Curt Doolittle

Theme: Reciprocity

  • A Rose By Any Other Name: Aristocratic Egalitarianism And Propertarianism

    —“Q&A: Curt, How Do We Refer To Your Work: Propertarianism or Aristocratic Egalitarianism”— In my view (which may or may not be right) I have written down in rational and scientific terms, the western group evolutionary strategy – the philosophy of the west.

    But it’s a very big scope of work. So what you call it depends upon which perspective you’re looking at it from. Culturally and civilizationally, it’s the philosophy of the west: aristocratic egalitarianism. a set of values: Aristocratic, and the criteria for membership: open to anyone who will fight. But if we are to ask what operations and processes do we use within aristocratic egalitarianism that refers to The metaphysics of action, Testimonial Truth and Epistemology, Propertarian Ethics, Market Government, and Aristocratic Ethics (excellence in man) To make things ‘simple’ for people to understand we use the term ‘Propertarianism’ as a shortcut, even though that only technically refers to the ethical component of Aristocratic Egalitarianism. We have debated using Testimonialism in order to place truth above property, but this term borders on the platonic, so we prefer the ‘real’ – propertarianism as a ‘common’ name for philosophical arguments that constitute the cultural strategy of the western indo European people we call Aryans: Aristocratic Egalitarianism. So that’s the full explanation. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute The Philosophy of Aristocracy Kiev, Ukraine

  • Taleb vs Doolittle: Demanding Skin-in-the-Game vs Involuntary Warranty

    Nassim Taleb and I are working on the same problem, which we identified by similar means: designing models. He was inspired when he designed financial risk models, and I was inspired when I designed artificial intelligences for games in anticipation of the kind of warfare we are seeing emerge today. I work bottom up (operationally), and Taleb works top-down (statistically). But this is the same problem from two ends of the spectrum. (He publishes books on the mass market to make money, I build software and companies for a limited number of partners and customers.) I want to find the mechanism and he wants to quantify the effect. But we are looking for the same thing. What is it? Computers are useful in increasing our perceptions. The game of Life is an interesting software experiment in that if you vary the rate (time) you see different patterns emerge. If you vary the scale you see different patterns emerge. But in the end, these patterns, while they appear relatively random at slow (operationally observable) rates, turn out to be highly deterministic at faster ( consequentially observable) rates. And this single experimental game tells us a lot about the human mind’s limits of perception. We see what we can, and the longer we observe the more consequential the patterns are that emerge, and the more deterministic is any system we observe. We have all heard how few behaviors ants have but what kind of complexity emerges from it. During a vacation in southern Oregon one year I observed ducks for a few days as a way of distracting myself from business stress. Ducks are not smart like crows. They have just a few behaviors (intuitions is perhaps a better word). And their apparent complexities emerge from just those few behaviors. But if you watch them long enough you see machines that do about four or five things. And that’s all. So, there is some limit to our perception underneath man’s behavior that is ascertainable: the metrics of human thought. And I would suggestion without reservation that this research program is at least – if more – profoundly important than the research program into the physical structure of the universe. This mathematics is achievable, but we don’t yet know how to go about it. And I am pretty certain that it’s a data collection problem: until we have vastly more data about our selves we probably cannot determine it. (emphasis on probably). We may solve it by analogy with artificial intelligence. Or we may not. I suspect that we will. We will develop a unit of cognition wherein x information is required for every IQ point in order to create a bridge between one substantive network of relations and another. But Taleb and I issue the same warning – although I think I have an institutional solution that can be implemented as formal policy and he has an informative narrative but no solution – as yet. Although his paper last year that shows just how extraordinarily large our information must be once we start getting into outliers. We both use some version of ‘skin in the game’ as a guardianship against wishful thinking and cognitive bias. I use the legal term warranty and he uses the financial street name ‘skin in the game’ But the idea is the same. In Taleb’s case, I think he is more concerned with stupidity and hubris as we have seen in the statistical (non-operational) financialization of our economy. Whereas I am more concerned with deception, as we have seen in the conversion of the social sciences to statistical pseudosciences in every field: psychology, sociology, economics, politics, and (as I have extended the scope of political theory) to group evolutionary strategy. But whether top down or bottom up, statistical or pseudoscientific, skin in the game or warranty, hubris or deceit, the problem remains the same: It is too easy for people in modernity to rely on pseudoscience in order to execute deceptions that cause us to consume every form of capital, from the genetic, to the normative, to the ethical and moral, to the informational (knowledge itself), to the institutional, to built capital, to portable capital, to money, to accounts, to the territorial, and destroying civilization, and in particular the uniqueness of western civilization in the process. So to assert our ( Taleb and I) argument more directly: given that these people have put no skin in the game, and provided no warranty, but that we can impose upon them the warranty against their will for their malfeasance, what form of restitution shall we extract from them? Territorial, physical, institutional, traditional, informational, normative, and genetic? How do we demand restitution for what they have done? How would you balance the accounts plus provide such incentive under rule of law that this would never happen again? As for the Great Wars – all debts are paid. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Taleb vs Doolittle: Demanding Skin-in-the-Game vs Involuntary Warranty

    Nassim Taleb and I are working on the same problem, which we identified by similar means: designing models. He was inspired when he designed financial risk models, and I was inspired when I designed artificial intelligences for games in anticipation of the kind of warfare we are seeing emerge today. I work bottom up (operationally), and Taleb works top-down (statistically). But this is the same problem from two ends of the spectrum. (He publishes books on the mass market to make money, I build software and companies for a limited number of partners and customers.) I want to find the mechanism and he wants to quantify the effect. But we are looking for the same thing. What is it? Computers are useful in increasing our perceptions. The game of Life is an interesting software experiment in that if you vary the rate (time) you see different patterns emerge. If you vary the scale you see different patterns emerge. But in the end, these patterns, while they appear relatively random at slow (operationally observable) rates, turn out to be highly deterministic at faster ( consequentially observable) rates. And this single experimental game tells us a lot about the human mind’s limits of perception. We see what we can, and the longer we observe the more consequential the patterns are that emerge, and the more deterministic is any system we observe. We have all heard how few behaviors ants have but what kind of complexity emerges from it. During a vacation in southern Oregon one year I observed ducks for a few days as a way of distracting myself from business stress. Ducks are not smart like crows. They have just a few behaviors (intuitions is perhaps a better word). And their apparent complexities emerge from just those few behaviors. But if you watch them long enough you see machines that do about four or five things. And that’s all. So, there is some limit to our perception underneath man’s behavior that is ascertainable: the metrics of human thought. And I would suggestion without reservation that this research program is at least – if more – profoundly important than the research program into the physical structure of the universe. This mathematics is achievable, but we don’t yet know how to go about it. And I am pretty certain that it’s a data collection problem: until we have vastly more data about our selves we probably cannot determine it. (emphasis on probably). We may solve it by analogy with artificial intelligence. Or we may not. I suspect that we will. We will develop a unit of cognition wherein x information is required for every IQ point in order to create a bridge between one substantive network of relations and another. But Taleb and I issue the same warning – although I think I have an institutional solution that can be implemented as formal policy and he has an informative narrative but no solution – as yet. Although his paper last year that shows just how extraordinarily large our information must be once we start getting into outliers. We both use some version of ‘skin in the game’ as a guardianship against wishful thinking and cognitive bias. I use the legal term warranty and he uses the financial street name ‘skin in the game’ But the idea is the same. In Taleb’s case, I think he is more concerned with stupidity and hubris as we have seen in the statistical (non-operational) financialization of our economy. Whereas I am more concerned with deception, as we have seen in the conversion of the social sciences to statistical pseudosciences in every field: psychology, sociology, economics, politics, and (as I have extended the scope of political theory) to group evolutionary strategy. But whether top down or bottom up, statistical or pseudoscientific, skin in the game or warranty, hubris or deceit, the problem remains the same: It is too easy for people in modernity to rely on pseudoscience in order to execute deceptions that cause us to consume every form of capital, from the genetic, to the normative, to the ethical and moral, to the informational (knowledge itself), to the institutional, to built capital, to portable capital, to money, to accounts, to the territorial, and destroying civilization, and in particular the uniqueness of western civilization in the process. So to assert our ( Taleb and I) argument more directly: given that these people have put no skin in the game, and provided no warranty, but that we can impose upon them the warranty against their will for their malfeasance, what form of restitution shall we extract from them? Territorial, physical, institutional, traditional, informational, normative, and genetic? How do we demand restitution for what they have done? How would you balance the accounts plus provide such incentive under rule of law that this would never happen again? As for the Great Wars – all debts are paid. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • 3) destruction of the reciprocal local insurance under civic society increases u

    3) destruction of the reciprocal local insurance under civic society increases uncertainty and risk. Increases loneliness.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-09-30 08:08:02 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/781767545766502400

    Reply addressees: @JoshZumbrun

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/781157309145686016

    IN REPLY TO:

    @JoshZumbrun

    This is one of the most horrifying graphics I’ve ever seen:
    https://t.co/wM0VJZn0Wg https://t.co/qaUaNFtRPl

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/781157309145686016

  • Reciprocal insurance of life and property already covers survival conditions. If

    Reciprocal insurance of life and property already covers survival conditions. If you need water in the desert, others must give it to you, even if you have no money, although you must pay them back for it later.

    There is no altruism. Period. We can’t find it in nature.

    We find:

    1) Kin selection (kingroup morality)

    2) reciprocal insurance (ingroup morality)

    3) buying options on cooperation. (outgroup morality)

    4) defense against future retaliation (if you don’t give him water he and his might kill you for it) (pragmatism)

    There is no altruism.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-09-25 03:57:00 UTC

  • Limits Of Political Action

    No political action may be taken that is not reversible. Or framed alternatively: no action may be taken that one cannot pay restitution for the consequences. Or framed alternately: no government had the right to pursue immigration.

  • Limits Of Political Action

    No political action may be taken that is not reversible. Or framed alternatively: no action may be taken that one cannot pay restitution for the consequences. Or framed alternately: no government had the right to pursue immigration.

  • “All improvement in cooperation comes from parallel increases in informational q

    —“All improvement in cooperation comes from parallel increases in informational quality++ and theft/fraud/conspiracy suppression–.”— Something I posted on twitter in response to this question. Man is a rational actor. He acts in his rational self-interest at all times, choosing immoral and moral actions by intuitive cost vs benefit; and we can find no exceptions other than kin selection – and arguably that is also in one’s self-interest. For this reason we do not make the world a better place, but instead, we create institutions that raise the cost of unhelpful behaviors, and reduce the cost of helpful behaviors. Some of the methods we use to suppress immoral behaviors are obvious (law, restitution, punishment), and some are not (the conversion of property from material goods to partial-title) because they make theft more difficult. Others are difficult to admit to: that the differences between wealthier and poorer societies is generally explained by the relative sizes of the upper and lower genetic classes, meaning that no amount of effort will help some countries prosper because there are just too many people at the bottom to incentivize with the inventiveness and productivity at the top, using organization provided by the middle. So while a one-child policy is necessary in Africa, the Muslim world, and south america it cannot be implemented without the equivalent of the Red Army or the Revolutionary Guard. Which India’s weakness – even literacy has been a problem. So we cannot eliminate a tendency as much as eliminate generations with those tendencies, and provide institutions that preserve positive and suppress negative tendencies. Man evolves locally and fast. But we must help man do so just as we did under agrarianism – which was not a kind process to those who could not transition to it. They are largely gone. Just as the various other incarnations of man are gone. And we eliminated them from the planet, while walking on foot, over a comparatively small number of millennia. If we look back over the past century, most of the harm was done by the communist movement, the facist movement to resist it, and the capitalist movement to eradicate it. The communist movement promised utopian results to backward nations that had not transitioned through the enlightenment. Just as Islam is a utopian movement promising utopian results to backward nations, and using the same strategy as communism except distributed on moral and religoius grounds using weaponized reproduction rather than distributed on economic and political grounds using direct rebellion – a slower path to the same ends: changing the order to one suitable to the underclasses and less suitable to the middle and upper classes. The pseudoscientific communist economic movement(Marx) was accompanied by the pseudoscientific social science movement (boaz) and the pseudoscientific psychological movement (freud), and less harmflly the pseudoscientific mathematical moveent( Cantor). And then when by the pseudoscientific cultural movvement (the frankfurt school). So my prescription for improvement for mankind is that we can continue the suppression of new methods of theft and fraud by defending the informational commons the same way we defend the air, land, and water from pollution, our physical commons, infrastructure and monuments from physical damage, and our rule of law, govenrment from damage, and our religions and traditions from damage: By outlawing pseudoscience. We could not outlaw pseudoscience until very recently because we have only begun to understand truth at scale in the 20th century. But now that we know, we can force upon people a warranty of due diligence in speech inserted into the commons the same way we force a warranty of due diligenc upon people who provide goods and services. Those due diligences are (Painfully Briefly): 1 – categorical consistency (identity and non conflation) 2 – internal consistency (logical) 3 – external correspondence (empirical consistency) 4 – existential possibility (operational language) 5 – ethical consistency (consisting of fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary transfer, limited to externalities of the same.) 6 – scope consistency (defining limits, full accounting, and parsimony) We have many such other requirements in the law, and we use these requirements with academics when publishing. And there is no reason we do not demand these same warranties of political speech, which is far more consequential than academic speech. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute KIev, Ukraine http://www.drewgl.com/posts/4241

  • “All improvement in cooperation comes from parallel increases in informational q

    —“All improvement in cooperation comes from parallel increases in informational quality++ and theft/fraud/conspiracy suppression–.”— Something I posted on twitter in response to this question. Man is a rational actor. He acts in his rational self-interest at all times, choosing immoral and moral actions by intuitive cost vs benefit; and we can find no exceptions other than kin selection – and arguably that is also in one’s self-interest. For this reason we do not make the world a better place, but instead, we create institutions that raise the cost of unhelpful behaviors, and reduce the cost of helpful behaviors. Some of the methods we use to suppress immoral behaviors are obvious (law, restitution, punishment), and some are not (the conversion of property from material goods to partial-title) because they make theft more difficult. Others are difficult to admit to: that the differences between wealthier and poorer societies is generally explained by the relative sizes of the upper and lower genetic classes, meaning that no amount of effort will help some countries prosper because there are just too many people at the bottom to incentivize with the inventiveness and productivity at the top, using organization provided by the middle. So while a one-child policy is necessary in Africa, the Muslim world, and south america it cannot be implemented without the equivalent of the Red Army or the Revolutionary Guard. Which India’s weakness – even literacy has been a problem. So we cannot eliminate a tendency as much as eliminate generations with those tendencies, and provide institutions that preserve positive and suppress negative tendencies. Man evolves locally and fast. But we must help man do so just as we did under agrarianism – which was not a kind process to those who could not transition to it. They are largely gone. Just as the various other incarnations of man are gone. And we eliminated them from the planet, while walking on foot, over a comparatively small number of millennia. If we look back over the past century, most of the harm was done by the communist movement, the facist movement to resist it, and the capitalist movement to eradicate it. The communist movement promised utopian results to backward nations that had not transitioned through the enlightenment. Just as Islam is a utopian movement promising utopian results to backward nations, and using the same strategy as communism except distributed on moral and religoius grounds using weaponized reproduction rather than distributed on economic and political grounds using direct rebellion – a slower path to the same ends: changing the order to one suitable to the underclasses and less suitable to the middle and upper classes. The pseudoscientific communist economic movement(Marx) was accompanied by the pseudoscientific social science movement (boaz) and the pseudoscientific psychological movement (freud), and less harmflly the pseudoscientific mathematical moveent( Cantor). And then when by the pseudoscientific cultural movvement (the frankfurt school). So my prescription for improvement for mankind is that we can continue the suppression of new methods of theft and fraud by defending the informational commons the same way we defend the air, land, and water from pollution, our physical commons, infrastructure and monuments from physical damage, and our rule of law, govenrment from damage, and our religions and traditions from damage: By outlawing pseudoscience. We could not outlaw pseudoscience until very recently because we have only begun to understand truth at scale in the 20th century. But now that we know, we can force upon people a warranty of due diligence in speech inserted into the commons the same way we force a warranty of due diligenc upon people who provide goods and services. Those due diligences are (Painfully Briefly): 1 – categorical consistency (identity and non conflation) 2 – internal consistency (logical) 3 – external correspondence (empirical consistency) 4 – existential possibility (operational language) 5 – ethical consistency (consisting of fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary transfer, limited to externalities of the same.) 6 – scope consistency (defining limits, full accounting, and parsimony) We have many such other requirements in the law, and we use these requirements with academics when publishing. And there is no reason we do not demand these same warranties of political speech, which is far more consequential than academic speech. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute KIev, Ukraine http://www.drewgl.com/posts/4241

  • Q&a:Curt: Is There Any Morality Beyond Self Interest?

    —“Do you believe that morality beyond self-interest is entirely false as a result?”— I don’t believe in anything, because the term is archaic. I can state that it’s a strong truth candidate, because despite extremely exhaustive efforts by highly biased researchers, we cannot find a single instance of moral action that is not in itself selfish through kin selection. Now, when we use the word ‘moral’ we must grasp that there is an objective morality in natural (necessary, consistent, and decidable), and normative morality (local group contracts for different sets of behaviors that produce group benefits from which individuals largely benefit), and individual morality (those subsets of moral choices I choose to follow and not). We conflate these two terms, just as we conflate law (natural law), legislation (contract or command), and regulation (arbitrary edict). But objective and normative, and individual morality are equivalent to natural law (true), legislation (contractual), and regulation (arbitrary choice). When I write I use moral for objective morality of natural law, and norm for normative morality of local normative contract. We can extend this basic principle from not only sentient cooperative groups, but to non-sentient groups, to non sentient individuals, to plants, to bacteria, to the natural elements that make up the physical world, and to our emerging understanding of the physical world: that we must fight entropy if we wish to survive. So it is not only illogical to engage in self-destructive action, but it is physically impossible so to speak, as it would violate physical laws of the universe. Now some creatures appear to do sacrificial things, but this is sacrificial only from the (fallacious) human perspective as individual pleasure-seekers. But from evolution and the physical world’s standpoint, once we have exhausted a BENEFICIAL reproductive role we are no longer valuable to the organism (the algorithm) as a whole. Thankfully humans are almost always beneficial to one another when they are alive and not harming one another. Even then, those who harm, may be benefitting the organism (algorithm) “man”. Now when we say self-interest, selfishness that signals possible parasitism, or non-payment for commons is something all creatures that cooperate retaliate against. So there is a difference between COMPROMISE (rational self-interest) and ABSOLUTE (and therefore irrational) self-interest. What is rational for all of us is to preserve the incentive to cooperate, and to prevent providing incentive to retaliate, yet being defensive enough to discourage offense against us. So in this sense, it is always rational to compromise with those with whom you are compatible, because compromise with those with whom you are compatible is in your self-interest. There are no rules without limits. If we cannot state the limits of any general rule, we state a falsehood because we cannot state a truth. This is why the wise speak in teleological ethics (science/outcomes), the informed but inexperienced and deceitful speak in deontological ethics ( rationalism/rules ), the young, lacking knowlege and experience in virtues (analogy/imitations), and children in punishments and rewards (goods and bads). I hope this provided the answer you sought. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy or Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute