Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • “Pascal’s wager in personal choice, Occam’s razor in scientific investigation, D

    “Pascal’s wager in personal choice, Occam’s razor in scientific investigation, Dollar Cost Averaging in investment, Bayesian choice in computer science, and the law of the excluded middle in logic and mathematics all recommend precisely the same principle: When we are absent sufficient information or sufficient time, or sufficient resources, pragmatic decisions are still possible.”

    -Curt Doolittle

    Brett Sterling just posted this. And when I re-read it, it made me realize, that I’d forgotten to finish the explanation why.

    By choosing (purchasing) the lowest cost option we do not maximize gains or success or precision, but we minimize losses or failures, or under-over estimation.

    Why? Because the universe is cheap. It hasn’t the choice to take an option on higher, later, rewards to conserve energy. It conserves energy by taking the lowest cost solution that causes persistence.

    Why is this important? Because philosophy (morality, personal choice) pursues the good, and the optimum, but generally ignores costs.

    Adding costs to philosophy is analogous to removing immortality from the gods of our myths.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-11 08:04:00 UTC

  • Testimonialism is equivalent to the copernican, empirical, and darwinian revolut

    Testimonialism is equivalent to the copernican, empirical, and darwinian revolutions in the sense that it provides an answer that we don’t want to hear, even if it will be profoundly valuable for us to have heard.

    I can see very clearly (despite my own extreme difficulty with it) how a future looks after Testimonialism, just as we can see before and after the greeks, before and after the enlightenment, before and after darwin.

    Many things we hold dear are simply imprecise, false, or outright lies.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-10 11:03:00 UTC

  • “The human brain’s processing power is estimated at about 38 petaflops. But all

    —“The human brain’s processing power is estimated at about 38 petaflops. But all it needs to operate is about 20 watts of energy.”—

    That’s less than half of the current supercomputer (that runs on algorithms). But an algorithmic computer that could produce anywhere near the plasticity of the human brain would need thousands of times that processing power.

    Back in, i dunno, mid 2000’s I told people that the reason I got out of AI was when I understood that the power needed to create a general AI with current technology would turn the surface of the earth to cinders. And of course I was speaking (as usual) illustratively and therefore hyperbolically.

    But you know, the whole point is, that it’s actually a hardware problem. Most of what we need to do is not calculate, but to search. Algorithms calculate. (expensive). Search is cheap. And while many models require calculation, most of what humans need is to do is search.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-09 11:18:00 UTC

  • GENDERS: HOW ACCURATE IS THE r/K-SELECTION ANALOGY? —“some people are saying r

    GENDERS: HOW ACCURATE IS THE r/K-SELECTION ANALOGY?

    —“some people are saying r/K selection doesn’t apply to humans because we are just on a spectrum of K.”— A Friend

    (I am going to … suppress my urge to point out just how stupid it is to assume reproductive strategies are binary rather than graduated. … I want to smack people who run around confusing an analogy, describing theoretic observations, with an axiomatic statement. sigh…. Now, on to an explanation. )

    I think all of us know that r/K isn’t a binary system. But the fact that the female intuition and the underclass strategy mirrors r-selection (numbers) and the male intuition and upper class strategies mirror k-selection is a useful point for illustrating the different moral and cognitive biases of male and females that we see expressed in all walks of life, including voting patterns.

    I mean, I take it for granted everyone knows that when you select for neoteny you get decreasing dimorphism, and less exaggerated differences between the male and the female. Largely by domesticating the male (aggression) in both genders.

    WE ARE ALL A BLEND OF TRAITS.

    All five (six) major human personality factors(traits) (including intelligence) are marginally indifferent between the genders, but the expressions of these major personality traits in the corresponding ten(twelve) sub-traits differs greatly between the genders in stereotypical ways – just what you would expect.

    So we are all either more masculine or more feminine – which is observable in facial features and body types. (feminine/gracile, masculine/massive). And the greater the level of domestication (neotonic selection) the more likely we will create gender issues and start seeing ill effects in both genders. Hence the necessity for replacing genetic influence with developmental influence (training) so that we produce less ‘conflict’. (Hence why jewish men all seem ‘gay’ and we think (correctly) that those with more heavy features (bigger jaws, bigger noses, bigger brows, darker and more even hair and eye coloring, curlier hair) are more primitive. (‘Cause they are.) I mean. i say this as a guy with an ‘atlantic’ barrel chest, very wavy hair, lots of body hair, despite my rather gracile features, temperament, blue eyes and light brown hair.

    TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

    Now, you can have too much of a good thing. The east asians have taken it too far (less so the japanese). So, lIke I say frequently; I am pretty sure that we passed peak human. The point at which no further neoteny is valuable. And instead, the problem is culling the lower classes. And I would suggest that the aryans were pretty much ‘peak human’ at their time, and the Dutch prior to the 19th century were pretty much modern peak human. And that we have mostly seen decline since then, leaving the white russians and the ukrainians and the poles and the north germans peak human. IMHO the Finns are not far off the mark today just not as advanced as the Dutch were (or the norman aristocracy). (Much to the chagrin of the rest of the world, turns out that the tall, gracile, blonde, big round head, thing is right. Genetically superior, with an even distribution of verbal and spatial intelligence. )

    REVERSAL

    Hopefully, it seems that we might have been saved by science this time, despite losing 100 YEARS!!!! to marxist, feminist, postmodernist deceit, pseudoscience, and pseudorationalism.

    if so, we can prevent the second dark age caused by abrahamism: the art of lying through massive repetition.

    You wonder why prayer and chanting prayer works? Same reason abrahamic lying works.

    Repetition.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-07 14:08:00 UTC

  • Belyaev Experiment. The fox breeding experiment is probably the most important a

    Belyaev Experiment. The fox breeding experiment is probably the most important addition to evolutionary knowledge of the past century. Not to diminish genetics. But the fact that we can turn a fox into a dog that quickly by selecting for one simple, easily demonstrable trait, and that the cascade effects are identical to those in human domestication, as well as the domestication of all other farm animals, puts an end to the all sorts of pretense about rates of evolution, and dependence upon mutation and adaptation. Instead, we preserve, in our genetic records, multiple potentials that we can express in response to local need. We can select for rates of maturity or the reverse. And by doing so produce the variation in the races. It turns out that civilization requires we select for the very same trait we select for in foxes and wolves. We produce neoteny and its various consequences. Because all our endocrine and cerebro-chemical functions are interdependent.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-06 09:27:00 UTC

  • THREE INTERESTING QUESTIONS Dr Peterson, I have three of questions about your co

    THREE INTERESTING QUESTIONS

    Dr Peterson,

    I have three of questions about your combined use of mythology, literary analysis, personality psychology, and self-authoring for the purpose of education, diagnosis, and transformation.

    The three questions are:

    1) Are you, through your research, restoring our lost discipline of Stoicism (and have you considered that parallel? Do you have any thoughts on the subject?)

    2) What is the current scope of your ambitions? Where do you see your work leading? Especially now that you have captured so much attention.

    3) Given that the technique of employing suggestion that is common to abrahamic religions, marxism, postmodernism, and ‘political correctness’, if not all propaganda, is the use of the chain of myths from zoroaster, through the middle east, through the abrahamic religions, through the postmodern literature. Whereas the animistic myths common to all peoples, and the anthropomorphic myths common to most peoples do not make pretenses to truth instead, only wisdom, the authoritarian myths communicate utility (the monomyth>archetype>plot>virtue hierarchy) with what appears to be tragic externalities. While the other traditions and in particular the chinese and western do not produce tragic externalities. So what is your position on the use of fictionalisms? (meaning the use of hyperbole and exaggeration for the purpose of education, versus the use of ideals, utopias, and the supernatural – particularly the problem of conflation.).

    If you can answer these as is, that’s it. The rest below, merely elaborates on these three questions in some detail.

    —-ELABORATION—-

    QUESTION 1) ARE YOU RESTORING STOICISM?

    It certainly appears to me that between your use of the structure of myths, their correspondence with psychology, and self authoring, that you are advocating a modern, and scientific version, of Stoicism. I would venture that Stoicism, because of its action-orientation, was far superior to buddhism, and buddhism far superior to every other method of education in what we call ‘ mindfulness’ – regardless of whether it was taught by prophets, priests, philosophers, professors, or ordinary teachers, and whether taught as religion, spiritualism, ritual, or skill.

    Now setting aside that stoicism was a far larger program than its self authoring component, is it possible to scale your work on ‘self authoring’ institutionally and restore it as a central skill. (FWIW: my objective is restoring grammar logic, testimony, and rhetoric to central skills requirements for similar reasons)

    QUESTION 2) WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF YOUR AMBITION (CURRENTLY)?

    Here are three choices that represent a spectrum of possible ambitions I can imagine given the potential reach of your combination of cognitive science, psychology, literary analysis, and politics.

    1) Providing a clinical solution to the problem of modernity: meaning the suite of problems that arises when due to the complexity of the civic order, cause and consequence, are often out of our perception and cognition. This is how I might classify your research.

    2) Producing a reformation of civic religion, by similar means to the Augustinian integration of greek thought, by combining evolutionary biology, psychology, literary analysis, and the inventory of parables, myths, legends and histories.

    Note that I doubt that this is your intention, but as far as I am able to determine, of the myths, civic festival, civic ritual, and personal ritual that constitute civic religions, the rational use of the monomyth, archetypes, possible literary plots, and virtues, appears to provide wisdom (decidability) in successful navigation of one’s life, and either resistance to or vulnerability to ignorance, bias, wishful thinking, and deceit.

    3) Success in filling a market demand for means of opposing the forms of fictionalism: including (a) fundamentalism(meaning the conflation of history literature, wisdom and truth, advice and law), (b) marxism(meaning pseudoscience)/postmodernism(meaning pseudo-rationalism), (c) idealism, such as mathematical platonism, utopianism, universalism, and (d) political correctness (meaning outright lying).

    QUESTION 3 ) USING FICTIONALISM VS LITERARY ANALOGY

    Now, I have no idea how you will feel (or what you will think) about the this question, but I recognize that it’s sensitive, because it questions the utility of religions because of the myths they depend upon.

    In simple terms, the question is “what are the limits to the contents of portfolios of myths?”

    Across all civilizations, our myths rely on the monomyth, a limited set of archetypes, a limited set of plots, and limited set of virtues to provide us with wisdom – where wisdom, if operationally described, provides us with a continuous means of identifying opportunities to pursue, and hazards to avoid, and a continuous means of choice in their selection or avoidance.

    But, aside from the myths themselves, different mythic traditions include (a)statements about the universe, (b)our relationship to it, (c) our polity’s ambitions within it, – our polity’s competitive strategy for persistence and (d) the means of communicating all of the above.

    So, “what properties of myths produce externalities, the cumulative effect of which is destructive to individual, polity and mankind?”

    Because as far as I can tell, while the myths teach us many lessons, the techniques by which myths are conveyed, are perhaps more consequential, than the statements about the universe, or the lessons we learn about life from the myths themselves.

    Or rather, while the monomyth,archetypes,plots and virtues all teach us the same lessons about ourselves, they say very different things about the world itself. Or worse, there are sources of both knowledge and ignorance.

    You have spoken with no small passion and elegance about what we can learn from time tested lessons of history, and how those lessons map to both literary analysis, psychological experience, our brain structure, evolutionary necessity, and actions in reality. The scope of this correlative and apparently causal set of relationships serves to suggest that over the long term, wisdom literature – at least in cases of uncertainty – provides by survival in the market for application, if not scientific experiment, an effective method of learning about the world, our place in it, and how successfully survive in it.

    You have spoken a little less frequently but just as eloquently about the difference between a voluntary and involuntary mythos. Where in the voluntary mythos, man and god are bound by the laws of nature, and wherein the gods, demigods, and heroes (saints) provide advice but not command, and wisdom but not law. And where, we may trade with those gods — and if we are cunning and virtuous, we may not only outwit or defeat those gods, but rise to join them in some lesser manner. … And where in the involuntary mythos, nature is bound by the gods as is man, and we are not given wisdom and advice, but threat and law, and we do not trade but appease.

    You have participated in an uncomfortable argument where you conflated the true, the good, and the preferable, against an opponent for whom preference is a choice of the individual, the good is achieved by cooperative discovery and agreement, and the true provides decidability in matters of dispute regardless of one’s preference, or our agreement upon the good. (Although it appears both you and harris lacked the vocabulary for bringing that discussion to conclusion)

    You have talked about heroism(the direction of aggression to the service of the commons) and truth(the use of deflationary truth – as in military ‘reporting’ free of embellishment or opinion) regardless of it’s effects on the dominance( status ) hierarchy, but not talked about sovereignty(meritocracy).

    I have not seen you mention deflationary truth as unique to western civilization, where deflationary truth ( testimonly that is free of opinion, suggestion, obscurantism, and fictionalism). When it is the combination of both deflationary truth AND its use regardless of hierarchical consequences that is unique to the west.

    I believe I have seen you mention historicizing myths but I have not seen you discuss the problem of fictionalism in myth. In other words, the difference between the aristotelian descriptive(history), the literary analogy, the platonic and ideal, the animistic, and the abrahamic supernatural that conflates the real and ideal, good and true, wisdom and law.

    action rituals vs internal rituals.

    Not at all about how internal rituals appear to produce addiction behaviors.

    And this is where I am troubled, and where I ask my question. That is, the use of mythical literature, the archetypes, the plots, the virtues, the metaphysical relationships between ourselves, nature, gods, as wisdom literature appears to compete effectively with science, reason, and law. But whenever

    And the reason I ask, is that…

    …the techniques of Abrahamic religions: obedience, monopoly, and fictionalism, (meaning: denying truth by supernaturalism and idealism)…

    …and the techniques of Freudianism, Boazianism, Marxism, Scientific-Socialism (meaning: denying truth by pseudoscience), …

    …and the techniques of Postmodernism(meaning: denying truth by pseudo-ratioanlism), …

    …and the techniques of Political Correctness(meaning: just outright lying), …

    …all make use of the same process: conflation, loading, framing, fictionalism and overloading, to bypass reason and appeal to the genetic biases of our intuitions – or at least a subset of those intuitions.

    All transfer of meaning requires the art of suggestion. The value of myths, legends, parables, fairy tales, or any narrative at all, is in training us in general rules or collections we might call models, by suggestion, through the use of sympathetic analogy, and our increase in suggestibility under the narrative process.

    The problem is that just as we can be taught by suggestion, we can be deceived and harmed by suggestion.

    You are on the way to restoring our ancient literary ‘Religion’, but he seems bent on preserving the ‘fictionalism’ (lies) of Abrahamism.

    My question is, why preserve the lies of Abrahamism, if is is the use of the techniques of Abrahamism – fictionalism as a means of deception by suggestion – that the marxists (pseudo-science) and postmodernists (pseudorationalism) used to defeat the west in both the ancient and modern eras?

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-05 15:07:00 UTC

  • IDEOLOGIST, PHILOSOPHER, JUDGE, OR SCIENTIST? Ideology(preference), Philosopher(

    IDEOLOGIST, PHILOSOPHER, JUDGE, OR SCIENTIST?

    Ideology(preference), Philosopher(good), Judge(True), Scientist (Measurement)

    As far as I know:

    Ideology = advocating for change within a context, or change of context.

    Philosophy = Search for a method of decidability within a given context.

    Truth = a method of decidability independent of context: The Law of Dispute Resolution.

    Science = taking measurements that remove ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, fictionalism, and deception which are the natural states of man.

    I work in Science (defining methods of measurement free of error, bias, wishful-thinking and deceit).

    I work in Truth (defining universal methods of decidability)

    I work in Philosophy (recommending a preferred organization of society.)

    However, some people work only in philosophy, not in truth, or not in science. This list includes almost all philosophers.

    I considered myself a scientist, who uses the framework of philosophy, and has united science and philosophy.

    I think you must label yourself a scientist (researcher in measurements) or a judge (searcher for decidability), or a philosopher(search for preferences).

    I seek to be a judge, in order to prevent harm by philosophers and ideologists. I seek to be a scientist to help me in my judgements. If this casts me as a philosopher, this is a matter of convention. I only state that one philosophy is good or true, and another is bad or false. It is up to others to choose theirs, just as it is up to me to choose mine.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-05 12:21:00 UTC

  • Mathematics and logic make use of platonism (idealism) to a degree that is painf

    Mathematics and logic make use of platonism (idealism) to a degree that is painful, but it is translatable into scientific prose if you understand the foundations (causal relations) that constitute both math and logic.

    Now, it is one thing to move from the descriptive (scientific) to the ideal (supernormal), and quite another to move from the ideal (supernormal) to the experiential(phenomenological), and from the phenomenological to the supernatural and occult (abrahamic or religious surrender of reason).

    I mean, at some point you’re creating deception value rather than truth value. And while I we need analogy, and we can use ideal to substitute for knowledge when the ideal is demonstrable as a general rule – after that, everything starts moving from truth value, to meaning-value, into deception value.

    And I just dont’ understand why we should accept anything communicated in the realm of deception value.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-04 21:31:00 UTC

  • MATH IS DEAD SIMPLE. (Even if applying it gets increasingly difficult) Math is s

    MATH IS DEAD SIMPLE. (Even if applying it gets increasingly difficult)

    Math is stated as a form of idealism (mathematical platonism, specifically), and that’s the problem.

    Mathematics consists (scientifically) of the use of measurement, by using positional naming, serving as scale independent constant relations, to describe constant relations in the universe, and to deduce constant relations from those constant relations, or fragments of constant relations.

    I mean. Math could not be more simple. It’s trivial. That’s why its so powerful. We can use one of anything to describe any constant relation.

    Where math has a problem is inconstant relations (economics and law).

    Even there, we can identify some constant relations through the commensurability provided by property and money.

    Property and money themselves being empirical measures of the time saved through acts of voluntary cooperation.

    Math is really simple. Constant relations of position names provide scale independence.

    Unlike reality, we can construct numbers (positional names) in an infinite number of ‘dimensions’. So that not only can we represent countings, but one dimensional (lengths) two dimensional (geometric) three dimensional (spatial), four dimensional (change) – but we can also represent all sorts of pure relations ( ‘types, or classes’). For example, spreadsheets that reference each other’s pages form additional dimensions. But there is no limit to pure relations we can represent with positional names (topologies).

    Math is trivial. Just like binary number systems are trivial.

    Thats why they’re so powerful.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-04 20:50:00 UTC

  • METAPHYSICS, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY ? I my view the purpose of science is to constr

    METAPHYSICS, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY ?

    I my view the purpose of science is to construct measurements where we provide a means of sensing the otherwise unsensable such that we render it commensurable and judgeable. So Propertarianism is a method of measurement, where man is used as the unit of measure. In other words, perfect commensurably provided by the limits of human action within each dimension of actionable reality.

    Now given that we are marginally indifferent in our senses, we can then testify to one another in each of those dimensions (testimonially) and test one another’s statements for (as Joel says ) both correspondence and coherence. So it’s just very hard to construct a falsehood ‘testimonially’ that we cannot sense. Since everything is reduced to that which we can commensurably (marginally indifferently) sense.

    So I view science as the art of constructing measurements in logical and physical forms. I view philosophy as the means of decidability within a domain. I view truth as the means of decidability across domains, or independent of domain.

    So whether you want to take those three things and represent them as a triangle, or a hierarchy, I guess I have taken the position that there is a hierarchy, and it is Time > Life > Necessity of Action > Truth > Philosophy > Science. But I might be wrong about that relationship. I am almost certain I am wrong. But I can think about it a bit.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-04 18:58:00 UTC