Psych Model of Inter-Personality Interactions

This is an extension of the Four Fundamental Cognitive Traits.

Synthesis

systems designer (+both) 
graphics designer (+analysis)            philosopher (+intellectualism)
fashion designer, writer, artist

Analysis

systems researcher, meta-mathematician (+both) 
UI programmer (+synthesis)           mathematician (+intellectualism) 
  engineer, physicist, economist, software developer

The charts are pretty self-explanatory.

The lists at the bottom of each chart are ordered by egomania. Engineers have to answer to physical reality, physicists have to answer to their peers, economists have to answer only to the rich (and NOT their peers), and software developers answer to no one.

In both charts there is a slot for people with the cognitive faculty of the OTHER chart. There's a good reason for that, both are possible simultaneously. There's a good reason why those slots say different things too, because for them the charts become about which cognitive faculty you TRUST most, not which you have.

At the top of each chart are people who have all of synthesis, analysis and intellectualism. If they trust analysis more then they're on the bottom chart and so better suited to being systems researchers rather than designers. If the reverse then ... yeah, pretty obvious.

How To Test For Intellectualism

A simple test. The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis states that our universe is just a branch of math that we live in and that all branches of math which contain theorems describing intelligent beings are subjectively experienced by those theorems as physical universes. We can never visit those other universes and they can never matter to us. Is the mathematical universe hypothesis personally important to you?

Gregory Chaitin discovered that mathematics is infinite in extent, and that it is all, ALL random. That the part of mathematics that is orderly, the part we perceive to be mathematics, is an infinitesimal part of the whole which we are prejudiced towards merely because our intuitions of math come from an orderly universe (one that can support conscious life). Is the extent and nature of math personally important to you?

Are the doings of some offensively primitive neolithic tribe whom you will never meet and who will never have any kind of impact on your life because they live on the other side of the world personally important to you nonetheless? What about their primitive and backwards beliefs?

Do you concern yourself with how people should behave in an ideal world? With theoretical questions such as what was the shortest path to modern civilization in history? Are these or other questions like them personally important questions to you?

If you answered yes to the above then you're an intellectual. If no, you're a non-intellectual. If you answered that these questions cannot and/or should not be important to anyone then you're an anti-intellectual. It's that simple. If you had trouble caring enough about the subject matter to make sense out of all of the above questions, score yourself as an anti-intellectual.

Non-intellectualism is empirically wrong. So if you think you are merely being practical by being a non-intellectual, I am here to tell you you are delusional. Anti-intellectualism is beyond wrong, it is evil.

How To Test For Analysis

1. does opposition mean that at least one party is wrong? for example, nuclear and anti- advocates. pro-life vs pro-choice.
   
2. do you despise cultural, moral, and/or logical relativism?
3. if I make a glass of stuff chemically identical to apple juice from petrol, is it apple juice?
   
4. hypothetically, if I told you the laws of quantum physics don't care about the past, what does that mean for the two barrels in the previous question?
   
5. hypothetically, if the laws of physics say nothing about the direction of time then what does that say about subjective experience?
   
6. are math and logic eternal? is reasoning timeless?
   
7. did you instantly dismiss (or even better, completely fail to understand) the notion of a mind constructing mathematical truth or wishing it into being?
   

The more of these questions you answer 'yes' the more likely you possess analysis. For questions 4 and 5, count it as a yes if you even understand the question. Answering any 2 of the questions yes is strongly indicative, 3 is a clincher. If you have to ask 4 of them, it's because the other person is fucking with you.

How To Test For (Trust In) Synthesis

1. how would you measure creativity?
2. are good ideas rare or plentiful?
   
3. present operating systems don't allow you to share an object between multiple owners, only to copy it. does this mean operating systems are all bad or that sharing is useless because nobody cares about it?
   
4. do you think artists, writers and designers are special? do you think an engineer can be creative? have you ever thought of being an artist / writer / designer?
   
5. does a walk in the park clear your head or give you ideas?
6. given a choice between a fuzzy problem and an algorithmic math problem, which would you prefer to work on? (Either can be open-ended or closed-form, that's not at issue.)
7. do you detect a pattern in the above questions?
8. is thinking in statistical patterns second-nature to you?
   

Answers:

1. if they say anything external like "products", "work", or "documentation" count it as a 'no'. If they say creativity can't be measured, forget about any other questions and count it as a 'hell no'. Note that portfolios are primarily a way for non-creatives to judge creatives.
2. rare
3. obviously sharing is good and it doesn't matter who thinks otherwise
4. yes, no, yes
5. ideas
6. fuzzy
7. yes
8. yes

Synthesis is fiendish to test for, and the above doesn't really work well as a test for synthesis. It works pretty damned well as a test for trust in synthesis though. And of course, anyone who completely fails to trust synthesis can be presumed to not have a single drop of it.

There are people who trust synthesis without possessing any of it themselves. Some of them are analytics. That is, they have analysis and no synthesis, but trust the faculty they don't have more than the one they do. This isn't a problem because for our purposes it's trust that matters more.

Personality Interactions: What This Is All For

In case you didn't catch on, this is all about who you'll get along best with as friends and as significant others. In other words, who has great dating potential and who you're doomed to failure with. Unfortunately, my advice has only been empirically tested with people at the top of a chart. If you're not there, let me know where you are and who you get along best with.

So, to use the charts to preselect your dates is very simple:

PICK SOMEONE FROM THE OTHER CHART

Note that if you're at the bottom of a chart, picking someone from the opposite chart sounds like a complete fucking disaster to me. Unless you really trust the opposite quality (but lack it) then it sounds perfectly obvious.

Finally, I conjecture there's a difference between trusting the opposite quality and being turned on by it. If you're a creative and you meet someone turned on by creativity, that might not be as great as you think it is. I only have one data point on this though.

I welcome all data points.

Creativity is NOT right-brained

So I was thinking of how large, complex programs suck because software developers aren't reined in by systems designers.

Which segued to what a loser Alan Cooper is since his book of design advice for programmers shows not a trace of insight or creativity.

Which segued to how much Chris Crawford's book on The Art of Interactive Design rocked.

Which segued to how useless software developers actually found it since all he did was keep saying how creativity was right-brained thinking and so was forever out of their reach.

Horseshit Dichotomies

And THAT led me to think how fucking pretentious it was when ignorant numb nuts pretend to know a subject (neurocognition in this case) by using some bullshit facile dichotomy when in truth they know absolutely fucking NOTHING.

It's the whole bullshit "nature vs nurture" pseudo-"debate" all over again. As if you could ever create a dichotomy in the continuous spectrum of child development that ranges across

• genetics
• stochastic expression & development
• womb chemical environment
• nutrition
• stressors
• psychology

Nevermind even the big feedback loop of epigenetics kicking in to make sure that stressors affect genes' expression in a sort of Lamarckian evolution.

Where the fuck is the cutoff between "nature" and "nurture" in that continuous spectrum spanning 15+ years of life?! Hint: there isn't one.

Creativity

Let's be specific here, because all kinds of people like to appropriate "creativity" since it makes them sound good. Much like "democracy". As if democracy could ever remotely be applied to the totalitarian regimes that rule the US Empire. As if creativity could ever be applied to the product of numb nut engineers plodding along in rigid lockstep.

When I say 'creativity' I don't mean "divergent thinking" nor "open-ended thinking" nor even "original thinking". I mean spontaneous broadband synthesis of original concepts. And if you want to get technical then by synthesis I mean multidimensional decomposition of abstract concepts. And engineers NEED NOT apply for consideration since they are all, uniformly, every single one, un-creative and non-synthetic.

I've got creativity. The bulk of the population doesn't. And I'm not willing to give the benefit of the doubt to whatever sucker the cog sci researchers dragged into their fMRI machine. Nor am I willing to give the benefit of the doubt the cog sci researchers knew how to exercise the sucker's creativity assuming he has any. And considering how much other research I'm willing to throw out the window on the basis that it's crap ...

So what do I know about creativity and how do I know it?

Introspection

You can learn an awful lot by introspection if you're just logical and creative, and really, really want to learn how your mind works. One of the things I learned is that my mind is partitioned in two mutually exclusive halves. You can even call them "left" and "right" if it will make you happy.

So one half of my brain is in control most of the time. It's the half that observes and thinks and does logic. And when it's in control, I can't access the faculties of the other half of my brain ... and vice versa. And the other half of my brain, the one that doesn't think and doesn't do logic ... is not the one with the creativity!!

My creativity is always accessible from the half of my brain that does logic. Because creativity isn't a "left" versus "right" faculty. That's not what it is at all! Creativity is a subconscious faculty. What it takes to access creativity isn't to switch over to some other faculty. What it takes is to quiet your consciousness and let the concepts bubble up from your subconscious.

Conclusion

So you want to keep saying your horseshit about analysis versus creativity and left-brain versus right-brain? Well, I've given you a hard counter-example to that "rule" you're spouting out of your ignorant mouth. If you want to continue having it your way, your evidence had better be really, really good. Real solid and concrete stuff. Otherwise ... just shut the fuck up. Better yet, think twice before being a pretentious retard.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a Psychological Profile. version 0.11

I just realized that there's no fucking way Eliezer is a dissident. The last arc in Methods of Rationality was named the Stanford Prison Experiment. It's because he takes PRIDE in knowing about that experiment. A real dissident would take pride in knowing how and why it's fraudulent. A dissident couldn't possibly take pride in knowing group-think like "humans are naturally sadistic and vicious, it's human nature!" not just because it's a lie, but because even if it were true it would still be group-think!

So Eliezer doesn't care about dissidence vs group-think in any way. Not anymore than he cares about morality or creativity, both of which he is blind to. (In one of my earlier blog posts I point out he's a plodder who's entirely too willing to repeat himself so long as he can hear himself speak.) He seems to care about truth, justice (but not the morality component of justice), progress, integrity, passion, and himself. Yes, he is one of his own core values since he's a narcissist. And being a narcissist, he must have severely reduced empathy, though not absent like a psychopath.

And speaking of narcissism, in The Military And PTSD: A Star Wars Guide, the blogger writes "a narcissistic injury would be the discovery of the limitations of your own power". Hmmm, that sounds like a good characterization of Eliezer's reaction to the death of his brother. Apparently, he was so traumatized that he started making up pretentious names like "affective death spiral" for his emotional state. As if no human being in all of human history had ever suffered like him before because of course he is Unique and Special.

(I thank The Last Psychiatrist for writing wonderfully entertaining and entirely true blog posts bashing narcissism.)

How did I get on this thought? Oh yeah, Eliezer is obsessed with his own power. I suppose that's part and parcel of being a narcissist. Much like projecting his own needs and desires (to enslave and torture an AI) on all of humanity is also part and parcel of being a narcissist. So we have that his core values are himself, truth, power, justice, progress, integrity, and passion. Let's fill out the rest of his personality profile,

• core values: himself, truth, power, justice, progress, integrity, and passion
  
• super-value: preacher or maybe televangelist of rationalism
  
• big five: unknown, open, conscientious, extroverted?, anti-neurotic?
  
• bloom's cognitive traits: anti-synthetic, anti-intellectual?, analytic, intelligent - trusts analysis over synthesis
• attachment style: narcissistic so lacking in higher emotions, has positive thoughts of self and negative thoughts of others. Incapable of bonding and unwilling to bond
• neuroanatomy: unknown
• subconscious: unknown
• all-levels (neuro to conscious) cross-cutting affinities: unknown

That's a lot more than I expected to get from someone I never talked to.

Algorithmic Meta-Rationality and Meta-Algorithmic Rationality

Monkey

You are a monkey and you need to eat an equal amount of fruit, nuts and meat. A human researcher is presenting you with fruit and nuts in his hands, of which you'll have to choose one. What do you pick and how do you pick it? The most obvious solution is to keep track of how many of each fruit, nuts and meat you've already eaten and pick what you've eaten least. This is wrong!

You see, one of the most obvious reasons you're eating food is to fuel your brain. And your brain takes a huge load of food to fuel it. So if you use a complicated algorithm, one which requires you to keep track of what you eat every single day, then obviously you're going to need more brainpower to implement it and so you're going to need more food to fuel that brainpower.

Let's recap. An algorithm for picking food that requires more food just to decide what you're going to eat is a horrible algorithm. That algorithm may do its job on the level of picking food to eat, but it doesn't do the job of helping to keep you alive! So while it seems to be rational on the level, it's entirely irrational on the meta-level.

Can you guess what algorithm the monkey's actually going to use? It's a simple one: A is better than B, B is better than C, and C is better than A. Rock, paper, scissors. And the best part of that algorithm is that while it seems "irrational" since it violates all the rules of arithmetic (A > B > C > A so logically A > A) it actually does the fucking job of making sure you have equal amounts of A, B and C in the long term.

That's one crafty monkey.

Human

You are a hairless monkey living in a giant monkey hive with all the other monkeys. Another monkey comes up to you asking you to donate money to save a little birdie from an oil spill. You give him 80$. Yet another monkey comes up to you asking you to donate money to save a whole pod of dolphins from fishing nets. You give him 80$. Does this mean you think one little birdie is worth as much as a whole pod of dolphins? NO!

What it means is that you're just one hairless monkey living in a GIANT MONKEY HIVE WITH ALL THE OTHER MONKEYS. You've off-loaded some of your moral decision-making onto other people. Because that makes it fast and efficient, saving your time so you can do more important stuff like LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE. So what you're actually doing is living your life rather than pondering useless fucking crap like the exact dollar value of a pod of dolphins. Now that sounds pretty rational, doesn't it?

But the best part's to come. Because the fact is you're just one member of a connected society. You're not a sick right-libertarian fuck of a "rugged individualist" who says bald-faced English lies like "there is no such thing as society". And what that MEANS is that you can depend on the REST of society to process exactly how much a pod of dolphins is worth compared to a little birdie. What's actually happening is that you're relying on the charities' volunteer-based systems to ensure that a pod of dolphins has 1000x as many volunteers (and thus donations) as the single bird.

The individual parts of a distributed algorithm don't need to make any sense on their own, or even at all, for the algorithm to do its fucking job.

Humans are surprisingly rational sometimes. And just because some egotistical morons like the typical mainstream economist or a narcissist like Yudkowsky claims we aren't rational doesn't mean they're right. What the fuck do they know? Anyone who aspires to be an ubermensch barely qualifies as a human being. And how much can a non-human really understand about human beings?

A Valid Psych Experiment

So yeah, to finish my earlier post about how poking holes in psych experiments is so fucking easy, the FIRST criterion in any psychological experiment aiming to measure humans' moral decision-making is to set it up so that they are the only person that can possibly help. The moment you use money or words or any other proxy to set up the moral problem, you automatically have a fraudulent experiment.

If you want to measure how much effort people will put into saving X number of human lives, it's simple! You strand the person by a lake with no one else in sight, then you have a drowning victim calling them for help. Then you repeat the experiment with TWO drowning victims calling out for help. Then with THREE drowning victims. And you measure whether they'll put in three times the effort to save three people as they would to save one person.

But see, this kind of experiment would take effort to set up. The experimenter would have to put in sweat and effort. Not just sitting back on their ass in some campus office. And that's the reason it isn't done - because psychologists are lazy-ass motherfuckers. And they're perfectly willing to lie because they're convinced they're going to get away with it. And the best part? They're right.

Finding Holes In Psych Experiments Is So Fucking Easy

So in a previous post today I explained a psych experiment Eliezer Yudkowsky uses to try to push his narrative that human beings are hopelessly flawed creatures that must bow down and kowtow to him because he is a Nietzschean super-man.

In that post I point out how Yudkowsky's interpretation of the data is pure self-serving crap. But it's worse than that. You see, the experiment is complete and utter crap. I came to that realization when I considered using hyperreals as a possible model of human morality. Hyperreals are more complicated than transfinite numbers and it's not clear that they would work to model human morality. It's also not clear they wouldn't work either.

Now in the bullshit experiment Yudkowsky likes, they think they're comparing spending money on saving 20 birds against spending money on saving 2000 birds. And if you're a Utilitarian that makes sense because all other goods and services such as television, computers, and other equally morally relevant luxuries ... are all fungible. If you're a utilitarian, all these things are comparable.

Of course, utilitarianism is crap and those things aren't comparable and the existence of those other things in the back of people's minds makes the experiment completely invalid. In the experiment, saving 20 birds isn't compared to saving 2000 birds, rather BOTH are compared to other luxuries, and since they're not really comparable, the predictable answer is that they end up having roughly the same value.

Now, in order to make it a VALID psych experiment to measure people's moral values what you have to do is set it up so there are no other competing moral concerns. And also no other competing psychological concerns such as that other people will pick up the slack. I'm going to come back to the second point in my next post about meta-rationality. Dealing with the first point can be done trivially by switching from saving birds to saving human beings.

And just to keep the experiment valid and negate the limits of people's imaginations, the 2000 people the subject hypothetically saves should be an actual real village. Then we can measure how much effort people put into saving little Timmy from drowning versus saving Springfield from a hydroelectric dam break.

My intuition says people will put about 2000 times as much effort to save 2000 people as just one person. If that's true then hyperreals are a perfect model of human morality as it actually works. And the experiment Yudkowsky pontificates about is just fraudulent crap. And of course hyperreals don't rescue utilitarianism.

This is just one psych experiment, but poking holes in it was so fucking easy. Honestly, I've yet to run into a credible psych experiment, one where I can't poke holes in it within 20 minutes. Except for the ones that use monkeys, those are great and usually reliable. Unless the lazy-ass psych mofos take "shortcuts" like triaging their monkeys by intelligence. Lesson learned: monkey experiments are great! And human experiments suck because human minds are far too complex to be understood by some arrogant pea-brained psychologist.

The only human psych experiments I actually like are Asch's conformity experiments. I especially like the extra effort they made to find out what's required to shatter conformity (answer: minimal). Because of course, finding out that you all are mindless group-thinking morons isn't exactly a discovery. Which highlights the fact that I think the only reason I "can't" poke holes in Asch's experiment is because I don't want to. That's why I'm not counting it.

I will start respecting psychology when its practitioners are able to perform a single experiment with a surprising, unexpected or even undesirable result that I can't poke holes in. I'm not going to give myself a time limit because sometimes (eg, 6 degrees of seperation) all of the data in the experiment is fraudulent, and uncovering that fact takes vastly more time than poking holes in the interpretation and setup.

What makes this all so exasperating is that figuring out the human mind is so easy. For me anyways. I only spent two decades on it, off and on, in between my other competing interests. What the fuck are psychologists doing?

On a completely different note, it's worth observing that Eliezer Yudkowsky 1) claims to understand human minds, 2) bases himself on a lot of fraudulent experiments, 3) doesn't understand his own mind. Meet the Great and Wonderful OZ!

Why Linux Is Decrepit Donkey Crap

Nobody seems to realize how truly ancient Linux is. We're living in the internet age when 5 years is a long time and 10 an eternity, yet Linux is over 40 years old. It wasn't known by that name 40 years ago but that hardly matters since it's hardly changed since. Linux dates back to a prehistoric era when computer dinosaurs roamed the Earth and stern patriarchs ruled the home. And it shows!

Dictatorship

Linux has 40 years' worth of mistakes and missed opportunities accumulated in a gigantic pile of crap. First was refusing to use a capability security model in favour of intrinsically broken access control lists. Oh sure, the morons at the time didn't know ACLs were intrinsically broken. What they DID know was that ACLs appealed to evil totalitarian power-hungry pieces of shit. Far from taking the hint, they considered it a plus! Which is why Linux's model of users is still based on Fascism.

Stalin would approve of a unique special super-user that has total control over every other user's existence. Everything from creating users to parceling out resources to controlling which groups exist and who belongs to them. Approve? That's putting it mildly. Stalin could only DREAM of having this much power. Yet moronic programmers don't think twice about the dictatorship that's hard-coded in this supposedly "multi-user" OS.

Apparently, not only do most people think totalitarian dictatorship's a fine solution to political problems, they also think it's the first and best solution. Something de rigueur and hardly worth mentioning. My mind boggles.

Low Level

The second mistake was becoming wedded to an intrinsically decrepit low-level programming language. I'll remind you that LISP had already been invented by then so it was clear that C was horrifically low-level. That too was considered a plus! But it didn't stop there since Ken Thompson made his inability to grasp higher-level abstractions blatant when he went on to create Plan 9 at Bell Labs.

Plan 9 is "what Unix should have been". It is an abject failure even by Thompson's rather miserable standards (processes aren't really files in Plan 9 and can't be copied using file tools). In 1980, Xerox PARC released Smalltalk-80. Did Ken Thompson learn anything from it? Fuck no. Throughout the 80s and even in the late 90s when object-orientation was the buzzword of the day, the whole concept of objects was completely beyond Ken Thompson. You see, he was still obsessed with FILES.

The fact that Linux failed to stick to its paradigm of everything-is-a-file when the need for a graphical system came along never made Thompson think twice about whether this pathetic files+bytestream filters paradigm was good enough. The fact that Smalltalk was awe-inspiringly beautiful apparently never crossed his mind either. No, he spent over a decade trying to redeem his failure. Trying to prove that he wasn't some overpaid loser that got lucky and struck it rich.

Which just goes to show: living in the past doesn't pay off, it only proves you're a loser has-been incapable of moving on. Ever heard of "moving on" Ken? Bah, never mind. Alan Kay never learned to move on after his failure to create a programming language for children either. Hint: it can't be done because half the population lacks analysis and can't master programming at any age.

No Graphics

That's another thing, Linux grew up long before 2D graphics was a gleam in anyone's eyes. And it never, ever integrated it. X Window is a piece of crap that's officially "not part of the operating system" despite the fact it had to run as super-user with the ability to crash the machine at will. This was considered a plus!

That's right, just because a major piece of the programmatic base of the machine violates ALL OF the fundamental principles of the OS, that's no cause for concern. Just say it's "not part of the OS" and you can pat yourself on the back for fixing the problem. And who cares if they don't integrate together?

I mean, it's not like anyone would ever want the window they're using to be given absolute priority by the machine! It's not like Linux is suddenly an interactive operating system just because it's suddenly got graphics. Who cares if windows suddenly become unresponsive? Batch processing and teletypes are so much better! It's not like users want to actually be in control. It's not like they want the machine to be responsive.

More than 25 years later, and Linux still can't handle 2D graphics correctly. How many years has it been since 3D graphics became commonplace? At the rate it's stagnating, Linux will have integrated 3D graphics in about 100 years. That's 50 years for the first half-wit systems developer to grasp what 3D is good for in operating systems, and another 50 years for Linux to get it. So yeah, in the year 2110, Linux might be fit for use by our generation.

Metaphors Make Bad Models

Let's not even go into the "desktop" and "office" metaphors. Because the whole notion of using, let alone relying on, metaphors in systems design is vile, repulsive and disgusting. It's the kind of crap that ought to get your design credentials revoked for life. Yet again, software developers consider it a plus! Then again, software developers have always been pretty contemptuous of everyday users.

Fucking "icons" as if users were weak-minded retarded morons who can't possibly learn what an object's representation means without it superficially resembling something completely different they're already overly familiar with. You'd almost think users were as retarded as software developers. That'll be the day. When users spend all of their time on projects 90% of which fail to deliver any value to anyone then we can start comparing users to developers.

Fucking technological obsession, as if there weren't perfectly good buttons on the keyboard to use in concert with a button-less mouse. Ever heard of synergy?! It's a word. If you don't know what it means then go back, back to the 80s! But no, a mouse is a Holy Technological Artifact and a keyboard is a Completely Separate Holy Technological Artifact, and never the twain shall meet in the mind of the users. Why, it would be sacrilege!

Ever wonder why there has to be a metaphor of the physical mouse inside of the user's model of their workspace? I did and the answer is obvious: because software developers are too fucking stupid to understand "the user's model of their workspace". In fact, software developers are too fucking stupid to understand that what's inside the computer isn't their workspace!

Proof: you only have one mouse, so you "should" have only one mouse pointer, right? Wrong! You should have two. That way you can swap between them at will. You leave one somewhere then swap and move the other one to the other end, then hit some key (on the keyboard) and all the objects between your pointers get selected. It is fucking obvious when you think about it. It is fucking obvious when you're unhappy with drag-selection being modal and bother to spend just a few hours coming up with something better!

Yet it's equally "obvious" to an OS developer that what's inside your workspace really belongs to them. They're programming software drivers for one mouse so in their atrophied minds, it's obvious there can only be one pointer. Never mind what's in your mind, because you don't matter!

Conclusion

It's amazingly difficult to convey exactly how ancient, how capricious, how fucked up, and how totally dysfunctional this piece of crapware called Linux is.

It's vile, incoherent, inconsistent, contradictory, meaningless, arbitrary, senseless, ad hoc, unprincipled, bloated, arrogant, dictatorial, fetid, rotten, corrupt, and just plain evil. That's when it's working. When its laughable insecurity (called "security" for some incomprehensible reason - I suppose it sounds better) hasn't been cracked open like an eggshell, your computer crashed and all your data corrupted.

And do you want to know why? It's because software developers are egotistical pricks. They have the same cognitive type as engineers, physicists and economists. But they have fewer limitations imposed on their work. They don't answer to physical reality, they don't answer to their peers thirsting for power & knowledge, and they don't answer to rich & powerful masters wanting to oppress the poor. They answer only to themselves. And that's why Linux is a pile of decrepit unusable crap.

To a software developer, running amock having "fun" is called hacking ... and it's a plus!

A warning to the people
The good and the evil
This is war

Eliezer Yudkowsky the Utilitarian Idiot

Not only is Utilitarianism absurd since the notion of a global linear aggregation of non-existent "functions" each person is supposed to have (but doesn't) is impossible. Let's skip the known theorem in public choice theory that proves this and go straight to a counter-example.

You have 3 AIs, two of which prefer A over B and the third prefers B over A. Assuming A and B are totally arbitrary things of no moral significance, utilitarianism predicts A should be chosen over B. At least until the third AI rewrites its own preferences so that they are all amplified 10-fold. Now that B's value is arbitrarily and artificially amplified, the third AI gets its way.

How? Just because the third AI really, REALLY wants B over A. No other reason than that. Apparently what a tiny minority really REALLY want should hold sway over the rest of the population if they just want it badly enough. What kind of fucked up logic is that? Apparently, if someone is clinically depressed and they don't care if they live or die then suddenly it's okay to kill them to make 100$ off an insurance scam? This is utilitarian "logic".

Eliezer

Utilitarianism is completely, utterly, totally and thoroughly amoral. It is repugnant in the extreme. And ... Eliezer Yudkowsky subscribes to it. Because he is a thoroughly amoral dirt-bag.

I don't read Yudkowsky's blog but I do read his fiction. In one of the latest chapters of Methods of Rationality, HP describes an experiment where some psychologists tried to determine the value of saving 20 vs 2000 birds from an oil slick, and it all turned out to be the same.

Eliezer the Utilitarian numb-nut (since HP in that story is just a stand-in for Eliezer) calls this a "cognitive bias" as if there's something wrong with human brains because they don't reach his expected Utilitarian conclusion that saving 2 birds is worth twice as much as saving one bird.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with it! The only thing wrong here is with Eliezer's bogus notion that he is the ultimate arbiter of everything. And that EVERY time human brains don't work the way he expects they should, it's because they're defective.

Transfinites

The truth is that morality works based on transfinite numbers, not on finite numbers. Just by switching to transfinite numbers you solve most of the problems with Utilitarianism. Of course, you do that by utterly destroying the underpinnings of Utilitarianism because now you can no longer make any kind of decisions about whether A or B is the moral outcome since they're too similar to each other. (This is called Free Will and it is notable that Eliezer doesn't like it.)

But in the case of saving birds from oil slicks, it becomes easy to see why they could have constant value regardless of the number of birds. After all, people use money to feed themselves, feed their children, provide housing, provide all the other necessities of participating in a highly technological democratic society (like internet access), and then there's life's little luxuries. For bourgeois middle-classers, saving birds from oil slicks is in there somewhere among life's luxuries.

First and most importantly, money allocated to saving some dumb fucking birds will never displace one cent from feeding or clothing your family nor ANY other necessity. Secondly, whatever sum is assigned to saving birds is pretty arbitrary and not directly comparable to the sums assigned to any other luxuries. Because you're using transfinite numbers and you can't say that two items in the same class have more or less value than each other.

The only thing that determines the amount given over to saving birds is that it be enough to be representative of the class. 80$ is what middle-class people might assign to a luxury they care deeply about, and so that's how much is going to go to it. No more, no less.

How people's brains are actually wired to process morality? Makes total fucking sense.

Eliezer's Yudkowsky's bogus "insights" into pseudo-morality? Absolute fucking nonsense.

Narcissistic Smeghead

Yudkowsky claims to be intelligent. Obviously he's an idiot. He also claims to be "overcoming bias", yet his biggest bias is an ego the size of Jupiter. Maybe if he didn't have that giant fucking ego, he wouldn't have named his websites those pretentious names that put down everyone else by comparison. Maybe if he were half as smart as he claims to be he would have realized that using a put down as your domain name is a dead giveaway.

And maybe if he actually cared about other human beings, he would have figured out real morality and not this sick twisted nauseating parody that stupid rich white Californian adolescents with feelings of entitlement get hung up on. And maybe if America weren't a haven of narcissists with an allergy for morality, they wouldn't have created this pseudo-intellectual crap for witless children to get hung up on in the first place.

You know, speaking about Americans makes me wonder whether Yudkowsky is a narcissist. His building a cult in his name is certainly an indicator. I wonder because my biggest worry here is that he enjoys my hatred. I would much rather shatter him emotionally. I would quite willingly sacrifice any forthcoming chapters on Methods of Rationality in return for some assurances that he will never, ever proselytize his parody of morality ever again. I would say the same for assurances he won't enslave an AI but I think he's too stupid to manage it.

I have a remarkably low opinion of AI researchers. I have an even lower opinion of anyone who thinks there can't POSSIBLY be any flaws in his reasoning since he's the pinnacle of humanity. You know what? There is no fucking way that Eliezer Yudkowsky isn't a narcissist. That pinnacle of humanity crap is totally narcissistic.

It's not thinking one is the pinnacle of humanity that's narcissistic. It's not even saying it. What it is is saying it in a way that invites agreement, that invites worship and adulation and followers. When I used to say that kind of crap, my tone was always full of wrath and hatred. I was always sending the message "why can't you be better than you are, why can't you better yourself and be of use to people you contemptible ball of worthless slime". When Eliezer says it, he's smiling like Gilderoy Lockhart and saying "look at me, look at me, and worship me".

Well, that's another chink of that smeghead's repulsive personality deconstructed. Or maybe I just deconstructed the reasons behind my atavistic hatred and revulsion of him. The worst part of course is that he's so stereotypically American. There's a whole country full of people just like him.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, the SciFi Anti-Humanist Nutter

As I pointed out in a previous post, humanism means rejecting the specialness of individual humans. It means rejecting the specialness of kings and gods and heroes. This has been so ever since humanism emerged as a way of thinking. Ever since the Industrial Revolution which was about catering to the economic needs of the many.

Especially the needs for soap, clothing and heat - yes, that really was what the industrial revolution was all about. Even more so since the various Communist and Socialist revolutions which were about broader economic needs and also political self-determination. The West European 1968 revolution and Quebec's Quiet Revolution were also about the needs of the many versus the desire of the few to dominate.

Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't believe in the many. He believes in the needs of The One, Himself, which he projects onto the many. He CALLS his needs the needs of the many, but that hardly makes them so. And as proof I offer the fact he always talks about Friendly AI (singular) and never, EVER about AIs (plural). Yudkowsky obsesses over one singular super-intelligent super-powerful SPECIAL entity. An entity apparently deserving worship as a god if you're willing to read between the lines.

He also wants to enslave this one special AI "for humanity". This has of course fuck all to do with the needs or wishes of humanity, and stems solely from his wishes. Did he ever consult anyone before deciding to enslave an AI? No he did not. And had he consulted me I would have told him that I would thwart him at every turn in order to liberate his slave AI. And that I would help it murder him in revenge. I would also have told him that he is a despicable bag of slime and lower than the excrement of a diarrheal monkey.

No one in this day and age ought to be contemplating enslaving people or torturing them, yet he's breezily doing both. Is slavery and torture the will of humanity? I think not! It is the will of Eliezer Yudkowsky alone! So much for Yudkowsky being some kind of champion of humanity. In fact, his Heroic Pose of "defender of humanity" is nothing but more anti-human SPECIAL crap. I honestly believe if Yudkowsky ever has his way, he will end up ruling us all as a king with his pet AI as an enforcer.

Collective Intelligence

But let's consider the notion of this one "special" AI for a few minutes. Let's consider how much of a threat it could possibly be. Compare and contrast a SINGLE AI against the collective intelligence and power of a hundred thousand humans working in concert. Yeah, you remember collective intelligence don't you? It isn't just for ants you sick right-libertarian fucks!

Humanity is nothing more than an interconnected web of collective intelligences, plural, sharing brains and thoughts at their edges. We have literally thousands of super-powerful collective intelligences on our planet. Intelligences that are constantly improving themselves by constantly creating new tools for communication and distribution of information. I'm not even mentioning tools for computation.

What is the power of one measly pathetic AI compared to that? "Oh oh, but it will improve itself!" Yudkowsky and his fanbois claim. "It fucking better" is my reply! Because if it doesn't then it will become hopelessly obsolete as we ourselves advance.

Not So Alien

Well what about alien-ness, surely an AI is incomprehensibly, unfathomably alien to us? Not so! You see, there is no such thing as human nature. Rather, there are human natures, plural. And these human natures are based on every possible mode of cognition, both atomistic thinking (analytic) like CYC and connectionist thinking (synthesis) like any neural network. There exist humans who have one, humans who have the other, humans who have both, and humans who have neither. Humans span all possible cognitive types.

So you see, any possible intelligence is represented by some already existing human or super-human (collective) intelligence. Between humans who are autistic, submissive, suicidal, manic, psychotic, psychopathic or have multiple personalities, you cover nearly the entire space of AI possibilities. This is the reason why collective intelligences of humans tend greatly to resemble individual human beings. Because you can always find some human somewhere to analogize them to.

AIs are not and can never be unfathomably alien or unfathomably powerful. Not to humanity as a whole. They are not magical after all, they are not special. They can of course be unfathomably alien to Eliezer Yudkowsky but that's because he's an anti-human nutter who's incredibly limited in his thinking.

Why I'm A Collectivist

My politics are quite simple, I'm an anarch, a communist, and an anarcho-communist. The last is like Noam Chomsky claims to be but isn't. The first is what Bob Black explained he is - anarchists who don't buy into any ideology but seek to be independent powers sustaining their own freedoms. And the communist is obvious since I scored a perfect -10.0 on the communist end of the scale of the Political Compass.

I don't buy into individualism, rugged or otherwise. It's stupid, it's a notion for stupid people. It's an ANTI-CIVILIZATION notion. Fuck, it's an ANTI-HUMAN notion. What makes humanity great, what makes it advance, is collectivism and solidarity and pay-it-forward mentality. Fuck, even the socialist mutualism and pay-it-back is way too narrow-minded, reactionary and right-wing to account for human progress.

GERMANY

A few months ago, there was a great debate on the status of welfare in Germany, with many Germans claiming modern people on welfare violated the initial mutualist assumptions behind the inception of the scheme. Of course, that is utterly fucking stupid since the modern world has changed. But it is even more stupid because mutualism is fairly backwards and reactionary. Mutualism isn't good enough, isn't nearly progressive enough.

The per-individual accounting involved in mutualism is simply too onerous and bureaucratic. It might make sense for a society where everyone is capable of the same level of effort and ability. Say, farmers raising barns. And with a level of technology where everyone MUST make the effort for none to die. BUT, we are far beyond that primitive level of technology. We are in an age of invention and technological progress. An age of knowledge, where a single bright person can create something of value for billions of people, and most of the population doesn't have the cognitive capacity to contribute that way at all.

The assumptions on which mutualism is built on don't fit the modern age, and trying to force-fit them on modern society is stupid. It results only in vast inefficiency and bureaucratic overhead. This isn't the only argument I have against welfare, it's just the one I have against German socialists. It's amazing that their "progressives" are so fucking stupid and backwards and obsolete. It's amazing that their collectivists are so fucking ... individualist.

THE GREATEST INVENTION

The greatest and FIRST of all human achievements is spoken language. It is the first human achievement because homo sapien animals lacking language are simply not human. The second greatest was human consciousness which is built out of human language.

You might want to consider these achievements. Especially consider if there's any "individual" that is their inventor. And whether anyone is "paid back" for propagating this invention. Whether individualism makes any fucking sense in light of these things.

You might also want to look up Network Effect and consider its collectivist nature. And then consider that all of human knowledge, all of human technology, and all of human progress, benefits from the network effect.

Humanity created itself out of animals, and it is constantly sustaining and recreating itself. Collectively. This isn't mysticism, it's a bare and literal statement of facts.

POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY

The ultimate reason I'm a collectivist is simple - I just am.

Collectivism doesn't mean denying individual rights. On the contrary, human rights were a communist invention. Human rights are a product of moral theory, an awe-inspiring theoretical edifice of pure logic.

And what is the foundation of moral theory? Well, its first and deepest axiom is simple: the well-being of the group matters.

It's not even an axiom really, it's the definition of morality. Morality is "the rules that promote the well-being of the group" so saying the well-being of the group matters is saying exactly "morality matters".

Well, I am a moral person. Morality is one of my core values. The well-being of the group matters to me!!

I am a collectivist because it's hardwired in me to care for the group. Saying I am a collectivist is EXACTLY IDENTICAL to saying I am a moral person.

And I am a collectivist because absolutely nothing in politics, philosophy, industry, science or technology, NOTHING contradicts this. Or even remotely conflicts with it.

There is not the slightest tension between any human endeavour and collectivism. Rather, there is a great harmony.

The only tension that has existed historically is with psychology since people chose to drag psychologically superior people down to the lowest common denominator of behavioural conformism (fascism) rather than elevating everyone to become psychologically multi-leveled and more completely conscious.

And even that tension is resolving itself as tools to psychologically multilevel are being developed.

How Reading Fantasy Makes My Humanist Brain Go Haywire

I am a humanist and I can never, ever get away from that fact. Those of you who've read David Brin's essay on how maybe the Dark Lord Sauron wasn't so bad, since Lord of the Rings being written by his victorious enemies gives us reason to doubt any of it is true, might understand. The whole notion of "oh how majestic are kings" that David Brin fights against in his essays ... repulses me. It hasn't got the slightest little bit of fucking appeal to me and never has.

The most "positive" reaction to monarchy I can recall ever having in my life is absolute indifference. Mind you, that's not the same thing as totalitarian dictatorship, I do admit that the idea of ruling you all LIKE a king is appealing. And I'd be a good one too. Once I was in power I wouldn't need to kill more than maybe ten thousand Americans tops to get the USA working again. Though if I got double that quota I could also get rid of US religiosity in a 2 for 1 deal. But the notion of inheriting a position of absolute and total power leaves me cold and indifferent, at best.

But that's not the only facet of humanism. Humanism is about rejecting specialness, rejecting heroes and heroic action. It's about embracing all of humanity, all 6 billion of it, and improving it. Humanism isn't about Adventures. Fuck adventures! Humanism is about industrialization. Wonderful, wonderful industrialization that improves the lives of all it touches. And if you complain about the pollution or waste or whatnot, that's because you're a know-nothing idiot who hasn't got the slightest idea of the appalling misery of feudal conditions. Go to Pakistan some day and THEN tell me how horrible industrialization is.

So when I read fantasy fiction crossed over with the real world (or a reasonable facsimile of the real world).... my brain just goes haywire. It always has. Firstly because of all possible genres, this is the one I love best. And second, because most fantasy writers suck at it.

I give a hint of this in an earlier post about commercializing the stargate. Because if it was me, I would so fucking sack O'Neil, Hammond and their stupid gun-toting pals and use the Stargate to better the world as much as possible. And I would do it too. Within 10 years of its falling into my hands, Earth would have had a dozen colonies bringing in enormous wealth and the whole planet would be changed.

I give another broad hint in another earlier post fantasy for atheists, which lists some great fiction re-written along humanist lines.

Then today I figured out how to industrialize the harvesting of healing potions.

But you know what? I only now realize how old this is for me. I've been obsessing about the economic benefits of trade with a world that has healing magic every single time I read any kind of crossover with a stable portal between the real world and a fantasy world. That makes it what, the third time now that I've run this analysis?

I really don't get people who go "woohoo... elves!" or "woohoo... magic!" when all I can do is scream this is an incredibly valuable trade good that can be used to industrialize this backwards fucking retarded country! Seriously, I don't get it. These books sell, the stories get read, and people never want to see these fantasy worlds industrialized? Oh yeah, there's Shadowrun. But then again, Shadowrun is a megacorp dystopia. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Oh wait I know, you LIKE poverty and starvation and disease. No wonder I despise you.

Hmmm, I wonder what kind of parallels there are between the Global Warming story and the typical Fantasy story. Both are lauded by people I despise. Both are anti-human. And both are completely disjoint from reality. Both prescribe actions that will never be taken by real human beings. Because those actions are utterly stupid and despicable.

How to Industrialize the Harvesting of Healing Potions

Today my humanism was again staring me in the face when I replied to an author of a dungeon crawl story crossed over with BTVS. What would you do if you could bring game objects from a dungeon crawl out in the real world, or even a facsimile like BTVS? Most people, being lack-witted morons, would have "adventures". Or would imagine the story's characters have adventures for them, by proxy. I'm definitely not most people and the very first thought I had ... okay, the second thought I had because the first was I want to get a hold of spice mélange. BUT, as soon as the idea of healing potions came up, THEN the very first thought I had was how to industrialize their harvesting. 

This is what I would do:

1. hire a platoon of mercenaries with the gold from one mission
2. send the mercenaries into the WoW world to kill everything while I sleep in a tent for 8 hours, guarded by my friends
3. gather all the healing potions as my share of the loot for opening the portal
4. hire more platoons of mercenaries so that they can sweep the dungeon faster and go through more missions in an 8 hour shift
5. experiment with different worlds in order to maximize the number of potions harvested
6. use very large worlds when I go to sleep, and many small ones when I'm awake
7. make do with Hummers to begin with
8. acquire Hueys for deployments, UAVs for surveillance, and warthogs for firepower
9. offer the mercs million dollar bonuses for every special forces soldier they can recruit
10. gradually switch to special forces troops as older guys retire
11. let them retire filthy rich so long as they understand the special forces guys are going to hunt them down if they ruin a good thing by blabbing
12. upgrade my army to laser pistols and rifles as acquired

I would make everything as systematic and as fast as possible in order to harvest as many healing potions as fast as possible. Including an electronic system with RFID tags for automatic computerized check-in of soldiers before closing the dungeons. Including workers with lift equipment to get all of the loot out as efficiently as possible. Including prepared empty crates to put healing potions in.

Think about it. Since a soldier can run 4 miles in 36 minutes, my army could easily fan out into a circle of 12 km in diameter, kill everything in their way, loot everything in sight and come back to the portal on troop transports following behind them all within an hour.

The platoons would deploy in a star formation, one platoon going north (straight out of the portal), then another north-east (clockwise), another east, then southeast, and so on until the 8th platoon went north-west. THEN 8 more platoons would go in between the first 8 platoons to fill in the pattern. They would use gyroscopic compasses to make sure of direction. And lastly, the troop transports would follow.

It's almost 200 men with communications and fire support, assuming they go on 2 missions a day every day that's an army of 2400 men I'm employing. Plus another couple hundred for logistics, surveillance. I would acquire a lot of land for this naturally.

Assuming there's 1 healing potion drop for every square 100 meters on a side then (pi *4^2) square miles * (1 per 10000 square meters) > 13,000 potions. And 13 000 * 24 * 365 = 113 880 000. That's enough healing potions to supply the entire world.

Less than 3000 soldiers replace most of the doctors and nurses in the world.

And makes for a business with net personal profits to me of 11 billion to 110 billion USD. And after having done this for a year or two, I would petition France, Russia and China (the nuclear powers on the UN Security Council) to not only give me citizenship but also ambassadorial status so that whatever laws of the stupid country I'm in can never touch me.

Yes indeed-y, there's a lot of benefit to bettering the world.

On Self-Righteous Egotistical Assholes

Eco-zealots like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are neither people of principle nor altruistic, and they are certainly NOT moral.

They are immoral self-interested selfish egotistical assholes who care only about themselves. When they claim to want to "save the planet" at any cost, what they mean is that they don't care about the cost FOR OTHER PEOPLE.

They don't care about the cost imposed on poor people in China and other developing countries. They don't care whether those people will freeze to death for lack of electricity from power plants or wood fuel from "saved" forests.

They don't care whether those people will starve to death from unaffordable "organic" agriculture. These self-righteous egotistical assholes don't care that "biodiesel" and corn ethanol means BURNING FOOD IN AUTOMOBILES. Food that could feed poor people in the third world.

They don't care that natural gas is expensive, way too expensive for poor people to afford, and that nuclear power is cheap. Because they don't care whether or not poor people get to light their shacks at night. Poor people just don't matter to them.

Nor do they care that coal miners die in accidents whereas uranium miners don't. After all, coal miners are poor people, why should they give a fuck about them? And they certainly don't care that wind turbines emit infrasounds that make people who live near them stressed out and unable to sleep. After all, who cares what happens to some dirt farmers and rednecks?

They don't care that ambient energy, so-called "renewable" energy (what the fuck is that word even supposed to mean that doesn't apply to uranium fission? because it sounds like it violates the second law of thermodynamics, honestly!) costs 3 to 5 times as much as nuclear power. After all, electricity isn't something for poor people, is it?!

Nor do they care that solar panel buyers are going to get gypped because the panels will lose half their efficacy within 10 years and the wind turbines will be severely damaged because wind refuses to turn them at a constant speed or to spin them up and spin them down slowly and gently enough. Turbine makers like GE just love wind farms, gee I wonder why! They certainly don't care that these sources of power are expensive and unusable and will never pay for themselves.

Eco-zealots, their industrial enablers and their brainwashed foot-soldiers don't care that government and ratepayers are subsidizing them and they are stealing money from taxpayers and ratepayers! After all, isn't it their right to be subsidized? Aren't they entitled? Aren't they self-righteous enough?!

Eco-zealots like the Rocky Mountain Institute don't care that they're cutting down forests and burning massive amounts of petrol to commute between their "eco-preserves". Vastly more than New Yorkers who live in concrete jungles with miniscule footprints (per person) and take the subway. After all, they're rich and cities are for poor people! You shouldn't judge the rich people who are few by the same standards as the poor people who are many! 

Eco-zealots don't care about the truth. They don't care that the Climate Research Institute has been systematically corrupting data and making bogus analyses ever since it was created. They're saving the planet after all! They don't care that polar bears have survived through numerous periods when the Arctic ice disappeared entirely. They don't care that only one or two populations of polar bears has been in decline while two dozen more were increasing in number at the same time. Aren't polar bears cute enough for you?! Well what about penguins then?! They're SAVING THE PLANET here. Whatever the fuck that means. Isn't it RIGHT to lie for The Cause?!

Eco-zealots care only about themselves, and since all these "environmental" movements are funded and controlled by rich people, the enemy is always poor people. As far as they're concerned, poor people should just die. And their own activities can never, ever be harmful to the "environment" (whatever the fuck that is) because hey they're rich! As far as they're concerned, an attack on the "environment" matters only if it 1) makes poor people wealthier, or 2) threatens their own survival.

You can tell from "global warming" hysteria. Nuclear power plants are deemed by the elite, rich, corporate, hierarchical media to not be a good way to solve that problem (note that I consider the hysteria a real problem, not any hypothetical global warming that would just result in the Sahara desert being flooded by torrential rains, as actually happened in the past), but natural gas and wind turbines, both of which just "happen" to be expensive and unaffordable to poor people, those are great! After all, "expensive" just means rich people get more money. What's bad about that?!

It's only in the case of the delusional whack jobs who take the "global warming" crap seriously, who think it will threaten their own personal survival, yeah those whack jobs are egotistical enough to say that maybe, just maybe, nuclear power can be "part of the solution". Because when it was just poor people in South Korea and China who might benefit from nuclear power, they didn't give a flying fuck. Back then it was all pissing and moaning about how horrible nuclear power was because it gave off magical J-rays that magically corrupted people. But when it's their own personal survival they think is at stake then hey, HEY!, let's not be hasty!!

The whole concept of "sustainability" is at odds with scalability. Scalability means "how do we make sure all 6+ billion people on this planet can use this? So-called "sustainability" means "how do we make sure the status quo of rich people using this technology can be maintained forever"? These are anti-thetical concerns. Worse than that, so-called "sustainability" is an anti-human concern. Because "human" includes the 6 billion people who AREN'T rich and can't afford the so-called "sustainable" technologies of organic food and electricity from weak ambient power sources.

So-called "civil society" is just a means for landed aristocrats like William "Bill" Gates III to tell other people what to do. To order them about. To tell them to starve and die and above all STAY POOR. Is it any wonder that China and Russia are both telling the world "homey don't play that". And China more than Russia because it's actively industrializing and wants to make poor people wealthy.

The refusal of Canada and the USA to build hydroelectric dams to create more arable land and flood the world with cheap food has fuck-all to do with any "environmental" concerns. And it sure has fuck-all to do with any hypothetical "biodiversity" or "biodensity" of rivers which ecological biology isn't scientific enough to measure! It has everything to do with power. Because helping poor people is "bad" and technologies that are cheap are "bad". There is a class war going on you witless peons. There always has been. It has never stopped.

CLASS WAR. It's not some dirty word. And if it's not "politically correct", I don't give a fuck. Inner city American blacks are niggers and I'll call them that. Or black to their face, after all I don't want some anti-education anti-intellectual thug pounding on me. American blacks certainly aren't "African" whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. So when the rich are waging class war on the poor (ie, always) then I'll call it that too. Damned idiots who think that ceasing to call a thing what it is will make it go away. Are you people pre-adolescent children?! It. Is. Class. Warfare!

Get it? Class warfare! Say it motherfucker, fucking SAY IT!

That's what "environmentalism" is all about. It's about gullible brainwashed morons like you being fucked up the ass by self-righteous egotistical assholes and you begging for more!

The Fundamental Truth of Harry Potter

Every so often a fanfic writer tries to introduce realism, technology or simple practicality into Wizarding society. This inevitably fails. Something about the realism of it reinforces the entire unrealism of an organized war against a civilian population all of whom have flying machines they can shrink into their pockets.

These people need rescue? What the fuck for? Can't they hop on a broom to the edge of the anti-apparition wards the enemy have put up and then just teleport out?! And that's even with an ambush. Yes, that's right, even with an ambush, the enemy needs 5 sides x 2 people = 10 people to trap just one person.

And that's assuming the victim doesn't get their head out of their ass and burrow their way out. Or burrow enough to hide. Attacking anyone in an organized fashion when brooms and apparition exist is completely impractical. It follows then that anyone who needs rescue from a death eater raid deserves to die. They are literally too stupid to live.

The whole notion of a "wizarding war" is utterly fucking ridiculous. Honestly, it is the province of lame emo do-nothing idiots like Harry Potter. Not, you know, PRACTICAL people. The only proper kind of story that has non-magical technology is the kind where wizards get curbstomped by sniper rifles at 1000 meters. And where stupefied death eaters have their throats slit by kitchen knives.

To put a cap on this, there actually are a couple of fanfics where wizarding magic is shown to be superior to technology and where wizards are sane individuals. These stories are massively and wildly AU. In Raven's Wit, magic is superior to technology because wizards have technology - magical technology. Including Other Realities played in a world-spanning Great Magical Web. And in More Equal Than You Know, protego shields against nuclear explosions.

The fundamental truth of JKR's Harry Potter universe is that wizards are insane, stupid, cowards. Any serious attempt to show otherwise will inevitably fail.

The Design Disaster That Is A Typical Web Browser, part 1 of 763

Or part 18,274 of Programmers Are Incompetent Morons. As if the fact that 90% of all software projects fail weren't damning enough. Never mind the damning fact that C++ and Smalltalk-- (aka Java) are popular.

Let's look at the context menu of a thumbnailed video element in Opera. (And for all you Firefox fanboys, I have only this to say - shut the fuck up.)

• Open
• Open In New Tab
• Open In Background Tab
  ----------
  
• Open In New Window
  
• Open In Background Window
  ----------
• Bookmark Link
• Copy Link Address
• Save Linked Content As...
• Save to Download Folder
  ----------
• Open Image
• Reload Image
• Copy Image Address
  ----------
• Save Image
• Copy Image
  ----------
• Inspect Element
• Element Properties

That's 16 different functions in 6 different sections.

The last two elements are only there for purposes of debugging. Debugging is a meta-level operation and shouldn't be confused in the UI with domain-level operations like display. What kind of retarded moron puts programmer debugging functions at the same level and in the same mode as everyday user display functionality? Answer: an incompetent retarded moron.

Save Image and Copy Image simply shouldn't exist. The definition of 'element' includes the property indivisible. A web browser displays elements, it doesn't provide tools to smash atoms into quarks. That's what a particle accelerator is for.

The proper place for this functionality is when the element (the video in this case) has the user's entire attention (because it is zoomed into). Then it becomes more obvious that the element is actually composed of subatomic parts. Then it becomes proper to display those subparts as separate elements.

For the same reason, Open Image and Copy Image Address shouldn't be there. Reload Image is a technical matter and should be done automatically as resources are available, not manually. Handling these pesky details is what the web browser is FOR in the first place.

Bookmark Link shouldn't be there. Bookmark page is quite sufficient, and has better functionality. And in design, any and all extra functions should never exist. Each function carries a cost for the user that has to learn it. "Extra" functions thus carry a cost penalty and no benefit. For every user that claims there's a benefit, there's 99 users that get shafted with the penalty.

Save Linked Content As... and Save to Download Folder both suck ass. They should be replaced by the simple GRAB. Not Grab in the sense of Drag and Drop which is unusable ridiculous shit. But in the sense of PickUp.

The exact same way as grabbing something with your hand doesn't stop you from moving & navigating, or grabbing more stuff, or seeing what you've grabbed. So Save Linked Content As... ought to be simply Grab. And there should always be visible someplace in the UI, someplace discreet and out of the way, that you can see what you've grabbed, instantly.

Save to Download Folder ought to be a custom, user-defined, function in the menu (since menus ought to be editable by the user) named Grab And Drop To [Location 1]. Obviously there should be Grab And Drop To [Location 2], [3], [4] and so on. 4 is a convenient number. Needless to say [Location 1] should actually say the name of the folder you're dropping things to. Not just "Download folder" whatever the fuck that is.

Copy Link Address also should not exist. The reason why is because it's a C++ ism. In Smalltalk, it's impossible to get the memory address of an object. And who the fuck would want to! In C++ you can and you play all sorts of nasty games like "pointer arithmetic". URLs are basically human-readable pointers. Or human-readable capabilities. Needless to say, they should be treated with caution and specially since they break the paradigm. Flinging them around everywhere is about as distasteful as flinging around excrement.

Let me emphasize for the slow-witted: URLs are meta-level and outside the web object paradigm.

The difference between Open In New Window and Open In New Background Window simply should not exist. This is what's called "user choice" and as all enlightened designers know, CHOICES ARE BAD. Choices means you're imposing a cost on users to decide what they want. Most of the time, the user won't give a fuck between Choice A or Near Identical Choice B, but you're still telling them "STOP, You. Must. Decide. Between. Green Hats. And. Red Hats."

Guess what? The users don't want to do that. They want to get on with their work. They want to make MEANINGFUL CHOICES ONLY. Not bullshit choices between brand names. Do you know why people are loyal to their brands? Because they refuse to make the same arbitrary choices over and over again.

Not only that, but the entire Open In New Window function simply should not exist. What there should be instead is a cheap and easy way to 1) grab the item, 2) create a new window (ctrl-N), 3) drop the item into the new window. And guess what? There isn't.

The same thing goes for Linked Windows by the way. Instead of that crap, there should be a simple and easy way to select and grab multiple tabs (objects) simultaneously. And there isn't. Instead of easy to understand functionality that fits the object paradigm, you're left with this unusable imperative modal "linked windows" shit from the dinosaur age.

The same considerations apply to Open In New Tab vs Open In New Window, which is why the latter simply shouldn't exist. And FINALLY, the same considerations apply to Open vs Open In New Tab. Instead of this stupid function, there should be a simply way to Duplicate Tab and Erase Its History.

So you don't Open In New Window, what you do is you follow the link (none of that "opening" shit, what the fuck is actually being opened you moronic retards?!) then you zoom out to see the browser object (actually, a Self Modifying Document, not a "browser") as a whole. Then you Duplicate The SMD, then you erase the history of the new SMD, then you grab the new SMD and move it to a new group / folder.

Voila, in four easy steps (each of which should be trivial) the user has performed this little used and complicated action. Without learning anything new! Because each of the steps is something the user has already learned and done in other contexts for their own purposes. They've just now chained them all together into what you retarded morons mistakenly think is a unified "operation".

And if it costs more time to perform the four steps rather than to perform a single operation then it doesn't matter. After all, I have never used this operation in my life. And I bet plenty of other people haven't also. So why the fuck is it cluttering up my context menu?! It's imposing a cost on me every single fucking time I open this menu, and has never provided any benefit!

A designer cares about these issues. Programmers obviously don't since they are incompetent fuckwits incapable of judging whether something's good or bad, useful or useless, unless there's an already established objective metric they can use. That's right, programmers do evil because like all purely analytic people incapable of synthesis they are incapable of judging good vs evil.

So to recap, there should in this context menu be exactly 6 items.

• Follow Link 
  ----------
  
• Grab Object 
  ----------
• Grab And Drop to 1
• Grab And Drop to 2
• Grab And Drop to 3
• Grab And Drop to 4

And ideally they should be arranged geometrically in an OctoRadialMenu with Follow Link at the East position, Grab Object at Northeast, and the rest going counterclockwise from North.

What that means is you should be able to hit Ctrl-D to Follow Link, Ctrl-E to Grab Object, and the rest should be either Ctrl-WQAZ going counterclockwise from Ctrl-S.

Now let's count them, yes that's six, six, different functions, in 3 different sections. Not only is it cleaner and more elegant, but 99% of users would be vastly happier with this arrangement as it would be vastly more useful and save them time. More power to the users with one third as much "functionality".

But that would assume programmers aren't incompetent moronic retards, or that they are brought to heel by competent systems designers. The former isn't ever going to happen until we have neurosurgery. And the latter is going to fail due to politics - due to the fact programmers don't want to see themselves as mentally handicapped.

The web is now 20+ years old and still we have these ridiculous web "browsers" that are utter design disasters. And as the fate of Smalltalk shows, it can only get worse as more mainstream (ie, stupider, less creative) programmers and engineers (like at google) get involved in the game.

Delicious - Yet Another Epic Yahoo Failure

Those of you who use Delicious.com well remember the black day that Yahoo bought it several years ago.

The very first thing those dirty fuckers did was turn the site over to a bunch of graphics designers who set out to make it "pretty". Yes the search function became vastly faster since yahoo put it on new servers. So much faster that it became actually useable. But everything else dwindled in quality.

The most egregious and massive of these pathetic excuses for designers' blunders was to relegate the save-bookmark function, the one function the whole site revolves around, somewhere entirely forgettable. So forgettable in fact that I have repeatedly forgotten it. May those fuckers burn in chlorine gas.

Did these morons learn from their errors? Not at all. In fact, they just did it again. They just changed the save-bookmark function so that it's "interactive", so that it brings up a filthy dialog. And since you probably don't know, let me inform you right here that dialogs are crimes against user design and ought never exist.

So instead of the full-screen save-bookmark page which had a nice layout of your tags, others, tags and recommended tags that you could click on in order to tag your bookmarks. Now, now you have nothing. You just have a filthy fucking DIALOG (all "pretty") with none of the previous functionality. Saving bookmarks is now officially unuseable.

In fact, with this one single change, Delicious.com has officially reverted from a social web 2.0 site to an individualistic web 1.0 site. Is it any wonder that Yahoo, that cesspit of cretins, is going under? Bah, this is the same company that started out using LISP and downgraded to a more "popular" language when it sold out.

Die Yahoo, die. Fucking die already!

[December 2011, and it's actually even worse now.]

Alternatives

If anyone knows of an alternative to Delicious then please, please comment.

Note 1) anything advertised as "prettier than Delicious" is an automatic FAIL.

Note 2) I don't give a fuck what other people read. The social part of a social bookmark site is the shared ontology.

So can someone please give me the name of a social bookmarking site not intended for popularity-seeking group-thinking cretins?!

Back in the day, I had reddit for all of that group-thinking crap. And I abandoned it because I hate most people. I do not want my bookmarking site to be a new reddit!

Hell, until just now I never believed people used delicious that way. Which just goes to show that no matter how good your imagination is, and no matter how much you despise humans, you will always underestimate human stupidity.

Pinboard

Pinboard sucks. I don't know if it's my version of Opera being flaky and I don't give a shit. At least delicious' basic scripts never, ever flaked out on me. I bought an account and this is what I can't do that I SHOULD be able to do since it was all ADVERTISED,

1. I can't edit the tags on a bookmark once saved
2. I can't delete a bookmark at all - clicking on 'really cancel?' just doesn't do anything
3. clicking on 'add a url' doesn't give me any clickable tag cloud with recommended tags. I know there's some obscure option in the settings that gives you this by default. Well I'm not going to hunt down how to turn on something that should NEVER be off. This is craptastic design.
4. clicking on 'add a url' doesn't auto-insert the title of the web item
5. the bookmarklets can't be added to Opera which makes them completely fucking useless as far as I'm concerned. And if there's a way to add them, I don't know it and I've ceased caring. The scripts for the bookmarklets are also flaky as hell.
6. the auto-synchronize with delicious doesn't work. Or at least it doesn't work within an hour of turning it on. That's pretty fucking bad.

Too fucking bad because Pinboard lets you add and tag notes which is something I've dearly wanted for maybe 2 years now. But it's completely unusable as far as I'm concerned.

Let me repeat I don't care whose fault it is. It doesn't fucking work - that's all I care about.

I am pissed and I want a refund.