Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • IRONY: CONSERVATISM IS A SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE, AND PROGRESSIVISM IS AN UNSCIENT

    IRONY: CONSERVATISM IS A SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE, AND PROGRESSIVISM IS AN UNSCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE.

    —“…while conservatism is arationally structured, and progressivism is rationally structured, it turns out that conservatism as practiced is scientific, and progressive is unscientific (religious).”—

    This is in no small part because conservatism is structured demonstratively and progressivism is structured verbally.

    But the palpable irony, is that conservatism is a scientific method advocated arationally, while progressivism is an unscientific method advocated rationally.

    If humans can engage in such farcical verbal nonsense, on our most important matters, then what does that say about us? That we are just chickens clucking at the wind?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-19 03:45:00 UTC

  • INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATISM EXIST? Response to: Does intellectual conservatism exi

    http://anarcho-monarchism.com/2014/06/24/intellectual-conservatism-existDOES INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATISM EXIST?

    Response to: http://anarcho-monarchism.com/2014/06/24/intellectual-conservatism-exist

    Does intellectual conservatism exist? This may be the wrong question.

    I’ll argue that Yes, intellectual conservatism does exist. Although, when you say “intellectual” it is somewhat troublesome, because it’s not sufficiently articulate for the purpose intended. Instead, humans demonstrate the ability to argue( persuade or justify) using a limited number of frameworks – and those frameworks constitute a spectrum of complexity from the simplistically intuitive to the ratio-empirical.

    ARGUMENTATIVE SPECTRUM

    1) EXPRESSIVE (emotional): a type of argument where a person expresses a positive or negative opinion based upon his emotional response to the subject. While used as an argument, it is not. It is merely an opinion or expression.

    2) SENTIMENTAL (biological): a type of argument that relies upon one of the five (or six) human sentiments, and their artifacts as captured in human traditions, morals, or other unarticulated, but nevertheless consistently and universally demonstrated preferences and behaviors.

    3) MORAL (normative) : a type of argument that relies upon a set of assumedly normative rules of whose origin is either (a)socially contractual, (b)biologically natural, (c) economically necessary, or even (d)divine.

    4) HISTORICAL (analogical / correlative):

    5) RATIONAL (internally consistent)

    6) SCIENTIFIC (correlative and directly empirical)

    7) ECONOMIC: (correlative and *indirectly* empirical)

    8) RATIO-EMPIRICAL (Comprehensive, internally consistent and externally correspondent)

    The value of conservatism, as an *ARATIONAL* social system of myths, traditions, habits, and formal institutions, is that such a structure, much like religious faith, is impervious to fashionable changes, and in particular, verbal manipulation by Schumpeterian public intellectuals. In fact, I have argued, and I think successfully, that conservatism as practiced is demonstrably scientific: evidentiary – while progressivism is demonstrably and successfully verbalist. A fact which is somewhat humorous or ironic or depressing depending upon one’s own disposition: in effect while conservatism is arationally structured, and progressivism is rationally structured, it turns out that conservatism as practiced is scientific, and progressive is unscientific (religious).

    THE PROBLEMS OF AN ‘INTELLECTUAL’ CONSERVATISM

    1) Just as we solved the calculus and physics, before we solved economics and social science, conservatism has been unsolved (unarticulated in ratio-scientific terms) because it is a more complicated system than we had anticipated. And such complicated systems of thought are very hard to use in argument. Worse, they are hard to use in political argument because, under a democratic polity, we require numbers, and complicated arguments are the province of a permanent minority. Until conservatism is articulated in ratio-empirical form, and until public intellectuals can reduce those complex statements to simple narratives and memes, conservatism (Anglo-European Aristocratic Egalitarianism) is an advanced form of social order that is nearly impossible for ordinary people to argumentatively defend.

    2) There doesn’t appear to be demand for intellectual argument in conservatism, precisely because conservatives are so dependent upon taught, learned and innate moral intuition. If conservatives cannot ‘feel’ it then they don’t trust it. This turns out to be fairly good when one prevents adding false ideas to conservatism, but it turns out to be fairly difficult to argue conservatism rationally. So therefore, as a majority, conservatism can function and persist in a body of people. But under democratic rule, cultural and political diversity, the need to argue rationally in order to produce laws, and the ability to use law to impose changes upon the body politic, conservative arationalism is a weakness because conservative principles are not sufficiently defensible against (dishonest) framing, loading, overloading, pseudo-rationalism, and pseudoscience. Which is why the 20th century has been so harmful to conservatism: the cosmopolitans were merely superior at using the media to broadcast and repeat as a mantra, nearly any framed, loaded, overloaded, pseudo-rational (postmodern), and pseudoscientific (marxist-socialist) program.

    3) I generally test my ideas in the libertarian (libertine) community precisely because libertarianism (libertinism) is an intellectual ideology: structured as a very rigid, very analytic, moral, legal, and economic argument. Libertarians (libertines) are wrong, which is why their argument fails universally in all political populations. But at least it is possible to conduct conservative argument in moral, legal, and economic terms, and develop one’s arguments there. Most of us find, that even if we produce, as you say ‘intellectual’ philosophy, but I would state as ‘ratio-empirical, moral, analytic, legal, and economic philosophy’, conservatives behave so anti-intellectually, that the advocacy of conservatism in ratio-empirical, analytic, moral, legal, and economic terms, is exasperating.

    SO THE QUESTION MAY BE “WHY ARE CONSERVATIVES SO ANTI-INTELLECTUAL” rather than why are no conservative philosophers extant. I’m here. A few others are. But the conservative community does not demonstrate a demand for ‘intellectual’ arguments.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-19 02:20:00 UTC

  • Ok. This isn’t my thing. I’m just trying to look into the economics and the math

    Ok. This isn’t my thing. I’m just trying to look into the economics and the math of it. But if Ebola really can have a 42 or even 21 day incubation period, that means it’s impossible to know if you have been exposed, and so every sniffle someone gets is suspect. I know people aren’t contagious until they show symptoms, but this long a period means you can’t really isolate people, and that unless you are perfectly healthy you must stay home. I guess we could temporarily criminalize public illness for a while. But it’s almost impossible to control. And with these mortality rates it’s not like 1918 even. It’s very hard to wipe out something with these characteristics. That outbreak had only a 20% mortality rate and killed about 6% of the world population. I don’t really know enough about transmission to have an opinion, but with the extreme level of care needed, that long a a gestation period, the mortality rate, it seems economically devastating just from having to fight it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-15 08:57:00 UTC

  • DELAYED REPRODUCTION AND SLOWING RELATIVE MUTATION ACCUMULATION —“Delayed repr

    DELAYED REPRODUCTION AND SLOWING RELATIVE MUTATION ACCUMULATION

    —“Delayed reproduction leads to more chance of mutations (eg from sperm) and problems with poorer quality control on release of older eggs (eg trisomy twenty one is probably the tip of an iceberg of similar problems).

    ***But late reproduction also reduces the number of generations and the possibility of mutation accumulation from that cause – so that modern people only have two generations (e.g. average thirty plus years) – i.e. two new lots of mutations in sixty-something years – where in historical times there would have been three generations per 60-70 years – three lots of new mutations****.

    So slowing reproduction (by increasing the average age of reproduction) may perhaps reduce mutation accumulation temporarily; given that the effect of aging on mutations may be less per decade than the effect of an extra generation of new mutations. “—

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-14 06:42:00 UTC

  • ECONOMICS IS AN EMPIRICAL SCIENCE – ALL DISCIPLINES MUST BE CONSTRUCTED AS EMPIR

    ECONOMICS IS AN EMPIRICAL SCIENCE – ALL DISCIPLINES MUST BE CONSTRUCTED AS EMPIRICAL SCIENCES – AND THOSE THAT ONE ARGUES OTHERWISE DEMONSTRATE EMPTY VERBALISM ON THE PART OF THE ADVOCATE.

    (from elsewhere)

    a) to be classified as a science a discipline must practice the scientific method: observation (measurement to overcome limits to perception and memory), tests of external correspondence (experiments), tests of internal consistency (logic).

    b) empiricism (observation) is not equal to experimentation (positivism).

    c) economic properties are not deducible from first principles, and we have dozens of examples, the most common of which is sticky prices.

    d) humans are able to cooperate because of sympathetic intention, and could not do so without it. That is, we can (as can dogs, but not apes) understand intentions. We are also marginally indifferent in our incentives. As such we can test the rationality of incentives. Therefore all economic statements are empirically testable by sympathetic experience (the reduction of stimuli to that which we can perceive by our senses.) Or what is called ‘instrumentalism’.

    e) as such economics does not differ from any other scientific discipline in that we require instrumentation (both mechanical and logical) to reduce that which we cannot experience to that which we can experience, and upon experiencing, make a comparison. We simply need less instrumentation to perceive the data than we do in most other fields.

    f) the purpose of which is to develop general rules of arbitrary precision that we can use to model that which we cannot experience directly, from fragmentary information that we can experience directly.

    g) All statements of external correspondence are and always must be theoretical (in the spectrum intuition->hypothesis->theory->law.

    h) Since all hypothetical statements must include arbitrary precision, all general rules are limited by some scale or another(greater or lesser), beyond which the theory fails. In other words, all phenomenon demonstrate a distribution. That which does not is merely tautological.

    i) All axiomatic statements consist of constructions, with deterministic consequences, not observations – because all information that can exist, exists in the axioms.

    Ergo, economics is an empirical science as are all disciplines. All thought is empirical, hypothetical, theoretical, and bound by one or more axis of arbitrary precision. Logical MODELS consist of general rules. Axiomatic systems are TAUTOLOGICAL. Their value is in their tautology: which allows us to test the internal consistency of our statements.

    Mises failed to grasp operationalism which is why he had to create a lot of verbalist nonsense by equating verbal definitions with the properties of reality, so that he could justify his failure.

    (Honestly in retrospect, it’s amazing that like marx he could create that much nonsense – enough nonsense to overload the gullible.).

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-14 03:48:00 UTC

  • FROM ELSEWHERE: CLASSIFYING ONE’S SELF AS ‘AUSTRIAN’: INVESTIGATION VERSUS EXPLA

    FROM ELSEWHERE: CLASSIFYING ONE’S SELF AS ‘AUSTRIAN’: INVESTIGATION VERSUS EXPLANATION.

    I think most people who self identify as austrian outside of their employment:

    (a) mean that they use the austrian model of incentives and partial knowledge to understand the world we live in.

    (b) are merely using “I am” for the purpose of brevity, rather than the fully articulated: “I practice austrian economic models when I think of social questions.”

    The thing is, we can test statement (b), and have tested it, and it turns out that people can actually make use of that model, and that their use of that model is highly predictive, and highly explanatory.

    So given that the misesian austrian program (versus the christian austrian program) evolved as a legal-rational one, rather than an empirical one, I am not sure that the average person who uses the Austrian model is not practicing Austrian thought. I disagree that he is practicing empirical investigation, but I agree that he is practicing rational explanation.

    So given that to ‘be’ something is a verbalism (obscurantism using the verb to-be), and that Austrian thought falls into both empirical study, and rational explanation, I think that the debate as to whether one self identifies as Austrian or not, is simply a verbal criticism in itself.

    The empirical economist investigates phenomenon, and the rational modeler explains phenomenon by deduction from incentives. And both classify themselves as Austrian but fail to distinguish between the two schools of Austrian methods.

    Unfortunately Mises (and all the fruitcake-fringe at the Mises institute) conflate the empirical attempt at defining general rules, and the deductive application of general rules (modeling) for the purpose of explanation.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-13 20:46:00 UTC

  • MISES, HAYEK, ROTHBARD, AND THE AUSTRIAN PROGRAM (from elsewhere) Gabriel Zanott

    http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/06/21/mises-praxeology-as-the-failure-to-develop-economic-operationalism-yes/UNDERSTANDING MISES, HAYEK, ROTHBARD, AND THE AUSTRIAN PROGRAM

    (from elsewhere)

    Gabriel Zanotti is correct that (1) the hard core of the Austrian scientific research programme: is the study of dispersed knowledge. But Austrians also retain the remaining thesis of the Austrian program (2) that the business cycle (whether government intervention amplifies and extends booms and busts.) And (3) the Austrian program is perhaps best understood as an effort to develop a legal philosophy of economics rather than rational or empirical. Failure to understand this distinction is probably why the movement failed.

    The following might be life altering for those of you who are deeply engaged in philosophy?

    A) Mises’ program can best be understood as a failed effort to develop Economic Operationalism. He intuited it, but was not skilled enough to solve it, as did Bridgman and Brouwer in science and mathematics. (See my post at: http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/06/21/mises-praxeology-as-the-failure-to-develop-economic-operationalism-yes/ )

    B) Hayek succeeds in grasping that a legal philosophy is what is needed for the formation of a free society such that we produce the optimum economic outcomes – unfortunately he fails (as does Popper, Mises, and Rothbard, and even Hoppe) to solve the underlying cause, which is that property and morality are identical expressions given the structure of the family in relation to the structure of production. Hoppe correctly determines that property is the unit of commensurability and compatibility in all human cooperation (social systems) but his generation lacked the science to demonstrate that all human moral intuitions (instincts and norms) can be expressed as property rights, or to map them to the various family structures. (See my post here: http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/09/28/the-evolution-of-cooperation/ for condensed list, although I discuss this topic daily.)

    D) Rothbard an best be seen as an attempt to give us a religio-moral code, and an formal-institution-free society, rather than a legal system of formal institutions, and a legal philosophy. Rothbard writes as a cosmopolitan ideologist using the same arguments as marxists, socialists and neo-conservatives: to express Jewish ethics in christian legal terms. And, yes, Rothbard writes simply and accessibly. He excites our moral sentiments. But just as Hayek’s legal framework will produce beneficial ends, Rather than the high trust polity of the northern europeans advocated by Hayek using the formal institution of law, Rothbarian ethics using the informal institution of belief (moral religion) would produce the low trust levantine polity of the middle east. So while few self identified libertarians will like or appreciate it, Rothbard is probably as damaging to the liberty movement as Hayek was beneficial. As far as I know I have put Rothbard to bed permanently. (See: http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/06/20/rendering-rothbardian-fallacies-intellectually-embarrassing-and-argumentatively-impossible/ )

    Roula Robinson above, is largely correct: only western-into-europeans of the north sea region invented liberty as we know it (universalist liberty), by evolving it. And only the English managed to implement it as a formal system of legal institutions. And only Americans wrote it down in a constitution (Rather poorly it turns out). But that does not mean that once a formal institution is understood (universal individual property rights, rule of law, organic evolution of that law), it cannot be spread and adopted. However, the point I think Emmanuel Todd has demonstrated most convincingly, is that family structure and structure of production, determine moral intutions (as well as our genetics). So diversity turns out to be a ‘bad’, if diversity means a diversity in family structure. (See http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/08/26/how-do-family-structures-vary/ , or any of these: http://www.propertarianism.com/?s=family&submit.x=0&submit.y=0 )

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-13 20:24:00 UTC

  • RESULTS OF TWIN STUDIES behavioural genetics and twin studies | hbd chick

    http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/behavioral-genetics-and-twin-studies/CONFIRMING RESULTS OF TWIN STUDIES

    behavioural genetics and twin studies | hbd chick

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-05 15:00:00 UTC

  • THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IS A SUBSET OF “THE MORAL METHOD” All processes of product

    THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IS A SUBSET OF “THE MORAL METHOD”

    All processes of production are the same. We merely weight the outputs differently in value. Science values knowledge for its own sake (supposedly.) The scientific method ignores both real costs and opportunity costs. Technology doesn’t ignore them, because it is goal directed. The production of consumer goods, ignores places lower value on knowledge development and hides it rather than publishes it. But all that differs in any process of production (study of transformation) is which inputs we consider, and which outputs we prefer. PERIOD.

    The scientific method is but one instance of THE METHOD. The method is the same, whether in craft, production, technology or science. You would not believe how hard I have tried to make this argument, and how hard critical rationalists try to deny it so that they can preserve a special place in their hearts.

    Here is the mind blowing bit: The scientific method is written as a moral rule more than a logical one. The reason that scientists developed this moral rule in some detail before other fields, was because it was so much easier to lie, err, and fantasize about the production of hypotheses than it was to produce craft, production, or technology. Worse, (and this is what I work on) it is even harder to take the same moral prohibition and apply it to social science (economics, religion, morality, politics, law) because the incentives to lie, err, and fantasize, are even greater than those in science. My objective, in my work, is to apply the moral constraints we put in place upon science to defend us from lies, errors, and fantasies, to the social sciences, and the moral literature. And I expect that there will be a lot of resistance to following THE METHOD. Precisely because lying, useful error, and selling fantasies is so profitable.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-02 12:19:00 UTC

  • having ignorant, liberal education twits write bot-like questions that do nothin

    http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-know-how-people-view-me-as-a-person/answer/Curt-Doolittle?share=1Stop having ignorant, liberal education twits write bot-like questions that do nothing more than persist postmodern pseudoscience? Learn something empirical ok?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-27 09:42:00 UTC