Curt Doolittle

Theme: Operationalism

  • Science And Philosophy: 2500 Years Of Intellectual History Condensed Into 125 Words.

    [T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which philosophical science, the social sciences, and 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 requires the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another 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).”

    (I suppose a lot of philosophers could read that paragraph and weep – that it took us 2500 years to state it.)

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine.

  • Science And Philosophy: 2500 Years Of Intellectual History Condensed Into 125 Words.

    [T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which philosophical science, the social sciences, and 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 requires the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another 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).”

    (I suppose a lot of philosophers could read that paragraph and weep – that it took us 2500 years to state it.)

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine.

  • WHAT DOES PHILOSOPHY “BOIL DOWN TO”? >>Bogdan Kolesnyk So philosophy boils down

    WHAT DOES PHILOSOPHY “BOIL DOWN TO”?

    >>Bogdan Kolesnyk

    So philosophy boils down to pragmatism?

    >>Max Andronichuk

    Curt Doolittle I thought this could be a topic you might get sucked into smile

    >>Curt Doolittle

    Thanks Max Andronichuk

    Lets see if I can do this justice:

    Nassim and I are working on the same problem from different directions. But out of the current generation of intellectuals we are the only two who have identified the central problem. I don’t know the proper way to frame it for everyone’s understanding, but he is trying either to determine roughly what information is necessary to justify an argument, or to state that the amount of information necessary to justify any argument is unknowable (or at least, that it is either very vast, or very expensive). I sort of see him as trying to prevent fraudulent use of innumeracy. What I would like to see (and I think what Mandelbrot was trying with his later work, is to find empirical measurements of this limit from our best empirical evidence of human decisions: economics, stock markets, and finance.

    I am trying the same thing, but I have approached it differently, because I stumbled upon the failure of the Operational Revolution in a similar way to how Nassim did. I was modeling AI decisions for tanks in the 80’s as part of game design, and he was modeling decision trees for risk in the 80s. But I think what’s important about Mandelbrot’s analysis, Nassim’s analysis, and mine, is that we all were subject to Minsky’s observation: that computers teach you to think in existential operations, using a particular grammar that insulated from the errors common in philosophy that unfortunately worked their way into mathematics, and now into physics.

    So our generation of thinkers understands that there is a significant problem in intellectual history that much of the 20th and now 21st century (despite Hayek’s warning) has stumbled into what Hayek called ‘mysticism’, what Poincare, Brouwer and Bridgman called pejoratively ‘philosophy’, but what most of us today would call ‘pseudoscience’ in various disciplines: philosophy, economics, social science, the physical sciences, and mathematics.

    Or what I would call ‘the failure to warranty that you have sufficiently laundered error, imagination, bias, wishful thinking and deception from your theories (statements), leaving only existential information, free of projection, as truth candidates.

    We can fix this problem in both philosophy and science once we grasp that practice of what we call science is nothing more than the moral discipline of laundering error, imagination, bias, wishful thinking, and deception from your statements, by various forms of testing (criticism).

    If we understand then, that science, once the set of moral warranties that constitute science is complete, is identical to ethics, then philosophy and science are for all intents and purposes identical systems of thought. (I will cover why philosophy and science couldn’t merge earlier in another post at another time.)

    But then we need to show how we can complete science, which consists of these criticisms:

    …(a) Identity and/or ‘Naming’ (comparable, calculable)

    …(b) Internal Consistency (logical)

    …(c) Externally correspondent (empirical)

    …(d) Parsimony (limits, or imprecisely: falsifiability)

    by adding these criticisms:

    …(e) Operational Descriptions (tests of existential possibility)

    …(f) Full Accounting (tests against selection bias) (freedom from information loss)

    …(g) Morality (tests that any statement is objectively moral);

    Where:

    Full Accounting refers to what economists refer to as opportunity costs: the full inter-temporal consequences – which in ethics, economics and politics is much more complex than the physical sciences.

    And where:

    Objective morality refers to the involuntary imposition of costs. Or stated positively, as the requirement for productive, fully informed, voluntary transfer, free of negative externality of the same criteria.

    SO THE QUESTION OF WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY REDUCIBLE TO:

    It is reducible to truth-telling (science), whereby we produce truth candidates that survive criticism as a means of defeating error, imaginary content, bias, wishful thinking, justification (justificationary rationalism), and deception.

    Conversely: If it isn’t reducible to truth telling, then you have a serious problem on your hands. smile emoticon

    (That should melt your brains for a few months.)

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    >>>Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    I am working on bias-variance where we see that it is OK to miss the truth if it lowers the error rate.

    >>>Curt Doolittle

    I will flip this from the justificationary phrasing that Nassim is using, to “It is ok to miss truth if you warranty that you have performed due diligence against negative externalities.” This is “SKIN IN THE GAME”.

    >>>Curt Doolittle

    “SKIN IN THE GAME”

    An individual performs a demonstrated preference for a theory prior to action, where as an observation functions as a demonstrated preference post-action.

    In other words, there is no test of an individuals hypothesis, even to himself, without demonstrated preference. Statements are meaningless. The only way we know if someone has made a statement that has passed his own cognitive biases is if he demonstrates a preference by placing skin in the game.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-24 10:08:00 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

  • Without Propertarianism strict construction of law ( operational ism in law) is

    Without Propertarianism strict construction of law ( operational ism in law) is not possible.

    With Propertarianism strict construction is possible.

    And not particularly difficult.

    “Given this means of involuntary transfer/free riding,

    We prohibit such transfers,

    And define these rights,

    By this reasoning,

    Until such time as the aforementioned means of involuntary transfer is no longer possible.”

    We require no legislature. We require only a formal market for the construction of commons by contract.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-10 03:41:00 UTC

  • Is Propertarianism Utilitarian?

    (worth repeating) ( h/t: Kyle Trotta ) [I]s Propertarianism Utilitarian? First, Propertarianism consists of multiple concepts: (a) Testimonial Truth. (b) Testimonialism: The unification of morality, philosophy, law and science under testimonial truth. (c) Propertarian Ethics and Politics: a universal language of ethics and politics. (d) Testimonial Classical Liberalism: the means of constructing institutions that produce commons – (because truth and consequential trust, is the reason westerners can produce such hyper-competitive commons.) (e) Aristocratic Egalitarianism (Western Aristocratic Group Evolutionary Strategy) We (meaning the people who advise me) felt that lumping everything under the single term ‘Propertarianism’ was simply easier. It’s easier to understand one name than five or six. So when we say ‘Propertarianism’ in the narrowest sense, its the formal logic of ethics and politics. When we use it casually, in the broader sense, we refer to the use of that formal logic to create aristocratic egalitarian political orders. Now, back to “Utilitarian”. When we say something is utilitarian, we mean that the decidability of moral questions is determined by the usefulness of some outcome or other, by some criteria or other. In Propertarianism, I’ve tried to provide an AMORAL (non-moral), logically and operationally articulated, empirically derived, means of deciding moral questions: the prohibition on the imposition of costs – a prohibition that MUST exist for cooperation to remain rational. To state this prohibition in positive terms we can say we require: “productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of negative externality of the same criteria.” We can further express this requirement in law, as both the logical origin of all law, and the formal expression of that law as property rights where the scope of property is defined as property-en-toto; where property-en-toto is defined as accumulated capital of all forms that people will demonstrably defend and retaliate against impositions upon (enumerated on propertarianism.com), and where that capital was obtained by the same criteria. Propertarianism then, is the legal codification of the single necessary principle of rational cooperation. With it we can create nomocracy: Rule of Law, under the one law of rational cooperation. And it applies whether we resolve interpersonal disputes, or organize to construct commons. Propertarianism is expressible as the incremental, evolutionary suppression of parasitism (free riding) in all its forms, by the most immediate means possible: the organic, evolutionary, independent, rule of law, under the one principle (law) of anti-parasitism: the total prohibition on the imposition of costs against property-en-toto. Leaving no means of sustenance available except productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange free of negative externality. [D]oes Propertarianism take biological influences into account? The answer is yes. Both in ethics and in politics. One of the aspects I have tried to get across is that just as the market forms an information system that by way of prices provides us with information needed to serve ourselves by the service of others – to cooperate at vast scales – that our moral biases, and moral blindnesses, and rational justifications constitute a division of inter-temporal reproductive perception, cognition, negotiation, and labor. As such, voluntary excahgen between not only males and females, but voluntary exchange between progressives(feminine bias), libertarians(production bias), and conservatives(masculine tribal bias) are the only means by which to make full use of the information perceived by all. Each inter-temporal and moral specialization must specialize to gain expertise, but compromise to with other parts of the spectrum to obtain what their bias suggests to them. As such the market for commons must be divided as were the original houses into classes, and classes into genders, to reflect the biases of the groups. This is not to say we need representative government. It is only that no matter what means we use to make decisions on the provision of commons, whether direct, representative or economic, that monopoly decision making (majority rule) is not required, only the non-imposition of costs by the participants in the agreement and those who do not wish to participate in it. To facilitate negotiation it appears that criteria for joining one house or another is extremely useful. Although I suggest this be a virtual house, not a physical one. We are no longer limited by space and time in our communications. I hope this helped Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine Source: (1) Curt Doolittle – IS PROPERTARIANISM UTILITARIAN? DOES IT TAKE…

  • Is Propertarianism Utilitarian?

    (worth repeating) ( h/t: Kyle Trotta ) [I]s Propertarianism Utilitarian? First, Propertarianism consists of multiple concepts: (a) Testimonial Truth. (b) Testimonialism: The unification of morality, philosophy, law and science under testimonial truth. (c) Propertarian Ethics and Politics: a universal language of ethics and politics. (d) Testimonial Classical Liberalism: the means of constructing institutions that produce commons – (because truth and consequential trust, is the reason westerners can produce such hyper-competitive commons.) (e) Aristocratic Egalitarianism (Western Aristocratic Group Evolutionary Strategy) We (meaning the people who advise me) felt that lumping everything under the single term ‘Propertarianism’ was simply easier. It’s easier to understand one name than five or six. So when we say ‘Propertarianism’ in the narrowest sense, its the formal logic of ethics and politics. When we use it casually, in the broader sense, we refer to the use of that formal logic to create aristocratic egalitarian political orders. Now, back to “Utilitarian”. When we say something is utilitarian, we mean that the decidability of moral questions is determined by the usefulness of some outcome or other, by some criteria or other. In Propertarianism, I’ve tried to provide an AMORAL (non-moral), logically and operationally articulated, empirically derived, means of deciding moral questions: the prohibition on the imposition of costs – a prohibition that MUST exist for cooperation to remain rational. To state this prohibition in positive terms we can say we require: “productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of negative externality of the same criteria.” We can further express this requirement in law, as both the logical origin of all law, and the formal expression of that law as property rights where the scope of property is defined as property-en-toto; where property-en-toto is defined as accumulated capital of all forms that people will demonstrably defend and retaliate against impositions upon (enumerated on propertarianism.com), and where that capital was obtained by the same criteria. Propertarianism then, is the legal codification of the single necessary principle of rational cooperation. With it we can create nomocracy: Rule of Law, under the one law of rational cooperation. And it applies whether we resolve interpersonal disputes, or organize to construct commons. Propertarianism is expressible as the incremental, evolutionary suppression of parasitism (free riding) in all its forms, by the most immediate means possible: the organic, evolutionary, independent, rule of law, under the one principle (law) of anti-parasitism: the total prohibition on the imposition of costs against property-en-toto. Leaving no means of sustenance available except productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange free of negative externality. [D]oes Propertarianism take biological influences into account? The answer is yes. Both in ethics and in politics. One of the aspects I have tried to get across is that just as the market forms an information system that by way of prices provides us with information needed to serve ourselves by the service of others – to cooperate at vast scales – that our moral biases, and moral blindnesses, and rational justifications constitute a division of inter-temporal reproductive perception, cognition, negotiation, and labor. As such, voluntary excahgen between not only males and females, but voluntary exchange between progressives(feminine bias), libertarians(production bias), and conservatives(masculine tribal bias) are the only means by which to make full use of the information perceived by all. Each inter-temporal and moral specialization must specialize to gain expertise, but compromise to with other parts of the spectrum to obtain what their bias suggests to them. As such the market for commons must be divided as were the original houses into classes, and classes into genders, to reflect the biases of the groups. This is not to say we need representative government. It is only that no matter what means we use to make decisions on the provision of commons, whether direct, representative or economic, that monopoly decision making (majority rule) is not required, only the non-imposition of costs by the participants in the agreement and those who do not wish to participate in it. To facilitate negotiation it appears that criteria for joining one house or another is extremely useful. Although I suggest this be a virtual house, not a physical one. We are no longer limited by space and time in our communications. I hope this helped Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine Source: (1) Curt Doolittle – IS PROPERTARIANISM UTILITARIAN? DOES IT TAKE…

  • IS PROPERTARIANISM UTILITARIAN? DOES IT TAKE BIOLOGICAL INFLUENCES INTO ACCOUNT?

    IS PROPERTARIANISM UTILITARIAN? DOES IT TAKE BIOLOGICAL INFLUENCES INTO ACCOUNT?

    (worth repeating) ( h/t: Kyle Trotta )

    1) Is Propertarianism Utilitarian?

    First, Propertarianism consists of multiple concepts:

    (a) Testimonial Truth.

    (b) Testimonialism: The unification of morality, philosophy, law and science under testimonial truth.

    (c) Propertarian Ethics and Politics: a universal language of ethics and politics.

    (d) Testimonial Classical Liberalism: the means of constructing institutions that produce commons – (because truth and consequential trust, is the reason westerners can produce such hyper-competitive commons.)

    (e) Aristocratic Egalitarianism (Western Aristocratic Group Evolutionary Strategy)

    We (meaning the people who advise me) felt that lumping everything under the single term ‘Propertarianism’ was simply easier to understand one name, than five or six. So when we say ‘propertarianism’ in the narrowest sense, its the formal logic of ethics and politics. When we use it casually, in the broader sense, we refer to the use of that formal logic to create aristocratic egalitarian political orders.

    Now, back to “Utilitarian”. When we say something is utilitarian, we mean that the decidability of moral questions is determined by the usefulness of some outcome or other, by some criteria or other.

    In Propertarianism, I’ve tried to provide an AMORAL (non-moral), logically and operationally articulated, empirically derived, means of deciding moral questions: the prohibition on the imposition of costs – a prohibition that MUST exist for cooperation to remain rational.

    To state this prohibition in positive terms we can say we require: “productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of negative externality of the same criteria.”

    We can further express this requirement in law, as both the logical origin of all law, and the formal expression of that law as property rights where the scope of property is defined as property-en-toto; where property-en-toto is defined as accumulated capital of all forms that people will demonstrably defend and retaliate against impositions upon (enumerated on propertarianism.com), and where that capital was obtained by the same criteria.

    Propertarianism then, is the legal codification of the single necessary principle of rational cooperation. With it we can create nomocracy: Rule of Law, under the one law of rational cooperation. And it applies whether we resolve interpersonal disputes, or organize to construct commons.

    Propertarianism is expressible as the incremental, evolutionary suppression of parasitism (free riding) in all its forms, by the most immediate means possible: the organic, evolutionary, independent, rule of law, under the one principle (law) of anti-parasitism: the total prohibition on the imposition of costs against property-en-toto. Leaving no means of sustenance available except productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange free of negative externality.

    2) Does Propertarianism take biological influences into account?

    The answer is yes. Both in ethics and in politics.

    One of the aspects I have tried to get across is that just as the market forms an information system that by way of prices provides us with information needed to serve ourselves by the service of others – to cooperate at vast scales – that our moral biases, and moral blindnesses, and rational justifications constitute a division of inter-temporal reproductive perception, cognition, negotiation, and labor.

    As such, voluntary exchange between, not only males and females, but voluntary exchange between progressives(feminine bias), libertarians(production bias), and conservatives(masculine tribal bias) are the only means by which to make full use of the information perceived by all.

    Each inter-temporal and moral specialization must specialize to gain expertise, but must also compromise with other parts of the spectrum to obtain what their bias suggests to them.

    As such the market for commons must be divided as were the original houses into classes, and classes into genders, to reflect the biases of the groups. This is not to say we need representative government. It is only that no matter what means we use to make decisions on the provision of commons, whether direct, representative or economic, that monopoly decision making (majority rule) is not required, only the non-imposition of costs by the participants in the agreement and those who do not wish to participate in it.

    To facilitate negotiation it appears that criteria for joining one house or another is extremely useful. Although I suggest this be a virtual house, not a physical one. We are no longer limited by space and time in our communications.

    I hope this helped

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-08 02:52:00 UTC