest of society.

    The problem is, as the postmoderns and socialists and feminists have shown, is that it is much cheaper to produce deceit than it is to refute it.

    So liars won the 20th century.

    Now, you may be a moral man, and as a moral man you write moral content. As such you are immaterial other than that by such arguments as you’ve presented you give permission to the worlds most sophisticated liars to lie.

    So in order to preserve a discount for yourself you preserve the discount for the immoral men and women of this world – who arguably outnumber those of us who are moral men and women.

    Instead I would argue that you can write in whatever mode you prefer, as long as the content of your argument is test-ably moral. This is not a problem for you, certainly.

    But I want to make it a problem for immoral men by opening them to liability for pollution of the informational commons.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine (Tallinn, Estonia)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-08-05 12:27:00 UTC

  • Definitions: Calculable, Computational, Rational, Irrational, Arational, and “Black Box”

    (draft) (learning propertarianism) [T]he subtle differences in terms of comparison. DEFINITIONS:

    CALCULATIVE (HYPOTHETICAL) vs COMPUTATIONAL(DETERMINISTIC) – A process is CALCULATIVE if human beings are required to perform it, and COMPUTATIONAL if (current) computers can perform it. CALCULATIVE INSTITUTIONS – The set of technologies that permit human beings to extend their perception and comparison ability, and therefore their ability to understand and forecast in complexity, particularly a division of knowledge and labor, as a means of assisting in planning, forecasting, production and decision making. Specifically: numbers, counting, arithmetic, accounting, algebra, calculus, statistics, combined with money, numeric time, banking, interest, contract, rule of law, combined with narrative, history, objective truth, combined with property, exchange, trade, markets. CALCULATION / CALCULATIVE: A calculation is a deliberate process for transforming one or more inputs into one or more results, with variable change. The term is generally used to describe a spectrum of methods of reasoning, from the very definite arithmetical calculation of using an algorithm, to the vague heuristics of calculating a strategy in a competition or calculating the chance of a successful relationship between two people. OPERATIONAL: A recipe for a description of a series of actions that produce a result within a limit of precision. (an existence proof) COMPUTATIONAL: A sequence of mechanically producible and repeatable operations. LOGICAL – A sequence of operations Not entirely a synonym for rational, since logical statements should be formally testable, while rational statements nearly need not be irrational. RATIONAL – Reasonable. Reasoned. A conclusion achieved through the process of reason. Drawing hypotheses from juxtaposing facts against each other and determining their relations. Does not imply that the answer is correct. Only that logic was reasoning was properly applied. IRRATIONAL – Not reasonable. Not correctly reasoned. In philosophical usage, means illogical, or poor reasoning. Specifically that the reasoning applied or decision made, does not result in the desired ends. ARATIONAL – Having no rational characteristics; having no capacity to reason. In philosophy, not within the domain of what can be understood or analyzed by reason; outside the competence of the rules of reason. ARATIONAL BLACK BOX – I use the terms “Black Box” and “Arational” to refer to non-logical content that produces beneficial ends. The problem with all religions other than perhaps stoicism and Buddhism, is that their resulting strategy differs from their claimed mythology. Christianity for example is a set of myths and ideals the purpose of which is to encourage if not force the extension of kinship love to non-kin, and by consequence, produce a high trust society.

  • Definitions: Calculable, Computational, Rational, Irrational, Arational, and “Black Box”

    (draft) (learning propertarianism) [T]he subtle differences in terms of comparison. DEFINITIONS:

    CALCULATIVE (HYPOTHETICAL) vs COMPUTATIONAL(DETERMINISTIC) – A process is CALCULATIVE if human beings are required to perform it, and COMPUTATIONAL if (current) computers can perform it. CALCULATIVE INSTITUTIONS – The set of technologies that permit human beings to extend their perception and comparison ability, and therefore their ability to understand and forecast in complexity, particularly a division of knowledge and labor, as a means of assisting in planning, forecasting, production and decision making. Specifically: numbers, counting, arithmetic, accounting, algebra, calculus, statistics, combined with money, numeric time, banking, interest, contract, rule of law, combined with narrative, history, objective truth, combined with property, exchange, trade, markets. CALCULATION / CALCULATIVE: A calculation is a deliberate process for transforming one or more inputs into one or more results, with variable change. The term is generally used to describe a spectrum of methods of reasoning, from the very definite arithmetical calculation of using an algorithm, to the vague heuristics of calculating a strategy in a competition or calculating the chance of a successful relationship between two people. OPERATIONAL: A recipe for a description of a series of actions that produce a result within a limit of precision. (an existence proof) COMPUTATIONAL: A sequence of mechanically producible and repeatable operations. LOGICAL – A sequence of operations Not entirely a synonym for rational, since logical statements should be formally testable, while rational statements nearly need not be irrational. RATIONAL – Reasonable. Reasoned. A conclusion achieved through the process of reason. Drawing hypotheses from juxtaposing facts against each other and determining their relations. Does not imply that the answer is correct. Only that logic was reasoning was properly applied. IRRATIONAL – Not reasonable. Not correctly reasoned. In philosophical usage, means illogical, or poor reasoning. Specifically that the reasoning applied or decision made, does not result in the desired ends. ARATIONAL – Having no rational characteristics; having no capacity to reason. In philosophy, not within the domain of what can be understood or analyzed by reason; outside the competence of the rules of reason. ARATIONAL BLACK BOX – I use the terms “Black Box” and “Arational” to refer to non-logical content that produces beneficial ends. The problem with all religions other than perhaps stoicism and Buddhism, is that their resulting strategy differs from their claimed mythology. Christianity for example is a set of myths and ideals the purpose of which is to encourage if not force the extension of kinship love to non-kin, and by consequence, produce a high trust society.

  • Apriori and Rational vs Empirical and Operational

    —“Anything that can be shown apriori can be demonstrated or translated empirically with higher confidence but not everything that is empirical can be demonstrated apriori.”— Ayelam Valentine Agaliba

  • Apriori and Rational vs Empirical and Operational

    —“Anything that can be shown apriori can be demonstrated or translated empirically with higher confidence but not everything that is empirical can be demonstrated apriori.”— Ayelam Valentine Agaliba