Internal FTL May Be Possible

I ran into an article about making wormholes which pointed out that there is nothing in principle wrong with them. More importantly, the mathematicians' distaste for topology changes which I had unthinkingly assimilated is bullshit. There is no justification whatsoever in physics for wormholes not to exist. Mathematicians might not like them but fuck em.

Then again, maybe I hadn't assimilated mathematicians' distaste of topology changes too much. My main objection to wormholes has always been the unthinking unquestioned claim that a wormholes' insides have no geometry. That travel inside a wormhole is instantaneous because there is no distance between the wormhole mouths. When you start taking geometry seriously and dismissing topology, such a claim becomes bloody fucking stupid.

But just because faster-than-light travel through wormholes doesn't look even remotely likely, it doesn't mean it's impossible. And what's interesting about wormholes is that in order to create a wormhole between two points light years apart, you need to transport the wormhole mouth at sublight speeds. Unless you've got a warp drive of course since a wormhole mouth is just a bunch of warped spacetime and not matter.

That's where things get interesting because it means wormholes can't be used by a civilization to expand faster than light, only to travel faster than light internally inside the civilization's boundaries. And that makes wormholes really, really interesting because they don't violate the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox is bad enough when confined to sub-light speeds. It's bad enough that it proves conclusively and without a doubt that aliens do not exist. If a civilization could expand at FTL speeds, that would mean aliens don't exist in the entire universe. Something which is not even remotely credible. Hence the Fermi Paradox proves that FTL cannot be a feasible method of civilization expansion.

But, wormholes don't offer any way for a civilization to expand faster than the speed of light, only to stay unified as a civilization as it expands. And that makes them rather interesting. Because they're feasible. Maybe. Whether they're possible at all is an independent question. As I already said, I don't think they are, but it would be fun to discover otherwise.

Most Great Science Is Fraudulent, And Nearly All Scientists Are Frauds

Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram's Authority Experiment

A lot of hay is made over the Stanford Prison and Milgram Authority Experiments especially when someone wants to conclude that people are naturally submissive and sadistic. The truth is they're fraudulent and junk science. The truth is that Asch's Conformity Experiments perfectly explains the results of those other experiments as junk science.

How? Easy. The most basic requirement of any psychological experiment is that the subjects of the experiment are willing to take part in a psychology experiment. They are all, without exception, willing to obey the experimenter. Now that doesn't sound like a proper randomized sample of a population, does it?

At least, it doesn't if you know there exist iconoclasts in the general population, breakers of sacred idols, murderers of sacred cows, people who will dissent for the sake of dissent, people who will instinctively refuse to obey just because you made it an order. There are such people and I know it very well, being one of them. But the douchebags who call themselves "scientists" and "academics" and "psychologists" and "experts in the human mind" seem oblivious to this.

(For the record, I consider taking part in a psychology experiment [playing the part of a monkey for the edification of an ignorant jackass] about as distastefully intimate as prostitution. And since I have a high-class mind I would want to be paid in a manner similar to a high class escort. I think about 1000$ an hour would ensure my willingness to go along voluntarily. Since this much money would corrupt the results, the only way an experimenter could get an honest response out of me would be without my knowledge.)

But why should a few loners, dissenters, disgruntled radicals and revolutionaries mean anything about the Stanford Prison experiment? Doesn't the majority hold sway? Doesn't what happened in those experiments prove there is a natural sadistic desire in "human nature"? NO! Because the Asch conformity experiment proves that it takes only one, ONLY ONE person to utterly shatter a consensus. Once you have that one person, that one iconoclast in the group, the haze of conformity lifts as everyone suddenly finds they are permitted to think for themselves.

All the Stanford Prison Experiment tells us is that when iconoclasts are weeded out of a population, what's left is going to do what the experimenter expects them to do, what he tells them to do. Even though the experimenter will claim he was "surprised" by their viciousness and he "never expected" the situation to devolve so quickly. And all Milgram's experiment tells us is that after 20 years of brainwashing in obedience training, people are going to have a difficult time disobeying.

Six Degrees Of Separation

Another famous experiment is the so-called "six degrees of separation" where an experimenter sent out a bunch of letters, most of which never made it to their destinations, and then "concluded" based on his few positive results that everyone is connected in a graph of degree 6. Of course this is fraudulent since the data never supported the conclusion.

And very shortly after it was discovered that people are separated by class barriers so that it's all but impossible to find links from lower to upper class. Or in the USA, between the white and the nigger class. Blacks aren't a class, but niggers are, even though you aren't allowed to say it because of so-called "political correctness" (more lying and fraud).

Physics too

A lot of pretentious assholes are going to claim that things are entirely different in physics. But that's false. The problem with all these experiments is that they assume their own conclusions. Which is of course what Thomas Kuhn calls "normal science" as opposed to revolutionary science.

You see, physicists do it too! You can see this mindless unthinking unquestioning lying crap happening with the so-called Copenhagen consensus wrought by force of authority of Niels Bohr (may he rot in hell). You can also see it in Bell's theorem which "proved" its own vitalistic assumption by concluding that if you start by preparing a number of "identical" systems you will then get very strange results.

Vitalism is alive and well in modern quantum physics where it relies on the notion that experimenters are outside of the physical universe, outside of the phenomena they're studying.

Millikan

And then there's always the good old Millikan's oil drop experiment which was blatant and simple fraud of the most obvious kind. You see, the experiment couldn't be replicated using modern equipment. You just can't calculate the charge of the electron with any accuracy using the kind of setup Millikan used. What you can do however is assume your data fits the predicted result and eliminate any "outliers". It gets pretty fucking embarrassing though if the predicted result turns out to have been wrong, if you "saw" something that could never exist.

Of course, Millikan was such a famous scientist, had so much authority, that he must obviously have been correct, rather than a simple but highly embarrassing fraud. So over the course of a few decades, the "experimental results" of the charge of the electron steadily crept towards their modern (real) values as experiments got steadily more "accurate". So it wasn't only Millikan that was a fraud, it was also every physicist after him. Frauds, every single last fucking one of them.

Sociology

And fraud is still alive and well in science today what with the sociology experiment published in First Monday where the metric used implicitly included ostracism. Of course, the dumbfuck experimenters (all half dozen of them!) none of them want to admit that their experiment was worthless shit that measured the (patently obvious!) ostracism of generalists by specialists in the sciences. Of course not, since it was their thesis that generalists are less "productive", since you see, they don't like generalists. How stupider does it get than a bunch of prejudiced assholes measuring exactly how much an obviously prejudiced against group is actually prejudiced against? And that's stupid even without the prejudiced assholes then concluding the prejudiced against group is really inferior.

Psychology vs Anthropology

And let's not go into Lloyd deMause whose theory of the history of childrearing casually assumes that all anthropologists everywhere are frauds of the most vicious lying kind. Every single last fucking one of them, excepting only those anthropologists who have had psychological training and thus are really amateur psychologists. The most damning part of deMause's theory is that I believe him. There isn't the slightest doubt in my mind that the whole field of anthropology is ruled by quacks and charlatans who blithely and eagerly fake their data so as to maximize sympathy for the murderous infanticidal "noble" savages they think are precious.

After all, to anthropologists, primitiveness, ignorance, stupidity and rampant disease aren't to be eradicated. They are to be "studied" which is really a codeword for honest admiration. Anthropologists are anti-human eco-freaks, exactly as twisted up inside as the zealots that want to destroy all electric power plants so that humans freeze to death. All to save their precious fucking forests. Wishful thinking that since if power plants shut down, humans would NOT freeze to death, they would burn down every last fucking forest for wood fuel instead.

The fact these morons can't even realize that their "plans" are antithetical to their own goals, that even coal power plants are better than so-called "biomass", that SCALABILITY is more important than "sustainability" in a world with 6 to 9 billion humans who WILL survive no matter what, that is damning. Eco-zealots are fucking retarded moronic fuckers who think it's perfectly alright if an asteroid causes a mass extinction that happens to end the human species for lack of advanced space technology. After all, mass extinctions are "natural" and enhance "biodiversity" and are the "revenge of Gaia, the Mother-Earth".

And anthropologists take after them. They sound like them, they talk like them, they think like them. And that's damning to all anthropology.

What It All Means

The fact that an abomination like anthropology exists and is honoured by scientists and academics alike rather than derided and scorned as the useless fraudulent lit crit shit it really is .... that's damning to all science.

After all, the Sokal hoax proved to everyone that scientists are perfectly capable of scorning and deriding people who undermine the authority of the exact sciences. When lit crit assholes undermined exact scientists' authority, the latter counter-attacked.

What does it say then that those same exact scientists can't be moved, can't be bothered, when a field like anthropology "merely" spits on the truth? It says scientists only care about their authority, and will piss on the truth themselves if that's what it takes to remain in power.

It says Scientists. Are. Frauds.

Every last fucking one of them.

Because if scientists weren't frauds then anthropology wouldn't be permitted to exist.

Because if scientists weren't frauds then they would take an interest in psychology and bully and egg the proto-science until it developed formal, rigorous theories of the mind, until it became a REAL science.

Because if scientists weren't frauds then they wouldn't hush up their embarrassments and their failures, they would encourage the questioning of mainstream theories for its own sake and hold high every slightest misstep and stumble done by an eminent scientist as proof that you can't follow authority figures blindly.

But they don't do any of those things. Because they're only interested in their own power. And nothing else matters.

My Life Projects

When I hit 20 my life projects were:

• two SFF trilogies
  
• a formal theory of morality
  
• a formal theory of mind
• integrating and modeling my own mind
• designing an ideal OS
  

The first was abandoned pretty quickly since I couldn't write happy characters. And then about a year ago I discovered extraordinary writers are all non-analytic. So far, Yudkowsky is the only exception.

The next two are more or less done. Any further progress on them has been shelved because it wouldn't affect my life or the real world. I haven't read an AI researcher I didn't come to despise so telling them how to construct a mind sounds like a bad idea. Even assuming they would listen which they never would.

The before last is done to the point where any further progress wouldn't even be visible. For something with no definable end goal, it's as done as done can be.

The last project would affect my life directly, indirectly, affect the whole world, and eventually transform it utterly by undermining hierarchical media and teaching direct democracy. It's the ultimate example in leveraging meta levels.

Design work is substantially complete. The holdup has always been implementation. First because analysis isn't my strong point, second because I end up regressing every time.

That is, I need some tool to do something, discover that all the tools presented as candidates are hopelessly inadequate, and end up having to learn a whole new subject domain to build the tool. The new subject domain is invariably something I dislike and resent learning which causes an enormous holdup until I feel comfortable in it.

I am at the point of working on an OpenGL framework because I need one to build a weird 3D engine because I need it to build a 3D UI paradigm because I need a UI for the first application that's going to take advantage of my OS. It's a good thing I'm going to be publishing from the top down - UI first with very little OS then application then rest of OS.

Yes, it takes developing software across 4 levels of abstraction (3d, engine, objects, UI, social) in order to redefine human-computer interaction, in order to displace Unix, teach real democracy, undermine top-down media, and redefining software licenses in order to transform the software industry, in order to transform the real world's politics and economics. And it takes having every single level of that hierarchy in mind simultaneously.

I started a blog on design a few years ago intending to explain this whole process but there didn't seem much point.

Needless to say, I have more projects now.

How An-Syn Plays Out In Real Life

This is a précis of my model of those personality attributes that are tied to cognitive differences.

Table of Analytics.

systems researcher or mathematical philosopher
     UI programmer (+syn)                           mathematician (+int)
 engineer, physicist, software developer, economist (*)

Table of Synthetics.

systems designer
   graphics designer (+ana)                  philosopher (+int)
fashion designer, writer, artist (*/**)

*: in order of increasing egomania
int: intellectual, values ideas for their own sake

I used to think that people like Willard van Orman Quine, who chose a profession as a mathematician-philosopher, did so because they grew up before computers existed. But I was wrong. I now know of at least one mathematical-philosopher in the modern age.

And according to my personality interaction model, people at the top get along best with people from the other table for some unknown reason (+), then the left hand branch in their own table, and last with oddballs. Oddballs are people who don't trust the form of cognition they possess.

So for example, programmers who trust synthesis more than analysis, or writers who trust analysis more than synthesis. They don't have the form of cognition they trust so this can take a hit on their ego but more importantly they're more willing to recognize and accept people who do have the form of cognition they trust.

Being told "there's no such thing as analysis / synthesis" or even better "analysis / synthesis is unimportant" is roughly equivalent to "there's no such thing as homosexuality" and "get over it, it's not like being homosexual is important in any way".

+: I don't have the slightest theory why this would be but it is a fact with much empirical evidence supporting it. Nearly all of the data points I could gather support it. Those data points not supporting it are ambiguous in proportion to how much they violate the trend.

**: Engineers serve society. Physicists serve their profession. Economists serve the rich. And software developers serve themselves.

Elements Of Excellent Photo Gallery Design

I just ran into this website, which is the only site on the entire fucking web that has done photo galleries correctly. I cannot overstate its uniqueness or importance. It is the only well-designed photo site on the entire web! The only one. Gaze upon it in awe as I did and behold its majesty!

When I saw the main page I got the impression it was made by a really good graphics designer. Because it looks really good and clean. The attention to detail is exquisite and exactly what you'd expect from an amazing graphics designer.

1. the background is subtle and washed out
2. the composition of the photo that makes up the background is amazingly well-suited to a background page with its star present but off-side
3. the colour choices of the background photo harmonize with those of the home page - it's all blues with the only exceptions being the star and the name of the site
4. the playful descriptions with arrows draw the eye towards the menu options without being desperate, condescending or stuck-up - imagine what it would look like if there were only arrows with no descriptions, or alternatively if the descriptions were in a formal typed font
5. the menu options are underlined but not in a forced way, because the coloured bar is underneath them like a thick fat yet subtle and tasteful underline
6. the underline doesn't draw attention to itself by being vivid or sharp yet succeeds in drawing the eye to what it underlines in a perfectly natural way
7. the name of the site is in bright vivid letters to make it distinctive, and it's repeated because it's that important
8. the photo examples from new galleries cycle - at first I thought too fast but now I think just right
9. no euphemisms are used for the paid portion of the site which conveys refreshing honesty and directness
10. and the lack of minimization / maximization games (euphemisms like "member" or "join" but repeated all over the place) is tasteful and elegant

And then I saw the photo gallery and I was in awe. Because its behaviour is absolutely correct. You don't see that with mere graphics designers.

1. wasted space between photos is minimized with just enough to create boundaries
2. the grey colour that makes up the boundaries is exactly the same shade of grey water as in the home page - minimizes cognitive disruption
3. there are no elements other than the photos and the scroll bar
4. there are no active elements
5. none of the scrolling is hierarchical, you don't have to back out to go to the next photo or to see what's ahead
6. you can see all the photos in the gallery at once in miniature in the scroll bar
7. the scroll bar is vertical which allows the mousewheel to come into play
8. and harmonizes with the vertical pan motion you frequently use to see photos of people
9. the scroll bar is always visible, something that's difficult to achieve if the scroll bar is at the bottom of the screen but easy when it's at the right
10. even without the mousewheel, moving the mouse vertically the height of a screen is easier than moving it horizontally its entire width
11. scrolling the photo and scroll bar are overloaded functions, which is bad, however at least you CAN do both without repositioning the mouse, which is good
12. there are only just enough photos in a gallery so that the scroll bar will still fit entirely in a screen
13. and since this is the height of a screen, all of the photos in the gallery are accessible through a simple hand motion
14. while the scroll bar fills up the entire vertical extent of the screen - which it wouldn't if it were horizontal and limited to a simple hand motion, not with today's wide screens anyways
15. the designer is arrogant enough to disable all of the default or normal ways of doing things and demand you do it their way, using the scroll bar, so that you appreciate what a great site this is

The web was invented two decades ago and this is the first site I've encountered that has done photo galleries right. I think this says something about programmers' skills, talents, judgement and competence. Something exceedingly bad across the board.

Note that all of the galleries' behaviours and arrangement on this site ought to be encoded and determined by the web browser, not by the site owner. The instant you have a photo gallery with portraits, it should always, always look exactly like this. And when you have a photo gallery with landscapes then the only deviation is the scrollbar goes along the bottom of the screen. Because the rule is that the scroll bar should never, EVER form a visual boundary in the middle of a photo. There are no better options. The only open variable is the shade of the background between photos.

The only things missing in that gallery are two active things. The current photo should be outlined in yellow or highlight & washed out in white, or both. And there should be keystrokes to go to the previous and next photos in the list as well as first and last. And the behaviour of 'next' at the last photo should either be the next gallery or cycle back to the first photo.

On the Constancy of Human Nature, part 2

One of my favourite authors is under the unfortunate and deeply mistaken impression that there is something called human nature. He wrote to me:

> Human nature from the perspective of evolutionary-psychology *is* a constant. It's the society we live in and how that effects how our genetic predispositions towards certain behavior that changes.

This is fatuous, silly, foolish, stupid, empty-headed and ludicrous nonsense. It is actually worse than your proposition that fusion power is the wave of the future. Allow me to disillusion you of not one but three completely-fucking-wrong foundational ideas you hold which underpin your first sentence alone.

Myth 1: there is such a thing as "evolutionary psychology" in the sciences.

Truth: there is not. Psychology is a proto-science that does not meet the standards of rigour and formality that a real science must. Nonetheless, many of its practitioners (but not even a majority of them!) try to address objectively real phenomena of the mind. The same thing goes for biology although a greater proportion of biologists try to address objectively real phenomena - perhaps even a majority.

However, so-called "evolutionary biology" which tries to "explain" particular evolutionary pathways through pure guesswork is not a science at all nor is it in any way scientific. What it is is a bunch of handwaving nonsense and Just So storytelling. A bunch of arbitrary and irrational Bad Explanations. Neither correct nor incorrect, but simply bad - unworthy of any consideration as they are strictly pre-scientific. Evolutionary biology is not a proto-science, it is a fake science.

What do you get when you couple the massive uncertainty of a proto-science (psychology) with another proto-science (say, biology)? You get a pseudo-science. And what do you get when you couple a proto-science with a pseudo-science? You get something worthy of the death penalty. It is an INSULT to TRUTH for you to even utter the words "evolutionay psychology" thus lending that hogwash the smallest modicum of credibility by acknowledging its existence.

Myth 2: there is something like a singular "human nature" that is genetically determined

Truth: all three parts of this ridiculous notion are empirically false.

First, there is no singular "human nature" by ANY possible meaning of the term. Neither personality nor personality types nor even the basic substrate of cognition of human beings is singular. There is absolutely nothing which all human minds share in common, not at any moment in history and certainly not throughout history.

Nothing makes this more obvious than looking at a primitive neolithic human mind, a mind incapable of the simplest abstractions like counting to 3. And if that isn't enough then there's the empty minds of feral human-animals that are incapable of language or complex learned behaviour or even primitive consciousness. And as if that weren't bad enough, there is the plurality of cognitions available.

I am capable of both analysis (logic) and synthesis (spontaneous, broadband creativity). Analysis is the form of cognition encoded in artificial intelligences such as CYC. Synthesis, the capacity for multidimensional decomposition, is the form of cognition encoded in every neural network no matter how primitive. The noted natural language machine learning engines all function on the basis of multidimensional decomposition.

There exists no other forms of cognition other than analysis and synthesis. And more importantly, not all humans are capable of both forms of cognition. Being capable of both, I see the lack of either (and usually both) in human beings as a huge yawning gap in people's minds.

Consider the ridiculous claims of a singular "human nature" against the empirical fact that what people use to think isn't the same from person to person.

Second, the set of things (actions, behaviours, desires, motivations, drives, whatever) that are ingrained in human beings from birth is EMPTY. Humans have no instincts. Newborns do have a few simple reflexes such as automatically grasping whatever's in their hands and taking a big breath then holding it when put underwater. This is why infants don't automatically drown when put in water.

Let us digress for a moment on the question of what an instinct is. An instinct is a behaviour that never had to be learned. If it had to be learned then it's not an instinct! Dogs burying bones is an instinct. Dogs leaving shit in public places is an instinct. Cats buring their shit is an instinct. If you have to train a behaviour out of a puppy, then it's probably an instinct.

Humans have no instincts. But what about love, Richard? Love is not an instinct! As a matter of empirical fact, maternal love is a modern invention and so can't possibly be an instinct. And filial love grows out of the mother's nourishment and taking care of the newborn so it too isn't an instinct!

The closest thing to a hardwired instinct humans have is empathy. And empathy can't really be counted an instinct because exactly like analysis and synthesis, it is a general computing substrate. Empathy doesn't dictate any behaviours or thoughts or drives or motivations or anything else.

My empathy for instance is a tool that I use to exquisite effect in order to destroy people that disgust me. If you were thinking that empathy means "peace & loving kindness" you can forget it. Empathy is just knowing what makes others tick by automatically and subconsciously being able to simulate their minds using your own brain. Empathy is precisely limited by your own knowledge and cognitive capacity.

Third, genes don't code for shit in human neuroanatomy. Our species' genome has about 25000 genes of which about 6% are unique to chimps and humans. That's only 1500 genes of which most are going to be chimp genes. Meanwhile, we have about 100 billion neurons. What genes code for is a general computing substrate as Henry Markram explains in Supercomputing The Brain's Secrets.

Myth 3: human biology and human psychology can be cleanly differentiated and do not straddle each other.

Truth: the multiple feedback cycles going both ways between human biology and human psychology as well as the blurred regions between the two make any kind of categorization of "culture vs nature" a ridiculous exercise for pseudo-scientific nitwits touring the talk show circuits.

In fact, this is ridiculous on its face as even a cursory glance at height charts over historical periods will reveal. Why height charts? Because humans a few centuries ago were shrimps. And this hasn't changed due to evolution but due to better nutrition and hygiene. Both things which cause the development of stronger immune systems and greater cranial capacity.

The Flynn Effect, a sustained increase in the average IQ scores of populations by 3 points every decade for the last 120 years, ever since records began ... proves our ancestors were dim-witted fucking idiots. Our parents are on average 6 IQ points stupider than we are. In fact, we have detailed records showing how people in generations past were much less accustomed to abstraction than we are. Even simple abstractions like 'mammal' would be unfamiliar to them, things they do not use in everyday life.

It is a meaningless and anti-scientific exercise to try to categorize nutrition OR hygiene in the ridiculous "nature vs culture" obsolete fake-debate which stupider generations than ours were obsessed with. Square pegs round holes, people!

Myth 4: human psychology must be explained in terms of other things such as biology and culture.

Truth: human psychology is axiomatic. There is no explanation for human psychology other than more human psychology. There CANNOT BE any explanation for human psychology other than itself for the very simple reason that psychology as a field of science is the only possible root and basis of EVERY social science.

Every science dealing with human beings that lacks a rigorous basis in psychology is a proto-science at best. Every social "science" that CLAIMS a basis other than psychology ... is a lying pseudo-science. So-called "mainstream" economics (also known as market, analytic, Austrian, Chicago, and financial) is pure pseudo-scientific gibberish and hogwash. Neither industrial nor developmental economics claim any rigorous basis in anything. And behavioural economics looks for a basis in psychology, although it's hardly rigorous yet.

If you need another example of the social sciences' dependence on psychology, I need only point to deMause's work on the history of childrearing. In his work, he explains many social artifacts by tracing them back to childrearing styles, the psychology of the parents that used them and the psychology of the children that evolved from it. The ultimate explanation for all social phenomena is psychology, and the only explanations for psychological phenomena are ... more psychology.

Just as it is ridiculous to try to find an "explanation" for mathematics in the exact sciences since the latter uses and depends on the former. So too it is ridiculous to try to find a "cultural" or "environmental" or any other "explanation" for psychology in the social sciences. The social sciences all use and depend on psychology. Perhaps there is an explanation for psychology in mathematics. More likely there isn't. Psychology simply is. Either get used to it or shut the fuck up.

Wikiality, Academic Peer-Review and Socially Determined Truth

In a comment to my previous blog post, Stephen Diamond points to an article with a similar view.

That article is a mix of the superficially true and the deeply fatuous. Consider,

> But Wikipedia is no encyclopedia

as if being an encyclopedia were a good thing! An encyclopedia is by definition a collection of bourgeois liberal prejudices. Hardly an unvarnished Good Thing.

The Encyclopedia Britannica in particular is noted for allowing censorship of critiques of Christianity, its theology and its mythos by "anonymous" editors. This was simultaneous to its refusal to get into the 20th century by discussing feminism and the women's movement.

The same thing with academic "peer-review". As if academia held any kinds of answers. It's not like being less stupid than totally stupid were some kind of recommendation. And peer review! For fuck's sake, who the fuck believes in that shit anymore?

It's an artificial system designed to stall and hold up and blunt progress so as to preserve academics' reputations by putting them in positions of power over any potential usurpers. Incidentally, that paper is the ultimate production of the system it scorns - completely fucking useless because impenetrable, verbose, obsolete and mired in the past. 

Let me be explicit: any system that does not concern itself with directly determining and measuring truth but relies on symbols and artifacts will FAIL to determine truth. It is that fucking simple.

Wikipedia as a system aims to measure popularity. Peer-review aims to measure inoffensiveness (remember that results which undermine the validity of thousands of previously published results are frequently unpublishable). And BOTH of them measure groupthink. Absolutely none of these things have jack fuck all to do with the truth.

I am reminded of these retards on First Monday who set out to determine whether specialist researchers were more productive than generalist researchers, despite knowing that multidisciplinary teams are vastly more insightful than unidisciplinary teams. They measured something alright, they confirmed their bias towards specialists, they even "proved" it. There was just the niggling assumption in their data collection that all researchers had to provide "quality" papers.

So I was told by one of the authors of that paper that if a generalist were ostracized by the crowd of specialists then fuck im. Even though the generalist would be vastly more insightful and useful. Because he didn't provide the "quolity" of being accepted by his much more numerous inferiors, he couldn't possibly matter. Fucking retards. Yet THEY got published in a journal while my half-page (not even derogatory) incisive criticism gets dismissed entirely.

Because what I wrote was "unpublishable". Because I didn't "measure" anything and just provided a shotgun blast right through their interpretation of their data and inverted all of their conclusions. Thus proving that their data meant nothing since it was incapable of discriminating between diametrically opposed theories. Yeah, apparently it's just not the done thing for a non-academic to totally ruin an academic's work. I'm supposed to be inferior after all!

Peer review is just a mechanism for academics to secure their jobs and promotions. It has fuck-all to do with the truth, or with science, or with knowledge, or with progress. And never, ever forget that academics are never interested in the truth. They are interested only in their jobs. If you seriously doubt this for a single moment, you have only to reflect on the ridiculous field that is "climate science". A "field" full of garbage, anti-science, overt data manipulation, blatant money-grubbing and political activism (an activity that is intrinsically anti-science).

An intellectual is someone interested in ideas. Absolutely nothing in that description implies they are interested in true ideas. A good example is medieval Scholasticism. A more esoteric example is classical Sophism - gurus advising aspiring lawyers on how to win trials by sounding good.

So now what?

To my knowledge there exists not a single social system on the face of the planet, or even all of human history, designed to detect and advance truth. Advancing jobs? Yes. Detecting [and promoting] false authority? Oh yes. An awful lot of effort is wasted on establishing and furthering power hierarchies. The so-called "scientific method" doesn't exist anymore than the so-called "Moore's Law" - a fatuous mirage designed to lull the stupid and credulous. Even so-called "science" either doesn't serve truth (Kuhn) or doesn't have a process (Feyerabend) according to the more realistic, less masturbatory researchers.

I'm going to pull a Fermat and say that I know how to design such a social system but I'm too fucking lazy to write it out. Anyone who's read this blog will be able to guess it relies on systematically detecting and segregating people of fundamentally different cognitive abilities, and making sure the analytic-synthesists are on top while the magical thinkers are permitted membership only on sufferance. Okay, I guess this isn't a Fermat since it's not empty boasting - it's fairly trivial to design the requirements for software technology to support the self-segregation of such a community if you understand the concepts that determine the segregation.

Actually, I'm also going to give away that it depends on lotteries and juries (not judges or lawyers or fascists). You know, it's not like this is even remotely fucking new. Human beings have been building complex societies for thousands of years, for hundreds of fucking generations. So why the fuck, why the FUCK, does fascism and hierarchy always get fucking reinvented?! Why the fuck do magical thinking moronic assholes always reach for fascism as the first, last and only possible political solution?! For grief's sake but do a lot of people simply not deserve to live.

"Jimbo" Wales' smarmy smile

[Nov 13: somebody obviously talked to his publicist since the photo-advert has been changed to something more open and less freakish]

Have you seen "Jimbo" Wales' face on that donations advert in wikipedia? What does that facial expression say to you?

It says to me

• "I hold you in contempt"
• "I am your superior and I condescend to smile to you"
• "although it's more of a smirk"
• "give me money you peon"
• "I want money for my 6 figure salary"
• "give me money so that I may continue to look down on you and dismiss you, the people who made wikipedia, in favour of the bootlicks and lickspittles that lick my arse and kick you down and spit on you"

And of all things, it says this to me most loudly:

• "I am uncomfortable treating you like human beings or as if I cared what you thought in any way, shape or form. because deep down I despise you"
• "except not so deep down I guess"

The more I think about it, the more his smile says to me. None of it good. Given he's ostensibly begging inferiors (and he does consider us all to be his inferiors, people of absolutely no consequence) to give him money, yeah he's not very comfortable with it. It'd be kinda like a millionaire begging for money on a street corner.

And before you bother, yes it is a fact that "Jimbo" Wales holds mere wikipedia contributors (let alone readers) in utter contempt. He holds his fellow co-founder of wikipedia in enough loathing to try to write him out of history. The only people he likes are the cultish assholes and power-mongers who routinely lick his arse. Those are the ones he calls "top wikipedians" and claims "create 90% of content" a claim which is factually ridiculous on its face.

An empirical analysis has determined that 90% of content that survives is made by transients who never bother making a second contribution. Jimbo's cherished "top contributors" are responsible only for transient edits to category names that happen to affect thousands of pages simultaneously. These cherished "administrators" of Jimbo's (jackboots is more accurate) are responsible for all those loathesome [citation required] tags littering Wikipedia like so much garbage.

So yeah, apparently Jimbo's incapable of dealing with anybody else as an equal. His partner he backstabbed and the transient people Wikipedia depends on that don't need him in any way he dismisses entirely. Only lickspittle / jackboots get any recognition from him - those smegheads get catered to by Jimbo's exquisitely tailored totalitarian monarchy. So yeah, getting put into a position where he is the inferior would raise that hated banner of equality he dreads.

I might as well declare here that I despise everything that Wikipedia stands for: mob rule, group-think, liberal bourgeois orthodoxy, a combination of false authority and politically correct blandness (the so-called NPOV), truth by consensus (wikiality), clique-ishness, and fascistic oppression of dissenters. I yearn to see the day when Wikipedia will be torn down and destroyed and its top "wikipedians", SchutzStaffel to a body of lies, are hunted down and killed like the Gestapo members they actually are.

Orwellism isn't limited to the USA

So-called "third way" politics in the last decade meant right-wingers using left-wing rhetoric. It was loathesome crap. Fortunately it was self-limiting since "third way" politicians couldn't get away with their lies when their subjects were suffering for it.

More worrying is so-called "civil society" which refers to NGOs paid for and ruled by aristocrats. (They follow the corporate model with shareholders after all, not the cooperative model at all.) What "civil society" means as an ideal is the opposition to responsible government (whether democratic or dictatorial) in favour of rule by aristocrats ... through the back door.

The development of "civil society" is a scourge on any country that has it. China most recently has been beset by nutballs promoting weak ambient power sources (so-called "renewables"). South Korea has been beset by anti-nuclear nutballs.

While we're on the topic, so-called "renewables" are another Orwellism since there is nothing particularly renewable about power derived from thermonuclear reactions in the Sun that doesn't apply to fission power derived from burning already radioactive remnants of supernovae.

Remnants that can be found in plenty both in the granite that makes up all mountains and in the seawater of every ocean. Cheaply enough to be economical too, if we had to go that route. And since the Sun will become unusable in a mere 5 billion years whereas thorium should still be usable for ten billion of years, fission is actually MORE "renewable".

This scourge of "civil society" has brought about calamity in nation after nation. Witness the so-called "environmental" (another Orwellism! they're really the anti-industrial / anti-human movement) NGOs in Germany which flourished so well under Nazism.

Thanks to its "environmental" movement, Germany has a psychotic national energy policy, one totally divorced from physical reality. Billions of euros are being forcibly taken from ratepayers and taxpayers in order to "pay" for "investments" that produce neither electricity nor reduce CO2 emissions.

And it's not just money going down the drain or Germans being impoverished thanks to the ideals of fascists. It's also Germany's nuclear know-how that's stagnating and being dismantled instead of flourishing and sharpening. It's also tens of thousands of Europeans having their lives shortened thanks to German coal plants.

The so-called "environmental" NGOs only reveal themselves as the bought and paid for aristocratic, anti-human scum they are when they fail to protest coal plants (in the USA) or natural gas plants (in Germany) despite both of these putting out copious greenhouse gases.

No, Orwellism isn't limited to the USA. It's found all over the world. Because of course there are magical-thinking idiots willing and eager to buy that double-speaking tripe the world over.

Orwellism is also found in every subject. History for example. How many people know Sparta as the loathsome North Korea-esque cesspit of oppression it really was? How many people know Plato and Socrates as the lying anti-democratic pieces of shit they really were?

Apparently George Lucas was right, people are not only magical-thinking idiots, they're the kinds of idiots that desperately want to be ruled by kings. And you know what? I sincerely desire they get exactly what they wish for. Because I want to see their faces when they're being lashed and I get to tell them 'I told you so you dumb motherfucker'.