PEOPLE DON’T DESIRE TRUTH
People desire personal utility, interpersonal justification, and political persuasion so that they can obtain a discount on acquiring one thing or another. But they rarely want the truth, which all too often inhibits all three.
Curt Doolittle
Source date (UTC): 2015-10-05 13:28:00 UTC
(diary)
Kant is interesting really because on the one hand, I see him as the sort of root of all continental philosophical evil, and the man who gave license to the ‘liars’ with:
—“I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”—
For which he will ever be damned.
On the other hand, he does produce a few gems. Particularly that you should try never to lie, and a simple test of moral action:
–“the categorical imperative … Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”–
But he goes into god’s plan:
—“The friction among men, the inevitable antagonism, which is a mark of even the largest societies and political bodies, is used by Nature as a means to establish a condition of quiet and security. …. The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end.”—Kant
I state this instead as “Any super predator such as man will evolve to create a condition of pacification of the universe around him. history of man is of his pacification of the earth. Sometimes more so than he desires.”
–“The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.”—Kant
I state this instead as “competitive pressures determine group evolutionary strategy, expressed as norms, morals, laws and institutions.”
Source date (UTC): 2015-10-01 00:11:00 UTC
ACTUALLY I DONT READ PHILOSOPHY.
Marco just reminded me of something I take for granted: I write philosophy but I read science.
Philosophical tradition provides us with an established framework for conveying a complete framework of ideas. I use that framework. But I don’t read many philosophers. They’re largely horrible mixtures of theology, pseudoscience, justification of priors and empty verbalises obscuring the absence of relations.
I view a philosopher’s function as integrating new knowledge into our frames of reference with the ambition of increasing correspondence with reality, because there is advantage in correspondence and disadvantage without.
And as a consequence a philosopher restructures relations, values, and institutions to make use of that new knowledge.
Hence in Propertarianism I follow epistemology with psychology, and I follow ethics with sociology, thereby uniting philosophy psychology and social science.
I view the law as western philosophy and religion. And the judiciary as our priesthood. I view religion and theology, and philosophy largely as propaganda.
And hence my criticism of continentals who seek to construct a new religion. We already have one – and it’s bad: Progressivism. (Liberalism). Or more precisely “democratic secular redistributive(equalitarian), consumer capitalist, humanism”.
I usually argue that the mythos of the church was destructive but the church as an institution was amazingly beneficial.
Source date (UTC): 2015-09-30 12:15:00 UTC
THE THIRD WAY (the end of history) IS THE TRUTHFUL SOCIETY
I am not sure how Fukuyama missed it, other than it seems like all throughout his career he seeks to justify his theory of monopoly bureaucracy, and his admiration of Sinic civilization.
He investigates the problems of bureaucracy under democracy – the failure to develop an independent professional bureaucracy first, and then democracy, such that patronage jobs are not given out.
But he does not demonstrate that the public intellectual class and private companies would not create problems of the Deep State’s self maximization of self interest, the parasitism of bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy’s attempt to eliminate all competition, and it’s enforced stagnation.
To create a high trust society one requires (a) a near universal militia (b) private property rights, independent judiciary (‘priesthood’) and rule of law proper (c) a natural nobility with long term interest in the territory, (d) insurers of last resort operated by professionals.
One does not require a monopoly bureaucracy. It is an admission of the failure of a people to develop and maintain rule of law.
One requires rule of law, law sufficiently articulated that it is inescapable (decidable), and universal standing such that the people can make use of it to control anyone acting in a public capacity in addition to private capacity.
If the basis of law is articulated as the total prohibition on free riding in all its forms, including: violence, theft, fraud, free riding, conspiracy, invasion and conquest; and if we defend the informational commons from pollution (“Abusus”), by requiring proof of existence and morality in any claim of common good; and if we construct a market for the construction of commons between the classes; then the end of history is not as Fukuyama claims – the professional bureaucracy.
Instead, the professional bureaucracy is yet another example of the failure of a people to develop an answer to the problem of politics, ethics, economics and the social sciences.
Chinese failed first to solve the problem of politics. They created the monopoly state first, and never discovered the rule of law. And in doing so, they failed first.
The end of history – at least the end of history that we can see today – is the truthful society. And democratic polities of all stripes are yet another failure to construct rule of law applicable to every living soul.
Source date (UTC): 2015-09-28 02:40:00 UTC
[C]RITICISM AS JUSTIFICATION 1 – We justify moral action ( dependence upon norm ) 2 – We justify legal contract ( explicit reference to law) 3- We are skeptical of perception and cognition. (Honesty of witness) 4 – We criticize truth propositions (theory) Because in each case we test for different properties all of which we blanket under an analogy to the term “true”, but none of which are informationally complete enough to in fact be true (ultimately parsimonious). Instead, when we use the term true, we mean that we have adhered to moral norms in each case, when we give our testimony ( speak ). Truth then is a moral warranty of due diligence against falsehood. It is not and cannot ever exist outside of tautology. As far as I know that is the final analysis available to us. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute. Kyiv, Ukraine.
[C]RITICISM AS JUSTIFICATION 1 – We justify moral action ( dependence upon norm ) 2 – We justify legal contract ( explicit reference to law) 3- We are skeptical of perception and cognition. (Honesty of witness) 4 – We criticize truth propositions (theory) Because in each case we test for different properties all of which we blanket under an analogy to the term “true”, but none of which are informationally complete enough to in fact be true (ultimately parsimonious). Instead, when we use the term true, we mean that we have adhered to moral norms in each case, when we give our testimony ( speak ). Truth then is a moral warranty of due diligence against falsehood. It is not and cannot ever exist outside of tautology. As far as I know that is the final analysis available to us. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute. Kyiv, Ukraine.
(introduction to propertarianism)
Note: this is a sketch of propertarian reasoning I’ve put together to satisfy some of your requests. If you follow me you will recognize the technique as the application of the scientific method and amoral economic language to questions of social science.
[P]RINCIPLES
1) Everyone acts to acquire. Life is an expensive means of defeating entropy. Acting improves acquisition – at additional cost. Memory improves acquisition – at additional cost. reason improves acquisition – at additional cost. cooperation improves acquisition – at additional cost.
2) We act in furtherance of our reproductive strategy.
3) Male and Female reproductive strategies are in conflict. The female seeks to breed impulsively where it benefits her lineage, and then force the cost of her offspring on the tribe, and to further her offspring regardless of merit. The male seeks to breed impulsively wherever it does not harm his lineage, and to create a tribe capable of resisting conquest by other males – and as such males act meritocratic-ally. Men are political and divided into kin and non-kin – the universe is male. For women, men are marginally indifferent herdsmen of women. Women live in a world of women, and both men and the universe are alien.
4) Humans compete for status because status provides discounts on opportunities to acquire – especially mates and allies in cooperation. We can identify at least three horizontal axis of class division: biological (reproductive desirability), social (status desirability), economic (wealth desirability) – as well as their undesirable opposites.
5) There exist only three means of coercing other humans to cooperate with on one means or end vs cooperate with others on different means or ends. These three means of coercion can be used to construct three vertical axis of class specialization: coercion by force(conservatism/masculine), coercion by gossip(progressivism/feminine), coercion by remuneration (libertarianism / neutral masculine). Human elites are formed by those who specialize in one or more of these means of coercion. (gossip: public intellectuals and priests. force: military and political. exchange: voluntary organizations, including the voluntary organization of production.
6) Language is purely justificationary negotiation in furtherance of our acquisition by these three means. ergo: All ‘belief’ is justification to the self and others in furtherance of acquisition. It is meaningless. Statements of justification only provide us with information necessary to deduce what it is that we wish to acquire.
7) Cooperation is a disproportionately more productive means of acquisition than individual production.
8) We seek discounts in our acquisitions. Some of these discounts are productive and moral and encourage cooperation, and some of them are unproductive and immoral, discourage cooperation, and invite retaliation.
9) The only moral acquisition is one in which one either homesteads something new, or obtains it by productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, where external transfers are limited to the same criteria.
10) Aristotle’s ‘golden mean’ is an inarticulate primitive expression of the supply-demand curve. All human acquisition takes place within the pressures of supply and demand. As such all explanations of human action must be produced using supply and demand curves: the golden mean.
11) All human considerations and consequent actions take place in high causal density, choices determined by means of opportunity costs, and any analysis requires we show the choices that an individual or group is considering. (Full Accounting).
12) We cooperate and coerce in large numbers, as classes with common reproductive interests to using narratives at every scale. Science and moral law are the only means of resolving conflicts between these narratives. Propertarian analysis provides means of amoral analysis, argument and decidability between these loaded, framed, and obscured arguments.
13) Groups evolve evolutionary strategies and supporting narratives. While none of these strategies by any given group is fully moral, it is still true that we can compare strategies as more and less objectively moral. We can measure the differences in objective morality by the degree of suppression of free riding in that given society.
14) In all political matters ultimate decidability is provided by a bias to suicidal, proletarian and dysgenic, or competitive, aristocratic and eugenic reproduction. The myth of equality (the christian mythos) was let loose by the middle class takeover of the aristocratic governments, and the eventual enfranchisement of women whose reproductive strategy under industrial production is dysgenic – reversing 7,000 years of indo european genetic pacification (eugenic evolution). This is a very unpleasant and impolitic topic. But it is where we find decidability.
[L]IST OF PROPERTY-EN-TOTO: THAT WHICH WE ACT TO AQUIRE (DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY)
http://www.propertarianism.com/demonstrated-property/
[T]HE SIMPLE METHOD: INCENTIVES AS ACQUSITION
1) take any circumstance in which someone is attempting to persuade someone else.
2) identify the reproductive strategy of the speaker (largely by gender, class, and coercive technique.)
3) identify the property-en-toto that the speaker is attempting to acquire.
4) determine if his or her method is advocating a moral transfer(productive) or an immoral transfer (parasitism).
5) Determine which discounts (thefts) he or she is attempting to engage in, or which premiums (payments) he or she is offering in exchange.
6) State the user’s request in amoral propertarian terms free of loading, framing, or overloading. In other words, make a purely logical argument free of sentimental loading.
[A]DVANCED: AN EXAMPLE OF EMPLOYING THE PROPERTARIAN METHOD ON ADVANCED CONCEPTS
http://www.propertarianism.com/…/the-propertarian-methodol…/
This example addresses the term ‘evil’ in propertarian terms, and provides an example of how highly loaded terms from antiquity can be converted into scientific (propertarian) terms.
TERMINOLOGY
Demonstrated Property / Property en Toto
Exchange / Transfer / Voluntary Transfer / Involuntary Transfer
Parasitism / Free Riding / Imposed Costs
Productive / Unproductive
Fully Informed / Asymmetric Information
Warrantied / Un-warrantied
Discount / Premium
Coercion / Influence
Voluntary Organization of Production
Incremental Suppression of free riding
Truth / Truthfulness / Honesty
Moral / Amoral / Immoral
Morality / Cooperation / Retaliation
(introduction to propertarianism)
Note: this is a sketch of propertarian reasoning I’ve put together to satisfy some of your requests. If you follow me you will recognize the technique as the application of the scientific method and amoral economic language to questions of social science.
[P]RINCIPLES
1) Everyone acts to acquire. Life is an expensive means of defeating entropy. Acting improves acquisition – at additional cost. Memory improves acquisition – at additional cost. reason improves acquisition – at additional cost. cooperation improves acquisition – at additional cost.
2) We act in furtherance of our reproductive strategy.
3) Male and Female reproductive strategies are in conflict. The female seeks to breed impulsively where it benefits her lineage, and then force the cost of her offspring on the tribe, and to further her offspring regardless of merit. The male seeks to breed impulsively wherever it does not harm his lineage, and to create a tribe capable of resisting conquest by other males – and as such males act meritocratic-ally. Men are political and divided into kin and non-kin – the universe is male. For women, men are marginally indifferent herdsmen of women. Women live in a world of women, and both men and the universe are alien.
4) Humans compete for status because status provides discounts on opportunities to acquire – especially mates and allies in cooperation. We can identify at least three horizontal axis of class division: biological (reproductive desirability), social (status desirability), economic (wealth desirability) – as well as their undesirable opposites.
5) There exist only three means of coercing other humans to cooperate with on one means or end vs cooperate with others on different means or ends. These three means of coercion can be used to construct three vertical axis of class specialization: coercion by force(conservatism/masculine), coercion by gossip(progressivism/feminine), coercion by remuneration (libertarianism / neutral masculine). Human elites are formed by those who specialize in one or more of these means of coercion. (gossip: public intellectuals and priests. force: military and political. exchange: voluntary organizations, including the voluntary organization of production.
6) Language is purely justificationary negotiation in furtherance of our acquisition by these three means. ergo: All ‘belief’ is justification to the self and others in furtherance of acquisition. It is meaningless. Statements of justification only provide us with information necessary to deduce what it is that we wish to acquire.
7) Cooperation is a disproportionately more productive means of acquisition than individual production.
8) We seek discounts in our acquisitions. Some of these discounts are productive and moral and encourage cooperation, and some of them are unproductive and immoral, discourage cooperation, and invite retaliation.
9) The only moral acquisition is one in which one either homesteads something new, or obtains it by productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, where external transfers are limited to the same criteria.
10) Aristotle’s ‘golden mean’ is an inarticulate primitive expression of the supply-demand curve. All human acquisition takes place within the pressures of supply and demand. As such all explanations of human action must be produced using supply and demand curves: the golden mean.
11) All human considerations and consequent actions take place in high causal density, choices determined by means of opportunity costs, and any analysis requires we show the choices that an individual or group is considering. (Full Accounting).
12) We cooperate and coerce in large numbers, as classes with common reproductive interests to using narratives at every scale. Science and moral law are the only means of resolving conflicts between these narratives. Propertarian analysis provides means of amoral analysis, argument and decidability between these loaded, framed, and obscured arguments.
13) Groups evolve evolutionary strategies and supporting narratives. While none of these strategies by any given group is fully moral, it is still true that we can compare strategies as more and less objectively moral. We can measure the differences in objective morality by the degree of suppression of free riding in that given society.
14) In all political matters ultimate decidability is provided by a bias to suicidal, proletarian and dysgenic, or competitive, aristocratic and eugenic reproduction. The myth of equality (the christian mythos) was let loose by the middle class takeover of the aristocratic governments, and the eventual enfranchisement of women whose reproductive strategy under industrial production is dysgenic – reversing 7,000 years of indo european genetic pacification (eugenic evolution). This is a very unpleasant and impolitic topic. But it is where we find decidability.
[L]IST OF PROPERTY-EN-TOTO: THAT WHICH WE ACT TO AQUIRE (DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY)
http://www.propertarianism.com/demonstrated-property/
[T]HE SIMPLE METHOD: INCENTIVES AS ACQUSITION
1) take any circumstance in which someone is attempting to persuade someone else.
2) identify the reproductive strategy of the speaker (largely by gender, class, and coercive technique.)
3) identify the property-en-toto that the speaker is attempting to acquire.
4) determine if his or her method is advocating a moral transfer(productive) or an immoral transfer (parasitism).
5) Determine which discounts (thefts) he or she is attempting to engage in, or which premiums (payments) he or she is offering in exchange.
6) State the user’s request in amoral propertarian terms free of loading, framing, or overloading. In other words, make a purely logical argument free of sentimental loading.
[A]DVANCED: AN EXAMPLE OF EMPLOYING THE PROPERTARIAN METHOD ON ADVANCED CONCEPTS
http://www.propertarianism.com/…/the-propertarian-methodol…/
This example addresses the term ‘evil’ in propertarian terms, and provides an example of how highly loaded terms from antiquity can be converted into scientific (propertarian) terms.
TERMINOLOGY
Demonstrated Property / Property en Toto
Exchange / Transfer / Voluntary Transfer / Involuntary Transfer
Parasitism / Free Riding / Imposed Costs
Productive / Unproductive
Fully Informed / Asymmetric Information
Warrantied / Un-warrantied
Discount / Premium
Coercion / Influence
Voluntary Organization of Production
Incremental Suppression of free riding
Truth / Truthfulness / Honesty
Moral / Amoral / Immoral
Morality / Cooperation / Retaliation
—“Curt Doolittle and Chris Cathcart — I am not sure I get your point that [Mises] will never get credit … he already does!”—Peter Boettke
[W]ell, we all agree that he gets credit for stating that socialism was impossible. The question is whether he did so using justification from axiom, or by analysis of available information, available operations, and rational incentives. I don’t think anyone argues that his insight was correct. What I argue is that he, like Freud, Boaz, Cantor, Marx, (Mises), the Frankfurt School and Rothbard, demonstrated the pervasive Cosmopolitan error of creating an authoritarian pseudoscience in justification of his priors, rather than engaging in science for the specific purpose of eliminating error, bias and priors, wishful thinking and deceit from one’s theories. All knowledge is theoretical because outside of trivialities and tautologies, no premises are certain. Einstein demonstrated that if we cannot count on a concept such as length or time, that no premise is informationally complete enough to deduce necessary consequences. An axiom is a declarative construction – an analogy to reality, and is informationally complete. But no non trivial statement about reality is informationally complete. It cannot be. (hence critical rationalism and critical preference). Science is not justificationary, it is critical: we do not prove something is true, we see if it survives criticism. And the only test of existentially of any hypothesis is operational construction. As such praxeological analysis tests whether a statement CAN be true. So we cannot deduce all of economics from first premises (particularly the incomplete sentence “man acts”). We can observe (empirically) the unobservable, and then construct the observation out of rational actions to test if it is a truth candidate. But we cannot deduce all candidate operations from first principles – demonstrably so. As such correctly positioning Mises in intellectual history as the another failure of the 20th century thinkers to complete the evolution of the scientific method from moral and justificationary to objective and critical. This demonstrates that mises was, like Brouwer and Bridgman and Popper, attempting to eliminate the evolution of 19th and 20th century pseudoscience that Hayek warned us was the advent of a new form of mysticism. Unfortunately, Bridgman and Brouwer did not understand Popper, Hayek could’t put the fields together because he started with psychology rather than ‘calculability’ and ‘computability’. Mises correctly understood calculation but not computability, nor the relation between computably and subjective human incentives. Mises missed the boat by trying to create an pseudoscience or authoritarian logic to suppress pseudoscientific innumeracy in economics. What none of them realized – Popper included – is that the scientific method is a MORAL WARRANTY of due diligence in the elimination of error, bias, wishful thinking and deceit. And that what each of them had done was attempt to prevent the emergent pseudoscience of the Cosmopolitans and Postmodernists that for all intents and purposes functions as the second ‘christianization’ of Europe, this time, by pseudoscientific rather than mystical means. And that mises had incorrectly conflated logical necessity with adherence to the necessary morality of voluntary cooperation. This is a very profound insight into intellectual history. If I wanted to reform Mises I could. But that isn’t necessary. The world has moved on. Instead, the problem we face in our generation is not socialism, but postmodernism and lingering Cosmopolitan pseudoscience and innumeracy in the social sciences. We face pervasive mysticism, pseudoscience, innumeracy, propagandizing, and outright lying in politics and daily life after more than a century of diluting our education in grammar, rhetoric, logic, history and morality. Undermining Rothbardian fallacies is just as important as undermining socialist, postmodern, democratic secular humanist, and neo-conservatism. And unfortunately to undermine Rothbardian fallacies requires we undermine the fallacies that Rothbard depends upon in his arguments. And to some degree that means doing greater criticism of Mises than we might like. A philosopher’s followers can ruin his legacy. His did. There is Precious little Austrian in Mises to start with. He is from Lviv Ukraine, and a Cosmopolitan author in genetics, culture, and method of argument. He is not a scientist. He is attempting to write scriptural law. And he makes consistent errors of conflating law, hermeneutic interpretation in the construction of his insight: it’s not moral or true if it’s not constructible out of rational human actions, and it’s not calculable, moral, and true for human beings to attempt rational planning in the face of state-manufactured deceit. There is very little difference between postmodern propagandism and monetary manipulation. They are both disinformation campaigns designed to alter public behavior to state rather than individual, family, group and tribal ends. So it is not that state interference in the economy cannot be studied in the discipline of economics. It is that doing so studies disinformation, whereas the study of fully informed voluntary cooperation free of error, bias, wishful thinking and deception is the study of moral economics. In retrospect it’s not complicated. So while I partly agree with you, the damage done by his fallacies to the progress of liberty, and their amplification by rothbard/HHH/MI, have been far more harmful than good. LR at MI tried to use Alinsky’s model of creating propaganda and community. But this battle was above the heads of these people. Whether well intentioned or not. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
[T]he terms “Wise” and “Wisdom” have largely gone out of fashion. First, because they mix the observation that one is knowledgeable with the compliment for it, and we have grown to favor more sterile, scientific, terms when giving intellectual compliments. So we say “that was smart” not “that was wise”. An old adage claims that education makes one cunning but not moral, and a life of experience, study and age makes one both wise and moral, when we wish education to make our next generation wise. But what do we refer to with these terms? We use the trio: cunning, smart, and wise as a spectrum; using cunning to describe one who takes a shortcut, saves effort, or outwits others; smart to describe one who does the skilled or insightful thing; and wise to one who does that which reaches beyond general rules into nuance of particular cases, and in doing so produces extra benefits in addition to skilled and knowledgeable response. So we call a young thief cunning, a talented engineer smart, and old judge wise. Second, we discuss three kinds of ethics: Virtue, Rule, and Outcome, often as if they were very different things. But instead, they describe our ethical evolution through life, from someone who has little knowledge but seeks to be the best person that he or she can be(virtue ethics), to someone who has accumulated knowledge of general rules(rule ethics), to someone who has achieved wisdom(outcome ethics). Wisdom is the product of experience having learned virtues, having learned rules, and having learned nuance to rules if not to virtues. Third, since the 1920’s, we have passed through a century-long phase of pseudoscience in public discourse not seen since the closure of the stoic schools and forcible institution of christianity, whereby wisdom has been systematically attacked by pseudoscientists in the social sciences, literature, and the fine arts. It spread from Columbia University, to nearly all faculties, first in America, and then in Europe. One of the central arguments used by the pseudo-scientists was that accumulated wisdom was not from observation – and therefore empirical – but from bias and design. An ironic position since this was the strategy used by the pseudoscientists. So over the course of the second half of the twentieth century we saw generations taught this pseudoscience emerge and actively and constantly criticize accumulated wisdom – knowledge, to be replaced by the new pseudoscience. Starting in 1999, with Stephen Pinker, helped by a generation of new technology in cognitive science and in genetics, we have slowly seen the daily constant reversal of the pseudoscientists, and the return of wisdom – exhaustive observation – in genetic, cognitive, behavioral, social, economic and political sciences. Wisdom slowly returns to us thanks to science. So one day soon, some of us will again be called “wise”. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev Ukraine Source: Curt Doolittle