Curt Doolittle

Theme: Truth

  • SATURATE THE ENVIRONMENT WITH TRUTHFULNESS – AND PEOPLE WILL ACT TRUTHFULLY (By:

    SATURATE THE ENVIRONMENT WITH TRUTHFULNESS – AND PEOPLE WILL ACT TRUTHFULLY

    (By: Curt Doolittle, Johannes Meixner and Andy Curzon)

    [W]e learn actions by doing. But we learn metaphysics by observation: our most effective learning-by-doing comes from recognizing patterns and habits of others in the environment. Things we take for granted as static, rather than open to our modification.

    So I tend to see something like programming as a skill that must be learned by doing. Some people are incapable no matter how many times they try to do something. Some people must do something many, many times. Others must do things a few times. Others just once or twice. Some of us can master concepts purely by imagining doing them a few times, and some of us by imagining the art of imagining doing them instantly. (We are very RARE.)

    We know that this progression roughy mirrors standard deviations of IQ around a ‘human minimum’ of around 106 (the start of Smart Fraction abilities: verbal articulation of ideas). And that makes sense when you realize that verbalizing complex ideas is in itself, the art of imagining operations in sequence.

    WHERE DOES THIS LEAD?

    Saturate the environment with truth and people will act truthfully.

    Saturate the environment with error the people will act erroneously.

    Saturate the environment with deception and the people will act deceptively.

    Saturate the environment with violence, and people will act violently.

    Because that is what it means to adapt to the environment..

    – Education was the first means of public broadcasting.

    – Reading was the next, but it was voluntary.

    – Radio was next and could be done without effort.

    – Television was next and it was a serotonin-producing drug, that made saturation effortless.

    – Today the curious can see confirmation and alliance in almost any alternate reality that they can imagine. In Advanced countries people live in their isolation chambers, listening to echoes.

    Saturation is the best teaching. But how do we ensure people are saturated by truths rather than falsehoods?

    We make untruthful speech a crime when placed into the commons. Deprive the environment of negativity, and people will not act negatively. And within one or two generations we will saturate people with truth.

    And as such we:

    Saturate the environment with truth and people will act truthfully.

    Saturate the environment with trust and people will act trustworthily.

    Saturate the environment with confidence and people will act confidently.

    Saturate the environment with certainty and people will act certainly. (pun!)

    Saturate the environment with assurance, and people will act assuredly.

    Saturate the environment with anything, and people will act likewise.

    So you see…. “after all, we’re all alike.”

    Education need not be interpersonal if it is environmental.

    The Propertarian Institute

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-27 11:27:00 UTC

  • TESTIMONIALISM (COMPLETED CRITICAL RATIONALISM) (second draft) (full cycle) (sti

    TESTIMONIALISM (COMPLETED CRITICAL RATIONALISM)

    (second draft) (full cycle) (still needs third section)

    [W]e both perceive, and remember stimuli, and construct and remember relations from that stimuli, and construct and remember layers upon layers of those relations.

    The acts of planning, calculating, hypothesizing, searching, freely-associating, daydreaming, dreaming, and subconscious association attempt to imagine relations between the entire spectrum of memories we can store.

    Once some (useful?) association is made (found) we must criticize it: determine if it withstands the scrutiny of other relations.

    We determine if our imaginary relations survive (are truth candidates) by the act of testing those imagined relations to see if they fail or not – and therefore are worthy of our investment or not. We constantly compare the usefulness of the imagined relation with the cost of that imagined relation.

    The return on those relations determines how excited we ‘feel’ about those relations and the energy expenditure we can risk in pursuit of those relations.

    Returns can be both subjective and objective. Return can vary from mere satisfaction of curiosity, to personal gain, to a novel invention, to the total transformation of the world of man.

    As the complexity of relations increases, the means by which we test our imagined relations increases. While we are sometimes able to test our imagined relations by means of introspection, at some point we lack sufficient information to perform such tests, and must resort to both more structured methods of testing, and restore to gaining additional information to see if the imagined relation survives criticism.

    We perform this expansion of criticism until our estimation of the combination of risk,cost and reward favors conducting the final experiment of acting, rather than conducting either further criticism, or abandoning it as providing insufficient return.

    [T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which (a)philosophical science, (b)the social sciences, and (c)the physical sciences, use to launder existential impossibility, limitlessness, error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, deception, and (objective) immorality (in the domain of the social sciences) from our testimony (speech).

    This laundering is achieved by a set of methodological criticisms addressing increasing levels of complexity of which philosophical science consists of the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another a subset of those criticisms.

    Those criticisms consist of tests of: Identity, Internal Consistency, External Correspondence, Existential Possibility (Operationalism), Full Accounting (against selection bias), Parsimony (limits), and voluntary transfer (objective morality).”

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-27 06:56:00 UTC

  • Q&A: Does your methodology work backwards from a presumption? (Sigh. Critique is Everywhere.)

    A Question From Benjamin Uraminski

    Curt, your underlying methodology seems to work backward from a presupposed solution, similar to an algebra problem. In this instance, it having already been decided upon that everything is inherently sexual so that the missing variables which reinforce the preconceived notion appear obvious to one who holds those beliefs.

    I notice this particular Freudian-esque and neo-Darwinist methodology, that everything is inherently sexual, a lot in the modernist thought patterns.

    To draw another analogy: how is this inherently different than the methodology of a paranoid, believing that everyone is out to get him, interpreting the facts his sense-perceptions supply to him, to reinforce the preconceived notion that, everyone is, in fact, out to get him?

    [W]ell, Ben, I am going to assume that you’re asking a serious question. 🙂 Even if you fall into psychologizing (authoritarianism, ridicule, gossip, ad hominem) rather than criticizing the argument itself.

    Either the argument possess explanatory power, and survives criticism or it Doesn’t. In the case of both Testimonialism and Propertarianism that is going to be very hard. And to criticize aristocratic egalitarianism will require only that you justify deceit and favor dysgenic reproduction. Which is a preference, I admit.

    As for ‘working backward’ the answer is that I started with the very real problem of cooperation (See Axelrod et al), and constructed Propertarianism from rational incentives in in the face of opportunity costs. And like a good analytic I used every available bit of scientific evidence I could find to criticize it. When I understood that Haidt had pretty much identified the causes, and that I could map them to conflicts over the allocation of property rights, then it wasn’t difficult to use the work in his bibliography to develop the rest of Propertarianism: I expressed moral statements in the AMORAL language of economics.

    As for psychology, the reason it seems like psychology is that it replaces authoritarian psychologizing(pseudoscientific) with a much more sophisticated and nuanced means of describing human thoughts as incentives rather than experiences. So to some degree (by accident) I do think that Propertarianism and Testimonialism fully replace authoritarian/totalitarian/equalitarian psychology, by extending economics (observations of demonstrated preference) to include the first principles of economics: incentives to cooperate. And in doing so I explain demonstrated political preferences in voting as a division of moral perception knowledge and labor. This is pretty profound really. And one of the best tests of it, is that the explanatory power appears to unite all fields of inquiry under a very simple set of premises starting with the need to acquire.

    As for your analogy to Algebra, the differences is that numbers cannot make layer upon layer of intertemporally perishable normative contracts any more than hydrogen and oxygen can choose not to bond, where people can. As such we can exchange what appear to be violations of those first principles if in the aggregate we benefit.

    As for methodology, which methodology are you talking about?
    Testimonial truth?
    Propertarianism?
    Aristocratic Egalitarianism?

    I am pretty sure Testimonialism will survive as the definition of truth proper from which all others are derived. That’s probably one of the most important insights into truth in the past century. It completes Critical Rationalism / Critical Preference.

    To defeat Propertarianism would require some very substantial and what appears unlikely changes to the history of man’s development. (as we say, the framework of social science is evolutionary biology).

    To defeat aristocratic egalitarianism is a matter of preference, although I argue that if one built a high trust truthful polity, that they would all evolve into aristocratic egalitarian polities over time.

    So these arguments are defeat-able, but they’re defeat-able on fairly sophisticated grounds.

    But then again, Marx built an enormous edifice on a lie (dialectical materialism) and a falsehood (labor theory of value). So maybe I made similar mistakes.

    But like Marx, those mistakes will require ratio-scientific arguments not pseudoscientific (psychological gossip and shaming).

    (Sorry for throwing the tease in there but I couldn’t resist.)

  • Q&A: Does your methodology work backwards from a presumption? (Sigh. Critique is Everywhere.)

    A Question From Benjamin Uraminski

    Curt, your underlying methodology seems to work backward from a presupposed solution, similar to an algebra problem. In this instance, it having already been decided upon that everything is inherently sexual so that the missing variables which reinforce the preconceived notion appear obvious to one who holds those beliefs.

    I notice this particular Freudian-esque and neo-Darwinist methodology, that everything is inherently sexual, a lot in the modernist thought patterns.

    To draw another analogy: how is this inherently different than the methodology of a paranoid, believing that everyone is out to get him, interpreting the facts his sense-perceptions supply to him, to reinforce the preconceived notion that, everyone is, in fact, out to get him?

    [W]ell, Ben, I am going to assume that you’re asking a serious question. 🙂 Even if you fall into psychologizing (authoritarianism, ridicule, gossip, ad hominem) rather than criticizing the argument itself.

    Either the argument possess explanatory power, and survives criticism or it Doesn’t. In the case of both Testimonialism and Propertarianism that is going to be very hard. And to criticize aristocratic egalitarianism will require only that you justify deceit and favor dysgenic reproduction. Which is a preference, I admit.

    As for ‘working backward’ the answer is that I started with the very real problem of cooperation (See Axelrod et al), and constructed Propertarianism from rational incentives in in the face of opportunity costs. And like a good analytic I used every available bit of scientific evidence I could find to criticize it. When I understood that Haidt had pretty much identified the causes, and that I could map them to conflicts over the allocation of property rights, then it wasn’t difficult to use the work in his bibliography to develop the rest of Propertarianism: I expressed moral statements in the AMORAL language of economics.

    As for psychology, the reason it seems like psychology is that it replaces authoritarian psychologizing(pseudoscientific) with a much more sophisticated and nuanced means of describing human thoughts as incentives rather than experiences. So to some degree (by accident) I do think that Propertarianism and Testimonialism fully replace authoritarian/totalitarian/equalitarian psychology, by extending economics (observations of demonstrated preference) to include the first principles of economics: incentives to cooperate. And in doing so I explain demonstrated political preferences in voting as a division of moral perception knowledge and labor. This is pretty profound really. And one of the best tests of it, is that the explanatory power appears to unite all fields of inquiry under a very simple set of premises starting with the need to acquire.

    As for your analogy to Algebra, the differences is that numbers cannot make layer upon layer of intertemporally perishable normative contracts any more than hydrogen and oxygen can choose not to bond, where people can. As such we can exchange what appear to be violations of those first principles if in the aggregate we benefit.

    As for methodology, which methodology are you talking about?
    Testimonial truth?
    Propertarianism?
    Aristocratic Egalitarianism?

    I am pretty sure Testimonialism will survive as the definition of truth proper from which all others are derived. That’s probably one of the most important insights into truth in the past century. It completes Critical Rationalism / Critical Preference.

    To defeat Propertarianism would require some very substantial and what appears unlikely changes to the history of man’s development. (as we say, the framework of social science is evolutionary biology).

    To defeat aristocratic egalitarianism is a matter of preference, although I argue that if one built a high trust truthful polity, that they would all evolve into aristocratic egalitarian polities over time.

    So these arguments are defeat-able, but they’re defeat-able on fairly sophisticated grounds.

    But then again, Marx built an enormous edifice on a lie (dialectical materialism) and a falsehood (labor theory of value). So maybe I made similar mistakes.

    But like Marx, those mistakes will require ratio-scientific arguments not pseudoscientific (psychological gossip and shaming).

    (Sorry for throwing the tease in there but I couldn’t resist.)

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

    [T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which philosophical science, the social sciences, and the physical sciences, use to launder existential impossibility, limitlessness, error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, deception, and (objective) immorality (in the domain of the social sciences) from our testimony (speech).

    This laundering is achieved by a set of methodological criticisms addressing increasing levels of complexity, of which philosophical science requires the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another subset of those criticisms.

    Those criticisms consist of tests of: Identity, Internal Consistency, External Correspondence, Existential Possibility (Operationalism), Full Accounting (against selection bias), Parsimony (limits), and Voluntary Transfer (objective morality).”

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

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine.

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

    [T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which philosophical science, the social sciences, and the physical sciences, use to launder existential impossibility, limitlessness, error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, deception, and (objective) immorality (in the domain of the social sciences) from our testimony (speech).

    This laundering is achieved by a set of methodological criticisms addressing increasing levels of complexity, of which philosophical science requires the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another subset of those criticisms.

    Those criticisms consist of tests of: Identity, Internal Consistency, External Correspondence, Existential Possibility (Operationalism), Full Accounting (against selection bias), Parsimony (limits), and Voluntary Transfer (objective morality).”

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

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine.

  • Art is Criticizable. And Like Morality, It’s Objectively Better or Worse

    (worth repeating) [A]s for art theory it’s pretty simple stuff. You can read every significant tome on it in a month. (I am honestly not sure that Rand’s book isn’t one of the best really, in retrospect. And I don’t think much of rand as other than the children’s book version of philosophy for newbs.) All art can be criticized on these three criteria – Craftsmanship (skill in use of materials) – Design (aesthetics – skill in associative pre-cognitive patterns) – Content (meaning – skill in associative cognitive patterns) And, in all three dimensions by these criteria: – Novelty is better (innovation) – Parsimony is better (clarity) – More information is better (richness or density) – Monumental (level of public/social/political value) – Durable is better (the persistence of the work as a reference is better) – Unique is better (the symbol that captures an excellence of a time and place) We tend to see these criteria as as ‘excellence’. Using the three axis, and six criteria, all: – Craft– Design – Art Can be compared and contrasted if not quantitatively(cardinally) at least qualitatively(ordinary). You would think not, but opinion in art coalesces just as do theories in science. While one might have one taste or another, it is very hard to study the whole of art history and not come to about the same conclusion as have all the others: These works are clearly better and these works are clearly not as good. But I PREFER these over the objectively better ones as they suit my taste. (( I didn’t expect to love Medieval art, but I do.  I did come to appreciate through economics the struggles of post-photography artists, and I can also appreciate the minimalists, even if I still despise the pop and marxists. )) If you try it, sort of by stack ranking any set of art pieces by the criteria above it will rapidly become clear to you that art criticism and scientific criticism are extremely similar endeavors. This [messes] with the mind of sentimental people who desperately want an internal intuitionistic truth to appeal to – but it’s sad for them. I’m sorry. Carful criticism still defeats your ‘intuition’. Art is just as open to criticism as any other work of man. There is just a lot of marginal indifference within each strata of work. It’s very obvious after a while that the communists and socialists and feminists and postmodernists attacked art just as they attacked truth. ‘Cause they desperately wanna lie.

  • Art is Criticizable. And Like Morality, It’s Objectively Better or Worse

    (worth repeating) [A]s for art theory it’s pretty simple stuff. You can read every significant tome on it in a month. (I am honestly not sure that Rand’s book isn’t one of the best really, in retrospect. And I don’t think much of rand as other than the children’s book version of philosophy for newbs.) All art can be criticized on these three criteria – Craftsmanship (skill in use of materials) – Design (aesthetics – skill in associative pre-cognitive patterns) – Content (meaning – skill in associative cognitive patterns) And, in all three dimensions by these criteria: – Novelty is better (innovation) – Parsimony is better (clarity) – More information is better (richness or density) – Monumental (level of public/social/political value) – Durable is better (the persistence of the work as a reference is better) – Unique is better (the symbol that captures an excellence of a time and place) We tend to see these criteria as as ‘excellence’. Using the three axis, and six criteria, all: – Craft– Design – Art Can be compared and contrasted if not quantitatively(cardinally) at least qualitatively(ordinary). You would think not, but opinion in art coalesces just as do theories in science. While one might have one taste or another, it is very hard to study the whole of art history and not come to about the same conclusion as have all the others: These works are clearly better and these works are clearly not as good. But I PREFER these over the objectively better ones as they suit my taste. (( I didn’t expect to love Medieval art, but I do.  I did come to appreciate through economics the struggles of post-photography artists, and I can also appreciate the minimalists, even if I still despise the pop and marxists. )) If you try it, sort of by stack ranking any set of art pieces by the criteria above it will rapidly become clear to you that art criticism and scientific criticism are extremely similar endeavors. This [messes] with the mind of sentimental people who desperately want an internal intuitionistic truth to appeal to – but it’s sad for them. I’m sorry. Carful criticism still defeats your ‘intuition’. Art is just as open to criticism as any other work of man. There is just a lot of marginal indifference within each strata of work. It’s very obvious after a while that the communists and socialists and feminists and postmodernists attacked art just as they attacked truth. ‘Cause they desperately wanna lie.

  • ART IS VERY CRITICIZABLE, AND LIKE MORALITY IT”S OBJECTIVELY BETTER OR WORSE (wo

    ART IS VERY CRITICIZABLE, AND LIKE MORALITY IT”S OBJECTIVELY BETTER OR WORSE

    (worth repeating)

    As for art theory it’s pretty simple stuff. You can read every significant tome on it in a month. I am honestly not sure that Rand’s book isn’t one of the best really, in retrospect.

    – Craftsmanship (skill in use of materials)

    – Design (aesthetics – skill in associative pre-cognitive patterns)

    – Content (meaning – skill in associative cognitive patterns)

    All art can be criticized on these three criteria. And in simplest terms, in all three dimensions:

    – Novel is better (innovation)

    – Parsimony is better (clarity)

    – More information is better (richness or density)

    – Monumental (level of public/social/political value)

    – Durable (the persistence of the work as a reference is better)

    – Uniqueness (the symbol that captures an excellence of a time and place)

    We tend to see these criteria as as ‘excellence’.

    Using these criteria, all:

    – Craft

    – Design

    – Art

    Can be compared and contrasted if not quantitatively(cardinally) at least qualitatively(ordinary).

    You would think not, but opinion in art coalesces just as do theories in science. While one might have one taste or another, it is very hard to study the whole of art history and not come to about the same conclusion as have all the others: These are clearly better and these are clearly not as good. But I PREFER these over the objectively better ones as they suit my taste.

    I hope this helps.

    If you try it, sort of by stack ranking any set of art pieces by the criteria above it will rapidly become clear to you that art criticism and scientific criticism are extremely similar endeavors.

    This fucks with the mind of sentimental people who desperately want an internal intuitionistic truth to appeal to – but it’s sad for them. I’m sorry.

    Art is just as open to criticism as any other work of man. There is just a lot of marginal indifference withing each strata of work.

    It’s very obvious after a while that the communists and socialists and feminists and postmodernists attacked art just as they attacked truth.

    ‘Cause they desperately wanna lie.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-25 13:35:00 UTC

  • THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IS A MORAL PHILOSOPHY —I suppose it would really annoy H

    THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IS A MORAL PHILOSOPHY

    —I suppose it would really annoy Hawking to have it demonstrated that the scientific method is only a moral philosophy: a set of criticisms that allow you to warranty that your theories are free of existential impossibility, limitlessness, error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, deception, and (objective) immorality (in the domain of the social sciences).—

    (The first person who gave me that idea was Ken Hopf. Too bad he is stuck in 1930.)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-06-25 08:52:00 UTC