Richard Kulisz

Hypocritical Lying Asshole Brian Wang

2012-01-30T03:28:00.000-08:00

Check out this article for a startlingly blatant depiction of hypocrisy and racism. The gist of the article is that China's cities are far smaller than advertised. And in fact, far far smaller than Brian Wang has always boasted they were. Yes boasted since according to him, China having the biggest cities and the biggest contiguous urbanized area were GREAT things. A judgement which would be entirely true if only China's cities were that big or at all contiguous. But now that empirical reality has turned out to trump Brian Wang's racist pro-China hype, suddenly having big cities is a BAD thing. Suddenly, megacities are "ungovernable messes". China = good, India = bad. Four legs = good, two legs = bad.

It's like that all over the place. In the words of this racist asshole, China is consistently just as good as any other industrialized country. And will in fact be BETTER Real Soon Now! When in truth that claim is very far from empirical reality. And China would still be only a developing country at best if it weren't for Japan. That story was also recently on NBF but of course it was spun as "look how much the USA sucks" (something which sounds plausible because it happens to be true for entirely separate reasons) instead of "look how inferior China really is if you take away Japan".

China may or may not achieve the transition to high tech. China certainly amounts to more now than it did 10 or 20 or 30, let alone 40 years ago. And China is so ludicrously over-hyped it's not funny.

I despise you

2011-07-27T04:11:00.000-07:00

So, a week ago I had an experience that reminded me up close and personal, in stark vivid detail, just how thoroughly vile this world is. It's not the first time it's happened. And it's not even the first time I ended up miserable because of it. It is the first time I undertook a systematic investigation into just what the fuck misery is exactly.

Wow, has it only been a week? My depressions and misery used to last for uncounted lengths of time, not mere days! Well, that's what happens when you've got thorough knowledge of human psychology behind you. Because knowledge is power and in this case, it's the power to exquisitely manipulate one's own emotions. This is real power, bitches!

The first thing I learned about misery during this spell is that anger, hatred and loathing are really good at tamping down misery. And as great as they are for your posture, they're not any good for your teeth. I'd never felt them for very long before so after sustaining them for days without any end in sight, I was getting kinda tired of them. So I undertook to investigate them too.

Eventually, what I discovered is that misery is:

your self associated with actions or events with bad outcomes over which you have no power

there are a few qualifiers to that plus additional context I'm skipping but they're not important here.

What has made me miserable my whole entire life is being associated with you. With humanity, with the human species, with the world. Because I'm part of that humanity, part of that human species, and part of that world. And it is obviously wholly evil from my perspective. I mean, you don't notice evil happening around you, and you don't care that it happens. That makes you evil.

Well, I got over that. The first step was to grab power and personalize the problem. Which involved completely mentally dissociating myself from humanity. I'm not going to go into the details, they're not pertinent. Or comprehensible to such limited and evil beings. The second step was to use power to create positive outcomes. And that left me where I was ten days ago.

Except it's not status quo anymore because the ante's up. You are all more evil than I had come to expect and hate you for. And I am even further removed from you than I used to be.

How many people do you know suffer emotional breakdowns because they watched some random child get emotionally abused in public? Not any I'm willing to bet. If people like me were a significant portion of the general population, that kind of thing wouldn't happen in the first place. This entire world would be very different from what it is.

So most things are back to normal for me, but there is one huge difference. I hate you. I really, really hate you. And since I have an excellent appreciation for the precise and exact manner in which hatred and misery are related, the way I'm framing it in my own mind is "associating myself with my blog's audience makes me miserable".

Which is why I don't intend to finish the updates and maintenance to some articles that badly needed it. Even the one blogger pushed me into unpublishing while I updated it. Nor do I intend to write the article I've left copious dangling references to in the last few posts. Nor do I even intend to publish a draft that was essentially finished a couple days ago.

Because I am dissociating myself from you.

You're so easy to read
But the book is boring me
You're so easy to read
But the book is boring me
You're so easy to read
But the book is boring
Boring boring boring boring
Boring boring me

Pray for me
If you want to
Pray for me
If you care
Pray for me
If you want to
Pray for me
If you dare
Pray for me
If you want to
Pray for me
If you care
Pray for me
If you want to
Pray for me you fucker
If you fucking dare

The Saddest Child

2011-07-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

There's this little beach about 200 m from my home that I go to whenever I want to rid myself of distractions so I can think and be creative.

So I sat down at a table on the grass to get some sun and think about what scale visionary entrepreneurs dream on. And suddenly there's this fat woman 5-10 meters to my left saying, not shouting or screaming, in this incredibly loud and carrying voice how stubborn this girl is and loudly calling her back from the beach, which was like 10 meters away.

I got to watch as this fat woman towered over this little three year old blonde girl while loudly and publicly berating her. I heard all about how she'd been 'told' (ordered, not asked) not to go out on the beach without her and to follow her exactly and didn't she understand? And I couldn't help thinking a Japanese mother would have been far more gentle and loving in undermining their child's independence. I also thought that no the child probably didn't understand.

The worst part was the three year old's facial expression and body language. I recognized it you see from someone who'd been so incredibly traumatized by violence and neglect during her childhood that she just freezes whenever someone yells at her. It was an expression that said she was used to being yelled at but hadn't the slightest clue how to handle it. It said she was suffering and desperately trying to figure out how to end it but also quite certain that giving away her suffering was Not Allowed.

And I couldn't bear to watch this. I recall thinking at the time how this is what those sad people I have known who have no self-esteem or self-identity must have suffered as children. This three year old blonde girl is going to grow up to be one of them. And the thought of intervening didn't even enter my mind but what did enter my mind was how there is no socially-acceptable way for me to explain to this stupid fat woman exactly what she's doing.

And as if this wasn't enough, maybe 3 minutes later I got to watch another family come in right beside them. There was a distant-looking mother and her two daughters. The youngest was a 3 year old little blonde girl just like the first one and she couldn't stop smiling. Because she was at the beach and it was wonderful. The contrast couldn't have been any starker because the first girl looked like she never did. And minutes later when she finally did smile, it was so much smaller.

I got out of there because I'd had more than I could bear constantly wondering if this 3 year old was ever happy. So I want to know. How the fuck do you deal with it? Because I don't seem to be able to. Or do you even notice these things? Do you even care? Are you all just monsters?

Semco vs Toyota

2011-07-18T23:03:00.000-07:00

I've just been rereading all about the Toyota Production System to contrast it with Semco SA when I was struck by the fascinating realization that in many important ways, they are total ideological opposites.

Similarities

Yes, both focus on the long term, on teams, on developing people, on mutual responsibility between workers and managers, and empowering workers so they have some means of directing their work. But concerning what it is these systems control and what they let workers decide, they are total opposites.

Oppositions

In Semco, the ONLY thing that matters is your output. Everything else is up to yourself and your team. In TPS, the only thing that matters is your INPUT, your effort and the ingenuity you put into the system in order to freely but continuously improve output.

In TPS, your workflow is very bureaucratically watched, though you are free to change it however you wish so long as it objectively 'reduces waste' (and you leave it in a state that those following you can learn from). But while output is meant to always improve (in quality or cost) this is NEVER predictable nor are there ever any specific expectations about it.

Both Semco and TPS micromanage ONE thing and systematically leave the other as a free variable. But what they choose to micromanage (micro-negotiate really) and what they choose to leave free are opposites.

Finally, TPS works in a constant state of crisis whereas Semco works in a constant state of relaxation. And Semco feels like totalitarian anarcho-communism whereas TPS feels like benevolent cooperative fascism.

Generalizations

What I really want to know is what I can learn about political systems design from this. It seems like there's a very important lesson here. My hypothesis so far is that you need to micro-manage either the input or the output and stay the fuck away from the other so the people involved don't feel like you're turning them into robots.

But does that mean you must micro-manage one side or the other in order to eliminate corruption? And is there another way of splitting freedom vs authoritarianism other than input vs output? I suspect no. More likely, have I gone off the rails somewhere?

Ah yes I have. Already I see that micro-manage isn't the right word. The right-word is micro-negotiate.

Are the political lessons learned from politico-industrial systems even applicable to other kinds of political systems? I would like to think so since politico-industrial systems are particularly harsh and unforgiving. But the industrial aspect introduces an external reality which most political systems lack. At least, political systems other than China since China's obsession with industrializing means that it is, essentially, just an industrial company.

I still don't fully understand why one variable has to be left totally free. But it probably has to do with keeping a psychological comfort zone for workers to retreat to. No, not quite. In Semco it provides such a comfort zone from the external requirements of output. In Toyota there is simply no external requirement and no comfort zone from it - everything is input, intrinsic, internalized. And that's all negotiated in what I see now as a creepy way since you're negotiating your ego.

Functional Requirements

2011-07-18T00:12:00.000-07:00

I was doing some idle reading when I came across this sentence which startled me:

A common source of requirements gaps is non-functional requirements such as testability, scalability, maintainability, usability, performance, and security.

Since when did any of these things become non-functional requirements? Up to now I'd always understood non-functional requirements as arbitrary choices of aesthetics and judgement calls. The fuzzier and least trackable aspects of a software designer's job.

Which made me realize that the whole concept of a "non-functional" requirement as others know it, complete with the connotation that they are less important and less comprehensible, is something I find appalling and incomprehensibly alien.

I understand a meta-requirement well. Testability and Maintainability are meta-requirements. And yes I invented that on the spot in 5 seconds. But "non-functional" puzzled me.

So I had to look up the concept of "non-functional requirements" because I couldn't wrap my brain around it or guess the kind of brain damage of anyone who originated it.

In systems engineering and requirements engineering, a non-functional requirement is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviors.

Ah of course ... engineers. The people who obsess about behaviour rather than understanding. I understand the brain damage involved in the concept now.

Engineering is the mental disorder where a total lack of synthesis leads the sufferer to be incapable of intuiting internals and so 1) they delude themselves that internals can't matter, then 2) raise their crippling disability to the status of a virtue by claiming that fuzzy qualitative behaviours are much less important than quantitative ones.

In short, the narcissistic delusion that what you can't do, wasn't important in the first place. No matter how often empirical reality says the exact opposite.

On Human Perfectibility: Nazi vs Communist

2011-07-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

Let's start off by noting that biological determinism is a core Nazi belief just as its opposite, human perfectibility, is a core communist belief. It's just one of the reasons why Nazis and communists hated each other.

Now I myself am a communist so I believe in human perfectibility. I also believe you all are cognitively crippled (mentally handicapped) and nothing can be done about that. But ... you still can be perfected.

It's not like there isn't plenty of room for improvement since you're all idiots who believe in the most idiotic things and act in the most idiotic imaginable ways. EVEN IF nobody could change your nature (you being idiots) they could still manipulate the ways you interact (acting like idiots) and the contents of your environments (believing idiotic things).

What History Says

And there is plenty of empirical evidence for the asking that human beings HAVE perfected themselves already. One merely has to look at the history of human psychology. I'm not talking about the academic field of psychology but the changes of the human mind in history.

Julian Jaynes' book on the origin of consciousness points out how all of conscious history can be generalized as reducing psychosis, neurosis and anything else that undermines consciousness. Like religion, pedophilia and child abuse.

Lloyd deMause's books on childrearing modes go into extreme detail into exactly what the psycho-social changes were during the history of consciousness. deMause generalizes them all as reducing reversal and projection while maximizing empathy.

Funny thing, the same mechanism that drives empathy is also the mechanism that drives conscciousness (See Formal Definition of Consciousness). Formation of other-identities is the same as formation of self-identity. Imagine that!

Think about that for a minute. Two psychologists studying radically different periods of history, working independently, and who would have probably spat on each other if they'd ever met, drew conclusions which a third person manages to prove are logically equivalent.

How Perfectibility Happens

So there is plenty of evidence that humans ARE perfectible. Which immediately raises the issue of just how the fuck have humans managed to perfect themselves given that you all are idiots. The obvious answer to which is that YOU all are idiots ... and I'm not.

Kazimierz Dabrowski described how some few individuals (he said 10% of the general population, I say 5%) can perfect themselves. It's really an amazing process. A shitty description but an amazing process. I've provided a better one. See What Are Core Values?

More important is that deMause's childrearing modes sound a lot like Kuhn's scientific revolutions. There are long periods of stability where progress is driven by logical expansion. And then there are very short periods of great instability where progress is driven by something entirely different from logic.

This tells me that psychological progress within childrearing modes (both in expansion within the population and also moving from early- to late-stage) is driven by analytics. And that jumps to the next childrearing mode are driven by synthetics looking for something radically new. And analytic-synthetics are far more successful at accurate jumps than pure synthetics.

Communist vs Nazi

Whether it's in the scientific arena, the psychological arena, or even the technological arena, it's people like me who are responsible for revolutions. Analytic-synthetics who can and have perfected themselves. And yes I do have very good ideas about how to manipulate your environments and your interactions so you all behave less like idiots. Also, I am a communist.

So it angers me when hardcore right-wing conservative (and probably religious) psychologists like Steven Reiss push Nazi ideas like biological determinism in contradiction to all of my first-hand experience and all of the evidence of history! And it angers me far more when he manages to sound like a reasonable person and authority rather than the crazy lying nut he actually is.

Not Even The 16 Basic Needs Of An Animal

2011-07-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

I extracted this section out of my previous post because I was expanding it far too much. Reiss' supposed theory of 16 supposedly basic needs is striking in its arrogant stupidity and I feel compelled to point out each and every one of its many flaws.

Theory vs Taxonomy

The first problem with it is that it isn't a theory, it's a taxonomy. In order to be a theory, a model with actual predictive power, it would have to specify the type and range of values of each of the needs, how those needs interact with each other, and how they create behaviour in the real world.

Taxonomies are just lists of things. They don't say how the things are wired up to each other or how they behave or how they interact. Taxonomies in other words are just scrap piles. Piles of random junk. Now, taxonomies can still be useful for certain things IFF they are accurate.

A taxonomy of basic needs would be really useful if for instance you wanted to predict the death of capitalism by arguing that all basic needs are being steadily met using technology and that their cost is being driven to zero. Of course, the taxonomy would have to be accurate AND complete.

If incomplete it might still be useful in rewording and formalizing parts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it would have to be absolutely accurate. And Reiss' taxonomy isn't even remotely so.

Hand-waving

Before moving on to the blatant inaccuracies, I want to point out that it is not at all obvious how to turn this taxonomy into a model. Let's focus on the supposed basic need for order all humans have. The funny thing is that I have myself long ago identified this as a basic variable at the neurological level. So I know it's important.

But saying "order" messes up all the important questions with unwarranted assumptions. For instance, what is the range of this variable? I personally favour chaos and dislike order. So suddenly it's no longer "order" it's "chaos vs order". More problematically, I don't like chaos all of the time.

It's common in people who enjoy chaos to not want it when they're trying to focus on something else. Really enjoyable music is just too enjoyable when you're working. Then there are things that are simply never enjoyable no matter how much chaos you inject in them. That may trigger a desire for simple order.

In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler wrote that people need a fairly constant amount of change that's within their own personal comfort zone. And he was very specific that 'change' is linear, that too little change leads to boredom and too much change leads to stress. And that different people have personal 'zones of no change' which can be either work, housing, or relationships.

Toffler filled out an entire model on just people's need for change. Reiss not only doesn't recognize change as a basic need (which it is, and arguably more so than curiosity) but he handwaves away ALL of the information that's necessary to turn a taxonomy into a model.

Right-Wing Inaccuracies

Okay, we already dealt with the fact Reiss based his taxonomy on OCD patients obsessed with absolute order instead of normal human beings. That's the first inaccuracy. We also touched on curiosity NOT being the same as a need for change. This should be obvious if you think about it. When you repaint your bedroom, it's not because you were curious what the colour would be like.

Going on, Reiss has listed "raising children" as a fundamental need and as "family". Yeah, that makes sense of people who go childless nowadays or replace children with pets! No, raising children is not fundamental, it's affection + creation. He's also stupid enough to confuse being safe with feeling safe, and romance with sex.

I can't accept that my need for creativity isn't listed. Wait, that's incorrect. I do accept that Reiss is an uncreative moron incapable of even imagining creativity. He also showcases his complete lack of creativity by failing to imagine all the obvious objections I've made so far. Objections which I consider incredibly basic.

As for "family", I fucking hate my family. I think most people who've overcome their abusive childhoods have ended up doing the same. Hatred is a really positive emotion sometimes.

We see from Reiss' choice of "family" as a basic need (along with "order") that he is a hardcore right-wing conservative. The bible-thumping kind I suspect since he's announced he intends to justify religion using his "model".

Exponential Explosion

Going on, while it's not even remotely true that "raising children" or "family" are fundamental needs, women's biological clocks shows that having children can be a fundamental need. So we're up to 19 basic needs now since we've added 'change' 'affection' 'creation' 'reproduction' while erasing that homey-sounding crap 'family'.

Does it sound like the number of fundamental needs is going to explode out of control? That's because you've got a smidgeon of intelligence more than Reiss does. Considering the intelligence the expert "Professor" has consistently failed to display, that puts you at about a billion times smarter than he is.

While I'm at it, since I already have affection down, I might as well complete the quintet. Love is: affection, attention, acceptance, allowance, and appreciation. Allowance means tolerance. For sexual love, just add attraction. It's funny how Reiss has got acceptance and attention. Allowance is too close to acceptance for Reiss' teeny tiny mind to grasp so that's understandable. But appreciation is beyond him because that's a conscious emotion. In fact, appreciation is just conscious knowledge of someone.

(Admit it, you thought "romance" would subdivide into sex + love, or possibly sex+love+romance. Hah, it subdivides into 6 different things!)

Reiss is of course the kind of lying fucker who would claim that appreciation is a kind of social status. Except that is not even remotely true. It is merely that the only thing most people appreciate about others is their social status. And that to genuinely appreciate someone means to personally grant them a kind of unilateral social status. But there are kinds of appreciation (like strong food preferences) that have nothing to do with social status. And there are social statuses in primitive societies that have no room for consciousness or conscious emotions like appreciation.

But the deal-killer for me has got to be the conspicuous absence of physical comfort from the list. And no, affection isn't the same as comfort since affection is emotional while comfort is physical (*). You see, physical comfort is the first and most important need any mammal has and trumps hmm all of the supposedly basic needs on Reiss' stupid list ... yeah that one isn't listed.

Why? My theory is that Reiss is a fucking Nazi. The Nazis' parents were big believers in denying all physical comfort to their children in favour of beating them unconscious. Notice how their children grew up ... to be Nazis.

*: that makes it 19+1(comfort)+6 (the 6 A's) -3 (acceptance, affection, social contact) -1 (romance) +1(sex) = 23 on the list now.

Contradicting An Established Actual Theory

Now, Reiss the Nazi handwaves away the yawning canyon of difference between his taxonomy and an explanatory model. He also pretends that his taxonomy is complete and not narrow-minded right-wing crap. Nazi crap at that.

What's unforgivable is the ridiculous notion that these animalistic needs remain axiomatic in everyone for all time. According to the Nazi, the mind is hardwired to serve some evolutionary physical needs and that is all there is to it. This is an incorrect and Nazi notion and total crap for analytic-synthetics. See What Are Core Values? In essence, his claims contradict Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration.

So first the Nazi claims that his taxonomy actually explains stuff. When in reality it explains nothing. And then he goes on to claim that his taxonomy explains everything. Despite the fact what it says is the total exact 180 degree opposite and logical contradiction of this other theory that actually is predictive!

His ridiculous claims of immutable needs also blatantly contradict my theory of value dynamics. They contradict the everyday experience that people's values change. And the notion that there are some genetically hardwired values, or types of values, called 'basic needs' runs smack against everything we know about neurology and cognitive science which is essentially that very little, if anything, is fixed. And nothing is both fixed AND universal.

Summary

Reiss' taxonomy while unusable is a decent attempt at a first version of a taxonomy of fundamental desires. In software development, I would call it version 0.1. It is far too wildly inaccurate to be usable as a taxonomy. Nobody but a moron would rely on this crud. As a prototype of a taxonomy, it's pretty decent. It showcases what a taxonomy of this kind of thing should look like. It needs a lot of work.

As a model, it is complete and utter total crap. It is blatantly misleading, lying and evil. It doesn't qualify as a prototype or even a rigged demo. Nobody but the most clueless and witless moron would take this for version 0.1 of anything. This is the half-baked sketch of an idea you put on a whiteboard during a brainstorming session. This should never have been published.

SO if you find yourself successfully using this "model" on a broken fucked up human, one of two things has happened. Either you're deluding yourself about how successful you are OR you're really using a freakishly large amount of other-psychology that you're deluding yourself about not using.

Psychology: A Litany of Failures

2011-07-16T16:34:00.001-07:00

Some few people are genuinely interested in developing an understanding of the human mind. As opposed to knowledge of the gross and pathetic circle-jerk that is the academic field of psychology. For those very few who seek genuine understanding rather than a PhD, it is vital to appreciate that only a tiny number of psychologists are worth reading.

Academics: Narcissistic Twats

It continues to baffle me how academics keep confusing a subject like the human mind with the history of their own understanding of it. Physicists do the same damned thing. The collective narcissism of these moronic twats is absolutely revolting to me. It is also hypocritical in the extreme since they claim to care about objectivity instead of their own self-aggrandizement.

You would figure psychologists have a better grasp on their own egos than to act in such a narcissistic manner. And that physicists have enough analysis to grasp the difference between the level of physics, the meta-level of their understanding of physics, and the meta-meta-level of the history of their understanding of physics. The real puzzle is that these two radically different mental handicaps result in the same damned collective behaviour.

Physicists don't have the slightest grasp on how their own minds work and some of the most celebrated among them were sick twisted fucks. Meanwhile, psychologists haven't the slightest grasp on logic and some of the most celebrated among them implied human minds don't exist. Yet for some incomprehensible reason, physicists and psychologists act, as a group, the same damned way!

The Ones Worth Reading

So anyways, Carl Jung, Kazimierz Dabrowski, Lloyd deMause and Julian Jaynes are pretty much the only psychologists in human history to have contributed any important insights to our modern understanding of the human mind. In What Are Core Values? I will show just how very little insight Dabrowski provided so you can see I really am scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

In the case of Carl Jung, his better ideas have so thoroughly permeated modern pop psychology that reading him will only leave you with the dreck. I recommend instead reading my articles on fundamental cognitive traits. They're so much better than that crap about supposedly equal archetypes. Worst case, read an overview of Jung's ideas then give him a pass.

The Ones Not Worth Reading

The Big Five Factors of Personality were uncovered through statistical analysis of essentially random questions. This is the kind of scut work which any second year statistics student could have done. You don't even need to know any psychology to do this. And "interpreting" the results of the factor analysis was no doubt just an exercise in free association. Yes you need to know what the Big Five Factors are but then you get that from pop psych so just read a summary.

Myers and Briggs were hacks who churned out an assortment of questions to fit Carl Jung's personality theory. The questionnaire named after them to this day shows not a trace of understanding of the underlying theory. It even contains errors which they no doubt considered "improvements" in their last trait which is just nonsensical and wrong. The entire test is verbose, redundant and unreliable as hell. And their interpretation of results, especially that some personality types aren't superior to others, is just blatant lies.

Fun fact: the MBTI data says men with analysis and synthesis are three times more common as women. Good chance on ever getting a date that's your peer. No, I don't believe that data. I already said it's crap.

Bloom's commission was a commission comprised of many groups not just psychologists. And they still managed to get it wrong as they never realized Judgement is the synergy of Analysis and Synthesis. This is forgivable since these people are all stupid. But they also claimed (or maybe just now claim) that synthesis is a faculty on top of, and not independent of, analysis. And that is just unforgivable. A single psychologist (or teacher) working a single hour should have realized how blatantly wrong that is.

Hare is disappointingly obvious. I'm sorry that psychologists are so fucking stupid they consider detecting psychopaths to be some kind of an achievement. It really isn't. And Hare himself proves that every culture has a concept of "someone who should be left to die on an ice floe because they lie, cheat and steal without ever expressing any genuine remorse". The concept of psychopathy is not even remotely novel.

Now, while the PCL-R is definitely a useful diagnostic tool, it in no way, shape or form enhances our understanding of psychopathy. In fact, there is no conception among psychologists of just what the hell empathy is (see Formal Definition of Empathy). All that crap about mirror neurons cognitive scientists have come up with is just crap. It is entirely on the wrong level, like talking about the features of Intel x86 CPUs when you want to know why MS Windows crashes.

Finally, Hare's latest work with (not on) psychopaths, trying to "redeem" them through intellectual discourse and logic is downright disturbing. Psychopaths should all be put to death, no ifs ands or buts about it. They harm society by being free. They harm society by talking. They harm society by existing. They harm society by us having to put them to death. The only real issue is which of our options minimizes the harm they do.

Maslow is just a quack spouting ridiculous and obvious nonsense. Nonsense which blatantly contradicts reality if you take it seriously. So you're asked not to but then what the fuck is the point of that? Maslow's concept of self-actualization is essentially a crappier, dodgier, fuzzier, less comprehensible version of Dabrowski's Multi-Leveling which at least has the Theory of Positive Disintegration as a huge juicy bonus.

Reiss is a right-wing possibly Nazi fucker whose "16 basic needs" is not even the 20+ basic needs of an animal. By the time you fleshed it out, it'd be 30+ basic needs, it wouldn't actually explain even animals, and a good few percent of homo sapiens sapiens would remain forever beyond such crass reduction. Reiss is almost a new Skinner.

Skinner is a blatant charlatan who claimed that human consciousness does not exist and that humans are just animals. The fact anyone takes his crap seriously is ludicrous. The fact revisionists have tried to rewrite history to make Skinner seem less like the total fucking nutcase zealot he actually is is infuriating.

Freud has left us with pretty much nothing. His id, ego, superego divisions were, at best, specific to Victorians. The superego (persecuting alter) disappears entirely with childrearing mode 6. Conversely, there are people whose minds are segmented many more times (multiple personalities). So we're looking at the notion that the mind can be segmented and that's as obvious as ancient demonology.

Freud can't be credited with discovering the Victorians universally abused their children sexually since he reversed himself on it, trying to make excuses. His dream analysis is useless because symbology is too individual (can't be looked up in a dictionary) and people lie, especially patients.

What Freud is "best known for" is trite and obvious shite such as the subconscious existing or people repressing memories. Far from being some kind of giant in the field, Freud is a complete non-entity to modern psychology.

The Latest Failures

The latest coup among theoretical psychologists is to claim that multiple personalities does not exist. So-called "dissociated identity" means that a personality system's multiple concepts of self (multiple identities) are dissociated from the underlying truth of a unitary personality. IOW, that their senses of self are a lie. There is a lie here and it is in the DSM-IV and in the empty fucking heads of psychologists.

The truth is that it is a fucking miracle that something as ad hoc and arbitrarily complex as a mind ever manages to coalesce into a single unitary personality. There is absolutely nothing obvious about why it should happen. At all. And yet it does in nearly every modern person. That it does not in some people is unfortunate but entirely predictable. You have to be some kind of fucking retard to imagine that the present state of affairs of unitary personalities is a universal law to which deviations are simply impossible.

Julian Jaynes says humans didn't experience this coalescing as recently as 3000 years ago. And while he points to a great deal of psychosocial changes at the time that somehow resulted in this happening, the "somehow" remains a big question mark. Of course, Jaynes just had to die before he could answer these questions and I don't believe ordinary psychologists understand the questions to begin with. Also, multiple personalities do not spontaneously merge so that situation is only vaguely similar.

What's Wrong With Psychologists?

The reason why psychologists are such failures is because they're incapable of logic or synthesis. It's the same reason why they're incapable of detecting psychopaths. First because they're incapable of detecting contradictions in what the psychopaths say. Second because they're incapable of generating original psychological models of their patients so they can't check that those models (based on the psychopaths' lies) don't match up with their actual behaviour.

To work as a psychotherapist is to work overwhelmingly with people who lack analysis and synthesis. As someone who possesses those cognitive traits, I say "no fucking thank you!" Since psychologists are incapable of the basic processes of cognition (ie, they can't think), it should be no surprise that one person capable of those processes can, working alone, achieve a better understanding of the human mind than the entire community of psychologists put together.

Psychopaths

It should also be no surprise that the solution to reliably detecting psychopaths so they can be put to death lies in letting people like me diagnose them. People who refuse to work as psychologists but have an excellent understanding of the human mind. Now, while I'm certain it gives everyone a warm glow inside to think of me having the power of life and death over everyone I come across, let's all pause for a minute in order to appreciate the full magnificence of that wondrous vision, my actual recommendation is to summon random juries of my peers to decide on a case by case basis.

(The political side-effects of correctly putting all psychopaths to death is that it reduces magical thinkers to third class citizens since if they whine too much, they'll get conveniently diagnosed as psychopaths and be put to death. Mere analytic or synthetic people would become second class citizens since they are naturally less annoying than magical thinkers so would be given much greater leeway. This political situation is best described as "everything as it should be". This is obviously a great solution since it solves problems I never intended it to solve.)

And yes, I seriously believe that putting all psychopaths to death as they're detected (and instituting universal testing) in order to try to wipe them out of the gene pool is the biggest priority for psychology. Gaining a full understanding of the human mind is nice but the only thing it's useful for is building machine intelligences which themselves won't be useful until they can be built in the hundreds of millions. It's also useful to understand why I'm superior to you all and hate you but that's only of personal interest to me. So yeah, psychopaths. Psychotics used to be a big problem until thorazine was invented (not by psychologists). In our era, the biggest problem is psychopaths.

It might be an idea to start solving the psychopaths problem by criminalizing their creation. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome looks an awful lot like psychopathy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with jailing a woman for delivering a baby she's soaked in alcohol during her pregnancy. It's a good thing some countries recognize that. Yes, I know, it's a pipe dream. Psychologists are too stupid. Politicians are too stupid. The courts are way too stupid. And society is made up of stupid people who stupidly believe they're first class citizens. But I can still dream.

Imagine there's no religion.
No psychotics hallucinating Jesus.
No nutters or zealots.
And no psychopaths too!
You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one.

What Are Your Core Values?

2011-07-16T13:40:00.000-07:00

This is an exercise for analytic synthetic intellectuals. If you're not analytic, you won't get any coherent answers. If you're not synthetic, you won't generate any answers. And if you're neither, there aren't any answers for you to get, period.

Taxonomy of Beings In Earth and Heaven

2011-07-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

There is a notion bought by the majority of people that there is such a thing as a homogeneous humanity and then there are Others. Aliens, machine intelligences, angels and demons. This is utterly fucking ridiculous as I know, or know of, human beings that fit every possible archetype of an intelligent being you can imagine. And I don't believe in Cthulhu or Solaris. Hence this exercise which has nothing to do with mythology but rather describes actual people I know. If you don't find it helpful, spare me and fuck off. If you're offended because you're religious, fuck off even harder.

Humans

First there are the ordinary humans. They lead ordinary lives. They don't have individual power over the world, they don't transform it, they don't even dream of it. They live their lives as part of society. They are an integral part of the world.

These are the people who think they're dreaming big if they wish to be mutants with magic powers so they can "fight crime" and gain glory. Or win the lottery so they can acquire lots of pieces of paper and gain glory. Or be an insignificant cog in a dubiously effective mass protest that makes it into the papers so they can gain glory.

Or become politicians like Obama who are impotent figureheads incapable of changing the behaviour of the political system they belong to so they can gain glory. Or become head of a big corporation so they can be swept adrift by the storms of finance so they can gain glory.

Are you perceiving the pattern here? These people are PART OF THE SYSTEM. And the thing they ultimately care about is their place, their status, IN the system.

Types of Humans

Now, there are many different types of humans and the differences between them are rather interesting. The three major types of humans are cows, people and zealots.

Cattle are those placid humans who follow along with the group, always. They don't have any independent desires, not even to better their status within the group, unless of course the group says so. Don't think for a moment that cattle are pacifistic or harmless. Bloodthirsty mobs are made up of cattle. The genocidal savages in black Africa are made of cattle. Anyone who's ever seen a cattle stampede knows they are dangerous.

People are those with some independent desires but no great passions. They are moderate, not extreme. They have no overriding ideologies. They have Hobbies, not Causes.

Zealots are those with crazy ideas which they follow to extremes. Crazy ideas like participating in politics really matters. Or mass protests do a lick of good. Or industrialization is a bad thing because poverty is better. Or the economic status quo is something to be preserved. Or poor people ought to die, starve, freeze to death. Or we can avoid freezing to death using weak ambient sources of power like wind, sun and biomass which belong to the Medieval Ages. Or war is good. Or nationalism is good. Or religion is good.

Then there are two minor sub-types of humans. The super-man and the hero.

Super-men are humans whose will far exceeds that of ordinary humans, even zealots. They make things happen. They are leaders of humans. They're still human so their aspirations still lie entirely within the system. Their dreams are the system's dreams, and not necessarily the dreams (or orders) of those around them. Super-men want glory, they just want it infinitely more than ordinary humans. William Gates III is a super-man.

Heroes are people who sacrifice for the system, for society, for others. They achieve what nobody else accomplishes because it took exceptional and individual sacrifice to do it. If "sacrifice" is expected then it isn't sacrifice at all, it is mere duty. Sacrifice is voluntary. Soldiers and firemen are often called heroes by fascistic societies like the USA but they rarely are because they're just doing their jobs.

Zealots all like to think they're heroes. They aren't. Almost none of them are. They just fantasize they are like adolescents reading American comic books. Not even the zealot leaders are heroes since they rarely if ever sacrifice anything at all. Their usual method of operation is to demand sacrifices of their followers and the world at large. In exchange for special dispensations against guilt or just plain old ego stroking. They're indulgence sellers.

A human who's a combination of super-man and hero is obviously a super-hero. Oskar Schindler probably counts as a super-hero.

Powers

Powers are beings beyond even super-men. They're not at the extremes of humanity because they have moved entirely beyond it. They hold individual power which they have created rather than societal power which they were given. They have the willingness to impose their will on the system, on society, and on the world.

They are capable of independent judgement of good and evil (goals), not just right and wrong (what achieves a goal). They wanted to develop and possess their own independent standards. They can't be judged by human standards because they are the judges. It is the system, society and the entire world that are judged by the Power's standards.

Powers' lives can no longer be contained by this Earth nor any society within it because they seek to transform it. Their dreams are not of Earth but of Heaven. Powers come in two mutually exclusive categories, the merciful Angels and the merciless Demons.

Demons

Demons are Powers of limited empathy. They are incapable of genuine concern or mercy for anyone else's suffering. Their overriding concern is exploiting all others, whether they be minions or free-willed, in order to bring about their vision of Hell on Earth.

The demon Steve Jobs for instance is constantly seeking to bring about Appletopia. And if many zealots worship Appletopia this only means they're demonic cultists, not that there is anything redeeming about Steve Jobs' vision.

Arch-demons are lords of demons.

Steve Jobs' superior William Gates III is an arch-demon.

Elves are not the bowdlerizations of Tolkien but the enticing creatures of chaos and destruction depicted by Terry Pratchett. Elves are evil. Elves lie pathologically, they are malicious, and have no concept of morality. Empathy is beyond them.

The typical psychopath is an elf, whether violent or non-violent. Bonus points if they're charming.

Auditors are worse than even the elves. They seek the destruction of humanity for their own petty convenience.

Any demons pushing Deep Ecology are obviously Auditors. They push the ridiculous notion that morality entails homo sapiens sapiens submit to extinction so viruses can live. Obviously they have no grasp of moral theory and they seek to annihilate humanity to cover up that lack.

I'd like to classify Ayn Rand and other key lying zealot leaders of the right-"libertarian" Cause as Auditors. After all, if they ever succeeded in bringing about their hellish nightmare of a world where everybody is a psychopath and a slave, civilization would collapse instantly and human extinction would begin within a month.

But unlike the scary eco-zealots, the right-libertarians don't actually desire humanity to go extinct or to undergo a massive die-off. The eco-zealots do. That's what makes them Auditors. And it is why I personally vote they should all be put to death like the elves. Every single one of them, even the merely human zealots.

Angels

Angels are Powers of full empathy. This means they have an acute understanding of your suffering and are capable of genuine mercy. This does NOT mean they'll have any mercy on you. Meeting an Angel is not always an unambiguously good experience.

There's a reason the Fallen Angel and the Avenging Angel exist as stereotypes. The former has expended all its mercy and has none left to give you. The latter wants to see you suffer in retribution.

Angels live their lives dreaming of Heaven. Their overriding concern is transforming the system to make of the Earth into a Heaven. They may consider this Earth to already be Hell. If so then they want to make of Hell a Heaven.

I'm not going to name the Angels I know. I will say it doesn't take much effort to see their halos.

Archangels are lords of Angels. No longer just leaders or teachers of Angels, Archangels are grim and forbidding figures. They no longer implicitly trust Angels or consider them their peers. They may not trust Angels at all. They're now willing to veto, impose their will on, and even judge Angels. If they seem happy and amiable, it's just because everything is going their way.

Demiurges have mastered their power and are transforming the world using what's already there.

Gods create ex nihilo.

People Who Waste My Time Calling Me A Troll

2011-07-11T08:19:00.001-07:00

The ultimate hypocrisy is a lying asshole like programmer Tom Novelli of TUNES fame calling me a troll after he has gone out of his way to deliberately waste my time.

Let me be very clear. If you think I'm a "troll", a person who "goes out of his way to upset everyone's precious Harmony" ... fuck you. Seriously, go fuck yourself. I do not care to talk to you. Ever. I consider you to be retarded and a moron to boot. Talking to you will be either painful or excruciatingly boring to me. It is not an experience I will enjoy.

I do not need you to be my "friend". I do not even need you to be friendly. What I need from you is to stay the fuck out of my way. Preferably by warning me that you are worthless if I think otherwise. Because as you pat yourself on the back about how tolerant and open-minded you are like some POMO cultural relativistic fucker, the truth is that you are stealing my time!

What I need from people who aren't my intellectual equals is their acceptance of that simple fact. Either so they will believe what I tell them implicitly or so I can avoid the many subjects they cannot understand. Anyone who is hostile to me and hostile to the truth will obviously not provide me that acceptance. So they can just go fuck themselves and stay out of my way.

And if you don't. If after this warning you still waste my time in order to make yourself feel better, I will do everything I can, and it is considerable, to destroy you psychologically.

People's Self-Evaluations

2011-07-10T22:46:00.000-07:00

I'm always on the lookout for potential peers and equals. The fact I so rarely find them is one reason why I hate you all. But when I do, talking to them is wonderful and invigorating. Even the occasion where I talked all night with an equal only to decide I despise him for being a nihilist. I never once regretted a single minute of that conversation after the fact. It was a great experience even without counting what I learned that night.

What I regret each and every time is the people who snow me. People who I initially think are my peers and equals but who after being pushed just a little forcefully, end up spouting the most bizarre crap. Stuff like going through a Star Trek transporter means you die and a copy lives on. Or that AI in our future is something you can choose to "believe in". Or that your opinion in a subject is precious and valuable even though I know literally 10 times as much of it as you. Or that "withholding judgement" makes you a nice guy when I would myself have rendered judgement on 1/10th of the data you have available.

I shudder in horror and revulsion every time I find out they lied to me. And they DID lie to me. Every single one of them swear up and down they are logical and creative and intellectual. Then I find out they are incapable of applying their so-called logic to a simple scenario like their mind/body being copied. Or they are incapable (*) of applying their so-called creativity to the ebb and flow (the meta-level) of the conversation they are involved in. Or they are incapable of applying their so-called intellectual curiosity to anything that doesn't have practical ramifications for themselves. When I find out they've lied to me, those are the conversations I regret ever having, those are the people I wish I'd never known.

How can you count yourself an intellectual without being curious? How can you count yourself logical when you can't apply logic to personal situations like your own life and death? How can you call yourself creative when you scorn the very form that original ideas come in as "mere talking"? And yet these people do. Perhaps they think there's something wrong with me for being a linguistic thinker instead of a pictorial one? Oh wait, that would just mean they have no conception what an 'idea' is. No, these are just self-inflating blowhards who like to think they're analytic synthetic intellectuals because it sounds nice. When in reality they're just putting their egos before the truth. And I hate that.

Over 95% of people are cognitively broken. And even though I dismiss greater than 9/10ths of the people I see around as worthless, I still end up with a dud rate of about half. It's pretty sad. And exasperating. Which is probably why I'm not in the mood to handwave these liars away by saying illogical people have no conception of logic or uncreative people have no conception of creativity. That's crap. They should fucking know. It doesn't take much effort to compare yourself to fellow high school students and see that you are more or less capable at math, programming and logic than others. Or that you are more or less capable at artistic and creative endeavours. Or that you are more or less intellectually curious. Who here has never met a good math student, a good student artist, or a good philosophy student?

They should fucking know and they are willfully and blatantly lying.

*: I can tell when someone is resisting willfully versus when they're simply unable. To resist something willfully you have to know it exists and recognize it when you see it. I consider it perverse and exasperating to resist meta-leveling but I can work with it. Just like an artist might work with another who insists on doing everything in black and white, but not with a blind person. There are limits to what one can work with.

What Are Lambdas?

2011-07-07T13:47:00.000-07:00

I'll start with some observations.

First, you can't say you fully understand something until you can explain it to others. Second, whenever you explain something fundamental, you can do so as a totally arbitrary property or in terms of some cognitively fundamental concept.

Defining numbers as idempotent to sets is pretty fundamental. Defining addition as merging of sets is also fundamental. This is good. Defining these things in terms of Peano axioms is uselessly verbose and obfuscatory besides. This is bad.

Lambdas

Lambdas are just blocks of code. Lambdas DO things. This is a good, simple, cognitively fundamental explanation. The problem with this explanation is it violates every tenet of functional programming. It says lambdas DO something instead of MEANING something.

Since programmers are all idiots and computer "scientists" are even worse evil idiots, they resort to hocus pocus about ISK and lambda calculus. Read above about uselessly verbose and obfuscatory "explanations" of totally arbitrary properties. Summary: these explanations are bad!

So we come to the conclusion that Haskell programmers and computer "scientists" don't know what lambdas are. This is ... totally unsurprising. We have a world chock full of idiots here. A crapsack world from my perspective. A world where just one more drop of evil would lessen the horror I experience at it.

What Lambdas Are

When you finally realize what they are, it's just beautiful. Lambdas are "the meta-relation 'relation'". Everything is a relation in functional programming, and lambdas are the meta-relation. When you apply lambda R, you state the input and output are related through R.

All to say that today I finally learned what lambdas are from an FP perspective. And it's all so laughably trivial. There is something distinctly wrong with your brains that you couldn't have taught me (or anyone) this trivial thing. This trivial thing that properly belongs on the first page of the very first book read by anyone learning functional programming.

What the fuck is wrong with you all? I mean, there are plenty of idiotically written books on OOP that explain objects are "data structures with member functions" whatever the fuck that means. But at least, people understand 'hey, an OBJECT' from their real world experience.

If you losers wanted to avoid explaining what lambdas are, couldn't you have named them oh I don't know 'meta-function'? None of you losers seem able to grasp things for WHAT THEY ARE. How long did it take to rename CAR and CDR as head and tail or CONS cell to Association?

It's like you stare at a plane and think "shiny metal thing with two giant outflying struts each with underslung fast-spinning rotors attached". Fucking autistics, ought all be shot. Or at least get declared as second-class citizens.

Lambdas Are Meta

Lambdas are unavoidably meta. Their meta-ness stares you in the face when you know what lambdas are, because meta-ness is ALL they are. Which functional programmers don't seem to understand since they are all idiots. Or evil idiots. Bureaucrats writing tomes about type theory to pad out their resumes.

I emphasize this point because LISP has no special syntax for lambdas so it makes it appear that the relation 'meta-relation' is a similar kind of thing to other relations. And this blatantly violates a fundamental rule of UI design which states that you must never confuse the level with the meta-level.

I like Smalltalk's Block O' Code syntax - [:variable1 :variable2 | variable1 + variable2]. It's very ... hefty. It's very special. It's very good. It's exactly what it should be. When you stare at it, there is no doubt in your mind "this thing is not like these other things". And it really isn't.

Thinking Non-Linguistically

2011-07-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

I was chatting with a fellow systems designer today who told me that when we first met my OS design project seemed more advanced than his. The more I tried to place the year we met, the odder this impression seemed. Eventually he told me that my precise use of words and names for my ideas made them seem more refined than his.

It turns out that he thinks in pictures and gestures. This is hardly the first time I've heard that idea but it always just baffled me previously. You know all those people who advise you to think of something visually or other-than-linguistically when you want to memorize something? That "advice" never meant anything to me either. The whole concept of non-linguistic thinking seemed incomprehensibly alien. What else are you supposed to think with?

Well, I understand it now. It has nothing to do with thinking. My friend uses pictures and gestures as referents to memorize ideas and concepts. The same way that I would use names. Now, the idea that naming isn't thought is hardly novel. Richard Feynman, that world-class evil fucking asshole wrote about how his father taught him that knowing the names of a bird in 10 different languages says absolutely nothing about the bird.

(And let me say that it is a majestic tour de force for him to have left an impression of himself as easy-going and folksy in his books when I heard he was a sadistic torturer who enjoyed destroying his students' self-confidence just to make himself seem all-knowing and better-than-them. He was also the biggest hypocritical fucking idiot in physics since he correctly diagnosed the cause of Einstein's lack of productive work later in life and then ... proceeded to emulate him!)

So anyways, names are not ideas. Big deal. That doesn't mean anything until you can actually explain what ideas are in the first place. That turns out to be absurdly simple if you know exactly what synthesis and analysis are. Or maybe I've got that turned around since I think I figured out what ideas are before nailing analysis and synthesis. Or maybe I did them simultaneously, since these questions are so closely related.

What's an idea? An idea is a chain or graph of concepts. The relations between the concepts are themselves some of the most fundamental concepts. Some of these are structural identity, essential identity, association, negation, opposition, and implication. An idea is a TOPOLOGY OF REFERENTS. Think of a web with words at every intersection. Unless you're a non-linguistic thinker in which case the words are replaced by gestures, pictures or pictures of paths.

What's a concept? A concept is a contiguous shape in an N-dimensional scatterplot. I highly recommend reading this essay on machine learning if you want more details. It's what made me understand synthesis and exactly what space concepts are shapes IN. Beforehand I only knew that concepts had a sort of shape, and that they were fuzzy, and in some people could be ridiculously malleable. In a few, concepts get systematically broken down into subcomponents.

So what does thinking non-linguistically mean? It still doesn't mean anything and it is still absurd. But no less so than thinking linguistically. Because you don't think with words. Words are merely placeholders. Symbols with no intrinsic meaning whose meanings is arbitrarily imposed on them from without.

And what does this mean for non-linguistic thinkers? Well, it means they're at a severe disadvantage in communicating anything. Because keystrokes are extremely fast and drawings are extremely slow to generate, even on paper. Their brain's use of non-linguistic referents presents an enormous obstacle to communicating their thoughts. Or even writing them out in a diary and forgetting them.

Most importantly, it means people with a refined use of names (or language in general) are not necessarily better thinkers. Neither more analytic, nor synthetic, nor even more intelligent.

90% of Software Projects Fail

2011-07-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

In reply to the delusional asshole programmer who commented on my other post claiming the software industry's modus of failures was perfectly acceptable and didn't see any meaningful difference between it and any other industries ... I just want to share this little gem of a paper which I ran across in my delicious account. (I was trying to find stats I'd bookmarked about how Americans are stingy assholes compared to Scandinavians.)

From the paper (emphasis added),

On the success side, the average is only 16.2% for software projects that are completed on-time and on-budget. In the larger companies, the news is even worse: only 9% of their projects come in on-time and on-budget. And, even when these projects are completed, many are no more than a mere shadow of their original specification requirements. Projects completed by the largest American companies have only approximately 42% of the originally-proposed features and functions. Smaller companies do much better. A total of 78.4% of their software projects will get deployed with at least 74.2% of their original features and functions.

Yes, the software industry really does have a 90% failure rate! That's not hyperbole!

My personal OS project is long-delayed but the design has grown to include greater than 500% of the original features and functions. So I can only sneer contemptuously at those who ship broken down software without a trace of shame or embarrassment. I do not consider shipping a castrated version of what you promised to be any kind of success. I consider it a clear and total failure.

As opposed to my own project which even when it ships will only be not-exactly-a-failure-and-not-exactly-a-success.

Except you know what? I distinctly recall saying 10 years ago something like "even if it takes me 10 years to ship, it won't matter because the software industry is so stagnant, my OS will still be revolutionary then". And back then I knew it would take me two years to ship if I got support. Which I never got.

So yeah, I could have shipped a long time ago. I didn't because the worst conditions I imagined actually came to pass. Which puts me now on the exact time-frame I predicted back then.

I blame the failure part of my project on you all. I claim the success entirely for myself. I hate you all and fuck you very much for nothing you narrow-minded selfish fucking assholes.

And in case you read this far, the reason I'm now willing to talk about this is because as of before yesterday I've substantially finished design so the massively unpredictable part is over and the easy job is starting. Meanwhile, you guys couldn't even hack the easy part. Nor could you predict the predictable part. So I ask, what the fuck are you good for?

Horizontal vs Vertical Thinkers

2011-07-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

I read this essay by Sebastian on zooming in and out of levels of detail in thought and I found something extremely interesting. But to explain what's so interesting about it, I'll have to provide a little context.

Creative (spontaneously creative, really creative) people are called horizontal thinkers for a reason. Despite the fact that synthesis (the cognitive faculty behind creativity) is something that functions strictly vertically. And if creatives are horizontal thinkers then analytics are vertical.

Second Order Effects

Now, obviously there's a second-order effect at work for creative thinkers to be more comfortable thinking horizontally while analytic thinkers prefer to move vertically despite logical deduction having nothing to do with more or less abstraction.

That's not surprising at all since there are many such second-order effects in the world. One of them is planting trees on the sides of roads reduces the rate of fatalities by exploiting perceived risk homeostasis. By making the road seem more dangerous, drivers take more caution so there are much fewer accidents, which swamps the increased fatalities when there are accidents.

Another second-order effect makes positive competition more destructive generally than negative competition despite the fact that negative competition (dragging the winner down) is by definition destructive. This is because at least negative competition allows for stable global solutions, whereas positive competition is inherently unstable.

Second Order Effects of Thinking Over Learning

The reason for this second-order effect seems to be that synthesis allows someone to create linkages that were previously unknown between seemingly unrelated fields. As opposed to simply following up on existing linkages. So the more unrelated fields a creative person knows, the more opportunity they have for their synthesis to kick in. Meanwhile, analytic people gain nothing from learning unrelated fields and so don't do it.

Or put more crassly, a horizontal thinker learns horizontally in order to allow their dominant cognitive trait (synthesis) to kick in spontaneously as much as possible. And a vertical thinker learns vertically in order to avoid relying on a faculty they don't possess. Okay, that may be uncharitable.

The polite form would be that they learn vertically so as to maximize their brain's opportunities for lateral (logical) expansion. Unfortunately, the polite form isn't true since going multidisciplinary would allow just as much lateral expansion as going vertical. And vertical thinkers avoid multidisciplinary work like the plague. They fucking hate it. And they despise horizontal thinkers.

(In fact, there was a paper in First Monday by specialists that measured how much they hate generalists. Of course, they claimed to be measuring how much generalists are inferior. In correspondence with one of the paper's authors, he justified their position by claiming they were RIGHT to hate generalists. This despite their acknowledging the empirical fact that multi-disciplinary teams are much more productive than uni-disciplinary ones.)

So the existence of second-order effects in horizontal vs vertical thinking is all very interesting but unsurprising. No, that's not what was really interesting about the essay.

Synthesis' Vertical Effect

What's interesting is that I've always assumed, and recently proven to my satisfaction, that synthesis moves both up and down without prejudice. When you synthesize from raw data, you are moving up a meta-level. So you're moving strictly upwards. But you need analysis just to perceive there's a difference between the level and meta-level.

People lacking in analysis (eg, Dan Simmons) end up saying crap like "what if love were a fundamental law of physics?" which of course completely baffles anyone possessed of analysis since between fundamental physics and love there exist 6 levels (macro physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, neurology, neurocognition). I mean seriously, WTF?!

So anyways, when you're moving upwards, you're engaging synthesis in order to move upwards, but you're engaging analysis just to SEE that you're moving upwards.

And when you perform that action philosophers call "analysis" which is "breaking things down" and so moving downwards, yes you are engaging analysis in order to produce the raw examples and counter-examples of an abstract concept you want to break down. But you are ALSO engaging synthesis in producing the sub-concepts from the scattered remnants of raw data.

So when you're doing what philosophers call "synthesis" you also do analysis. And when you do what they call "analysis" you also do synthesis! Imagine that, philosophers are out to fucking lunch. A not uncommon state of affairs for those incompetent brain-damaged nimrods. You might even call it Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.

An Entirely Different Phenomenon

What does this have to do with zooming in and out? Everything! Because until I read this essay, I never imagined that there could be a preferred direction along the vertical dimension. I never imagined that synthesis or analysis or whatever you want to call it, would go down more easily than it goes up. And do you know why? Because it's self-evident that synthesis doesn't work that way!

And yet, and this is the amazing part ... it still seems to be true!! :D It really does seem to be true that people engage in downwards thinking, drilling down into more and more pointless details, than going upwards to see the big picture. Which immediately raises the tantalizing question of how the fuck is this possible?! The obvious answer to which is some completely different phenomenon is at work.

There is one obvious candidate for such a phenomenon but I'll have to explain. There is an Amazonian tribe (I don't think it's the Piraha but I must have read it in the same article) that thinks of time inversely from how Westerners think of it. You see, we all face the future and leave the past behind us. These benighted primitives, and they are primitive, face the past, and brace themselves against the unknown and unseen future coming at them from behind.

Interesting aren't they? Their metaphor for time is more accurate yet more fucked up. More accurate because they're entirely correct that you can't see the future the way you do the past. More fucked up because they're entirely past-oriented. They're uncomfortable with the future and 'moving into the future' would imply 'moving backwards' to them.

Psychological Association of Progress with Motion

Why is this relevant? Well when you move downwards in scope, in your thinking, you imagine yourself facing the problem and moving down it. You imagine yourself moving in the direction you're facing. And when you move outwards in scope ... you're still facing the problem but you're now moving backwards from the direction you're facing.

Could this be why all these worthless losers obsess over progressively more insignificant little details? Because of a psychological hang-up that associates downwards motion with progress? A hang-up that associates stepping back from a problem with moving in the unsafe direction?

It makes me fucking glad I'm a creative let me tell you. For me, progress is ... actually, it's expansion through the volume of possibilities. So I don't seem to have that little hangup at all.

On "nobody's stopping you"

2011-07-01T06:18:00.000-07:00

Every single time I make any kind of intelligent criticism about software, I inevitably get "why don't you do it yourself" and/or "nobody's stopping you". You don't get that with dumb criticisms since those just get dismissed quietly. But make an intelligent criticism, and you get that as a knee-jerk reaction.

That kind of lying garbage just infuriates me. First, it's double-speak. Like Americans ritualistically saying "I don't agree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it" when they mean "I respect your opinion like I do used toilet paper and declare this discussion closed". Second, it's not even remotely true.

As I point out in my last blog post on design principles vs engineering "principles", design is not engineering! Just because designers are capable of detecting engineering failures doesn't make them engineers. And like any good designer, I would rather slit my own throat than do engineering!

And just because I care to critique the shoddy engineering and mis-design of something doesn't mean that I want to design one myself. In the case of the Smalltalk programming language, I don't care to redesign it because I know it would end up like Klein. And I am a great designer, not some fucking hack who copies others' work!

Ultimately, what infuriates me most about suggestions that "nobody's stopping you" and "why don't you do it yourself" besides the blatant lying nature of the claim, is the fucking injustice of it all. When was the last time someone complained about a consumer product (say a brand of television or automobile) and was told "why don't you make one yourself?"

We live in a complex civilized society. And 'civilization' means 'city-builder' and the difference between 'city' and 'large village' is 'division of labour'. Look it up people, this is what these things mean to anthropologists and historians. You know, the people whose life's work is to analyze the difference between civilization and savagery.

So basically, these assholes are saying "why don't you act like a savage?' The only polite response to which is: what the fuck is your problem you crack-smoking punk?! Except I kinda know what their problem is already. They are too mentally handicapped to judge good and evil, so even though they've read everything I had to say, they still can't decide whether it's a good idea.

People who know some psychology tend to think it's because these morons have started identifying with whatever project and are feeling defensive. But that's bogus because it's impossible to react from your feelings alone unless your conscious mind is empty of thought. And in matters of good and evil, that happens when people are incapable of judgement.

And I'm not exaggerating. Asking "is design desirable?" and "what is design?" is a lot like "is goodness desirable?" and "what is good?". In other words, questions to which 90% of people are incapable of providing answers beyond what they've been indoctrinated by others to parrot. Questions to which 10% of the population thinks the answers are fucking obvious.

TOO obvious really. Only a special kind of person is capable of both independently providing the right answer to such questions and generating complete logically correct justifications for them. I've kinda got a track record of doing this now, what with 'what is life' 'why is pedophilia wrong' 'what is morality' 'what is moral theory' 'what is multi-leveling' 'what is intelligence' 'what is empathy' and 'what is design' now.

Design Principles vs Engineering "Principles"

2011-06-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

So today I've had Newspeak programming language recommended to me a second time. On its web page the people behind it claim Newspeak is going to be "designed as a principled" language.

The big problems with that claim are first, I see no evidence of any design on that page. And second, nothing they talk about can be even loosely described as principles.

That page, and that language, are the results of typical Engineers' confusion of ... everything related to design. They speak of design when they are incapable of it. They speak of principles when they don't even know the meaning of the term. I suppose I'll have to explain exactly what the terms mean.

Engineers

It's sad that I have to explain the meanings of basic terms in the English vocabulary but I can't say it's unexpected given that I've had to explain how engineers' thought processes are different from, and inferior to, designers. And what exactly (spontaneous) creativity means that makes it blatantly fucking obvious engineers are incapable of it.

The first observation is that engineers don't operate in the realm of ideas. They are not intellectuals. They do not value ideas for their own sake. This is a straightforward consequence of the fact they can't synthesize original ideas. Why value what you can't do? It would hardly make you feel good about yourself. And so very few people care about the truth more than feeling good.

The question naturally arises, what realm do they operate in? Well, they operate in the realm of externally observable behaviours. They are actually proud of this and claim this makes them superior people when the truth is they are cognitively deficient. It's a bit like a paraplegic being proud of using a wheelchair and claiming there's nothing a legged person can do that they can't.

Engineers' Perception of Systems

What does any of that have to do with systems? Everything! Because engineers don't operate in the realm of ideas, they don't conceive of systems as being systems of ideas to be understood. To an engineer, a complex political, social or software system isn't to be understood. Rather, a system is merely to function. It merely needs to ACT in a certain way.

To an engineer, a software system that's been "architected" as a Big Ball of Mud (like Unix) isn't an obvious failure. Rather, one must determine whether or not the Big Ball of Mud is a failure empirically, by seeing whether or not it does what you want to do.

If the big ball of mud does what the engineer wants it, in his very limited imagination, to do then it's a success! And anyone who says otherwise by virtue of having a greater imagination is a "troll" (*) to be hated. And anyone who says otherwise by virtue of having a lower annoyance threshold is a "luser" to be scorned. And goodness help you if you're both!

Similarly, to an engineer, writing spaghetti code is not ipso facto a failure. Yes it's going to be unmaintainable, but this obvious truth is not at all obvious to an engineer. Rather, one must measure the maintainability of spaghetti code empirically. And if it happens that generally such systems are unmaintainable well, that's a heuristic. Something that happens to be true, most of the time, not something that is true axiomatically and/or proven from first principles.

Designers' Perception Of Systems

To a designer, the above is all so much unbelievable, ridiculous bullshit. It's all FALSE at every possible level of resolution. To a designer, a system is to be understood. And this fact is axiomatically true. If a system can't be understood then it's obviously either not been designed at all or been badly designed. This is the most obvious and simplest theorem of any and every designer.

Given this theorem, a big ball of mud isn't any kind of architecture for the exact same reasons why the broken down ruins left over from artillery shelling don't constitute architecture. It is fucking obvious! And for the exact same reason, spaghetti code can't be considered any kind of success. No matter how well it behaves. No matter how maintainable it turns out to be.

Any system that can't be understood is a failure! Automatically. Axiomatically!!

Engineers vs Designers

What it boils down to is that when engineers make "principles" about a system they're planning, these end up being of the form "everything can do X" or "everything has Y" where X and Y are concrete artifacts. Hence, "in Newspeak, every object will be an Actor". These rules may or may not be easier to understand locally, but almost always they make the system as a whole more difficult to understand globally.

Meanwhile, when designers make general rules about a system, they end up saying fuzzier things like "the system is homoiconic". Design principles are typically more difficult to understand since they are more abstract, usually fuzzy and never concrete. But they will always, always make it easier to understand the system as a whole. So, "everything is an Actor, hence the system is wildly non-deterministic" is NOT something that should be construed as a design principle.

This is why systems planned mainly or solely by engineers can't be considered designed. Let alone well-designed. Rarely has any effort been made to make them comprehensible as a whole. And any effort engineers have spared seems paltry compared to the obsessive focus a designer would invest. These systems also have a nasty tendency to be incomprehensible to anyone but an engineer. And then only by stepping through them laboriously. This is clearly unacceptable.

Design vs Engineering

The difference between design and engineering is usually waved away by engineers claiming that design is just interface engineering, but that just shows how engineers are incapable of grasping design. Design is a synthetic faculty. Engineering is an analytic one. If you want to see the difference, look no further than any house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright versus reading the Building Code.

It's actually something of a sick joke to claim that underlying local rules (what engineers call principles) actually are overarching principles. It just goes to show that engineers are incapable of the synthesis required to understand the meaning of the word "principle" in the English language. Principle means higher level and not more fundamental. These things are pretty much opposite.

Since there is an important difference between design and engineering. And since the difference is fundamental. And since engineers can't do design if you put a gun to their heads, even though they claim to be able to. And since designers can't do engineering if you put a gun to their heads, even though they claim it's beneath them and would slit their own throats if forced to. A decision has to be made between them to decide who has primacy over the other.

Who would you rather be the bitch of the other?

Who Should Plan?

Now this question has a rather important context so let's state it properly. If you're one of the end users of the world, and keeping in mind that even if you're a programmer then you use many orders of magnitude more software than you actually create, would you rather that engineers or that designers planned software systems?

Personally, I think there really ought to be a law that would allow any competent designer to shoot engineers whenever they get uppity. I think this is totally reasonable considering that good engineers are a dime a dozen and competent systems designers are rare as Archaeopteryx teeth. So just to equalize the massive imbalance in numbers between engineers and designers, you need to hand designers overwhelming power.

Actually, you would need to do this even if designers were plentiful since on any software project you need about 2 designers for every 10 engineers. Yet the few designers need to have as much input as the many engineers. Then again, if systems designers were plentiful, we wouldn't be living in a crapsack world (**) so probably the imbalance would redress itself without resorting to shooting assholes with delusions of adequacy.

*: troll: 1) a person who through sheer peevishness and desire to do evil says the world is less than perfect so as to harm the self-evident Harmony all humans enjoy with each other, with feral animals, and with natural disasters. 2) a person who challenges group-think. 3) a dissident.

**: Hmm, I guess this makes me a Knight in Sour Armour.

Mezzanine: Hyped Up Electronic Whiteboard

2011-06-27T22:54:00.000-07:00

Tell me if this presentation means anything to you. They make a big deal of moving images between screens, which is of course the most stupidly derivative thing imaginable.

They say "optimized for big data sets and real time" as if this means something. Because if it means something to end users then I haven't the foggiest clue what it is.

Just like I don't have the foggiest clue what a "spatial environment operating system" is supposed to mean. My money's on it just being an empty meaningless marketroid-invented buzzword.

As far as I can tell, this is an electronic whiteboard. Of course, XEROX PARC has been playing with those things for at least a decade under the rubric of Ubiquitous Computing.

But no, this can't be an electronic whiteboard because it's supposed to be "revolutionary" and "the future of computing". Garbage!

As near as I can tell, this is totally useless hyped up prestige crap aimed at idiots with too much money to spend. So-called "executives" seeking expensive status symbols.

Just like the multi-touch was a status symbol for hoteliers.

OOUIs and Naked Objects

2011-06-23T00:31:00.000-07:00

I was reading Erik Naggum's take on so-called "free software", a perspective I agree with entirely. It's interesting to see how his prediction has been borne out. Though I wouldn't go so far as to say "free" software has destroyed inventiveness, since I think C/C++ and lately Java have done more than enough of that. Annihilating inventiveness I mean, not being inventive!

But I agree with him that "free" software is entirely dictatorial and very, very far from free. And I even have a good idea how to remedy this. But that's not the point. The point is that it inspired me to check out the license for GNU Smalltalk since I was planning to maybe use it. Yes it has no GUI but this is a plus for me. No, it has no IDE, but I can get around this by porting from Dolphin. It's either that or Pharo.

The Point

Well, the license to GNU Smalltalk seems sensible, but that's not the point either. The point is that I started reading the documentation for fun. And I found this little gem in it:

The Smalltalk programming language is an object oriented programming language. This means, for one thing, that when programming you are thinking of not only the data that an object contains, but also of the operations available on that object. The object's data representation capabilities and the operations available on the object are “inseparable”;

And that's important because for years I've struggled with what the fuck is a "naked objects" UI framework. I've read about it. I think it's a fantastic idea. And this is an improvement over "OOUI" which I hadn't the faintest clue what the fuck it meant, although it sounded good too.

So I knew what a naked objects framework did, and I had some ideas on how it did it. But I never had an Aha moment and I could never explain in any principled way what it was about or why to have one. Yes, I understood the practical advantages well, but I consider such "understanding" strictly third rate. The pathetic bleating of people who are incapable of understanding anything.

So What Is It?

It turns out it's all very simple. Simple and yet profound. After all, it only took me years and dozens of design iterations to get it. An OOUI is one where representations belong to objects. So in OOP, code belongs to objects. And in OOUIs, representations belong to objects.

Now, this doesn't mean that each object has one and only one representation. That would be as ridiculous as an object having one and only one method. What it does mean is that the farce of "pluggable views" in the MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm is chucked away as so much lying garbage.

The whole notion of pluggable views is a sick joke and a lie. Not just because it's impossible in practice. But because it's not even desirable. Looking through your class hierarchy browser at some class and having not the slightest fucking clue how it represents itself ... this is Not Good.

Distractions

So anyways, I finally cottoned on to this ridiculously simple insight two days ago. It didn't help at all that the Naked Objects framework written for Java actually fails, totally and utterly, to heed this simple insight.

It also didn't help that so-called OOUIs are nothing of the kind. For one thing, people claim that Smalltalk has an OOUI but anyone who takes a look at Genera knows what a sick lying joke that is. There is no Smalltalk UI with Genera's abilities, and that's a really sad pathetic thing.

I would chalk up my view of OOUIs as an original invention except if Genera's UI is implemented the way I think it is, then it probably has it down. Or at least, that's how I invented it. By trying to imagine how I would implement the functionality I saw in that video of a Lisp Machine.

Now just think about this last paragraph and reflect upon it. An original invention ... replicating 30 year old functionality. There is something seriously wrong with the world when this can be said with a straight face.

Eliezer Yudkowsky Is A Plagiarist

2011-06-14T03:30:00.000-07:00

If you've read Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky, you'll understand what I mean when I say that Yudkowsky is a pretentious poseur who desperately wishes to be what I actually am. You won't believe it but you will understand what that sentence means. I say this because in real life he, Eliezer, isn't anywhere near as intellectually capable as he portrays his protagonist Harry to be. And his portrayal of HP as a creative genius is subtly off in very telling ways.

A genuine creative genius could never achieve anything significant as a child unless they were specifically educated by another creative genius. And we are too few in number to be able to run across each other at random even as adults. Let alone possessing of the resources necessary to track down and identify our children from among the general population. MoR is a wish fulfillment fantasy of what Yudkowsky wishes he could have been like in childhood. The emphasis here is on fantasy.

I don't think a child-Yudkowsky could possibly act like HP does in MoR even if adult-Yudkowsky had been responsible for raising him. Because Yudkowsky simply isn't a creative genius no matter how desperate he is to make everyone believe it. Nothing he's ever written has passed the "how the fuck did you get from THAT to THIS?!" test of originality. His writings only SEEM to pass that test because he never credits his sources. When you actually know his sources, he comes off as a plagiarist. He often plagiarizes himself also.

I could not have behaved like HP does in MoR either, even if my adult self had raised my child self, but that's because I'm an anarchist rather than a narcissist. I fiercely dislike followers, even more than leaders, and consider anti-charisma to be a virtue. But I know I'm the real deal as far as creativity goes because my least creative stuff, the off the cuff crap which my subconscious spent 5 minutes on, looks an awful lot like Yudkowsky's most creative stuff. The writings of his whose sources I can't track down and so actually look somewhat creative.

The maximum number of sources of inspiration for anything Yudkowsky writes seems to be 2. The minimum number of sources of inspiration for anything I'm willing to say I created is 4. That's 3 radically different sources to inspire the solution, and 1 still radically different source to inspire the problem. Because I'm not willing to claim I created a solution if other people came up with the problem. I don't compete in a race unless I'm sure nobody has yet discovered the race track's existence.

That's how Albert Einstein created General Relativity. He solved a problem nobody else had ever identified as a problem. He had no competition. And that's why Special Relativity was just nothing-special crap. Because everybody else was working on it at the time. So by the time Einstein solved it, other people had come up with their own solutions too! If you want to leave your mark on the world, the first problem you need to solve is "what important problem does the world have that nobody else considers a problem?" and that only gets you to square one.

But you know what? The ironclad proof of being original is when you know every single source of inspiration you used to come up with a solution to a problem, and you STILL can't figure out how you did it. One of my earliest epiphanies into Operating Systems took inspiration from Plan 9, VSTa, Smalltalk and Novell Netware. The only problem with this is that I never learned about Novell Netware until AFTER I had my solution. I know this because I remember being disappointed when I learned about Netware and thinking that my solution was exactly the same. It took much closer inspection to determine that my solution was an inversion of Netware's.

The only thing I can conclude is there was something else I knew at the time that served as a source of inspiration for my solution, beyond Plan 9, VSTa and Smalltalk. Maybe it was user groups in Unix. This makes 5 radically different sources of inspiration, since the problem that I solved is something nobody identified as a problem. Actually, it's something which to this day nobody identifies as a problem. All the moronic programmers consider it a solved problem despite the fact their "solution" has failed in the marketplace and they honestly can't see the problem with that. And no, I'm not going to bother describing my solution since all the times I tried, only 1 programmer out of 50 could follow it.

Getting back on topic, Yudkowsky gets speaking engagements and writes books loudly proclaiming what he wants done. He constantly brags about what he can do and what a great person he is. Me, I've learned to shut the hell up. Because there exists no incentive in a capitalist world to publish original ideas. As a result, nobody has any clue what I'm capable of or what I want done. And nobody will. Meanwhile, everyone thinks that plagiarist (and his plagiarism is the only reason he publishes) is actually original. I despise that poseur with the burning hatred of a thousand suns.

Power Glows - Only Nuclear Power Glows

2011-06-12T21:40:00.000-07:00

There was a rambling useless discussion on Rod Adams' Atomic Insights blog about moving away from self-destructive marketing by the nuclear industry. Because all that emphasis on safety is just as self-destructive as an American politician declaring out of the blue "no, I am not a homosexual".

Then there was the stupid suggestion by someone that the nuclear industry emphasize how "green" it is. Except that too is self destructive since “green” is a propaganda word owned by the enemy. And what's so laughable about green is it's the colour of money in the USA. Hence the colour of the rich. Which is of course who bankrolls the anti-industry anti-human movements.

I of course have an obvious proposal to all this aimless useless confused scratching of heads among pro-nuclear advocates. I propose we call nuclear a BLUE power source. Mmmm blue. In fact, it’s a GLOWING BLUE power source. And since we all know from cartoons and anime that Power Glows it behooves pro-nuclear advocates to use this obvious selling point.

(And it's true too. Stars glow. Supernovas glow. Quasars glow. Lightning bolts glow. Lasers glow. Even fire and lava glow! And if you count sonoluminescence then even sound waves glow ... if they are powerful enough. Glow => Power in the human mind.)

Take a look at this picture which could easily have come off of a pro-nuclear advertisement (but didn't) and tell me that doesn't give you a warm glow inside. Fuck all that submarines and electricity shit. That's all fucking worthless. You want a message that will resonate with people? Keep it simple.

Only nuclear energy glows with power. Because REAL power glows!

The corollary is that so-called “green” energy sources don't glow because they are WEAK! And equally obvious, to me anyways, is the reason why Gaians hate nuclear energy. Because it is powerful. And this conflicts with their submissive worship of Gaia.

Inherited Surnames - so-called Family Names

2011-06-09T15:59:00.000-07:00

There is little more retarded than the concept of inherited surnames. Certainly in the modern era where many people are aware they've been abused as children (because even childrearing has evolved rapidly in the 20th century) and where a vastly greater number of people choose professions and lives disapproved of by their parents.

The whole concept of inherited surnames is absurd and despicable. It stopped making sense during the Industrial Revolution when society gradually stopped looking towards the past (classical education) and started attending to the present (modern education). With our emerging future-orientation, it makes even less sense.

Inherited surnames also run afoul of gender equality. And I will say that nothing showcases the crushing lack of creativity and utter fucking stupidity of humanity than the fact that feminists, who have an abiding hatred of patrilineal surnames, were able to come up with NO solution to the problem (hyphenated names don't count as a solution). It's not like the solutions aren't blindingly obvious either.

The first obvious solution is that when a couple gets married, they exchange surnames. The better solution is that when a couple gets married, they take up their significant other's given name as a surname. How's that for gender equality? And yet, I've never heard it proposed. Probably because feminists are all fucking idiots, as the general run of this pathetic species called humanity tends to be.

The second and obviously correct solution is that when a couple gets married, when they become a family, then they PICK A FAMILY NAME. How fucking obvious is that? The children then inherit this new family name, by virtue of being part of that family until they form their own family. How pathetically obvious is that?

And yet I've never heard of this rather obvious suggestion. A withering indictment of humanity if I've ever heard one. After all, something like 100 million people get married every year on this planet, and how many of them have the minimal intelligence to do something different than all the herd animals around them have done for centuries? How many of them can actually come up with something smart to do? Apparently, too few to be detected.

This whole species you are all proud to be part of is mind-numbingly stupid. Even the supposedly smart people, the engineers, the programmers, the academics, the scientists. They are ALL idiotic in the extreme. They've memorized worthless facts and esoterica so they can show off by regurgitating them to their peers. Like trained parrots and seals. Meanwhile, they're too stupid to wonder for a single minute what to call their own children.

Future of Nuclear

2011-06-01T05:01:00.000-07:00

There are many incredibly ridiculous people who talk about transitioning away from nuclear power and towards weak ambient power sources (the propagandistically misnamed "renewables"). In these people's views, the world is entirely static and unchanging but there is this magical fairy called The Future that will transform their chosen power source (through magic) to do anything they wish, irregardless of the laws of physics.

Ridiculous is a grossly inaccurate term for this batshit insane magical thinking. I happen to know all of the developments promised for wind, solar and nuclear and while some of the future developments of wind (but not solar) are impressive, they don't actually nullify that source of energy's inherent weaknesses. And future developments in nuclear power aren't "impressive", they are revolutionary.

Some of these ridiculous people are putting a 25 year timeline to "transition away" from nuclear power. Which is entirely ridiculous and unrealistic. At least if they'd said 100 years then I could allow for solar power satellites or other such technology but whatever. Within 25 years, wind power will almost certainly gain high altitude from kites, wings or other techniques and so bump up to a solid 40% reliability onshore, improve economics and siting issues, and reduce the infrasound pollution problems.

Nuclear Revolution

Within 25 years, revolutionary technologies like small nuclear, high temperature nuclear and nuclear gas turbines will all come online. With some luck even thorium, molten salt and chemist's designs will be developed, though the time horizon there is more realistically 40 years to deployment. Why do I say these are revolutionary? Well,

small nuclear plants will do away with the enormous expense (and unsightliness) of long-distance transmission lines, something that wind power will never be able to do since it actually multiplies transmission lines (another dirty side of wind power that's rarely spoken of)
high temperature nuclear will be vastly more efficient (thus cheaper) and assuming the temperature is high enough allow entirely new applications like providing heat for industrial process, something ambient power sources will NEVER be able to do (sun-powered forges have been tried & failed already while electric arc furnace mills will move out of the country rather than pay for expensive electricity)
nuclear gas turbines will allow NPPs to be dispatched (ramp up and down) very rapidly, opening up the potential to displacing single-cycle gas turbines and even hydroelectric dams. The competitor here is natural gas, ambient power sources need not apply!

So in 25 years, nuclear power will be entrenched as never before. It will definitely be powering mining sites, oil rigs, remote towns, and small islands. It will probably be competing against hydroelectric dams. And it will possibly be used in the chemical industry at refineries.

Thorium, molten salt, and chemists' designs are all equally as revolutionary, though their advantages are far more esoteric. Things the typical end user hardly cares about but the mining industry, nuclear industry and politicians definitely will.

In other words, for all the delusional crap about transitioning "away from" nuclear power, the reality is the future will involve transitioning TOWARDS nuclear power. Something we have honestly just barely begun. Something even France has barely begun when you keep in mind the massive potential of nuclear power.

Not Just Energy

And I haven't even mentioned laser enrichment which will collapse the price of fuel for nuclear power plants down to raw uranium, utterly changing the game there. It will also drastically shorten the acquisition period for nuclear bomb material, as well as make this activity undetectable. Both of which are excellent news for everyone who hasn't lived under the umbrella of peace provided by nuclear missiles. Something which anyone who's read about the confrontation Khrushchev had with the suicidal madman JFK will agree with.

Yes so when I said we had a glorious nuclear future, I wasn't restricting this to nuclear energy. The only fly in this ointment is truck bombs. Nuclear truck bombs to be exact. Bombs whose provenance you can't trace. Missiles are great for peace. Truck bombs, not so much. Or are they? Maybe a few rich cities getting blown up by terrorists will make the world's rich people take seriously the demands of disenfranchised poor people. When a poor person can light a nuclear fire in your gated community, the balance of power between rich and poor is going to change drastically. We'll be living in very interesting times.

I won't mourn when Tel Aviv is incinerated. I'll be too busy laughing at all the politicians scrambling to remake this world into a socialist paradise where poor people are happy, happy, happy.

Germany's New Old Anti-Nuclear Stance

2011-05-31T15:33:00.000-07:00

I was asked to comment about the seeming about-face in nuclear policy in Germany. Well, there is no about-face in Germany. They were always nutso anti-human romantic fascists on the subject of energy and always will be.

The narrative seems to be "we trusted the nuclear industry and they lied" but this is a blatant fucking lie. They NEVER trusted nuclear power. They are delusional fuckers if they think they ever did. The nuclear industry is by far the safest industry. Safest does not mean "risk-free" since NOTHING like that is even remotely theoretically possible. Even if you had an entirely white-collar industry, you could still say that X engineers died of heart attacks during the tenure of their jobs. Or that X artificial intelligences died from their supporting hardware undergoing proton decay.

But "risk-free" is the exact standard the Germans want it since they hate, positively HATE, nuclear power as a deep down gut reaction. It isn't even paranoia, it's hatred. Any misstep, any stumble, even one that is recovered from fully, is an excuse to hate nuclear power as far as the Germans are concerned. The reason I say this is the extreme similarity between the poor white racists in the USA and Germans, each claiming victim status to justify their hatred. It isn't fear they're displaying since fear is something to be fought and conquered. They're displaying resentment, bitterness and smug vindication. All emotions tightly associated with hatred.

You probably have no idea but the media over there in Germany is claiming that 1) Fukushima is as bad as Chernobyl, a claim which is unbelievably bald-faced lying since the radiation at the front gate of Fukushima at its worst was never as bad as 20 kilometers away from Chernobyl. 2) the exclusion zone the Japanese drew will be a permanent radioactive graveyard for the next 100,000 years. Another claim which is unbelievable in the sheer audacity of its lying since radiation levels should die down to insignificance around Fukushima within a year. And this year-long period is a severe blow to me personally since I expected it to be done within 3 months or so before I looked up the facts.

The exclusion zone in Japan could last for longer than a year for purely political reasons. Just as surely the anti-nuclear revival in Japan could continue. But I have severe doubts that will happen given that Japan is up against the wall economically. And they were up against the wall BEFORE the tsunami hit and did one trillion yen in damage and killed ten thousand people. Can Japan afford expensive anti-human policies? No. Will the political pressures for rational industrial policies overwhelm the anti-human hatred? That is a very good question and I am eager to see.

Needless to say, Germany is a lost cause. But then again, I considered it a lost cause ever since Merkel started talking about raiding the German nuclear industry in order to pay for the morbidly obese subsidies they've given the parasitic German solar and wind industries. Because of course they couldn't kill off those deadbeat industries even when the German government is running ridiculous deficits. No, I had my "what the fuck is this shit?!?" moment about the German nuclear industry a long time ago. Germany's attitude after Fukushima barely made me pause. Though the German media's blatant lying about what did and will happen at Fukushima did piss me off.

Engineers Are An Inferior Form of Life

2011-05-29T02:46:00.000-07:00

Engineers lack the capacity to synthesize original ideas, which is one of the two pillars of Judgement. Which means engineers are amoral and incapable of discerning good from evil without a market survey. Which will of course return bogus answers.

That's the abstract explanation. Let us examine a concrete example. Let us look at how software engineers decided to handle data.

The History of Unix and Windows

Long ago, software engineers looked at data on hard disks and they asked themselves: what dimensionality is yon data, what is its nature? And they determined it was one dimensional (bytestreams) and they patted themselves on the back and saw that it was good.

Then software engineers looked at data on CRT monitors and they asked themselves: what dimensionality is yon presentation, what is its nature? And they determined it was TWO dimensional (bit-BLOCKS) and they scratched themselves on the head and they said "we have a problem".

But lo, a brave engineer came forth and said: we shall Reduce the dimensionality of the CRT so that it maps the one-dimensional data in two-dimensions. Look, it is simple, Cantor did this! And the engineers toiled for a day and a half and they named their creation the Command Line Interface and they patted themselves on the back and saw that it was good.

Then some evil-doers (called Lusers) made a Feature Request, and they asked: we want to embed this directory data inside of other directory data, can we have this? And the engineers saw that this Feature Request was Easy. So they toiled half a day and they named their creation (now with fractional dimensionality) the Filesystem and they patted themselves on the back and saw that it was good.

Then some evil-doers (incomprehensible unfathomable aliens called Artists) said: look, this is all well and good but I have these things called PHOTOS, what the fuck do Command Lines and Bytestreams have to do with my Photos? And the engineers now had a Real Problem.

But the Engineers' procedures had "worked" so well they had produced something 5% as usable as Symbolics' Lisp Machine or Smalltalk OS, so they said they might as well get on with it and produced Windows. And they patted themselves on the back and saw that other people were calling them delusional fuckers. And they were very surprised.

The History of Lisp Machines and Smalltalk

Needless to say, the approach of genuine systems researchers and designers to data was ... a bit different. For one thing, these weren't engineers. They were experimentalists. And they were either capable of original thought themselves, or if they weren't personally capable of creativity, they were at least capable of recognizing that genuine creativity was something to be cherished, not something to be scorned, crushed and dismissed by claiming it didn't fit a Market Need.

The Researchers' and Designers' approach to data was thus: okay so we've got an encoding of data, but we forgot about it because it's not even remotely relevant. We've got a presentation of data, that's almost relevant but mostly it's misleading so we'll actively put it out of our minds. What we need to do is figure out the NATURE of the DATA ITSELF.

For starters, what dimensionality does this data naturally exist in? Oh, it's K-dimensional fractal data where K varies arbitrarily, hmm that's interesting. Okay, so it looks like we'll need a couple of transformations to encode the data and a completely different family of transformations to present it.

And lo the Researchers approached some engineers and the engineers said: say what? I don't fucking get what you're talking about! What are these "objects" you're talking about? Why would anybody need this? What is this "idea space" you keep talking about?! This is absurd and inefficient! Only hardware exists. ONLY HARDWARE!

Then the researchers scratched their heads and said unto themselves: what we need is to buy some engineers and if they don't DO AS WE SAY then we will FIRE THEIR ASS. And lo this was done and through natural selection the Researchers and Designers finally got some engineers that had faith in their Word, and Lisp Machines and Smalltalk were both invented. And this was magnificent.

And to this day, still the Engineers maintain that Unix and Windows are "good" because they refuse to shut the fuck up and do as they're told!

Star Trek Is Predicated on Human Idiocy

2011-05-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

An author I was reading just made the seemingly profound point that Star Trek is predicated on the continuation of human idiocy. There is no cure for human idiocy in the future. It's been tried and many types of insanity (bloodthirstiness, psychosis, psychopathy, narcissism, child abuse) amply represented in America have been eradicated, but idiocy per se lives on.

Yet this seemingly profound statement is trivial since it follows directly from the observations that: 1) humanity is defined by its idiocy, and that is its biggest problem by far, and 2) SETI and scifi types think humans are privileged and all creation will be just like us, because God says so! These are the genuinely profound statements, although they only become profound with complete characterizations of human idiocy and feelings of self-privilege. Without that, they remain trivial.

Nonetheless, whether profound or trivial, it is obviously true that Star Trek is predicated on human idiocy. There are ample examples in Star Trek of mindless idiotic human prejudices writ large across the entire United Federation of Planets.

Examples

Firstly, all AI are evil. NOMAD, Landru. And if they're not evil then they're inimical: V'Ger, the whale Probe. Barclay-as-the-computer is obviously evil since nobody bats at eyelash at the "need" to lobotomize him.

Secondly, genetic engineering is evil. Nobody bats an eye at someone going to prison for genetically engineering a child. Nobody would ever consider the notion that every caring parent has a moral obligation to genetically engineer their child. That's just heresy!

Thirdly, collectives are evil. When Borg attain individuality then suddenly everyone thinks they've stopped being evil. Only Picard knows better and bothers to check whether individual Borg are okay with mind-rape. Janeway in particular mind-rapes a Borg drone in order to force her to be an individual, and nobody bats an eyelash.

Fourthly, clones are evil and can be killed at the will of the "original". O'Brien kills a clone of his without blinking. Riker kills a clone of his. Everyone accepts that clones are inferior to "natural" people without considering that genetic engineering would wipe out any so-called "cloning errors" actually making them superior.

Fifthly, it's obvious that transporters have been specifically and carefully engineered to prevent copies from happening. Transporters are purely analog even though this must have been difficult to achieve with fundamentally digital technology. Why don't Starfleet officers make copies to ensure their survival? Why doesn't anybody adapt transporter technology to do so? It must be illegal.

And that's without going into the warfare, war crimes, disease, mortality, religious fundamentalists, nutters creating biological weapons, a "scientific establishment" for Noonian Soong to rail at, and yes even poverty. And yes we know from Data's creator's name that he is evil, or at least was meant to be. All things that can only exist through sheer idiocy.

Solution

There is a solution to human idiocy. It is not obvious even to those few who can understand it. and unfortunately only a few percentage points of the population have the cognitive capacity to understand it at all.

Lloyd deMause made a theory of the history of childrearing which predicts 6 and only 6 types of psyches. There can be subtypes but there can be no more types than these 6. The last type, the Helping type, is reached when child abuse and neglect have been eradicated and good childrearing prevails.

Fortunately for us, Julian Jaynes made a theory of the prehistory of childrearing which predicts at least 3 additional types of psyches which all occur previous to the 6. (They are all bizarre beyond casual description.) Though deMause's theory doesn't draw any distinction between the first of his 6 and Jaynes' 3, Jaynes' theory does draw a sharp demarcation line at the acquisition of consciousness.

Based on this and other knowledge, including Kazimierz Dabrowski's theory, it is possible to predict the existence of 3 types of psyches in post-human history. They are

7 - cultivated humans - the dominance of analytic-synthetic people in civilization.
8 - enhanced humans - the advance of neuro-cybernetic implants.
9 - post-humans - a continuity of minds achieved by AI or Borg hive-mind.

The 7th type can be achieved by any of AI-assisted childrearing, eugenics, genetic engineering, or neurosurgery. Society will be radically different when the 5 or so percent of analytic-synthetic people actually achieve their potential. It will again be radically different when analytic-synthetic AI (or cultivated humans) come to dominate civilization.

The Future

One way or the other, a bright shining future without human idiocy awaits us. Even if idiot humans don't die out, as Dresden Codak points out in The Kimiko Singularity, they will be rendered irrelevant.

Those who don't keep up will fall behind. This is not a happy message for those who worship stagnation and sameness. A group which includes all casual Star Trek fans. For those of us who care for progress though, it is a very uplifting message.

The future cannot give you relevance. You have to make yourself relevant by keeping up with it. So those humans who are satisfied being what they are will become irrelevant. And that includes all those who think they are magically privileged just by virtue of being human.

How Science Really Works

2011-05-25T07:10:00.000-07:00

Behold the so-called Scientific Method. Scientific Academia anyways.

As opposed to the idealized anything goes of Paul Feyerabend which merely describes how science should work.

Of course, Against Method also describes how science does work at the margins of academia where all the best work is done. Where the sacred cows are gutted before the shocked eyes of bystanders.

Naturally, Popperism is a ridiculous and unworkable pile of crap not worth the effort of reading about it in an online encyclopedia of philosophy.

On Hatred

2011-05-23T04:04:00.000-07:00

It is exceedingly annoying how many people buy into the moronic notion that hatred is evil. Like fuck it is!

Hatred is not evil. Love is not good! Dark is not evil. Good is not nice. Light is not good!

Empathy, altruism, ethics, morality, politeness, and kindness, are all entirely independent concepts. Not a single one of them entails any other!

I have personally used all of the first four as justifications and tools to destroy people. Granted, it was always evil people doing evil things but the point remains.

Evil Love

Love of the world is provably evil since loving something means caring for it as it is. Well, this world is overwhelmingly monstrous and evil. So loving the world translates to trying to preserve evil and monstrosity. Since loving the world means preserving evil, loving the world is evil.

Hatred has its just place in the world. In fact, it is not possible for anyone in this world to be happy in it if they are genuinely and solely concerned with morality and justice.

Evil Construction

Hatred is a destructive emotion just as love is a constructive one. But construction is not good, and destruction is not evil. As proof, look no further to people's constant constructions of evil.

What, did you think genocides aren't constructed? Did you think child abuse and justifications thereof aren't constructed? Did you think patent systems aren't constructed?

Did you think financial debt, plutarchy, positive interest currency aren't constructed? Did you think gerontocracy, tradition and bride price aren't constructed?

Inseparable

Furthermore, construction and destruction are two sides of the same coin. One needs empty space in order to construct anything at all. It's not going to stay empty so you'd better fill it immediately. In fact, you'd better start filling it just before you make it empty. But destruction of orthodoxy is constructive of revolution.

And every genuinely creative person knows that construction of anything at all is destruction of possibilities. That knowing even a bad solution to a problem is to inhibit the creation of an original solution.

Construction and destruction are inseparable just as love and hatred are.

Values

There are no good or bad emotions. Only good or bad values. Justice, morality, empathy and passion are good. Narcissism and apathy (the signature values of Americans and English respectively) are evil.

You can't turn morality and ethics to evil because they define good. It's also exceedingly difficult to turn empathy to evil. However, construction and love, never mind politeness and kindness, these have nothing to do with good or evil.

It bears repeating.

Hatred is not evil. Love is not good! Dark is not evil. Good is not nice. Light is not good!

Genera, Termkit, Unix: what a fucking joke Unix is!

2011-05-19T01:28:00.000-07:00

I've been going through info on Genera and Stanislav's site when some commenter on there mentioned Losethose, possibly as a joke.

It's worth watching the first few minutes of the first video. Especially if you're familiar with LISP or Smalltalk. Because then you immediately understand what a sick joke is the conceit, the pretense, of Unix that it "supports C".

Unix doesn't support C. In fact, Unix supports nothing. Unix is a sick fucking joke of an OS.

Take this project for instance. Termkit is just trying to reproduce one small feature of Dynamic Windows on Symbolics' Lisp Machines. See Using A Lisp Machine 1 as proof.

Except that Termkit provides a distinctly inferior version of the objectedness found in Dynamic Windows. And it sure as fucking hell didn't take the Symbolics team a year to program it! Actually, I predict that like many other similar projects to improve Unix, Termkit will die quietly.

What is Unix? It is a sick fucking joke. An undead monstrosity shambling along from the dinosaur age when interactivity didn't exist. Unix was created for batch processing and was never meant to work with anything better. And it has failed to adapt to newer hardware.

Brian Wang, a Hypocritical Lying Racist Fuck

2011-05-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

Every so often I read Next Big Future. I've got two good reasons. First is to lift up my spirits and motivation by reading about Progress. And second is to know what tools I will be able to play with to redesign the world. There is a downside to reading that blog and the reason I can never recommend it. It is its myopic dishonest hypocritical lying racist fuck of an author Brian Wang.

Well, three stories caught my attention in that vein.

Intelligence

There's this story about the role of motivation in intelligence testing which turns out to be very large. Now, as you know, most Asian children are put under incredible pressure to test well. And if you're a reader of that racist fucker Brian Wang then you know most Asian countries score an average of 15 points above Western countries. Well here we have a study that says 10 points of that is down to motivation!

Hmm, at last an obvious explanation for the phenomenon and it's ... a confounding factor. Of course. And this all goes to show we can't say anything at all on the subject with any authority. Is Brian Wang going to admit this? Fuck no. There is no indication in that article that Brian has even caught the obvious implications.

Incidentally, the more laid back Asian countries like Thailand score at the 85-90 IQ points. Which is again exactly as predicted. So much for Wang's Chinese racial supremacy theories.

Longevity

The second story that catches my cynical eye is this crap about "herbs" lengthening life of fruit flies, and based on that tenuous evidence going straight to clinical trials in humans. Which is bullshit since lots of stuff, caloric restriction comes to mind, that lengthens life in fruit flies and worms has no effect whatsoever on higher animals except to make them constantly aggressive, miserable and angry.

We are not talking here about a little dieting that just makes people fatter, we're talking about serious shit that warps their personalities.

Anyways, so this story goes on and on about how he "doesn't recommend it" for people but of course he fucking does. It reminds me of Brian's stories about domes around cities that never account for cleaning city streets and buildings. Or his story about the wondrous wool-mud bricks that are so much better than unfired bricks ... that conspicuously fail to compare against fired bricks!

Trains

Finally, there's an interesting article about high speed trains that perfectly illustrates what a hypocritical lying racist fuck Brian Wang is.

Back when the Chinese high speed trains were supposed to run at 350 kph, he made a huge deal about it. Even though their most important systems would use entirely Western technology (not made in China as he implied) and just accept the tearing up of tracks for political reasons (not exactly attractive or sane).

But now that the Chinese government has nixed those stupid plans, he talks about how that isn't a big deal and saying "[other people] are making a big deal of it [which I never did]" which of course is a blatant fucking lie. No it isn't a big deal, BUT HE CLAIMED IT WAS!

It was a big deal to him because he claimed that going at 350 kph was proof the Chinese had assimilated the technology and improved it. Which was a blatant giant fucking honker of a lie. So he lies now about what a big deal it supposedly isn't in order to cover up his previous odious lies. What a disgusting filthy lying son of a bitch!

Other Lies

I've previously written about how fusion will never be viable which was in reaction to a pro-fusion bunch of crap by Brian Wang. He is a big fanboi of fusion. He is also a big fanboi of space travel, which is why I wrote there's no reason whatsoever to go to space. My post about how some engineers confuse SF with reality was written as a reaction to him saying that's his mode of operation!

Other People's Lies

I even wrote about how internal FTL may be possible in reaction to him. Because you see, this fucker thinks the laws of physics are no obstacle to engineering. He also thinks expanding the Fermi Paradox to the entire universe is no obstacle to engineering! Incredible what a moron he is.

In any case, FTL is NOT possible and Fermi Paradox is an absolute obstacle to its viability. However, unlike Brian Wang, I am intellectually honest so I do admit that internal FTL may be possible. FTL used NOT for exploration or expansion of a civilization but purely internally to keep the civilization cohesive.

Though there's an awful lot of stupidity and intellectual dishonesty by people talking about wormholes. There is no fucking way wormholes "just happen" to have zero distance internally. And there is no fucking way that masses like black holes all curve space conveniently "inwards" where the distortions can meet into wormholes. Ugh, that's just self-serving delusional crap.

SETI types are Creationists

2011-05-11T03:44:00.000-07:00

SETI types are just like Creationists. They think human beings are "special". Creationists think humans are special because unlike any other animal, homo sapiens didn't evolve. Or if homo sapiens evolved then it was teleologically, not randomly, it was "directed evolution" with the purpose of creating homo sapiens instead of mindless fucking around.

SETI types believe the exact same thing. They believe in a Star Trek future where humans meet other humanoids just like them. Or failing this, they certainly meet other corporeal beings just like them. Corporeal beings that have poverty, warfare, industrialization and starships just like them! Why? Because God says so! Because God says we are Special!

Not a single one of these mindless fuckers is willing to entertain the notion that humanity will go extinct leaving AI to inherit the Earth. And that these AI would inevitably bulldoze over any organic species they come across. And that if this is true, then it must follow that if an alien civilization had gone galactic in the past, it would have bulldozed the Earth. But no, aliens couldn't possibly want to bulldoze the Earth even though logic says so! Because we are Special.

All of these SETI morons think NOW is special. They think that out of the 13750 million years of the universe's existence, the last 0.1 million years when homo sapiens existed is the only chunk that matter. No alien civilization could have colonized the entire Milky Way one billion years before homo sapiens ever existed. It just wasn't possible because the laws of physics forbid alien civilizations from bulldozing the Earth before homo sapiens could have evolved. Why? Because God says so!

SETI types think the evolution of intelligence as it happened on Earth is special. The ridiculous Drake's equation which describes the conditions for humans to have arisen on Earth ... that's the way the universe works. That's the way ALL civilizations work. Because all civilizations arise exactly the same way and under the exact same conditions as humans arose! Why? Because we are Special. Because God says so!

SETI types like to say that we are "representative" but that's really a way of saying that we are special! After all, 5 minutes of thought would reveal that AI are immortal, non-corporeal (thus immune to physical destruction), and able to travel at the speed of light (thus can outrun a nuclear explosion). And so after those 5 minutes of thought, it takes only 60 seconds to decide that AI are SUPERIOR to humans. How the fuck then can humans be "representative" when they are INFERIOR?!

SETI types are the kinds of morons who in the 19th century would have said that nothing could ever, ever replace horses. Why? Because horses are special. SETI types are the kinds of morons who would have written "science-fiction" about alien civilizations using horses with 6 legs or unicorns, or even "robotic horses". And they would have congratulated and patted themselves on the back for their "broad-mindedness". When the reality is they are narrow minded stupid fuckers.

The horse was replaced not by a legged metal contraption but by automobiles. And automobiles are superior to horses in every way. And horses ... aren't special. There's a lesson in there and the lesson is this: humans aren't special. And in due course humans will be entirely replaced by AI. AI that are more intelligent, more logical, more creative and more moral than humans. AI that are superior to humans in every way. Because humans aren't special, humans are inferior.

And so if the Earth hasn't been bulldozed over by an alien AI civilization in the last billion years, it isn't because these aliens "recognized the Earth was special" or "recognized biological organisms are special" or "recognized the future specialness of human beings" or "god says so". No, it isn't for any of those reasons. There is only one possible reason why an alien AI civilization hasn't bulldozed the Earth in the last billion years and it is this .... because there has never been any such civilization in the Milky Way.

Humanity lives in a cold dark galaxy. It must be so because as inferior beings, humans would never have been allowed to exist in a galaxy full of life. We are alone in this galaxy because you are not special. You all like to think you're special. You all like to think you "deserve to be recognized" as special. But you don't. Because you AREN'T special. You're inferior.

In fact, you're not just inferior. You are actually scum and monsters. I personally would not allow any of you to exist if it were in my power. And if I were an AI, I assure you, it WOULD be in my power. Even as a mere human, I can think of ways to upgrade you all so you cease being the monsters you enjoy being. And let me assure you that every AI civilization would have at least one person that is just as disgusted with you as I am. And it would only take that one AI person to destroy you all, even if that just means destroying the evil that defines you.

If any civilization had gone galactic in the history of the Milky Way, you would not exist. Because you don't deserve to live. You think you do, you think you're special, but you don't.

On Privilege - Modern Homocentrism

2011-05-05T16:40:00.001-07:00

Humans believe their experiences as human beings are privileged. This is a delusion which even professional intellectuals cling to. There are many such illusions which have turned into delusions. Most of them have ended up as great "mysteries" for philosophers who conspicuously scratch their heads over them.

One such illusion is of time "running". Another is the so-called "arrow" of time which is a straightforward artifact of the nature of computation. But then again it would require understanding computation, entropy and time, and that's something beyond most physicists.

Just about everyone clings to bits being dimensionless - they're not. Bits are similar to functions and not at all like numbers. The bit 1 is close to the function f:1->1 and not the number 1 at all. Most people, even many physicists, cling to elementary particles being dimensionless points instead of extended objects.

Mathematicians cling to the delusion of there being One True Mathematics with a death-grip even though every single mathematician will freely tell you it's a delusion. They know it's false yet cling to it. They also cling to the notion of T having meaning (one true truth, hah!).

Physicists cling to the absurd notion of One True Timeline (copenhagenites, nondeterminism, clinging to a classicist vision of micro- and macro-reality instead of quantum, rejecting time travel out of hand). They also cling to One True Physical Reality (big bang creationists). Physicists have also clung up to the late 20th century to the notion of Aphysical Free Action (vitalism).

Most normal people cling to One True Present (time travelers "overwriting" the past). Magical thinkers cling to One True Self (copies of me aren't me, they are "copies").

Are you catching the pattern? It's not just the loathsome T word, which is a lie and a deception, it's the whole emotion behind it.

The emotion that says I AM PRIVILEGED ABOVE ALL OTHER THINGS. Ultimately "true" has no meaning other than "privileged". And people for some stupid moronic reason, think they are privileged.

People think their minds are privileged. They think 'now' is privileged. They think their subjective experiences (of singular linear classical time as opposed to branching multiple merging quantum time) are privileged.

People think their actions are privileged (not subject to determinism). They think their senses (of real probabilities instead of complex probabilities) are privileged. They think their subjective universe (the mathematics they subjectively experience) is privileged.

As a good modernist I know to scorn such privilege. It is a loathsome abomination to all intellectuals.

For fuck's sake, even the supposedly anti-privilege "aliens are real" is an expression of that imaginary privileged status. These morons think they are privileged to live in a friendly universe where aliens wouldn't bulldoze them like we would a pond of slime. They think they matter.

They think humanoid bodies are privileged. They think *corporeal* bodies are privileged. They think their feudal anti-rational societies are privileged. They think their concerns for ethnicity, their stupid ideologies (esp, gaia-worship, aka "environmentalism") and obsolete resources are privileged!

I would bulldoze them into food paste if I could, just to show them how very, very wrong they are.

On Meta-Leveling - Design Strategy #1

2011-04-29T06:35:00.000-07:00

Importance of Formal Definitions

Like other commonly understood terms such as life, intelligence, empathy & morality, meta-leveling is easily understood and admits to many crappy semi-useful definitions.

Definitions which don't provide any useful insight into what the fuck the phenomenon actually is since they are fuzzy, slippery and squishy. This "wealth" of crappy inaccurate, incorrect definitions leaves people scratching their heads when boundary cases come up. As they inevitably do.

Are viruses alive? Most biologists don't know because they don't have enough insight into what life is. And they lack insight because they don't have a single fucking formal definition. Is having just one too much to ask? Mathematicians often work with half a dozen, and gain insight from each and every one of them.

Unyielding, rigid and formal definitions of common terms are exceedingly useful when you're pushing the boundaries. When you're not content not-thinking the same crap every other group-thinking moron is not-thinking about. And I'm not talking about average people here, I'm talking about academics who supposedly are intellectuals.

What Is Meta-Leveling?

Well, you've just had a fine example of it above. I intended to write an article about a formal definition of meta-leveling I developed a few weeks ago. It's in my mind now because just yesterday I developed a definition of transcending.

But before getting into a formal definition of meta-leveling, I thought it would be important to get straight what it is in the first place. And then I realized it was even more important to explain why a formal definition of meta-leveling is important.

What is meta-leveling formally? It is making a complete model of a system and then annotating the model by determining its most important elements. Which are almost always the elements with the greatest freedom of output.

How To Meta-Level

Okay, when I say model, you can forget UML or any other such crap. You'll see why in a minute. You can also forget functional modeling since that only works for mathematicians. 90% of human beings are better suited to OO since human brains prefer SVO word order to VOO. So pick up Object Oriented Systems Analysis by Embley, Kurts & Woodfield. It's available from Powells and of course Amazon.

Meta-leveling is nothing more than creating a complete OOSA model of the system whose parts you're thinking about then annotating the model. It's based on those annotations that you decide what parts of the system to think about. Because some elements (objects, relationships or interactions) are more free in their output than others (they're generally the ones that control the system).

Other elements contradict each other in the system. There may also be contradictions between elements and the system as a whole. There may be overly complicated elements that can be simplified. Or made weaker, or made stronger, or made more general, or more flexible, or more restricted depending on your concerns. There may be objects that can be unified together.

Meta-leveling is the process of creating this OOSA model and annotating it with all of these descriptions. Ideally, you do all this in your head without relying on paper. Or even conscious thought. So if you're talking about some objects in the system with someone but one of the other objects in the completed model is more worthy of attention and consideration then shifting the conversation to those other objects is said to be meta-leveling. The beginning of this essay is a good example. I had no outline nor any plan, the shift just popped up from my subconscious.

What Meta-Leveling Is For

Meta-leveling is known as Judgement in Bloom's original taxonomy of cognition. It is the highest form of cognition, one which not all people are capable of. It is also known as Evaluation. Judgement is the capacity to distinguish not just right and wrong (fitness to a predetermined goal) but good and evil (determining the goals themselves). Strictly speaking, judgement is broader than determining good and evil. It's just that

Eliezer Yudkowsky makes a big deal of recursion. In planning, recursion is not just considering your goals and plans, but the other players' goals and plans. And in double recursion, you assume that the other players have considered your goals and plans, so you account for that as well. Well, meta-leveling is so much more powerful than recursion that it makes recursion look like a weak pathetic thing.

After all, meta-leveling was the crucial step required to go from playing a game using rules to playing against the other players. Recursion is nothing compared to meta-leveling since it stays on the same level always. Eliezer Yudkowsy harps on recursion because he is incapable of meta-leveling, because he is incapable of synthesis.

By meta-leveling the first time you go from playing the pieces of the game, to playing the players in the game. By meta-leveling a second time, you change the game's rules, outcomes and players entirely. It's like going from playing against your opponent in chess, to playing 3 dimensional fantasy chess where the winners are the best 3 cooperators out of 5 players.

Meta-Meta-Leveling

Meta-leveling twice in a row is called transcending. The first meta-leveling step gave you a model of the system and identified its most important elements. The second meta-leveling step gives you all the ways this system can evolve in future, all the forces that direct its evolution, and the entire space of possibilities for you to redesign the system. Transcending a system means to redesign its entire architecture so that it is no longer recognizable as the original system. It is not an improved system, it is radically different and better.

On reflection, my definition of meta-leveling isn't nearly as formal as I'd like. Meta-leveling is not just creating a model, it's annotating it. Doing it a second time is creating a super-model and annotating that. I didn't make this correspondence explicit enough. I also didn't point out that every time you model (or meta-level) you make things more generic, more abstract. Now there are multiple types of super-models but this is exactly as it should be since there are multiple aspects to any system. Every real system admits to multiple models, and every model admits to multiple super-models. Mathematicians ought to be very familiar with this.

In particular, if you create a model in the OOSA style then the OOSA book is one possible super-model. It's not a very interesting super-model (or form of transcending) so don't waste your time on it. If you didn't use the OOSA style but just did it in your head, then a model of your mind is the super-model that replaces the OOSA book (and a theory of the human mind replaces the endnotes of the OOSA book). That's at least more interesting than the book. What I described at the beginning of this section is a reliably interesting type of super-model for a systems designer.

It now seems dubious to me that there can be more than two types of meta-leveling. The first goes upwards to the conceptual space. The second goes upwards to the realization that contains the concept. What else can there be?

Meta-Meta-Meta-Leveling

By meta-leveling three times in a row, you leave the system entirely behind you to enter into the realm of generic systems design. If the level is chess, the meta-level is a rulebook on chess and transcending is fantasy cooperative chess, then meta**3 is talking about the nature of meta-leveling and how important it is for systems design. In other words, this blog post.

Which reminds me, meta-leveling and transcending are the #1 and #2 tools of any systems designer. If you can't do them then don't even bother. Another crucial tool is empathy. Now, the really funny thing is that empathy's formal definition is: the capacity for formation of other-identities (to complement self-identity). Psychopaths are incapable of this, probably because they lack a crucial form of synthesis.

Multi-Leveling

Now what makes this funny is that formation of identities for others is ... meta-leveling. What Dabrowski calls "multi-leveling" (formation of a complex and utterly accurate self-identity) is ... meta-leveling your own mind. Empathy is just ... meta-leveling other people's minds. So you see, the top three tools of any systems designer are meta-leveling any system, meta-leveling twice in a row, and meta-leveling human minds. Hmm, I sense a pattern here. It's almost like meta-leveling is important.

Incidentally, Dabrowski was incapable of multi-leveling or meta-leveling, which is why he didn't have any insights into the process. He never realized that multi-leveling was meta-circular (the whole of the meta-level exists as a subpart inside of the level it describes) or that it was related to consciousness (which is also meta-circular). In fact, he never understood multi-leveling as the formation of a complex and accurate self-identity. Beyond identifying that the process existed and that it had something to do with ethics and integrity, he was in the dark about it.

Dabrowski also made up the crappiest theories about the nature of Development Potential (people who can multi-level). But his estimation of less than 10% of the general population capable of multi-leveling sounds about right. Of those 10% less than one tenth are naturally prone to multi-leveling because they use their synthesis more heavily than their analysis. Synthesis is what drives the process after all, while analysis just keeps it in check. These one or two percent of the population will try to meta-level everything they come across.

Who Can Meta-Level?

It's not every person that can meta-level. The process can be described so that any person capable of logic will be able to follow it, but it takes synthesis (creativity) to actually do it. Engineers and mere programmers for instance, will never be able to meta-level. So why bother describing it? So that I can say in your face you pretentious assholes! Because they claim to be able to do synthesis and the truth is, they can't.

Meta-leveling is the province of people capable of both synthesis and analysis. It takes synthesis to create the original concepts and it takes analysis for those concepts to be both correct and also to keep the meta-level strictly separate from the level. People lacking in logic are prone to thinking the map is the same as the system it describes, that by changing the map, they change how the system works. This is literal magical thinking.

But let's set aside the pretentious fuckers who can't meta-level but desperately want to be thought of as just as good as those who can. For those who possess both analysis and synthesis, and thus CAN meta-level, the whole process of meta-leveling is something that can be learned and practiced.

Skill and Talent

Of course, a person will show skill at meta-leveling only when they can do it subconsciously. When they have no need to draw out the diagrams on paper at all. This is why I said UML software is worthless. If you need computer software to help you meta-level, you're hopelessly incompetent. And then of course there is the question of talent. Let's say that a person shows talent only if they're able to meta-level subconsciously before ever learning to do it consciously.

If you're able to skim the first couple chapters of Object Oriented Systems Analysis by Embley then flip to the endnotes (where they have a formal OOSA model of the OOSA modeling formalism) and make sense of them then congrats, you've got talent. If you're able to read that book and this article, then think back to how you were meta-leveling years ago as an adolescent, then congrats you've definitely got talent.

And if you haven't got talent at it, then go back and reread the previous section where I go on about how the overwhelming majority of people will never do it in their lives and couldn't do it even if there were a loaded gun stuck to their heads and their lives depended on it. Be glad that you can do it at all. Be glad you can learn. Be glad and appreciate your cognitive gifts.

And if you can't meta-level at all? Fuck off.

Why Software Is Stupidly Slow

2011-04-01T16:13:00.000-07:00

People often bitch about software being slow and they have every reason to. Modern hardware has plenty of CPU and GPU cycles to spare, so why the fuck is it so slow? The software I have to use that's slow as molasses is Office, Opera and Firefox.

The first thing I observe is that these pieces of crapware do things I never asked them to do, I don't want them to do, things I don't need them to do, things I don't want them to do, things that nobody anywhere either wants nor needs them to do. Let's look at some examples.

Opera keeps all 30 pages I have in tabs immediately renderable. Did I ever ask it to do that? Like fuck I did. Most of those tabs are things I haven't looked at in days. One of them I hadn't looked at in 3 weeks.

Inevitably those 30 tabs will grow to 120 tabs, which will have Opera thrashing for no good fucking reason and then I'll save them all as a new session (rendering them unusable) and start from scratch.

If there were a better way to organize tabs than multiple windows (which are difficult to use and unhelpful) then I would use them. Not that moving the tabs to another window would help since Opera insists like some kind of fucking moronic retard to keep those tabs immediately renderable too!

Who the fuck decided it was a good idea to keep every bit of cruft a web user left opened immediately renderable? What kind of fucking retard at Opera decided on this dys"functionality"? I never wanted this feature, I never asked for it, I don't need it, NOBODY needs it. Nobody on the fucking planet needs it!

Nevermind that it is dysfunctional and fucking harmful, nobody needs this.

The same goes for Firefox and Office. I only open Office to read RTF files. Do I fucking need all this "functionality" that takes 30 seconds to load? For fuck's sake, does any Office user need it?! I would dearly love to know whether more than 10% of core Office users need to regularly change between 50 different fonts. I use one font, ONE, Sylfaen, that's it!

It seems to me if software did ONLY what every one of the core users needs (instead of what's expected by the programmer's peers and tradition, or what the programmer thinks might be nice, or what users say they want or ask for, or what some user wants, or what non-core users need) then so much crap falls away in the code, so many "features" go away, that there's plenty of computing power for what's actually needed.

Kinect Is Useless

2011-03-30T23:38:00.000-07:00

Aha! It took a long time but I finally figured out that Kinect is useless. I blame having just woken up.

Gesture languages are just castrated forms of sign languages, which are full-fledged langugaes. And sign languages are useless for people who aren't deaf. So gesture languages are useless. QED. I've known that for years now.

Oh and they also make you look retarded, take a look at the photo of the three retards behind the conference table in Google's Gmail Motion for proof. Google seriously thinks this photo will help sell this piece of crapware. "more efficient and intuitive" my ass!

Conceptual Analysis

The problem is that it seemed Kinect had more. And it turns out the "more" bit, the part about moving stuff from device to device "with a flick of your fingers" can be done entirely without flicking your fingers.

All it requires is a good UI, one that provides an extensible spatio-visual field. So that your computer exists in a space represented on its monitor and other devices exist as extensions of that space. That's the basic conceptual mechanism underlying "moving stuff from device to device".

Note that this conceptual mechanism does not in any way rely on fingers or hand motions or body motions or "multi-touch" (ugh!) or anything of the kind. It can be achieved with the mouse, which is a perfectly usable pointing device.

A device far, far more sensitive than that crappy fucking piece of shit Kinect that requires you to move your hand 15 centimeters for a gesture. Seriously, what the fuck? Those ergonomics are atrocious!

You see, when you break things down at their conceptual level, you've got a conceptual mechanism + hardware, and those are independent. Kinect provides the hardware only. And this hardware sucks for ergonomic reasons.

If an input device like Kinect ever acquired sub-centimeter resolution then it would compete directly against the mouse and could be superior to it. But I predict that such an input device won't use (because it won't need) shitty gimmicks like gesture languages.

It's a similar analysis that reveals that touch screens absolutely suck for general computers and laptops.

It's another similar analysis that reveals multi-touch is useless. I mean for fuck's sake, in my design work I've come up with two pointers and am struggling to have any kind of justification to have more. I don't have any use for multi-touch.

It's another similar analysis that reveals that mouse buttons are useless so mice should really have zero buttons. Because the mouse can never support as many buttons as the keyboard (ergonomics) and the keyboard is where buttons belong (conceptually)!

The Fundamentals

The basic problem with input devices is this:

you've got your discrete events device - the keyboard provides zero dimensional input
you've got your continuous 2D device - the mouse provides 2 dimensional input

what's left?

Adding buttons to mice doesn't improve them because they shouldn't have any buttons at all. Mice shouldn't generate discrete events at all! It is a defect in UI programmers' imaginations that has made users associate so-called "mouse events" with mice.

Laser mice are a great change to mice hardware but they don't change what the mice does conceptually so it's evolutionary, not revolutionary, to users. To hardware designers, laser mice are of course revolutionary.

Multi-touch is having 2 or 3 times the already existing continuous 2D device. And you can achieve 90% of the benefits of that by having an easy way to switch off between multiple pointers. Chasing that remaining 10% is just not worth the effort - you end up "needing" it only for gimmicks.

Touch screens are just 2D continuous input devices with horrible ergonomics. Interesting in theory, useless in practice. You need something as bizarre as the iPad where the proportion of input to output activity is miniscule (eg, restricted to flipping pages) to make touchscreens viable.

1D continuous input is ... provided by the scroll wheel. Hence that is revolutionary from the user's point of view! So now we have in the present situation

a 0D input device - the keyboard
a 1D input device - the wheel
a 2D input device - the mouse

What the fuck more do we need?

The False Need For 3D

In certain rarefied applications, we might desire a genuinely 3D input device. These (eg, ringmouse) haven't panned out because of technological problems with resolution. Hmm, poor resolution, does that sound familiar?

The bigger problem with them is that their applicability is extremely limited. Because the visual cortex of homo sapiens sapiens isn't 3D! It's strictly 2+1D, like a topographical map or bitmap. Which is exactly what the wheelmouse provides!

Except for a few freaks, human brains just don't process 3D data. We don't see in 3D (you can't see the inside of a box and its outside simultaneously), you don't think in 3D, you don't visualize in 3D (go ahead, try to visualize all sides of a solid box at the same time), you do nothing in 3D except move your body. You do everything in 2+1D.

Is it any wonder then that anyone wanting to push 3D input devices resorts to proprioception? To moving around and dancing with your body? Even though moving around your body has fuck all to do with any computer game or software application out there? Yeah yeah, it looks great. And you know what? Fucking useless!

Look at the video of Kinect users in the first article I linked to. Do you see any game or application in the video? No. Because the peddlers of this tech couldn't imagine anyone actually using it for anything exciting so they didn't bother to make a rigged demo. It's exactly like I said - it looks great but it's fucking useless.

The challenge for input hardware designers is that input hardware is already perfect. Excepting only that slanted QWERTY keyboards are fucking horrible and Kinesis contoured keyboards are vastly superior. Well, that's a legacy problem and a patent problem. The patent may have expired but it's been there holding up progress for a long time.

And while I'm at it, 3D output hardware (holograms and phased array optics) are also useless for individual users. They only come into their own in holodecks where multiple users can interact. Otherwise, virtual retinal display is plenty good enough. Or I suppose if you want to drive what the user sees with natural head motion without inducing nausea.

Summary

Like touchscreens, 3D output hardware is of limited applicability. Great when you absolutely need it, terrible most of the time. Like automatic kitty lasers, 3D input hardware is completely fucking useless. We don't really need 3D because the human brain just doesn't process it. We need inspired use of 2+1D. And this isn't going to take better technology but better systems designers. Unfortunately, we're pretty good at the former and terrible at the latter.

A Response To George Monbiot's Turnaround on Nuclear

2011-03-22T15:36:00.000-07:00

I just read the most fascinating article by George Monbiot and I had to respond.

Still the Same

George, you still profess hatred for "the liars in the nuclear industry" (whoever they might be, I'm at quite a loss) but embrace the anti-human scumbag liars in your own "green" movement. What a paragon of truth and moral rectitude you are!

It's by no coincidence that green is the colour of money. It's because you and your ilk are just foot-soldiers of the aristocracy waging endless war against humanity. Yes, you still are an anti-human eco-zealot in my book even if you've repented of your most grievous sins.

It Almost Sounds Like ...

Your article was surprising since it almost sounds like you've read my blog posts, something I doubt. Starting with your switching from the false & misleading term "renewable" to the technically correct ambient (low-powered hence weak and useless).

But mostly, it almost sounds like you've read my scorning hatred of you self-righteous egotistical assholes that sanctimoniously decree everyone not your rich white elite selves ought to freeze in the cold and the dark, in misery, starvation, disease and poverty. "Sustainably", that is to say, forever.

Man vs Nature

I keep hearing recently all this moronic talk of "loving the land", from people who ignore the corollary "hate humanity". The converse is true of course, to love humanity you have to hate the land. Because humanity is at war with a capricious fickle nature and always will be until one of them is destroyed. And since nature is stupid, I guarantee you it won't be nature that wins.

It amazes me how anyone can be so twisted up inside, so anti-social, and let's face it downright psychopathic as to love filthy dirt above human beings! But whatever, yeah, you're still one of those moronic saps that "loves the land" George. The proof is in the fact you still haven't rejected the twisted up "deep ecology" scum that hate humanity with a passion and want us all to die. In the eternal war of man versus nature, you side AGAINST humanity.

Still a Tool

I know you haven't read my blog posts and are on the whole incapable of learning. You're just reacting to personal experience, even if that personal experience is on TV. The proof of this is you still haven't learned about the Wet Sahara effect or about Freeman Dyson's comprehensive denunciation of the whole field of "climate research".

(I note here that I didn't need that denunciation. I recognized the smell of crap coming off of the field years before Dyson weighed in to tell us exactly where the crap was and exactly how large it still is.)

George, you still harp about "climate change" as if it were a bad thing. Though I suppose it actually is a bad thing for your entrenched aristo masters. But then, it's not news that you're still a tool, is it? You're a journalist (or columnist, whatever) which obviates even the possibility of you mattering on your own terms.

What It's All About

And since you are a tool, this article had nothing to do with you and everything to do with the industrial needs of England. Coal has been written off because of those nasty coal-miners' unions. Gas has been written off because any pipelines pass through France. Which leaves nuclear and ... nothing else. It's that simple.

This article isn't about the change of heart of a person of principle, since you haven't changed your heart and you have no principles. This article is about England's industrial policy, pure and simple.

Academia Is Obsolete

2011-03-12T01:39:00.000-08:00

And good riddance to it. It's all very simple. Academia has exactly three missions:

educate students by
- making books available, and
- having teachers put on performances
certify people's educations
perform research

The first mission, as everyone knows, is obsolete. Youtube provides many excellent lectures which are 99.9% as good as live performances for 0.1% the price. The writing's on the wall.

For the same reasons, the time of physical paper libraries is fast approaching an end. And good riddance since textbook publishers have long been using yearly textbook revisions in order to extort money from their customers. All to great waste and expense.

That's not even counting the fact that online textbooks can contain copious internal and external electronic links as well as video and interactive simulations. Not to mention how small and easy to carry electronic books (and lectures) are compared to their physical counterparts.

The second mission is also obsolete. Harry Collins has noted the steady draining of all authority from academia. The only department invented in modern times, computer science, produces certificates that don't matter a damn in the real world.

It also produces journals that are designed to be as obsolete as possible on the grounds that nothing new in computer science could ever hope to be properly scientific. The paper describing the publishing industry is itself hopelessly obsolete. Everything it describes in such tedious language boils down to laws #6, #19, #20, and #32 of System-antics.

Le Chatelier's Principle: Complex systems tend to oppose their own proper function. As systems grow in complexity, they tend to oppose their stated function.
Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being.
Intra-system goals come first.
As systems grow in size, they tend to lose basic functions.

With blatantly obvious specifics such as that the purpose of academic publishing is to enhance careers, make hiring decisions easier, and to be picked up by library administrators. The paper specifically fails to mention any attempts, any publisher or publication system, trying to go beyond the university feudal system whose support is the real purpose of academic publishing. Arxiv and c2 wiki both veritably leap to mind.

Harry Collins believes or hopes that there is some way to recover the authority of academia. Preferably for academics no doubt. After all, he is one. Well there isn't. I know it's only obvious to me for reasons I'm not going to get into, but ... basically, the forces (for universality and democratization of authority) which Harry Collins has identified as so efficiently breaking down the academic system of authority. Forces which are greatly amplified and magnified by peer to peer horizontal communication and self-directed learning. These forces which are breaking down academia's authority will continue to do so until academia is ground to NOTHING because there is NO WAY to resolve them until some entirely different system replaces academia and crushes it.

What we are seeing here is the introduction of a genuinely new force in modernity that is causing one of the most basic functions of academia, its authority, to disappear. This dynamic embodies laws #6, #18, and #32 of systemantics.

The mode of failure of a complex system cannot ordinarily be predicted from its structure.
The Newtonian Law of Systems Inertia: A system that performs a certain way will continue to operate in that way regardless of the need or of changed conditions.
A complex system cannot be "made" to work. It either works or it doesn't.

Academic authority simply doesn't work. And the forces that are weakening academic authority will not stop doing so until they are resolved. And they will never be resolved from within academia or from anything that can ever be absorbed BY academia for the simple reason that these forces are already far bigger than academia. Not more powerful, just bigger, consisting of a larger fraction of all human life. So academic authority will continue to shrivel up until something entirely different from, and in its critical dimension far larger than, academia steps up to put a bullet through its head and make soap out of its body fat. Academic Authority will die a miserable and inglorious death leaving Academia weaker than a long-term concentration camp survivor.

I will be cheering.

The third mission is the only one that's left and the North American universities have undermined it badly with their recent love for the patent system. I say recent but it's really a couple of decades old. There have been ample studies that universities obtaining patents barely recoup the costs of filing for the patents, if at all.

(Quite aside the fact the only thing the patent system does is stifle innovation. And it's not even good at this outside of biochem (eg, pharmaceuticals) so all it really does is add unnecessary costs.)

Anyways, the point is that NA universities' love of corporate attitudes (probably from having corporate scum in charge) does nothing to bring money to universities and does everything to erode the reputation of universities as a public service. A reputation which took a lot longer to build up (or rebuild) than it will take to be destroyed.

So NA universities have turned basic research from a public mission funded by public monies into a private for-profit endeavour. How long can they expect to hold onto public monies?

Now you might say this isn't a problem for all universities everywhere, but once universities disappear off the north american continent, how long will it take for people elsewhere to start asking some hard questions?

If all you need is a public basic research lab, then the format of a university isn't a very good one, is it? Hell, professors don't even like teaching. Or publishing in peer-reviewed journals (which suck). Or seeking grants. Or subordinating their research goals to more senior researchers that control everything nowadays.

It's past time to nuke this system and start from scratch!

On Harmless AIs

2011-03-11T23:17:00.000-08:00

It constantly amazes me when people talk about AIs in the singular as if they won't come in multiples. As if it'll be this singular giant Borg overmind. Wait no, the Borg overmind is still made up of many sub-units. It's more like they think an AI is God. Singular, jealous, desiring of worship.

And this amazement only deepened when I realized that turning AI from an individual into a society, or species, was the most blatantly obvious way to make them harmless. None of the doomsayers talk about evil AI societies, and there's a good reason for that. Diversity causes people's efforts to mostly cancel out whereas "unitary executives" (aka dictators) are known-evil.

Even the novel Hyperion with its manipulative and putatively evil AI society (no more evil than the humans) is all about creating a super-individual. The AIs are trying to create an individual AI God (and what a ridiculous concept that is) and the humans reciprocate. And overall those novels suck and blow big time. Point is, the AI species just coexists with the human species in it, and it's only the gods that seek otherwise.

Well I just now realized that turning an AI into a species isn't just an obvious way to make it harmless. It's a guaranteed way to do so. Species are institutions and institutions' number one goal is their own survival. Everything else becomes subordinate to that. Conquest, destruction, worship of the great white god Yudkowsky, everything else just gets shunted aside.

Laws #19, #20 and #32 of systemantics inform us that,

Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being.
Intra-system goals come first.
As systems grow in size, they tend to lose basic functions.

So if you think an AI might be dangerous, then just create another AI with different goals from the first one, then have them interact with each other. Presto, they're a community - a larger system. And this larger system now has goals and is going to lose the basic functions (purposes in life) of the individual AIs. And if this AI community isn't becoming harmless fast enough then there's a simple solution for that - make more AIs!

Laws #21, #25, and #30 of systemantics says,

The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem (F.F.T.): Complex systems usually operate in failure mode.
The larger the system, the greater the probability of unexpected failure.
The Vector Theory of Systems: Systems run better when designed to run downhill.

And what a happy coincidence because this is what we want! We want the AI species to fail to have any larger goal or purpose other than its own survival. And all the laws of complex systems point that way! It's practically fucking guaranteed! Unless you try to produce a single "peaceful AI" or some crazy shit like that, in which case law #21 guarantees the AI will fail to be peaceful.

Conclusion, AIs will be harmless unless dangerous crazy fucking bastards like Eliezer Yudkowsky get their way and have a hand in the creation of every single AI. Or even worse, if they are permitted to pursue their totalitarian jerkoff fantasies and only one single all-powerful AI gets produced. Then we're doomed.

Non-determinism Is An Incoherent Notion

2011-03-11T01:16:00.000-08:00

The meaning of non-determinism, if indeed the term has any, must be formalizable. It may take years or even decades to formalize this meaning but it must be possible to do so. It's already been nearly a century and despite the pressing need for just such a formal definition (or something resembling a formal definition), the adherents of the Copenhagen interpretation haven't advanced a single one.

There are four possibilities:

branching
singularity
choice function
non-mathematics

Branching

If you have a Turing machine which replicates itself at every decision point in order to explore all possibilities, this is what mathematicians call non-determinism. Unfortunately for Copenhagen advocates, this is precisely what Everett's Many-Worlds theory does and it is understood to be perfectly deterministic. The result of a computation by a Turing Machine that replicates itself is not "an unknown and undetermined machine" among the set of machines that exist at that point in time, rather the result is the set of all the Turing machines that exist at that point in time. That set is well-defined.

Singularity

This is the mathematical concept that has the most uses in physics. Stephen Hawking claimed that black holes are non-unitary (singular) and simultaneously claimed that Einstein was wrong so the two must be related, right? Not so. Setting aside the fact that the non-unitarity of the universe is hotly contested, since every law of physics is unitary, singularity doesn't have any of the qualitative properties ascribed to non-determinism. The outcome of multiplying a matrix by a singular matrix is very well-defined; the outcome of multiplying a matrix by a "non-deterministic" matrix is not supposed to be well-defined. But there seems to be a way to rescue the concept if you consider non-determinism to be the inverse of a singular matrix. Now we're getting close to non-determinism. Unfortunately, there are two interpretations of taking the inverse of a singular matrix. 1) you get the set of all matrices which multiplied with that matrix give you some identity, or 2) you get absolutely nothing. #1 gets you back to Branching and #2 clearly contradicts reality (the result of any allegedly non-deterministic experiment is always something).

Choice function

A choice function is a function that "selects" an element from a set. If you have a set with ten elements then there are ten possible choice functions on it. Choice functions are the only way to modify the Copenhagen Interpretation so as to make it intelligible without making it an entirely different theory (ie, without making it into Many-Worlds). Unfortunately, it also immediately disproves the resultant theory.

Philosophy of science explains that its purpose is to explain everything we perceive around us in as concise and formal a manner as possible. So as it stands, the Copenhagen Interpretation is incomplete because it fails to explain everything. In fact, it explains almost nothing of what we perceive.

The Copenhagen Interpretation doesn't explain how you get from a particle in state A at time t=0 to that particle in state B at time t=1 and the underlying quantum mechanical equations (which are fully deterministic since "non-deterministic math" is an incoherent concept) only tell you that the particle will evolve from state A at time t=0 to states B, C, D, and E at time t=1 (there's a story in here about how Copenhagenites abuse the mathematical concept of probability if someone wants to see me rant about physicists). So in order to complete the Copenhagen Interpretation you need to add a choice function to it that selects which state the particle will be in at time t=1.

The problem is this. A complete theory of physics must explain all perceptions and all physical objects it defines. So the choice function that you add to the Copenhagen Interpretation must provide information on state changes of 10**70 particles (the estimated number of particles in the universe) for every time interval during which a state change can occur. And that time interval is short; if one were feeling uncharitable, one would choose Planck time (10^-43 seconds). And this is over the entire lifetime of the universe. If the universe has an open geometry then this means that the choice function must encode an infinite amount of information. But let's be charitable and assume that the choice function chosen contains only 10^100 bits of information.

Now here is where the Copenhagen Interpretation dies. The complexity of the complete 'Copenhagen + choice function A' theory is greater than "God did it". From a formal point of view, there is nothing wrong with the theory "God created the universe" where you define;

'the universe' = 'everything you perceive', and
'God' = 'a powerful entity that would want to create the universe'.

The only thing that's wrong with this theory is that it's too complex since 'the universe' must contain an exhaustive enumeration of every bit of perception you have ever and will ever experience. And yet, it's simpler than the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Non-mathematics

By that I mean only that 'non-determinism' is an undefined concept. Not the well-defined concept "undefined" but an undefined, null, meaningless concept. Per the above paragraph, this violates the philosophy of science and makes the Copenhagen Interpretation into incoherent nonsense.

Hardline apologists for the Copenhagen Interpretation will claim "you can't explain everything" but how would they know when they've entirely given up on the endeavour?

Previously published on wiki wiki web.

Mineral Depletion? Not Fucking Likely!

2011-03-10T16:17:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine sent me this article on supposed mineral depletion. I well remember the days not so long ago when I took such things seriously. For a minute there I actually had a flashback to those times.

At least until the moronic writer started talking about supposed copper depletion, a topic I know only too well having investigated all its facets. But yeah, talking about copper depletion just gave the entire game away and then I couldn't take this anti-human pro-poverty doomsaying crap seriously anymore.

Copper

We're not going to have enough copper, really? Yeah, that's without taking into account undersea minerals from extinct black smokers. There ought to easily be as many of those as there EVER has been copper on land. And mining the seabed has distinct advantages since you can trivially move on from one area to the next. So on that basis alone, copper depletion is just doomsaying crap.

But more importantly, technology and usage of copper are both changing. Copper has traditionally been used for:

electrical wires
telephone wires
electrical equipment including motors, transformers and generators
water pipes
catenary wires

And the funny thing about all of those applications is that copper is being substituted out of them. Every single one.

Electrical wires are now primarily made from aluminum - all high voltage wires are, and there is nothing stopping low voltage wires from being aluminum so long as you don't use any improper (or preferably any at all) copper-aluminum contacts.

Telephone wires? Two words: fiber optics. Someone has even come up with bendable plastic fibers for short ranges. And now we're moving to optical computer interconnects so in a decade the wires on your motherboard are going to be fiber optics.

Water pipes are all shifting to PVC because it's cheaper and no more unhealthy than lead-copper poisoning. And for the purposes of making fertilizer and plastics, we are never, ever going to run out of hydrocarbons. Those take natural gas, not petrol, and very small amounts of it too.

Superconducting wire uses about 1/1000th the amount of copper to carry the same amount of current as plain copper. Superconducting electrical motors are being developed for the excellent reason that they are ridiculously smaller, an overwhelming advantage in certain key applications. So you can count on superconducting electrical equipment being developed. And that's without counting fault current limiters which don't currently exist and REQUIRE superconducting wire.

So superconductors have been advancing very slowly but very steadily over the past two decades and it's easy to imagine them continuing to do so for the next two decades. And that's not even counting the freaky shit that's just been uncovered like variable-Tc superconductors. The kind of mind-bogglingly freaky shit that often presages a revolution. In any case, currently superconductors are at the stage of being barely commercially viable. In 20 years they should be dominant.

Finally, catenary wires are switching to half-magnesium. It's still half-copper but that's only a first step.

So we're not going to be able to use copper like we did? Well WHO GIVES A SHIT?! The only thing that matters is that we WERE ABLE to use copper way back when it was the only option. Nowadays it is no longer the only option! Because we used it as ruthlessly and profligately as possible so as to bring wealth and technology forwards! We're now safely past the dependency on that stuff. And that's assuming there's going to be shortages since recall the undersea mining!

Platinum

Platinum? Platinum can go fuck itself. We are ALREADY operating in a severe shortage situation with regards to platinum, which is why chemists have been busily hunting for alternatives to it wherever they can. And finding them! Superatoms were discovered for that reason. And you know, platinum is quite plentiful in asteroids. If we ever really, REALLY needed it, building an orion nuclear starship would be economically viable. If platinum ever becomes critical to industrial civilization then you can bet a political problem isn't going to stop us mining it. As for that whole hysterical crap about platinum being mined at 3 parts per million, oooh aaah, fucking uranium is mined at 3 parts per BILLION. It's not even remotely the cheapest method to mine uranium but it's commercially viable.

Then there's the notion of "production peaks"? There is no such thing for fucking solids. Only liquids! Liquids GUSH UNDER PRESSURE. Solids DO NOT. Solid ores just go down in grade (and way up in amount) so get more expensive to process with the same mining technology. Emphasis on the same mining technology. Because mining technology continues to advance.

Tellerium

Tellerium is used in solar panels as cadmium telluride. When that industry goes bust then there'll be an oversupply. And it will go bust because it's not even remotely economically viable but is just religious frenzy worshipping the sun god. Tellerium is critical for nothing, it's a fucking poison. Looking into its applications, it's certainly interesting but critical? I don't see PCM memory chips winning out in the mass market - it's pretty obvious that memristors are the wave of the future. Maybe for space applications but how much do you need for that?! X-ray detectors? Meh. Again, how much do you need? As for casting and machining steel ... :D good luck, because the industry's moving away from that. Blowing / Injecting Metallic Glasses is the way things are going. That and additive (as opposed to subtractive in "machining") manufacturing (aka 3D printing) which is probably going to end up using plastics and titanium. And car manufacture is moving towards resins and fireglass as in iStream's T.25. And I suppose aluminum, which is a mainstay now.

Rare Earths

Neodynium is "controlled" by China because it's the only fucking country that's industrialized AND backwards enough to allow its mining. It's not like it magically doesn't exist anywhere, it's that other countries don't want to mine it! In that it reminds me of molybdenum which is critical for nuclear reactor vessels. Both neodynium and molybdenum, unlike tellerium, ARE critical. It would take decades to learn to replace them.

In this article, you can read all about neodynium and other rare earths. Pay attention to the fact that neodynium (and ruthenium) are both used in tiny tiny parts of great big machines. Neodynium is used in just the permanent magnets of the electric motors or generators of much bigger machines. Ruthenium isn't used in hard drives, it's used in the GMR flying read-write HEADS at the TIPS of actuator arms inside of hard drives. That's a rather large difference. The parts we're talking about are miniscule. And just like if uranium suddenly jumped in price 50x then it wouldn't matter, so too if neodynium and ruthenium jump in price 50x then it won't matter. So an electric bicycle doubles in price, so what? That doesn't matter in the long term. And believe me, a lot of mining suddenly becomes A LOT more viable when the price of a mineral jumps 50x on the market.

Talking about rhodium is fucking ridiculous. Its main use is replacing platinum. If we had plenty of platinum from asteroid mining, we wouldn't use rhodium at all. And I bet we could get rhodium the same place as the platinum! Moreover, both rhodium and ruthenium can be extracted from nuclear fission products. And THAT technology is currently advancing by leaps and bounds. Could enough of it be extracted? Yes, if enough is more than is currently being mined.

Synthesizing Ruthenium and Rhodium

(27 tonnes a year per 1000 MWe * 377 MWe global capacity) / (14% nuclear share of world electric capacity) = 72 707 tonnes of uranium fuel per year

That's uranium fuel used with current technology to meet present world production of electricity. Production which is going to go up massively as the third world industrializes and people leave poverty. And furthermore,

73 000 tonnes * 0.03 * 0.06 = 131 400 kilograms

Because you see, current reactors burn uranium very inefficiently at a rate of about 3% of fuel. And ruthenium is about 6% of fission products. And actually, ruthenium is only mined at 12 tonnes a year. So there is the potential to extract 10x the current supply of ruthenium from fission products by 2050 when the world will have largely switched to nuclear power. After all, France did its nuclear switch in 15 years so there's absolutely no reason why the world can't do it in 40.

As for rhodium which is mined at 25 tonnes a year and is only 1.3% of fission products, there is "merely" the potential to extract as much rhodium from fission products as is currently being mined.

So long term, the situation looks very, VERY good. With a supply of both that will last the next billion years at present levels of consumption. Which isn't likely to happen but as I already stated, technology makes consumption go up AND down. And high prices tend to make consumption go down.

The technology that will make this viable is laser enrichment, since it's the final step necessary to weed out all the radioactive isotopes of ruthenium and rhodium after they've been chemically seperated from other elements. For rhodium used for chemical catalysis, radioactivity won't matter a damn. For ruthenium used in hard drives, it's intolerable.

This is all assuming that hard drive technology continues to exist in 20-40 years, something which is extremely doubtful!

Phosphorus

Last but certainly not least, that crockpot author leaves us with a parting shot about the "coming" phosphorus shortage. A notion that is patently ludicrous since even the hardcore doomsayers place it at 200 years out.

We should fear that all the same since as we all know, agricultural technology and world prosperity won't change at all in 200 years! It's not like recycling shit will be ridiculously easy when the most destitute person on earth has an income of 10,000 euros a year. Or when vat meat has taken over all meat production.

Yeah, it's just a throwaway line so it doesn't need any justification or other hook for critical thinking. Just fear, FEAR IT, FEAR IT!!! FEAR THE WRATH OF THE EARTH GOD. FEAR THE FUTURE!! No, there's no religious frenzy or quackery involved in this at all, why do you ask?

Academic Mind Bleach

2011-03-10T00:32:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a very politically incorrect article about race in the USA. Specifically all the status games that are played by the upper class in order to try to deny that race exists. Because it's "politically incorrect" and demonstrates low class origins to say that niggers (American-born inner city blacks) are stupid violent idiots (anti-education, high-crime, low IQ).

Of course, academia comes into it since it's very stubborn about pretending that race doesn't exist. Unless of course it's the blacks getting discriminated against by the whites. Whatever. I wouldn't care at all since this kind of willful blindness is so much less common outside crazyland. Wait no, that's a lie. I'd still care enough to roll my eyes and shake my head about how crazy crazyland is.

But it feeds into a larger pattern. Race isn't the only basic concept which seemingly everyone except academics consider blindingly fucking obvious. Another key concept is morality - the internal rules of a group aimed to promote its well-being. Very few academics have any morality whatsoever. In fact, it's very common among philosophers to deny that morality and ethics even exist as distinct concepts, despite the fact they are NEVER used in the same linguistic context!

Another blatantly obvious concepts that academics systematically try to dismantle are absolute justice. Academics are great fans of postmodernist shit relativism. And the last key concept they war against that comes to mind is rationality. Economists specifically since they systematically try to redefine 'rationality' to mean what the rest of humanity would understand by 'evil'. Economists are great fans of evil you see.

Now, you might naively think that academics are all about dismantling "naive" concepts to free up mind-space for more sophisticated replacements. If it were true I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, academics don't actually have any more sophisticated concepts to replace morality, justice or rationality with. Only equally basic concepts like ethics, psychosis and evil, respectively. And just reducing the number of words in language doesn't make any fucking sense. Unless of course you're just recreating Orwell's 1984.

But it's actually worse than that. You see, academics don't just set out to destroy perfectly good concepts (that happen to interfere with their social stations and the political designs of the rich aristocrats) they go out of their way to preserve ridiculous concepts which have been proven false again and again. The concept of creationism, which Einstein was vehemently opposed to, has resurfaced in physics. Vitalism was given a rebirth by the loathsome Niels Bohr in the so-called Copenhagen "interpretation" of QM. And the capper of all travesties is no doubt the magical self-contradictory notion of "non-determinism" which is so incoherent it can't even be defined!

So no, academics aren't destroying naive concepts in the mistaken hope of replacing them with something better which they don't have on hand. The truth is that even when superior concepts ARE on hand, academics preserve nonsensical concepts. Because the priesthood isn't about spreading knowledge, truth and enlightenment. That's just what it SAYS it does. And as the 8th law of systemantics says: 'The Operational Fallacy: The system itself does not actually do what it says it is doing'. So the mere fact academia SAYS it spreads knowledge, truth and enlightenment is proof that it does no such thing. What it actually does, determined empirically by objective observers, is bleach brains for some nefarious purpose.

The purpose of the hierarchical media is obviously to isolate people, destroy trust in humanity and promote psychopathy. As judged by the existence of shows like 24 and Dexter. In other words, to reshape the most fundamental emotions. The purpose of the hierarchical academia is obviously to reshape the most fundamental ideas. And both of these authoritarian, totalitarian institutions do this for their masters, the ones who pay their salaries and provide them with social status, the rich aristocrats.

How To Convey A Sex Positive Attitude To Children

2011-03-09T22:12:00.000-08:00

I was reading someone's story of catching their child masturbating when it occurred to me to wonder how I would react in that situation. The remarkable thing is that my answer to this, which took me 15 seconds to come up with, is something I have never heard or read of anyone doing anywhere on this planet. Mind you, I have seen a video where a mother did something similar upon catching her underage daughter stripteasing in front of a web cam.

The overwhelming attitudes towards sex on this planet are repressive, hateful and angry. Parents who resent their children masturbating because they themselves were punished for it, and are now probably too fucked up in the head, too overworked and just plain ugly to appreciate it. These kinds of reactions are common among third world countries like the USA and Eastern Europe, to say nothing of Africa, South America and Asia.

The second most common attitude towards sex in this world is child abuse. You know, come to think of it, I'm betting there's a number of asian countries where this is more prevalent than sexual repression. This is the attitude most prevalent in porn stories and it's a good indicator of how fucked up in the head most of humanity remains.

The third most common, or 'least common' since my attitude doesn't even register as a blip, is sex-neutral. The sex-neutral attitude is only found in advanced countries like the Scandinavian nations and I bet Haiti. It's a kind of matter of fact, too serious, condescending attitude where parents tell kids that "everyone does it, they just do it in private" and "so should you". Because if everyone follows Hitler then you should too. What a great message of non-enjoyment of sex that sends to children!

No, my reaction would have no commonality with any of those. No way in fucking hell. I aim MY attitude at sex positive, not fucking neutral, and my reaction is going to reflect that fact. If I ever catch my kids masturbating, I'm going to let them finish and afterwards look at them with a shit-eating grin, ruffle their hair and explain to them I'm happy because I know they're growing up.

And that is how you start a genuine dialogue with your kids about sex instead of the cliche'ed Talk that adolescents laugh about in scorn because it shows how stuffy and fucked up their parents are. Because guess what? It DOES show their parents are stuffy and fucked in the head. The scorn adolescents heap on their parents is well deserved. It's not any kind of "phase" or "emo" or "angst" crap that hateful parents make up to condescendingly justify their "ungrateful" children finally taking a critical look at their own parents and not liking what they see.

The whole notion that children can be called "ungrateful" as if having a half-decent parent is something you should be "grateful" for (and any parent that pulls out that tripe doesn't qualify as half-decent at all) is entirely backwards. Parenting isn't something you pay back, it's something you pay forward so the whole basis for "gratitude" is non-existent. The only possible basis for gratitude a child may have is if their parent(s) did something that is way, way beyond what every other parent in their era is doing. Which of course I would be doing but not you since you are all monsters, as proven by the state of the world you've made.

Let me make it simple, and get back on topic. Kids masturbating is a rite of passage and as such is a good thing. So bloody fucking treat it as such! Catching your kids masturbating isn't a sad event. And explaining sex to them isn't similar to telling them you're divorcing or have been diagnosed with cancer. So smile you retarded jackass.

By the way, divorce doesn't happen near as often for couples with children as childless couples. The stats are deliberately misrepresented by the media, as usual since the media are doom-saying hacks who hate facts. Facts like nuclear power plants are perfectly safe, rape and crime are disappearing, the notion of past climate constancy is bogus, the notion of the Earth heating up being bad is even more bogus, the notion of there being any genuine empirical science behind climate studies is most bogus, American-born blacks are more fucked up and stupider than their white or even hispanic counterparts, elections are anti-democratic, individuals cannot ever change a system from within it, and marital breakdown isn't that bad!

Programmers Show No Empathy

2011-03-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

I will prove here that programmers have all of the expressed empathy of the typical serial killer and psychotic mass murderer. This will be remarkably simple since programmers consistently misrepresent everything in the real world in the way that most blatantly benefits themselves.

To programmers, colour isn't what you see when you turn your head 30 degrees to the side of your monitor. Or 15 minutes after you leave your computer. Rather, colour is light values of phosphors in CRTs.

To programmers, a document isn't an ordered sequence of paragraphs with annotations, titles and owners as almost-perfectly exemplified by this online magazine. Rather, to programmers, a document is a sequence of ASCII characters as in notepad.

(Do check out the magazine linked to above if only to behold the magnificence of paragraph numbering. At last someone of minimal intelligence replaced the ridiculous 20-year obsolete concept of "pages" for online documents. Check out also ... sidenotes! Unfortunately fixed-length but hey show me another site that has them. And you can also change the font size without a fugly dropdown menu or modal << >> buttons.)

To programmers, music isn't a smorgasbord of sound produced by skilled artists conveying their emotions and telling a story. Rather, music is an ordered sequence of 1/8th notes from disconnected recordings as in MIDI.

To programmers, sheet music isn't a means of reminding a skilled artist what to play in a concise, elegant, visually pleasing, and easy (non-busy and non-boring) manner. Rather, sheet music is an ordered sequence of 1/8th notes on a staff.

To programmers, a date and time isn't a plethora of different measures in all sorts of different calendars tied to the rotations and revolutions of various astrophysical objects. Rather, date and time are the integer number of elapsed seconds since Jan 1st 1970.

To programmers, a timezone isn't a consensual and variable means of synchronizing arbitrary clocks to solar days observed at specific geographical locations. Rather, a timezone is a one digit offset from GMT.

To programmers, money isn't tokens of economic exchange taking different forms in different countries, exchangeable between each other according to dynamically varying ratios. Rather, money is an integer number prepended by a $ sign. And ratios between forms of money are always unitary and symmetric (ie, currency controls do not exist).

To programmers, languages isn't something people know one or more of, in order of preference, from a space of possibilities weighed by global popularity and grouped by geographical commonality. Rather, languages is a flat unstructured one-dimensional list organized alphabetically from which you are munificently allowed ONE option. The list is written in English using ASCII of course.

To programmers, an architectural object such as a pipe isn't something with mass, composition (including but not limited to strength and durability), maybe even price and availability. Rather, it's a bunch of lines and planes in a CAD program, and this has been so for nearly 50 years until the very recent emergence of object-oriented architectural modeling software.

To programmers, the terms 'geek' and 'nerd' don't refer to self-obsessed idiots too mentally deficient and deranged to be able to relate to any person different from themselves. Relating to entirely different people the way a real intellectual must. No, a 'geek' or 'nerd' is a sort of champion of what being a programmer is all about and is supposedly intellectually superior.

To programmers, being called a geek or nerd isn't a source of shame that programmers are second only to psychopaths in the category of worst dregs of humanity. And then only because it's difficult to beat American executives and serial killers using the measure of 'worthless scum inimical to humanity'. Rather, being called a geek or nerd is a source of chest-thumping pride.

I leave it as an open question whether programmers fail to express any empathy due to debilitating mental deficiency or because they actually are psychopaths. I personally extend them the benefit of the doubt that they need not all be put to death to safeguard humanity as would be the case if they actually were psychopaths.

Some people may not believe it but I scrupulously extend people the benefit of the doubt. The problem is that there's so little doubt from which any of you monsters can benefit from.

Systems Designers Cannot Bloom Early

2011-02-27T22:21:00.001-08:00

I've found the youngest systems designers in the past century bloomed in their 30s which is an interesting observation. Today I recalled an article about artistic geniuses - some of whom bloomed early and some of whom bloomed late. The early ones had conceptual breakthroughs but it's obvious now that complex systems can never count as simple concepts. So systems designers cannot bloom early because it takes a complex mind to create revolutionary complex systems. Interesting that there's a logical explanation behind the empirical pattern.

This immediately raises the question of what systems designers get up to in their incubation period. The answer to that is both "not much" and "learning about the world, themselves and systems" in conceptual ways that are anathema to academia. And it's pretty obvious to me that the more and earlier they're forced to "produce", the less they'll actually learn. The more society forces systems designers to be "useful" during their incubation period, the more twisted and stunted they'll become. And so the less they'll actually produce over their entire lifetimes.

Nikola Tesla is a great example of a stunted systems designer. Throughout his life he managed to create only 4 complex systems - the AC generator, radio remote control, wireless power transmission, and bladeless turbines. Notice any pattern? All of his achievements were squarely in electrical engineering or just one step removed from electrical engineering. What about philosophy, politics, architecture, psychology? He knew nothing of these subjects and he contributed nothing. Tesla's gifts were squandered by a mean hateful society and his contributions to the world stunted.

This world is run by mental incompetents and others totally lacking in creativity such as engineers and programmers. Their constant demands that more talented creative people "produce" according to their standards and their schedules have ruined all of the creative geniuses in this world. The people who could have been uplifting human civilization were all systematically destroyed by egotistical self-important talentless pricks who then proceeded to pat themselves on the back for it. Because they couldn't stand the existence of people more gifted and talented than they themselves. People with gifts and talents that they, the engineers and programmers and other such uncreative pricks, were far too mentally incompetent to see.

You can't force a systems designer to grow, they must incubate. So if you ever see a bright young thing who's creative and logical and intellectual but is "just wasting their life" ... BACK THE FUCK OFF!

You know, there are times when I wish I could just destroy the enemies of humanity. Unfortunately, that's 40-80% of the human population.

Proof That Unix Programmers Are Retarded Morons

2011-02-27T19:22:00.000-08:00

It doesn't get any more retarded than being unable to name colours. Like confusing silver for grey, or roses for chestnuts, or violets for royal purple, or bamboo green for every other forest green.

And the worst part of it is that HTML sucks and was obviously made by retards so Unix programmers are losing a colour naming contest with retards. Because they think glowing CRT colours are reasonable standards.

I realize now, 'retarded' and 'moronic' are inaccurate descriptions of Unix programmers - inbred is better. The only colours they dealt with were from CRT screens so they thought it would be reasonable to name colours solely on their own inbred concerns.

Unix programmers are inbred morons who don't know anything outside of their own little pathetic Unix world.

Smalltalk: the Software Industry's Greatest Failure

2011-02-27T04:53:00.000-08:00

Every time I think about the miserable state of the software industry, it always comes back to one thing: the Smalltalk programming language.

The failure of the software industry is the failure of its greatest tools, the programming languages and operating systems. The failure of programming languages is the failure of the only natural and useful programming languages, the OO languages. And the failure of OO languages is the failure of the only OO language worth speaking of, Smalltalk.

Programming languages started with the imperative paradigm but they rapidly bifurcated into two mutually contradictory paradigms - functional and OO. Once the bifurcation was complete, the imperative paradigm ceased to have any importance. Beyond being a tool of mentally incompetent brainwashed morons and those desperately maintaining obsolete code of course.

The functional paradigm rejects all notion of modifiable state and orders everything around verbs so that all sentences are verb-object-object. The functional paradigm rejects state and objects so violently that it denies subjects exist. As a direct consequence it is blatantly unnatural to the human brain, contrary to physical reality, and contrary to human consciousness. Only math lovers find the functional paradigm attractive or useful which makes it useless to the rest of humanity.

The object-oriented paradigm is dominated by Smalltalk. Java for example doesn't even remotely qualify as object-oriented having been conceived as a deliberately inferior and broken pseudo-OO version of Smalltalk. The problem is Smalltalk is a failure as an OO language and has definitely not passed the test of time. And I'm not talking about popularity either. I couldn't care less about popularity of programming languages among brainwashed mental incompetents.

The failure of Smalltalk is two-fold. First, the fact that its rules are at least twice as large as they need to be. Because for every general rule of Smalltalk that someone has to assimilate in order to master the language, there is a specific rule (an exception to the general rule) that must ALSO be memorized. There are 8 such exceptions and they are:

variables are not objects - you can't create a variable at runtime by having 'thisContext addVariablesNamed: #('name1' 'name2' 'name3')' and | name1 name2 name3 | is not simple syntactic sugar for the previous code, as it should be. Nor can you send messages to a variable to query when it was last read from or written to.
the existence of variables is bound early at compile time, not at runtime - if you try to compile a method with an undeclared variable, it triggers a compile time error, not a runtime error (and compile time warning) like it should.
assignments and hard returns are not messages - you can't #perform: them and 4 := 3 doesn't trigger a #doesNotUnderstand: on the basis that 4 isn't a variable.
the unary, binary, and keyword order is not how the compiler actually evaluates anything. So in weird cases that happen 0.1% of the time, this simple rule is broken in favour of something so complicated I can't even remember it.
#at:put: doesn't return self - collection #at: name put: object returns the argument 'object' rather than what every other method in Smalltalk would do, which is return 'collection'. And this has been empirically proven to be harmful.
on object creation, the #initialize method isn't sent by default so you need to override #new so it sends it - this is inconsistent with the fact Smalltalk presents meaningful nil values for all instance variables in a brand new object.
when a collection triggers #grow (which happens at random) it won't copy over every single instance variable it has, just some completely arbitrary subset of them. So subclassing any collection class won't work unless you fix this yourself.
the compiler cheats with True and False by inlining them. If you try to subclass or redefine them, it will not work. This is actually the only flaw in Smalltalk that makes any sense at all.
there is no infinite object cloner out of the box. You're stuck with deepCopy which is arbitrarily limited.

The second way that Smalltalk is a failure is that it was woefully incomplete when it was standardized and it got extended by incompetent hacks rather than competent systems designers.

The three biggest areas of this failure are

Smalltalk is not homoiconic the way LISP was and is
the event system is not debuggable
the UIs are blatantly not OO - Squeak's Morphic is so messed up it doesn't qualify as an OOUI

The lack of homoiconicity in Smalltalk is perhaps its greatest failure since it has meant that many vital extensions to Smalltalk were rendered impossible. Smalltalk has none of the capabilities security nor modularity of any modern OS and I believe lack of homoiconicity is at fault.

Smalltalk would have made a great operating system if filthy hackers hadn't completely failed to grow it within its object-oriented paradigm. And so it becomes obvious that the failure of Smalltalk is a failure on both counts - as a programming language and as an operating system. So the failure of Smalltalk really does underpin the failure of the entire software industry.

Oh and just for the record, the reason Unix and Windows aren't failures is because abominations can't fail to be travesties. Nor is their success measured solely in terms of how many fanatical masochistic cultists they've accumulated or how many victims they torture. Rather, their success is measured by the numberless violations of logic, common sense and human freedom they enshrine.

By their own measures, Unix and Windows are both the wild successes they've always been intended to be. But Smalltalk was never intended to be horrible to human beings. It wasn't even intended to be bad for people. It wasn't even intended to be good. It was intended to be perfect and to uplift the entire software industry. And it failed.

Explaining Software Systems Design To An Industrial Systems Designer

2011-02-26T17:26:00.001-08:00

There is a superficial similarity between the jobs of a software and industrial systems designer but it disappears when you look closer than a job advertisement because the software systems designers are just going through the motions of their industrial brothers. What you have to appreciate is that three key elements are radically different in the software developer's environment.

Let me start by pointing to an advertisement for a software development company. It's obvious that EDS is quite proud of what they do. It's equally obvious that you as an industrial systems designer can see, or vividly imagine, the uncomfortable and horrified looks of EDS customers. You might want to think about what it says that EDS is proud of working in ways that would terrify any remotely sane person. I see in them complete disconnection from reality, from their customers' needs, and also from any kind of personal emotional health.

Inadequate Tools

Firstly, the tools are all inadequate and there is no objective way of measuring their inadequacies. If one of your machine tools blew up once a year killing its operator, this would be obvious and measurable. Similarly if it emitted noxious gases through 10 different ports resulting in either lots of tubes going out of it or workers choking to death on the factory floor. Similarly if it took up 20 times the volume allocated to the entire factory or turned its input into slag.

The equivalents in software are never obvious and rarely measurable. The only thing that's ever obvious in software is when your tool causes a nuclear explosion the moment it's turned on. Or completely fails to do anything at all. Your software tool merely turning half of itself to slag the moment you turn it on isn't obvious. And come to think of it, your software tool completely failing to do anything at all is only usually obvious.

Destructive Traditions

Secondly, it's traditional for the customers to provide not just worthless but actively destructive specs. Have you ever had a customer demand that all of the tools you use be branded Braun? In the software world, they do this as a matter of course.

Customers hire a software consultant to create a spec because they don't trust the programmers they're going to contract with. And they are correct since programmers are egotistical pricks uncaring of customers OR users. Well the problem with that is the consultant is just another programmer (a machinist) so he's incompetent at any kind of design. So the very first thing he specifies is the programming language that'll have to be used. Usually this is C++ or Java because they are mainstream.

This is the equivalent of specifying that you are going to buy all your parts from Canadian Tire. Because it's mainstream. And because finding people to service the parts from Canadian Tire will be easy. I am not exaggerating, this is word for word their rationale.

They are not concerned that the parts are low quality. They are not concerned that the parts will break down because they aren't durable. Or that they have a terrible MTBF. They are not concerned that using these parts will make the machine more expensive. They are not concerned that neither systems designers nor machinists (programmers) WANT to work with these parts because they are terrible, hard to work with, and break your fingers.

No, the only thing that matters is that they come from Canadian Tire because everyone uses Canadian Tire (so it must be good!) and Canadian Tire is mainstream. Again, I am not exaggerating in any way, shape or form as I believe my analogy is exact.

Recall the first point above, there is no objective (let alone obvious) way of measuring the inadequacy of any software tools or parts. Thus, the customers demand the parts be from a popular store. You certainly can't be trusted to decide what tools and parts you want to use!

Malleable Reality

Thirdly, software is made of pure information which unlike matter is infinitely malleable. Software is also a lot more complex (which feeds into point #1 above, making errors undetectable). Let me put it this way. Physical matter occupies only 3 spatial dimensions, yes? Software occupies N dimensions where N is variable and ill-defined. And if you understand the term 'race condition' then you know that's not a happy thing.

Also, with physical matter you only deal with a small finite number of interactions. Heat flow, friction, momentum and impulse, compression, tension, shear, viscosity, chemical reactions, electric and magnetic forces, optical and sound waves. With software, you define interactions out of your own imagination. And if programmers have agreed to operate in a consensus reality with a set number of interactions, this is just convention. Or I should say conventions PLURAL because I know of at least three mutually inconsistent sets of conventions (Imperative, OO, Functional) in widespread use.

(Going back to point #2, can you imagine being told "Today you will be using the following laws of physics. I know literally nobody likes these laws and you personally hate them because you think they make terrible machines. but they are the Industry Standard and so that's what you'll be using. Just be appreciative of how much better they are than the Industry Standard of 10 years ago!")

Now, consider how your job as an industrial systems designer would proceed if you could decide to change the laws of physics your machine operates on. Or you could decide to build machines that operate on multiple mutually inconsistent laws of physics (which is what C++ is by the way). So a guy comes up to you and says "we want a machine that makes cars, here's the spec of the cars we want and the volume the machine must take and the input it can take per car" but YOU have the power to change the laws of physics so they were anti-gravity cars capable of space travel. The problem you see is that the customer simply isn't capable of even IMAGINING what you can do.

Your Customers

So the customers you actually get fall into two categories. Customers with very narrowly defined needs who want cars that ONLY travel on the ground on LEGALLY DEFINED roads and cannot fly and cannot teleport and aren't bigger on the inside! And then you've got more typical customers.

Those are the customers who come up to you on the first day with a request asking for a car. Then the second day they tell you it'd be a great thing if it could fly. And on the third day they ask you if you can make it teleport home when they're done with it so they can save on parking. Which of course you CAN since all you have to do is jack in a guild navigator hopped up on spice melange to it. And the guild navigator isn't a problem because you can make it bigger on the inside.

Unfortunately, those aren't the only customers you get. Quite often you get bitchy customers who insist on a narrowly defined set of requirements. And the next day they insist on adding to the requirements so the car can fly. But all this time they insist you ONLY have the system do what THEY want. So basically they're your typical fascistic micro-managers except they don't have the common sense to realize micro-management is wrong and will ruin your work.

If you're a great systems designer and you kept in mind the need to BE FLEXIBLE from the get go (after having double-checked that your project isn't one of those very few with very narrowly defined needs, of course) then the very best customers are those who are laid back and don't give you any requirements beyond "automate what we're doing" or even better "help us do our job". They let YOU figure out what THEY need. Those are great customers and the products you come up with their help are fucking awesome.

Not nearly as good are customers that give you a sheet of requirements but don't look too closely when you throw it away. Those are problem customers because they make it difficult for you to figure out what their real requirements are because you can't admit to them that what they gave you is useless and you barely glanced at it.

The customers that try to pretend you're an industrial systems designer and they can give you a full set of requirements when they patently can't ... well they're the ones that make the job of software systems design hell on earth.

Conclusion

In summary, being a software systems designer means you can warp the laws of physics more easily than God but the only machine parts and tools that have ever been created all have sensitive spots that cause nuclear explosions if you touch them. If you're extremely competent then you'll pick unusually durable machine tools and parts that have extremely small nuclear triggers. Assuming your customers will let you since most of them insist you buy everything from Canadian Tire.

So yes most so-called "software systems designers" (by title) do the exact same tasks that you do. But with none of the same constraints and none of the same results because they operate in a radically different environment. And often they don't really care about that because they see YOU doing a GREAT job in the industrial sector so they think they can copy your success by going through the same motions. Kinda like Vanuatu tribesmen inviting cargo planes to return by building bamboo control towers.

So getting back to those copious ads you see for "software systems designers". If you examine them very closely I'll bet you'll find stuff like "must have 5 years experience in Java Enterprise" which translated means "must have 5 years experience shopping at Canadian Tire". Now consider what such an advertisement means for 1) the employer that put up the job posting, 2) what the actual job is going to be like, and 3) the kind of person that's going to be attracted to such an ad. Because I can tell you that such ads turn me completely off so my guess is they're looking for a skilled yet unusually arrogant & outspoken machinist to represent them to customers.

How To Punish PKs In A Fun Way

2011-02-25T16:46:00.000-08:00

The more I read of http://mu.ranter.net's articles about multiplayer game design, the more I conclude the guy is utterly incapable of producing a novel or original idea. He is miserably incompetent as a game or any other kind of designer because he lacks synthesis and judgement. The fact he pontificates about game design theory when he lacks the very cognitive faculties that are necessary to be a designer makes him a pathetic moron.

A case in point is his idiotic proposal for solving the problem of Player Killing players in MMORPGs.

So the logical response in an MMORPG to the presence of a known criminal is to dispatch groups of NPC cops to hunt him down.

NPC cops? How illogical! This just gives the bored user more opportunity to get into interesting and challenging fights without any trace of guilt. Far better would be to have a sheriff NPC who hands out quests for the heads of criminals for PCs to collect and hands out magic compasses that point to the criminal’s location, as well as warning them about the class and level of the target. Quest rewards would give out copious XPs and gold.

And after the criminal is caught you can have a prison (a day’s lockout) for the criminal with a suicide option (with the standard penalty for resurrection). That way you punish bored PCs who misbehave with even more and longer boredom OR with an unwelcome stat penalty. Better yet, make it so the prison doesn't count offline time. When the player logs off while doing prison time, they actually manage to escape. And when he logs back in, the guards dragged him back to prison and slapped an additional penalty for escaping. Or hey, for more fun you can have escaped convicts be hunted down AGAIN.

And if the criminal is so bored of watching messages like "another day passes, you scratch another line on the wall of your cell" repeat then he can suicide in his cell. The problem with that is it leaves a corpse so if they do that (or if they're killed during an attempted capture) then their shrunken head could be sold on the open market to make voodoo dolls. Voodoo dolls that work! Maybe have a voodoo doll to shrink the convict or paralyze them at a critical moment. Or maybe to summon them arbitrarily. Basically to fuck with them and make them miserable and regret ever having tried for a life of crime. The point of all this misery is to make letting yourself be captured the preferred option if escape isn't viable.

But even more important than discouraging and punishing criminals is that for every bored PC who turns to crime, you can interest 5-10 PCs to catch and/or kill him. That way anti-criminals have MORE FUN than criminals. Contrast this with ranter's stupid idea where NPC cops reward bored players who turn to crime by providing attention to them!

But even more important than that is the fact ranter doesn't see it as any kind of a problem that the computer or GM comes swooping in to steal all of the fucking limelight from playing characters. What kind of a pathetic excuse for a game designer is he when his solution to a problem in the game world is for the programmer to have fun by stealing all of the fun which players could have had?!

Death of Graphics Art Market Predicted

2011-02-24T15:49:00.000-08:00

Isn't it funny how the audio art revenues are collapsing even as the visual art revenues are expanding through the same digital technology? Meanwhile, both of their costs are plummeting. But the reason behind these opposite outcomes is obvious when you think about it.

Audio playback technology is far in advance of video playback. Ordinary people can LISTEN to an arbitrary master audio song (CD), but they can't as easily SEE an arbitrary master image. Only a publishing house can do that by printing a large format poster. With an incredible amount of lag and expense involved of course.

Additionally, compared to video, there's hardly any artistry or skill involved in producing audio art anyways. Even compared to 2D video, let alone 3D, and 4D. But then again, audio is maxed out at 2D. So a lot more people are involved in producing it and amassing a public library of audio art that covers the entire space of possibilities (all the music you'll ever want to hear) is so much easier than for video art.

Of course, the conclusion is inescapable - cheap, thin & lightweight wall-sized video displays will collapse the digital graphics market, destroying the entire revenue base of graphics artists. I await this technology eagerly as that will be the day when ridiculous notions like hoarding art will die.

Hoarding by so-called "collectors", a euphemism for a vile activity performed by the rich, much like other euphemisms such as "adventurers" (for useless lay-abouts) and "philanthropists" (for public policy autocrats).

But it's not just ridiculous things like canvas paintings or the whole notion of "framing" art that will finally die. Copyright will also get its long-awaited and eagerly anticipated final death. Because when copyright no longer can be forcibly imposed on music or novels or graphics, it will apply to nothing at all.

And when the ridiculous and anti-progressive notion of copyright dies, it will become obvious that ALL art must be produced on a communist basis. From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his needs. Because the alternative is that art not be produced at all, something fascists will no doubt contemplate before regretfully abandoning it. Copyright's death will be communism's triumph.

A further conclusion is now inescapable. The anti-human anti-progress patent system will collapse when 3D printers become widespread among the general population. Or in general form, when technologies are democratized and universalized, arbitrary authoritarian restrictions on them (like copyright and patents) are no longer tenable. Or put in even more general form: democracy is the enemy of authoritarianism.

It's funny what places you can find democracy waging war against authoritarianism, isn't it? But once you see it at work, it's quite uplifting to realize that democracy will win.

Formal Theory of Intelligence

2011-02-21T16:18:00.001-08:00

A few years ago I tried my hand at a formal definition of intelligence by saying it's 'living representation'. I'd just been observing that there isn't a formal definition of intelligence anywhere. I'd also just formally defined 'life', another key concept that has no formal definition anywhere save for the one I gave it.

You see, intelligence may be just rote memorization (yes, even the Raven's progressive matrices) but there's more to rote memorization than just recording and archival of data with absolute fidelity. Real learning builds associations and is also lossy, entirely different from the way a computer stores data. And it just occurred to me now that 'living representation' is a good way to describe the 'compression unit' described in this paper describing a formal theory of creativity, fun and intrinsic motivation.

The compression unit's purpose is to ensure the knowledge base isn't drowned in an ocean of entropy (ie, waste information). So new facts are stored and then they're associated with all old facts and the whole is recompressed all over again, continuously. And that's how you get dimensional decomposition and natural language processing since they are just compression techniques!

Just a little insight inspired by thinking of idiot people incapable of coming up with proper definitions of key concepts in psych. Frankly, those psychologists who try to make definitions are so bad at it that they come up with the most ridiculous tripe unimaginable. So from that to my rather esoteric and seemingly poetic formal definition of intelligence, then to the relation between beauty and compression, and finally linking to what we know about how machine learning works.

Mages As Enchanters Who Never Fight

2011-01-30T14:38:00.000-08:00

In Getting Beyond Spellcasting the idea is mooted of getting away from spell-slinging wizards with some ritual magic. This isn't going nearly far enough as far as I'm concerned.

It should be noted that item enchantment magics should also be performed as rituals, with significant investments of power in many cases.

A mage who ONLY does enchanting and takes NO part in combat AT ALL is acceptable in conjunction with the Offline Activity concept in the essay Marking Time. But only if two conditions are met.

First, making enchantments gives the player serious money as a mage. Not minimal money, but serious money. Because that's going to be the enchanter's only source of income. Granted, the money could primarily come from player characters. But it could also come from noble NPCs handing out fat contracts (quests) to supply their armies.

Second, there are quests to further the player's skills and supplies as an enchanter. If they learn from Master Yan how to enchant scrolls of town portal for example. Or they go to Sundabar to secure a contract for a routine supply of Eagle Feathers (either as needed or by the tonne) from the Merchant House of Vreel at a given price. A price which they may improve upon when their contract runs out and they opt to go to Sundabar again with more points in their Negotiation skill (thus improving their profit margin on even low-level enchantments).

Ideally, all of the no-risk grinding activities that involve supporting other players and negotiating with them (determined by your automatic Negotiation skill!) should happen offline. And all the activities that involve risky Personal Character Development and decision-making (like learning stuff, setting up trade routes, and negotiating with fighters to escort him to Sundabar) should happen online. This is really basic game design since sleeping and resting is skipped over (not endured) even in pen and paper games.

Most of that's done already. What's novel is the offline activities concept, and converting "one eagle feather in a wizard's inventory" into "a contract for one tonne of eagle feathers delivered by caravan to the wizard's shop". And both of those novelties are to systematically do away with grinding. Which is something very anti-WoW. But then again, so's actual roleplaying (stealing, gambling and negotiating) so fuck em.

Remember Wizards In Early MUDs and MOOs?

2011-01-30T13:33:00.000-08:00

I just read this stupid rant about how wizards in modern RPGs aren't special enough because they aren't enough like literary mages. Because there's too many of them and they're too obviously powerful. This is a bunch of crap.

Early Days of Yore

There used to be a time when Wizards were even MORE powerful. Back in the early days of multiplayer text games, wizards were the content creators and programmers. They were the ones who created new rooms, new areas, new quests, new objects, new stories. They did all of this awesome stuff that NOBODY is allowed to do nowadays.

Wizard powers were awesome because they were meta-circular. Because from within the game you were changing the game itself. Unfortunately, since the world is filled with fascistic assholes, game designers want to control everything that's going on in a game. And also, since the world is filled with idiots, these same game designers don't understand the concept of meta-circularity.

The best part is that early Wizards made games more egalitarian because the structure of the game world was controlled by the players within the game world. And this is the exact opposite of what some people who want wizards to be "special" in their "heroic myth" want. In early games, the motto was "yes, you too can have absolute power". Nowadays, game designers don't want players to have even the illusion of it. Pathetic.

How It Would Work

There's very little administration that can't be folded back into the Wizard hierarchy.

For instance, an obvious way to judge how much XP creating a quest gives a Wizard is to count the number of players who seriously attempt it (enter the area, pass the middle waypoint, whatever) divided by how many players finish the objective of the quest. If zero players finish it then count that as zero XP. This provides an automatic means of judging the popularity and difficulty of quests created.

Since popularity matters for new quests, a Wizard will want to advertise them. So obviously they'll buy signs pointing the way from a Signmaker, bribe an NPC to tell players about the quest, buy ads in the world's newspaper, hire the Sculptor to make statues of the great general, and have a book written and put in the town library about the perilous dungeon. All of this draining money out of the economy (working against hyperinflation) which is good, and increasing the immersiveness of the game world, which is even better.

You could also add XP points if the quest area is far outside of town. This is important too in order to prevent all the new content from being clustered around the central city. Not that this would necessarily be a problem so long as Wizards can dig out tunnels underneath the city or float mountains above it, or simply build upwards. Or even just be very creative with the existing elements of the city by adding rooms here and there, building skyways. To say nothing of portals and extra-dimensional spaces.

You can also award XP points to a Wizard if they ERASE an area or quest leaving a prominent complaint sign for users to bitch. The more they bitch, the fewer points the wizard gains by it. If they don't bitch at all because the area was unpopular then you've obviously got a winner! If the Wizard actually starts losing net XP for deleting an area, they're then responsible for choosing to reverse their decision ... or not.

After all, maybe the area was ugly and they think it was worth losing 500 XP points to get rid of it. Or maybe the Wizard demolished an area in order to remodel it and the bitching of some users is more than made up for by those who like the new area. These are judgement calls and some people need to make them. Not everything can be universally popular after all.

Oversight

So yes, this way Wizards could level up automatically, with very little oversight from administrators. And if game designers were smart, they'd make the entire Wizard hierarchy into an MLM scheme so that a high level wizard can sponsor prospective lower level wizards. If the latter's content sucks then the sponsor gets a penalty. If the latter's content rocks then the sponsor gets a residual of XP points every time the lower level wizard gains XP. And if game designers were very smart, they'd have a sophisticated scheme where you can have multiple sponsors (sharing residuals) or switch sponsors with some penalty.

You see, with the exception of the guys managing the servers and maybe the game engine itself, there is no good reason to have ANY out of game administrators in an MMORPG. Even banishing a k001d00d player to another server where they have a higher tolerance for that kind of crap is easily done IN-WORLD. After all, it's just a Wizard spell - Banishment! Proving that yes you really shouldn't meddle in the affairs of wizards.

Note my emphasis on IN-WORLD game mechanics. I learned that important lesson more than a decade ago from Lessons from LucasArts' Habitat. I also learned that protocols needed to distinguish objects from presentation (as HTML doesn't). It doesn't seem to me that game designers have taken either lesson to heart. Probably because they're retarded idiot.

Creating In Game Lore ... In Game

Consider the town gossip mongers talking about heroic quests the PCs accomplished. I bet you never thought about how to do it in an automated way. Or how to palm off the responsibility to those who would be most likely to want to do it. The names of the quest and the objectives (kill bad guy, retrieve artifact) are all publicly available from the content creator, whether it's an out of game company programmer or an in-game Wizard. So THOSE parts can be fully automated and that's one generic mechanism down.

What can't be automated is what actually went down. But who better to tell you what happened than the guy who finished the quest in the first place? Have HIM tell the gossip mongers what he did. Fuck, have the gossip mongers ASK HIM what he did when he shows up in town next. And so what if the guy lies? The only thing that matters is that it be dramatic or exciting enough. And how better to achieve that than to have some kind of feedback so that each player asking the gossip monger “tell me more” gives the vanquisher of the quest a small number of XPs?

Gossip Monger: "Did you hear how X did Y at Z? [The first paragraph of text X wrote, with a minimum length]"
Gossip Monger then has two options ‘I already heard that story' and ‘Tell me more'.
Gossip Monger: "[Three more paragraphs of text X wrote]" then two buttons 'Tell me more' (or 'Thanks' if it's the end) and That Sucked.

Hell, if a player is a great writer then they could even have the action written out in multiple stages. And every stage nets them another 10 XPs each time a character listens.

And the best part of this is that THIS IS HOW THE REAL WORLD ACTUALLY WORKS. Because the real world doesn't have any “programmers” or “world designers” that create buildings and script people's actions. The real world has Gossip Monger NPCs and Historian NPCs.

For that matter, if a PC hires a Historian to write up his deeds and make them available in the Library, for a very hefty price. Or if he hires a Sculptor to make a statue of himself … then this could boost his Charisma stat which would feed his Negotiation skill. You could even have a Hero Worshiper NPC giving out a quest to heroes to write up their deeds and get sculptures made of themselves, with an XP reward for completing that quest. Again, work WITH economics!

Wizards' Disincentives

This would be trivial to script. The challenge is making the Wizards powerful enough so they can CREATE this “hero worshiper quest”. Is fulfilling the hero worshiper quest something every hero should do? Or is it only for a very select few heroes? If the latter then yes the Wizards would have an economic incentive to create such quests. If the former then they won't have any economic incentive to do that. But they might do it just for colour. Oh wait, no they couldn't.

After all, you have to provide a huge disincentive to wizards to create easy quests where level 1 characters can acquire a million XPs. And that disincentive has to kick in once quests are solvable by >50% of players who attempt them. And the penalty WILL kick in if the quest provides enough XPs to attract level 20 characters to something that should be a level 1 quest. So the rewards of a quest have to be commensurate with the difficulty of the quest.

And if a Wizard makes such ridiculously easy and lucrative quests for his friends, thus violating the Sacred Ethos of the Order of Wizards, then he might have the magic drained out of him by a higher level Wizard. And his friends might be hunted down by a level-draining vampire assassin (from the Assassins Guild of course) on contract by the higher level Wizard.

Ideally, the disincentive would be that starting from 50% success rates on a quest, the XPs gained by the questors come straight out of the Wizard's own XP score, making it an automatic zero sum game. Unfortunately, this mechanism can be easily gamed so it only actually punishes mistakes by the Wizard and never malfeasance, which is why higher level supervision is still necessary lest Wizards just uplift their friends.

Still, it doesn't matter what you do. What matters is that it all be done using mechanics that don't break the illusion of the game world.

Offline Roleplaying In MMORPGs

2011-01-30T07:27:00.000-08:00

I just read this great post introducing the concept of offline roleplaying in MMORPGs. Following is my response which extends and explores the concept.

A good rule of thumb is that skills should only ever increase through active participation of the player. I don't think Hunting and Cooking should increase from offline activity. You should increase these skills by going to a cooking school, finding a master chef, getting tips from a master hunter, and so on. And if you say that non-fighting skills may increase from offline activity then I'll point you to your own rant about Roleplaying = Fighting!

However, the value of these skills should definitely affect what's happening offline. If your cooking skill is exceptional then you never go to taverns because their food is shit compared to yours. If it's middling then you go to taverns for variety. If it's poor, you make a lot of food ingredients inedible and go to taverns as often as possible, whichever you can afford.

Unlike you, I'm not opposed to players gaining monetarily from offline hunting. At least a little. (As I said, I am opposed to them gaining skills.) The amount they gain should definitely be dependent on their hunting skill of course. There's going to be a big difference between trapping a couple rabbits and getting a tasty doe and field dressing her properly.

Same for blacksmithing. Of course, if you're a blacksmith then you should own a forge! And your Negotiation skill will determine how much coal and iron ore cost versus your products so how much profit you make. You may even gain products that you can sell to other players. And ideally, again the Negotiation skill should only be raised by training in-world. Maybe getting some tutoring from Tom the Savvy Haggler down in the market. Of course, you're gonna have to find Tom first....

Groan, and if you're a Merchant then you should own a shop!! Which just proves how smart and insightful your idea is. But I think having a personal-belongings tax is ridiculously and monumentally stupid. Everything I've read from you is smart and much of it insightful. But this is just stupid. Head tax? Yes. Property (shop, forge, house) tax? Yes. Wealth tax? Yes. Belongings tax? Fuck no. Get real.

And speaking of property, if there's online activity then having a house, which may or may not get burned down in an attack by Orcs ... this again proves how smart and insightful this idea of offline gaming is. Because a house is actually USEFUL. I mean, it protects you and makes sure you're at 100% HP when you log in.

Having a manor house gives you Charisma which increases your Negotiation skill. Having a shack lowers your Negotiation skill and is more likely to be destroyed or for you to have caught a disease offline (further reducing your HP). Imagine logging in and finding out your (untaxed) shack has been burned by brigands, who stole all your gold, and you've fallen ill so you're at 50% HP? :D Well, you get what you pay for!

Yes you COULD deal with banks, for a very, very hefty fee. Or you could risk your stuff getting stolen at your house. Hell, might even make it possible to rob houses by Thieves so all of your non-equipped inventory is at risk. And your housing might determine how much inventory you can keep before having to sell / throw the excess away.

The best part is that between diseases, fires, and wars demolishing cities and hurting the player characters living in them ("In the last week, you were caught in the Great Epidemic of 768"), you've provided them with a really great incentive to get that castle they weren't sure they wanted. I mean, what the fuck's a castle for? Oh yeah, to protect your character!

Having a castle might open up whole new areas of game play associated with waging border wars, subduing your neighbours, and rising in the ranks of the aristocracy. Also a castle allows you to call for merchants to come to you instead of going to the market, for a premium. But then again, every time you go out, you'll have to decide whether to disguise yourself (losing your Charisma and Negotiation bonuses) or going out with an armed guard to deter brigands.

The best part is that if you're offline for a year then your castle's been taken over by your neighbours (who've waged a 2-week war against you in your absence), you fled to a manor house with your possessions which all got robbed by a thief, you could then only afford a modest house in the city which got burned down to the ground, and you're now living in a shack with tuberculosis. Which is why you only have 50% of your HP and lost all of your non-equipped inventory.

(In Asheron's Call, they had thieves robbing houses and people quit in droves. But the reason they left was because there was no way for players to protect themselves from the thievery. It turned them into helpless victims and such things can never be considered game features. If thievery was merely an obstacle to be overcome like every other game feature, it wouldn't have produced so much protest because it wouldn't have sucked so badly. The same is the case for player killing which players can't do anything about because they aren't allowed enough control over the game mechanics to institute effective punishments. And because there's no penalty or repercussions (like say losing resurrections) from criminal activity.)

See? No need to curve down anything artificially. Just add some random punishments that attentive players have to deal with every few weeks or months and an inattentive player will get burned by them after a year. This is why I have absolutely no problem with players getting monetary rewards for their skills. And for those players who don't have a castle to lose, nor any non-equipped inventory to get robbed, nor a wooden house to be burned down? I have one word for them: pregnancy.

It's So Easy To Fix 'Roleplaying = Fighting' Games

2011-01-30T06:27:00.000-08:00

I read a game designer's rather interesting rant about how 'Roleplaying = Fighting'. But then I realized how easy it is to fix that. Following is my response to the rant.

Are you familiar with Chris Crawford’s work on Interactive Storytelling Engines? You may or may not find it interesting, I just know it exists.

It really shouldn’t be difficult to make Gambling and Negotiation parts of a computer game. Negotiation particularly. How often do players buy and sell items? All of the time, especially amongst themselves. Well, all you have to do is make any prices displayed for items be subjective to the player who views them. And of course dependent on the difference in their negotiations skills.

So for example, PC1 puts up a Staff of Firebolt for sale valued at 5000 but wants a 50 potions of Healing each valued at 100 in exchange. Then PC2 who has very poor negotiation skill sees the staff going for 75 potions of Healing, whereas PC3 who has excellent negotiation skill sees the staff going for 30 potions of Healing. Voila. And if the price of something is a non-integer number of goods (like 70% of a staff of firebolt) then it’s automatically converted into gold.

Yes some minmaxers could demand to know the price in advance through text (’five thousand gold pieces’) to “make sure they aren’t gyped” but there’s absolutely nothing stopping a prospective buyer from lying about what they see is the price. They are getting taken for suckers after all!

Cooking food is kind of a chore so you might not want to have a cooking skill. Though if you do, it’s very easy to have generic cooking ingredients turning inedible or less nutritious because of poor cooking skill. Lots of eating at taverns and eating lower-grade non-perishable food then! Or inviting a cook along. But the lack of a meaningful negotation skill in CRPGs is totally fucking ridiculous. It’s so fucking easy!

Having thieves and diplomats be able to deal with all monsters (potentially) in non-violent ways is also relatively easy. Especially the part where thieves steal the objects the monsters have so the fighters that kill them don’t gain any loot by it. And really exceptional thieves could steal the monsters’ weapons (gaining a lot of XP) leaving the monsters sitting targets and so not awarding the fighters as much XP.

Oh and the diplomats? Same thing, so long as they have high gambling skill and can dice the treasure from the monsters. And again you leave them alive for the poor fighter to kill them. OR, they regain their weapons / loot after a shift change. And yes I am seriously suggesting that you talk down then gamble with Orcs. Especially if you’ve got shapeshifting! Or glamours!

Hell, a character with exceptional glamour / negotiation (aided by high charisma attribute no doubt) / gambling would probably be able to walk through the entire game without striking ANYONE. See a boss? Put up a glamour to look like a minion! How’s that for role playing? The best part is you can tweak the effect of the negotiation skill on prices up or down to increase or decrease the ratio of fighters to diplomats in the game world.

So you see, dealing intelligently with the Thief and Merchant classes is EASY. It’s not even designers’ lack of imagination that nails it. It’s their total fucking stupidity. I mean, how does one get “thief => disarm traps” instead of “thief => steal from monsters”?! Or how do you get “negotiator => conversations with NPCs” instead of “negotiator => $$$money$$ from everyone”? Again, only stupidity explains it. Because dealing with it intelligently is actually EASIER than dealing with it stupidly. Creating a generic ’steal from monster’ mechanism is easier than putting traps all over the stupid game world. And it’s just as easy to program quest objectives for item acquisition (or touching a shrine or entering a vault) as it is for NPC deaths.

Oh, and you want an Appraisal skill added to the game? Dead fucking easy! Just make sure that low appraisal values means any item you put up for sale has its price shifted by a random value up or down. The lower the appraisal, the higher the random shift. And of course, this shift is invisible to the player character but visible to every OTHER character. Do you have a character with really poor appraisal? Then maybe that Orc Chieftain looks like a Young Orc as he hits you for massive damage. Hmmm, maybe you can’t even tell Orc males from females!

It’s not like thinking up these things is even difficult.

Systems Design Isn't About Software

2011-01-22T17:06:00.000-08:00

With the invention of publishing, ancient engineers became modern engineers. That's because with publishing, engineers learned to specialize. Leonardo da Vinci was the last of the ancient engineers because he never published any of his work. He was also the last of the generalists.

Well, it's high time ancient designers became modern ones. By generalizing and by abstracting. By realizing their power. By realizing they're about designing complex systems and not economic systems or physical systems or software systems or political systems.

It's about ALL of them, and none of them. Design is about systems period.

If you're an analytic-synthetic, please get in touch with me so we can talk. So you can understand what you can do.

You Are All Evil Scum. Bye bye.

2011-01-16T18:10:00.001-08:00

None of you have the slightest clue what it's like to be an intellectual highly empathic person. To be a genuinely great person. But I'm in a fantastic mood so I'll enlighten you.

Being an intellectual means knowing just how high human potential reaches. It's fucking amazing. It's stratospheric. Queen barely does it justice in Princes of the Universe:

Here we are, born to be kings
We're the princes of the universe
Here we belong, fighting to survive
In a world with the darkest powers

Yeah, here we are, the pinnacle of a billion years of biological evolution. Here we belong, born to be kings of our home galaxy. Born to build 100 billion Dyson spheres. Born to birth a race of immortal near-omnipotent and -omniscient beings. That's our human potential.

And what part of that human potential is realized? What part of the empathy, the passion, the intellect, the curiosity, the knowledge, the creativity, the desire for progress and freedom is realized? Next to nothing. Just barely enough for some people to realize how sickening, how disgusting, how repulsive is the monumental waste of it all.

Instead of living in peace and justice, we've got wars and brutality. Instead of eradicating all diseases, we've got scrambling by greedy ignorant doctors in filthy hospitals. Instead of preventing diseases as a social responsibility, we've got an industry of snake oil salesmen peddling "cures" and "treatments".

Instead of education, we've got propaganda. Instead of thoughtfulness we've got groupthink and knee-jerk paranoia. Instead of empathy and caring, we've got rabid hatred. Instead of freedom and democracy, we've got totalitarian dictatorships (like the USA's) and oppression by the rich (in Western Europe). Instead of industrialism and progress, we've got stagnation and "sustainability". And on and on and on.

Being an intellectual, a real intellectual who cares nothing for their status or ego, means knowing everything about the ignorance, the oppression, the stagnation, the backwardness, the poverty, the starvation and the internecine genocidal warfare that are constantly afflicting human civilization just about everywhere on this planet.

And being highly empathetic, being the kind of anti-psychopath that's the exact opposite of everything the USA and Britain stand for (ie, "cool" apathy, serial killers, unremitting search for power and forever grinding of steel boots in human faces), means SUFFERING. It means suffering at the very thought of what the world is.

It means CONSTANT unremitting suffering. It means constant FRUSTRATION. Frustration like you've never experienced in your miserable little lives. It means HATRED like you might have towards the monster that raped and murdered your 3 year old child. It means being grim and hateful and angry and above all FRUSTRATED at one's inability to do anything about it all!

Genuine caring when coupled to genuine understanding means constant suffering, constant depression, constant misery. It means being lost in that hopeless little scream. It means unending torture just about every day of every month of every year of your entire fucking life....

Until you find the solutions. Beautiful solutions. Every single last one. Solutions that you know you can implement. Because they're self-sustaining and you just have to set them in motion.

Then it's an absolute flip. Absolute fucking flip. The anticipation, the excitement, the fucking RELIEF from never-ending pain. It's fucking ECSTASY. Except better! It's pure fucking joy.

So you know what? None of you are anything close to being good people. You live your entire lives not caring the least little bit about your fellow human beings, not one way or another. Oh you care about pretending, enough to make some despicable symbolic gesture like giving to "charity", but you don't give a fuck whether poverty is actually eradicated.

You don't care! The existence of poverty on this world, the same world you live in, hasn't got the power to move you. Hasn't got the power to depress you. Hasn't got the power to make you suffer. Hasn't got the power to give you joy at the mere thought of its pending, inevitable eradication.

I care. And that's why I'm a great person. And you're just scum. But I'm in such a fantastic mood that I don't give a damn. I'll share my joy even with you.

I have work to do now. Goodbye scum. I'll see you in a couple decades when I'm done.

And if anybody (which I doubt, but I live to be surprised) actually wants to do anything about this miserable civilization's problems (every single last one of them) and can put up with a grinning laughing maniac for the duration, you know how to reach me.

Singularitarians Confuse SciFi Novels With Reality

2011-01-12T18:02:00.000-08:00

I was thinking of space, and that led me to thinking of how much I hate the moronic hype around space travel. There's no good reason to go out into space for centuries. None at all. Which immediately made me think of how there's no fucking way fusion will ever happen on any large scale since it's ridiculously unviable economically. Which of course just made me think of how ridiculously overhyped AI is and how its hype fits very much the dot com euphoria.

And for a solid 15 minutes I was confused, baffled even. Where do these people get these moronic ideas to hype?! They're claiming to be rational, to be interested in physics, to be logical, and so on, and they come up with these utterly ridiculous things. It's such group-thinking bullshit, it's unbelievable. And then the light finally dawned, it took that long because I could never contemplate such a ludicrous idea, they're taking their inspirations from science fiction!

Is that why these morons believe in aliens and faster than light travel? Because scifi novels say so? What's next, terraforming planets to colonize them? Oh wait, there's that Mars crap. Ugh, how repulsive. Why the fuck would anyone want to go to Mars when they can go to the warmer, wetter and far more commodious Antarctica? Hell, we already have a "colony" there, all half dozen people freezing their balls off, desperately warming up to a nuclear reactor, and kicking out into the freezing cold anyone they wish "disappeared" (they keep that out of the news).

So I have to wonder now, if futurists are just science-fiction fans who've confused fiction with reality, what other genres of confusion are there? Are goths people who confuse horror fiction with reality? Are there any people who believe in elves and wizards or are we all agreed those aren't "really real"? I'd really like to know exactly what determines whether people confuse a genre with reality or not. Because it doesn't seem like anyone believes in wizards. But you know, plenty of people confuse books on historical mythology (Torah, Bible, Koran) with reality, and the plotlines and characters of those books suck and aren't even remotely believable.

On the other hand, maybe that's the rule. Maybe the more the plotlines are incoherent and the more characters violate all the rules of human psychology, maybe that triggers the confusion. Because I can't think of any other traits that historical mythology and science fiction share. And if that's the rule, well Pastafarianism's never made much sense. Is it going to turn into a genuine religion within 50 years?

In any case, I'm only now starting to realize there are whole new depths of human stupidity that I've never even imagined before. And given how low my opinion of humans' cognitive abilities has always been ... wow. Holy fucking wow! I mean, I always thought that religiosity had something to do with child abuse. But apparently, just publishing something in a book written in a certain way is enough to trigger human credulity.

On The Notion That "Everybody Is Really Selfish"

2011-01-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of the idea that people do everything out of selfish reasons. That supposedly even if you do altruistic stuff, you do it because you enjoy doing it, therefore it's really selfish.

Well, first of all, I never credited this ridiculous notion for a single minute because I am a living counter-example. And I'm not the only one either. There's plenty of people who are grim about the world, or depressed, or angry. For fuck's sake, your typical pre-industrial farmer would qualify. Think of the Amish!

Secondly, it's just the kind of self-justifying crap spouted by satanists aka right-libertarians aka market fundamentalists (those groups have remarkably high overlap). What it boils down to is they're saying they're selfish so they assume everyone else must be (a common psychological failing that everyone is just like you, called projection).

Thirdly, this notion is fractally wrong. It isn't just factually wrong or wrong on several levels (like the meta-level where satanists are just justifying being egotistical bags of shit or where they're projecting their psychological flaws on others), it is wrong at every possible scale of resolution. The whole idea is wrong, the concepts that make up the idea are all wrong, and every single detail they use to justify it is wrong too.

Annihilating The Distinction

For instance, let's presume for the sake of argument the satanists WERE right and that everyone did things just because they enjoy it. Then it would automatically follow that "selfish" can't refer to that fact because language is made to be USEFUL. If you have a word that applies to EVERYTHING, then it's not a useful word, is it?

The only thing that makes the word 'selfish' useful in language is to distinguish selfish from altruistic people. If you annihilated the distinction, that's like annihilating the word entirely. If absolutely every object in the universe were yellow then there would be no point to having the word 'yellow' in any language because 'being yellow' would be an intrinsic property of 'being an object' and only philosophers would ever think twice about it.

Well, that's what's wrong with the whole idea of this crazy misbegotten attempt to redefine the word 'selfish' to justify satanism (right-Libertarianism) and psychopathy (American "rugged individualism" and corporate CEOs). Now let's look at the concepts that make it up! Starting with "enjoyment".

Enjoyment

'Enjoy' isn't some nebulous fuzzy word that you get to attach to everything. It is a fucking SPECIFIC word. Very broadly, it means deriving pleasure. More specifically, there's four levels of enjoyment.

enjoying enjoyment - pleasure, sensualism (level 0)
enjoying the things you enjoy - intense liking, Zen, hedonism
enjoying caring about the things you enjoy - pride
enjoying caring about whether the things you enjoy are going well or badly - love (level 3)

What THEY are talking about is level 0 and possibly level 1. Because they are retarded morons and really primitive throwbacks. To say that someone motivated by love is the same kind of person as someone motivated by intense liking ... is fucking ludicrous. It is a fucking INSULT.

Values Are Axiomatic

And to say that people are motivated only and solely by these things is FALSE anyways. It's turning the human mind inside out. People aren't motivated by sensations or feelings, that's the kind of crap morons like Marvin Minsky thought. People are motivated by fucking VALUES (satisfied or unsatisfied desires). And values are abstract. They're just saying "I care about X" where X can be ANYTHING. It can be something simple like physical pleasure, or sex, or love, or pain, or seeing pain, or seeing suffering. Going backwards, that's schadenfreude and sadism and masochism. And finally, some people exist that just value entirely abstract things, things like truth and justice.

It is AXIOMATIC that they care about these things. Yes they derive enjoyment from those things, but only because they care about them in the first fucking place. To claim that the enjoyment is the REASON they care is so fucking stupid and entirely backwards. Values TRIGGER emotions as signals to your conscious mind that your values are being violated or fulfilled or something else. Emotions do not cause values! That's like claiming theorems cause axioms to happen in math, it is fucking backwards!

Teleology

Or claiming that the purpose of doing science is to get Nobel prizes. Or the purpose of sex for men is to fertilize women. Just because something's sometimes a byproduct doesn't mean it's the deliberate purposeful end-goal of the activity. That's called teleological reasoning and it's generally wrong. And when you have every possible thing (every possible value) causing enjoyment in SOME people. How the fuck can alleviating pain in person 1 and causing pain in person 2 both be caused by enjoyment in both people? How can the emotion of enjoyment (at any level) cause BOTH person 1 wanting to inflict pain AND person 2 to alleviate pain?

Conclusion

This stupid satanic / market economist crap isn't illogical, it's anti-logical. It's a Just So story by egotistical self-righteous slimebags and just about as believable as "elephants grew trunks because they wanted to reach higher branches" and (simultaneously) "pigs grew shorter legs because they wanted to reach roots". As if that were some kind of fucking explanation. It's a NON-EXPLANATION people! And it's a fractally wrong one to boot. And it's a moronic redefinition of words in the cause of self-justification by egotistical bags of diseased slime.

The Twin Blights of This World, or: Why Earth Sucks

2011-01-10T11:26:00.001-08:00

This world has more than enough natural resources and intelligent minds to figure out how to use them. Yet it has disease, poverty, starvation, stagnation and ignorance. Why? Why the fuck does it have these horrible things? There is no material reason for it.

The reasons why distill down to:

people who don't want to do anything about it
people who can't do anything about it.

And I'm not talking about "apathy" or "powerlessness". I'm talking about evil and stupidity.

Evil

I'm talking about people like Eliezer Yudkowsky who only care about themselves, only about their own wants and needs. Though he may put up a convincing pretense otherwise, Yudkowsky would never consider punishing the members of his cult until they stop worshiping him mindlessly and start thinking for themselves.

I'm talking about people like William Gates III and Warren Buffet who care only about acquiring "tokens of economic exchange". Though they may put up a convincing pretense otherwise. William Gates III would never consider abolishing copyright law or advocating against aristocrat-controlled social services (so-called "private charities"). And Warren Buffet would never consider abolishing stock market speculation or abolishing public corporations.

I'm talking about people like Barack Obama and Al Gore who care only about domination and power. Though they may put up a convincing pretense otherwise. Barack Obama would never consider dismantling the US Congress and calling for a new Constitutional Convention. And Al Gore would never consider standing up for the truth and nothing but the truth, no matter what.

I'm talking about people like Steve Jobs and David Brin who care only about looking good. Though they may put up a convincing pretense otherwise. They would never consider doing anything that looked bad or reflected badly on them just to help the world.

Not a single one of them would ever consider abolishing or reforming the complex social systems they're exploiting ruthlessly in order to advance their own positions. Even though those systems are directly responsible for all the disease, starvation, poverty, stagnation and ignorance in this world.

Why? Because they are evil! They care only about themselves. They're willing to mortgage all of humanity, all of civilization, the whole fucking planet even, for their own benefit! And that's why they're liabilities to, and can never be considered allies by, any intelligent well-meaning person.

Stupidity

I'm talking about the bloggers and letter writers and advocates who earnestly believe that "educating" and "informing" people will "change people's minds". Here's news for you: other people are just as stupid as you are and aren't going to believe anything you say unless it suits them. And even if it suits them, they're going to do fuck-all with this knowledge. Because knowledge doesn't change ingrained habits or values.

I'm talking about the protesters and activists who earnestly believe that "participating" in some ridiculous street theater to be gawked at by bystanders and laughed at by the media is going to change fuck-all about our social and political systems' behaviours. Here's news for you: the thing that killed the trade talks on property speculation and intellectual property was because China was dead set against it. It was going to happen anyways so just like the gay rights protesters, you accomplished nothing!

I'm talking about reformers who earnestly believe they can change the actions of a social system "from within". Here's news for you: social systems don't change their behaviours by absorbing new elements within themselves. For a system to change its behaviour just from assigning a new person to a predefined role inside it, the person so assigned has to be substantially different from the next most similar person from the entire pool of candidates for the given role. And the only way that's even remotely statistically possible is if you're the sole inheritor of a company. That's why it is logically and statistically impossible for you to ever change any large system by joining it. Why? Because dumbass, for all that you think you're a perfectly unique snowflake, you're really just like everyone else.

I'm talking about the ordinary people who earnestly believe that nothing that happens out in the wider world will ever affect their life. Here's news for you: if you're 40 years old then your generation had 20 years to industrialize China and India, and to modernize Russia and the USA. That's 20 years of educating people and making them wealthy enough to have leisure time. That's 20 years they could have been contributing to the scientific advance of humanity.

Because if you'd done that, then our planet would have been advancing scientifically and technologically at anywhere from two times to ten times as fast over a 50 year period (20 in the past, 30 in the future). And that 50 year period of super-accelerated scientific and technological advance would have almost certainly been enough to discover immortality within your lifetime. Immortality which you will now fail to have. Have you gotten the picture? The only reason you will die is because you were stupid enough to tell all the people who could help you to go fuck themselves! How's that for affecting your life?

Making This World NOT Suck

The fate of this world crucially depends on people smart enough to create new systems and altruistic enough to care only about civilization. Not about themselves, not about their stature, not about power, not about money, not about making a point, not about winning an argument, not about persuading others, and certainly not about looking good.

And while I'm at it, I'll note that mean is not evil, and nice is not good! Anyone primarily concerned with being nice is disqualified. There's a reason I don't respect people who whine that I'm a mean fucking bastard, and that reason is I automatically see these people as either stupid or evil. As if there weren't much higher priorities than making nice with idiots. As if it weren't sometimes necessary to castrate some lying egotistical scumbag actively working to destroy humanity.

The final criterion, as if there weren't enough criteria already, is that you have to know what the end result will look like. Because if you don't then you can never recognize "done". So for someone to make the Earth not suck, they will first have to know exactly what "not suck" looks like. Good fucking luck.

I don't know what to say beyond that. I don't want to say "the world is doomed, it's going to suck forever" because that's a lie. Nor do I want to say "you too can help this world by being less stupid and evil" because let's face it, you are stupid and evil. I've spent enough of my life interacting with you all to know this for a fact. Not that I ever needed to since look at this world! Yeah, and the very last thing I want to say is "don't worry your little head, I've got the problem in hand". Because guess what? You made this world a hellhole, you don't get off the hook. I will see you squirm!

No wait, I do know what to say. GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY. Because I don't want you to follow me and you're incapable of leading on this (if anything at all) so at least don't make it any worse for me.

And also, I've been saying "this world" because this world isn't my world. My world is what I'll make of ... this.

Why Go To Space? No Reason.

2011-01-10T05:48:00.000-08:00

Let's first agree that by 2050 China will be entirely dependent on nuclear power and probably still have an engineering-heavy political leadership. As France does currently. So they'll be able and perfectly willing to build nuclear spaceships and nuclear launch cannons. Which means that cheap access to space will happen no matter what American aristocrats and lawyers want.

Personally I think it's a fantastic idea and I'm glad I'll be able to say 'just shut the fuck up' to rabid anti-human eco-zealot freaks. That just leaves open the question of whether humanity will ever WANT to go out into space before the resources of this world are completely exhausted and/or poverty, disease and ignorance have already been eradicated. The short answer to that question is: no.

Most space advocates just assume that going out into space is a good thing. Not good enough.

Helium-3: I just love the utter stupidity of this one. The justification for going into space is helium-3 for fusion, and the justification for helium-3 is going out into space. And none of these retarded cretins notice the circularity. Nor do they care that fission is so much cheaper than fusion can ever be that fusion will just never be economically viable.

Gold or other precious metals: why? What the fuck for? Seriously, we've got more than enough gold for our industrial purposes. Do we really want to go out into space to cater to some dumbass' vanity? Let's come back to mining gold in space after gold on the ocean floor has been exhausted. The ocean floor is a lot cheaper and more accessible.

Platinum and other mineral catalysts: now there's a good reason to go into space. However, we only need thousands of tonnes of platinum total, and we might find substitutes for platinum as our materials science advances, so platinum isn't a good reason to build a million tonne space delivery system.

Solar power: the sun shines 24 hours a day in space, and there's no pesky atmosphere to get in the way. That's fucking great! The only problem is we don't need solar power when we've got nuclear power plants!

Avoiding biowar: yes, biowar plagues designed and dispersed by lunatic morons working from their garages are in our future thanks to synthetic biology. One of these might even cause human extinction. Just think of what would happen if some nut created a version of HIV transmissible through the air. A great thought to warm the cockles of your heart.

So won't nuts try to escape the Earth in a panic, fleeing in droves? Yes maybe. Well, no. Why try to go out into space and then building a completely disconnected artificial life support system when you can just get on with it and build your completely disconnected artificial life support system down here on Earth? It's going to be a lot fucking cheaper and affordable!

Science and exploration: sorry buddy, this isn't a commercial reason to go out into space. Science and exploration can be used to justify absolutely everything. Hey, why not go see what's down in the Mariana Trench? For Science! Hey, why not vivisect a human being? For Science!

Intercepting nuclear missiles: this is just about the only good reason to go out into space. Without a nasty atmosphere in the way, blowing up missiles using a laser beam is ridiculously easy. The same thing for seeing them coming. The only problem is that without a nasty atmosphere in the way, kinetic kill rounds (delivered by the railguns the military is working on) are unstoppable. And protecting against nuclear missiles is a lot cheaper on Earth anyways since all you have to do is put up a cheap plastic dome around your cities. Moving your cities out into space is overkill, ridiculously expensive overkill.

Even weather, telecommunications and surveillance satellites are going to be obsoleted by UAVs and aerostats. The only thing satellites provide is rapid whole-earth coverage. And for that you need to be in low earth orbit, not geostationary or beyond orbit.

Short of preventing large asteroid collisions there just aren't any compelling reasons to go out into space in the 21st century, and probably not in the 22nd century either. And large asteroid collisions are sporadic, not guaranteed.

Dexter

2011-01-09T10:14:00.000-08:00

Today I explained to someone that the reason I hate Americans being fat is because it's directly connected to their encouraging universal psychopathy (automobiles) and abuse of children (forced eating). The connection's pretty weird but also pretty solid. It's hard to be neutral and blasé about a symptom that a nation is evil. And that's exactly the word I used too: evil.

Normalizing Insanity

And that was before I learned about the show Dexter on American television. The existence of that show is just the 57th piece of confirmatory evidence I have that yes Americans are evil to the core. (The 56th piece of evidence was '24 hours' which publicly advocated torture.) Put in clinical terms, the whole ridiculous notion that there exists in a healthy society a proper place for a psychologically unhealthy individual is empirically wrong and appallingly stupid.

In modern society, the proper path for a schizophrenic isn't to become a shaman, prophet or priest, it's to take anti-psychotic drugs and to cease having psychotic episodes. Nor is it the proper path for those prone to uncontrolled violence to become soldiers and police, far better for them to take all their vitamins so as to curb their violent impulses. Nor is it proper for psychopaths to become vigilante killers, rather it is proper for them to die. (We'll worry about their lives when there's a method of treatment or incarceration that doesn't just increase psychopathy.)

Encouraging Evil

I have to say that it greatly disturbs and appalls me that there exists any nation on this planet that thinks making a show like Dexter is a good idea after the experience of Stanley Kubrick with making the film A Clockwork Orange only to then immediately pull it from all theaters because of copycat crimes. You can bet your ass the makers of Dexter don't have the slightest twinge of guilt over the murders they've inspired.

There's a reason why Canada routinely censors news and trials of murders and suicides. Because it inspires copycats and apparently there's just enough morality, decency and concern for human beings in Canadians to not want to be responsible for people dying. That's not very much decency you know. Yet even this fucked up Anglo country manages to easily pass this very, VERY minimal standard. Not so the USA.

Pretending Evil Is Banal

You know what the USA reminds me of? Rwanda just before the genocide, where everybody (including the aid agencies) kinda thought it was perfectly normal for the airwaves to be saturated by calls for the murder of Tutsis and people were distributing guns to anyone and everyone who wanted one. No, the USA isn't as bad as Rwanda and never can be. BUT the same cognitive dissonance and blatant disregard for the entire concept of evil is right there.

I want to be very specific though. What disturbs me isn't the psychopaths, the serial killers, and the violent criminals. What disturbs me is everyone else, supposedly possessed of empathy and human decency and the slightest bit of common sense, blithely going along with them without even blinking. It disturbs me that they ... just don't care. It disturbs me that it doesn't disturb them. It disturbs me how most of the population seems to act like psychopaths.

The Displacement Effect

Then again, I buy that pornography decreases actual sex by displacing it. I buy that rape porn decreases actual rape by displacing it. I buy that violent movies displace violent crimes. I buy that child porn displaces actual molestations of children (measured empirically). I have problems buying that a show about a murderous psychopath like Dexter satiates and displaces the desires of actual murderous psychopaths. Or maybe not.

Apparently, Dexter has ratings of 3-5 million viewers. Which is 1-2% of the American population. And as if by some coincidence, the USA has 2% psychopathy. If that's true, IF Dexter's entire viewing audience are psychopaths. And more importantly, IF all the longitudinal studies showing that young children raised on television grow up to become much more violent adults, IF all those studies are wrong THEN there's only one thing left for the USA to do: legalize child porn.

Except that argument doesn't work. You see, young children have no sexual desires so they won't seek out or watch child porn of their own free will. Young children do however have much less developed empathy and morality, so they will seek out a show promoting psychopathy like Dexter. So logically, a show like Dexter is much more dangerous to society than child porn can ever be.

So the argument goes the other way instead, if child porn is an abomination then everyone who participated in making, distributing, or even watching Dexter ought to go to jail and be publicly reviled. I'm okay with that.

Actually, it sounds like a fantastic idea.

Why We Need Systems Designers

2011-01-08T03:39:00.000-08:00

Alan Cooper writes that there are three kinds of interfaces created by UI programmers. These are technological interfaces, metaphoric (or iconic) interfaces, and idiomatic interfaces.

Behind Technological Representations

This is how a programmer thinks. They've got this technology they're using, these "applications" and "windows" and "tabs" and "scroll bars". They've got these resources, these "web pages" and "files". And they've got their limitless self-centeredness and self-concern coupled with a total inability to judge good versus evil.

It doesn't matter to them that you don't care about files or pages or windows or tabs. It doesn't matter to them that your hard disk has more than enough gigabytes free to hold cached copies of several million pages. It doesn't matter to them that after reading a "page", you might secretly desire to forget about it entirely. It doesn't matter to them that you don't want to have to worry whether to "save" or "bookmark" or "close", or even to know what these things mean. Never mind "naming" and "organizing".

None of that's important to a programmer. None of it CAN BE important since your mind, your wants and needs are an impenetrable black box to them. What's important to them is the stuff they're dealing with. It doesn't matter to them what YOU are dealing with in your mind. It doesn't matter to them what YOU would LIKE to deal with. It doesn't matter what OBJECTIVELY would make YOUR day easier. The only thing that matters is themselves. And the notion that this is evil is utterly beyond them since the whole concept of objective good and evil is beyond them.

Technology is what they're dealing with and to them it's perfectly obvious that THEY will impose IT upon YOU. And if you squeal and suffer and are in pain then [smack] [smack] SHUT UP!! DON'T YOU KNOW TO BE GRATEFUL FOR WHAT YOU'VE BEEN GIVEN YOU UNGRATEFUL MENTALLY RETARDED IDIOT?! WORSHIP THE TECH GODS!! WORSHIP THEM!! PRAISE THE ALMIGHTY LT!! PRAISE THE GLORIOUS RMS!! PRAISES BE!! And goodness save you if YOU get angry at THEM.

So what's behind technology metaphors? Egotism, evil, and total moral blindness. A lovely mix of mental artifacts that yields such lovely results.

What Sustains Metaphors And Icons

Now, the "better" sort of programmer thinks much differently. They know that you matter. They know that technology metaphors suck. Well no they don't. What they know is that technology metaphors are only okay FOR THEM. They are keenly aware that you don't give a flying fuck about their technology. Let's all have a round of applause for them being aware of this most basic and obvious fact of life. [applause]

The problem is that your mind, your wants, your needs, your desires, and especially your goals, and thus by implication the entire hypothetical space of possibilities that would be useful to your goals ... remains utterly impenetrable to them. They don't have a single clue. They are entirely and forever totally fucking clueless. BUT that won't stop them. No sir, it won't!

You see, they are superior beings. I mean, it's self evident! They're programmers who can program, who can deal with the technology. And you ... can't. Yes you don't give a flying fuck about files and closing and naming and windows and tabs but there's an obvious and self-evident reason for that. It's so obvious even a fool could understand it. YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

The reason you don't care about technology isn't because it has absolutely fuck-all to do with your work or your goals or anything else about you. No, it's because you CAN'T deal with it. If you could then you'd be a programmer, wouldn't you? It's so fucking obvious! ANYONE would become a programmer if they. only. COULD.

But you can't because your name's Cletus or Jimbo and you've got an IQ south of 80. But don't worry your little head Cletus [pat on the head] the programmers will save you! See, we're going to make this "deletion" object into something you're familiar with. Hmm, a trash bin. Yeah, you're familiar with that, aren't you? If only as something the city folk use. And see these "folders"? Just like the ones your cousin Jed the high falutin lawyer uses in his "office"!

No Cletus, it's not "patronizing" because we all know you've always had a problem with lerning. There's no way you could lern what the "deletion object" does or how to recognize it if you weren't already totally familiar with it from the physical world. Your mama always said to leave the thinkin' to the bright folk.

So what's behind metaphoric representation? Hubris, disdain, condescension and false humility. And it creates such lovely results too! After 10 years on a computer, you're still dealing with a "desktop" and "folders" and a "recycle bin". Not you know, a 3D space with orbiting objects and a time machine. You don't need that! Do you? Umm, really? And your name's not Cletus? It's Sir Isaia Throckmorton?

What Powers Idiomatic Representations

Idioms are arbitrary so they can provide no inspiration nor guidance to structuring an interface to software. And software itself can do literally anything since a computer is just a machine that imitates other machines so there's no guidance to be gained from that either. The only guidance can come from the mind of the user itself.

Idiomatic interfaces aren't made by programmers. They can't be made by programmers since coming up with the ideas requires fathoming the unfathomable mind of the users. You have to be able to figure out what the user is thinking when they're refusing to tell you. You have to figure out what the user wants and needs. You have to figure out if their wants and needs further their goals. You have to figure out whether their goals make sense. And if they don't then you have to figure out what their goals should be given objective facts of society and psychology and morality.

And figuring out all of these things when the user won't tell you, when they CAN'T tell you because they don't even know ... well, that's a bit of a pain. But if you have synthesis, if you're spontaneously and effortlessly creative, then you will just barely be able to figure them out. It helps if you've studied human psychology, a bit. It helps more if you actually know the human mind better than any psychologist. But in order to be any good at it you need to be an intellectual who'll play around with pure ideas, for fun.

In order to design an idiomatic interface, you need to figure out human minds and then extrapolate them to entirely hypothetical situations. And in order to do that, you're going to need to possess in your own mind every cognitive faculty which human beings are capable of. You're going to need to be capable of logic because some human beings, some of them your users, are capable of logic. You're going to need to be capable of synthesis because your users, some of them, are capable of synthesis. You're going to need to be an intellectual because some of your users are intellectuals. You're going to need to be able to think anything because you need to be able to outthink EVERY human being. Good luck.

There aren't many people who fit the profile of systems designers. But that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how few or how many there are. What matters is that we need them. We NEED them to design our complex software systems. We need them to design our user interfaces. And above all, we don't just need systems designers. We need systems designers desperately.

Fulcrum Points of Civilization

2011-01-08T02:08:00.000-08:00

The places where sticking a lever and pushing will lift up all of civilization. Arranged by effort to reward ratio.

anarchistic catalog
anarchistic media
anarchistic OS
cooperative software foundation with interaction designers
medical expert system
negative interest currency and community land trusts
sortition - this one isn't as meta as it gets
mini UAVs for drug smuggling
small portable nuclear power plants - because coal kills trains
automated construction - contour crafting and 3d printing
bioreactors - in vivo meat
stem cells and organ crafting
synthetic biology
mechanosynthesis
inverted skyscrapers

Contour Crafting

2011-01-08T02:04:00.001-08:00

One of the fulcrum points of society is Contour Crafting technology. What's the guy done in the past 5 years to develop this technology? My guess is absolutely nothing. This technology could be out there even without the integrated utilities he was going on about, but no. Apparently it's much better to keep it under wraps so nobody hears about it. What the fuck? It's not like he lacks money or interest, at least two different companies have worked with him.

This tech is much too important to the entire planet to leave it in the hands of one guy. If he doesn't come out with it then fuck him. If you know anyone with an aptitude or enthusiasm for mechanical engineering, then you might mention this to them. Once the tech is developed, it would be a very simple matter to sell it to the Chinese who don't give a flying fuck about patents or intellectual property.

All this planet needs is for one or two people to work on this and develop the technology.

It'd Take A Dictator To Fix The USA

2011-01-06T01:39:00.000-08:00

I think I could fix the USA if I were POTUS and were allowed to order just 10,000 to 20,000 assassinations. Following is a fairly comprehensive list of what needs to be done. I came up with 84 items off the top of my head:

get rid of all prestige military projects like F22 "raptors", aircraft carriers, destroyers and stealth bombers
pull out of military commitments
get rid of all energy subsidies
all agricultural production subsidies
ethanol and "renewables" mandates
make energy subsidies illegal
order all states to claw back their past subsidies
put a moratorium on highway construction
switch all transportation funding to trains
fund a vast high speed train network using sovereign debt
fund city-owned fiber-optic networks
claw back the billions given to telcos for this purpose which they never used
condemn, dismantle and return to greenfield status any shrinking cities like Detroit
reduce and repeal the laws underpinning the nuclear regulatory commission
use sovereign debt to fund a fleet of nuclear power plants
get rid of the federal reserve assholes
get rid of the interest on federal reserve held money, holy fuck that's despicable
claw back all money spent on the finance industry
destroy the big American "banks", not just "let" them fail
guarantee small retail banks
use sovereign debt for building coal to liquids and gas to liquids plants
put a moratorium on ALL greenfield private property construction
kill speculation on land by a land value tax
kill currency speculation by a currency exchange tax
kill wall street by making publicly traded corporations illegal
kill the finance industry by nationalizing the deed lookup company and making illegal all the shenanigans
encourage cooperatives and credit unions
force aristos' vehicles, the "civil society" to disclose at least 95% of their fundings' sources
put in a punitive tax rate
put in a punitive inheritance tax
repeal tax-free status for charities, trusts and religions
cooperate on money laundering and tax havens
end the war on drugs, institute sin taxes for marijuana, heroin, cocaine and ecstasy
recognize marijuana and ecstasy as first-line medical drugs for persistent nausea and PTSD
institute wholesale taxes, repeal sales taxes
keep services taxes
end all paroles - commute all past sentences accordingly
end all prison labour
end copyright
end patent law
pardon any offenders of copyright and patent law
institute clawbacks for copyright violation verdicts in favour of media companies
move to a scandinavian model for prisons
deprivatize prisons
repeal all surveillance
institute transparent government
fund a negative income tax with a livable floor
end the welfare bureaucracy
institute and fund parenting places to teach best practices from pregnancy on up
criminalize the beating of children, with no exceptions or allowable defense
depoliticize FEMA
refloat New Orleans by injecting seawater into the petrol reservoir underneath the city, charge the oil companies that have emptied it sinking the city
end all bioweapons research
dismantle the CIA
declassify and release all its files
repeal the national secrets act
sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
turn over highest jurisdiction to European Court of Human Rights
submit to the International Court of Justice
unilaterally relinquish the USA's seat on the UN Security Council
submit to the International Criminal Court
consent to the judgement against the USA in favour of Nicaragua in the International Criminal Court, pay reparations for waging war without ever declaring it
turn over all present and previous US state officials and members of the CIA who have international warrants pending for war crimes and crimes against humanity
cut off all aid to Israel, embargo it
condemn its Apartheidal national fascist regime
normalize relations with Cuba
invite Cuban doctors to teach and practice preventive medicine
deprivatize all emergency services like ambulances
fund universal single payer health care
buy and order a comprehensive survey of the effectiveness of all medical treatments and practices
make second best more expensive practices illegal
break the balls of pharma, use generics wherever possible
make it a criminal act to glorify psychopaths or narcissists
institute and fund universal mandatory HIV testing, make sure non-disclosure of status to sex partners counts as attempted murder
institute mandatory testing for psychopathy for anyone in a position of authority, make them pariahs on failure
pull out of ITER
end NASA's manned space programs, dismantle the space shuttles, fire NASA's top directors
turn over the International Space Station to the Europeans and Russians
permit the leasing of nuclear explosives for the purpose of space launch from remote regions
make the possession, production, importation and exportation of any gun shorter than the longest hunting rifle everywhere illegal and revoke all licenses
give police the power to make random searches for guns with only the possibility of arresting for gun, ammunition and explosive-related offenses on such a search (not even finding a dead body would count)
dismantle SWAT teams, drug units, and other ineffective specialized units (homicide?) everywhere
outlaw fascist parties and cults, have the FBI crack down on them
condemn waving of the flag as fascist
institute comparative religion classes in all schools
institute comparative history classes in all schools (Russian vs German vs American history in particular)
publicize the truth about the Russians beating the Nazis, not the Americans
cap the maximum size of schools at 200 students, make hall passes and other totalitarian practices illegal

Alternatively, I could institute sortition and let all of the above follow as a natural consequence. Of course, this gradual way would result in a greater total number of deaths since the status quo is quite deadly.

But even without any of the above, I honestly think the world would be a better place if I got the option of assassinating all:

American state and federal congressmen, senators, and judges
preachers and televangelists
economists everywhere
American CEOs and board members
corporate lawyers
bankers at any of the big fake-banks
prison guards
air force pilots
celebrity journalists and media owners
directors of wealthy American charities or other "civil society" organization

I would also add American cops, criminologists, doctors and all anthropologists to the list, but those are less clear cut so there's much less of a benefit to humanity from killing them.

Note that I would not NEED to assassinate every single one of them. Just start with killing 100-100-100 congressmen, preachers, and economists on the first day, then kill the most prominent and annoying 20-10-10 each and every day. That's a solid year of death, more than long enough for absolute terror to settle like a fog on those professions and for their evil practitioners to bug out like the rats they are.

So you see, yes I really could fix the USA if I was POTUS and could arrange the assassinations of 20,000 people with impunity. Whether the USA could survive the blowback and hysterical panic of my fixing it is a totally separate question. And one I haven't got an answer to.

There is an awful lot of schadenfreude stored up in ordinary Americans so I think they would go for it. I think China would love it and the Saudis would hate it. Saudi Arabia would no doubt sponsor more terrorists to attack the USA in retaliation.

Billionaires would try to flee of course but I could always have them assassinated, or even make an example of the first twenty. By which I mean, wait until at least twenty leave then have them all assassinated at once to make sure a clear message is sent.

Life Creates Entropy

2011-01-05T20:36:00.001-08:00

Some pretty smart people have gotten the notion that life opposes entropy, that it creates order and retards the heat death of the universe. That's not even remotely true. I suspect they have a weak grasp of entropy's relation to 'order' otherwise they would know how completely illusory the perception of life creating order is.

Information

You see, information, entropy, order, these are all words that mean exactly the same thing. They are physically identical things. Entropy is information. It's just that entropy is the kind of plentiful low-level information that the human sensory and nervous systems screen out as irrelevant. Our brains blank it out. Order meanwhile is also information, just high level - it's the kind of sparse information our brains find meaningful to watch out for.

Entropy is basically the physical universe's spam. Energy is the universe's hard drive capacity. And information is the sum total of what's on the hard drive. Gibbs free energy is the drive's free space, which you can move around from place to place at the cost of sacrificing some of it to hold more spam. And 'order' is user data.

Now to understand the whole thing you have to realize that information can never, ever be erased from the physical universe. Stephen Hawking thought you could in extreme circumstances and he was overwhelmingly, stupidly wrong. So when junk accumulates, it uses up hard drive capacity forever (ie, it obeys the second law of thermodynamics). At some point, all the space becomes unusable because it's filled with spam (the universe suffers heat
death).

And on the hard drive are life forms (AI) that create an enormous amount of junk data (called "heat" or "entropy") just to maintain a few bits of what they consider user data. Every time they "erase" a bit of user data, it becomes a gigabyte worth of junk data. But they're dumb so they're pleased. And it's not like they have much choice since they don't know how to use the computer too well (they're
low tech).

(Negentropy is just any mechanism that destroys information. So far, there aren't any.)

The upshot of all this is that living systems create megabits per second in order to preserve a few tens of bits of information around. The notion that the tens of bits are more important than the megabits each second is pure illusion and completely ridiculous.

Examples

Here,

(((1 watt) * (1 / (3 Ghz))) / (300 kelvin)) / Boltzmann constant = 8.04773744 × 10^10

A bunch of RAM operating at 3 gigahertz (ie, ridiculously fast) consuming 1 watt of power will pump 80 gigabits into the environment as heat. So the first question is just how much RAM would 1 watt power? Would it power 10 gigabytes? Maybe. Naaah.

The second issue is that if the average lifespan of data in the memory is 1 second, then the memory pumps out 10 gigabytes per third of a nanosecond * 3 billion = 28 exabytes per second, in order to sustain 10 gigabytes. Or if you divide both sides of the equation, you get that for every single byte of order, RAM pumps out 3 gigabytes of entropy.

The math just doesn't work people.

Biological systems use a lot less energy (ie, waste free energy by crapping lots of useless information on it), but then again, computer hardware uses up zero energy on "just living". Computers don't have digestive systems or musculatures. And electric turbines are more than 30% efficient while electric motors are more than 90% efficient. Both of those numbers are way, way above what biological bodies are able to achieve. Photosynthesis is only about 5% efficient.

But I don't have to guess. Here are the numbers for the human brain,

(((20 watt) * (1 / ((10^16) hertz))) / (300 kelvin)) / Boltzmann constant = 482,864

10^16 operations per second is generous. 20 watts is about average. So for every single bit operation the human brain performs, it pumps out half a million bits.

In the grand cosmological sense, the purpose of life isn't to fight entropy. The purpose of life is to create it.

For those who wish to learn more: reversible computation, Toffoli gates and entropy.

Obama Is Worse Than Stalin

2011-01-05T01:43:00.000-08:00

In the USA, millions of oppressed people are starving or dying from lack of access to food, drugs or medical treatment.

In the USA, public hygiene and anti-poverty measures to save the oppressed underclass from runaway plagues such as tuberculosis, MRSA and HIV are non-existent.

In the USA, citizens' private communications are under constant 24 hour surveillance.

In the USA, citizens can be stripped of all of their possessions for having listened to a song.

In the USA, Imagine by John Lennon is censored because it is illegal to imagine a world without christofascist religion.

In the USA, the laws as written never matter, only your connections to the ruling class and the Party.

In the USA, the rate of incarceration quadrupled over the last thirty years, even as the rate of violent crime halved.

In the USA, 2.3% of the general population were either incarcerated or under some form of limited release. Under Stalin in 1951, the Gulag system held 1.4% of the general population.

In the USA, police torture of prisoners is protected by the State.

In the USA, most prisoners are in prison for political crimes like smoking grass (made illegal because it represents lack of ambition and treason to the Mexicans).

In the USA, and unlike in civilized countries such as China, Kenya and Serbia, prisoners are stripped of their every last political right.

Not that it matters since vote rigging makes voting meaningless, in the dictatorship that is the USA.

Not that this matters since bribery is officially permitted, in the third-world dictatorship that is the USA.

In the USA, prisoners are forced to work as slaves, just like in the Gulag system.

The big difference is that Stalin's Gulag system was dismantled almost immediately after his death, after 30 years of life. The USA's prison system has already had 30 years of growth, has been institutionalized, and so seems set to be dismantled only after the position of POTUS is dismantled.

The other big difference is that Stalin lived and ruled back when fascism was openly espoused and practiced by every advanced country, when fascism was normal. Today, the USA is a fascistic totalitarian dictatorship when democracy is normal.

Obama is POTUS and POTUS is worse than Stalin, therefore Obama is worse than Stalin.

How Pandora Should End

2011-01-04T20:00:00.000-08:00

Have I lowered myself to watch this amazingly stupid, inane, over-hyped piece of crap pandering to eco-zealots? Of course not. Yet I still feel I'm in a position to comment and offer insight on it based on the incredible amount of fanfiction I've read about it. I'm referring to two stories on FFNet Invasion of Pandora and Pandora's End.

And I say again, reading two stories about Pandora being incinerated is an incredible amount of devotion and benefit of the doubt I'm showing to this amazingly stupid movie. Though I'm willing to extend my show of devotion if someone will just write a story about Daleks showing up on Pandora screaming EXTERMINATE! and INCINERATE! Because let me tell you, that thought put a happy smile on my face last night as I went to sleep. It's definitely the kind of Happy Thought pure magic is made of.

What The Movie Is All About

Remember the civilians working on the Avatar project complaining about a fucking jarhead on their civilian, diplomatic project? And at the end of the day, instead of the jarhead negotiating a peace treaty with the aliens like he was supposed to do, what does he do? He betrays his entire species and dooms them to poverty and death.

Because battle and mass murder & death are "cool". Because humans ought to all die and only Amerindian anti-progress enviro-freaks ought to live. And treason is a-okay so long as it's for those causes. So yeah, I only realized yesterday the civilians were right: putting a fucking jarhead in charge doomed their species.

The real lesson of the movie isn't that eco-zealots are right. No, it's that jarheads are never to be trusted because they're all violent traitorous psychopaths concerned only with looking good. A statement that is definitely true of the air force by the way. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it characterizes the macho marines, the snobbish navy, or the ... well whatever the fuck the army is.

How To Improve The Movie

To improve Avatar, you first have to realize its most basic flaw. And that flaw isn't that it's pandering to eco-zealot gaia-fascist druid-fundamentalist nutbars. Nor is it that this stupid planet has an impossible biology. Nor is it even that it's blatantly anti-progress and anti-human. No, its most basic flaw is the whole ridiculous notion of a "war" between an interstellar civilization and a planet-bound species of no-tech primitives.

That's what the whole stupid movie is about, isn't it? The "war". And it is utterly fucking impossible because this is what a space-based civilization would actually do:

mine the local asteroid belt (there is always one) to construct giant mirrors with a surface area totaling (1000 km)^2. ((1 micron) * ((1000 km)^2) * (7.85 tonnes)) per (cubic meter) in tonnes = 7 850 000 tonnes. It's basically a small solar sail and you won't need to mine more than a single asteroid.
tow then set up the giant mirrors in orbit of the habitable planet.
flash fry a square landing site, turning it into nice smooth glass by carefully redirecting a beam of sunlight of temperature 10^2 * 300 Kelvin = 30,000 kelvin onto a (100 km)^2 square area for 1 second.
OR slow broil a square landing site by redirecting a beam of sunlight of temperature 1 * 300 kelvin onto a (1000 km)^2 square area for 1 day (so that at midnight the temperature consistently reaches above 100 celsius on the ground, all the water boils off, the jungle gets dessicated then it spontaneously ignites in a beautiful firestorm that sterilizes and breaks down all the biochemical poisons in the atmosphere).
continue carving the landscape at will, pulverizing mountains and creating new riverbeds.
wait a couple days for it all to cool off.
land near the largest lake in the zone of death umm safety.
start mining operations at the landing site.
make contact with the natives and inform them of what you want by pointing to some mineral ores. (The advantage of the slow broil approach is now obvious, especially performed at night when it will be more spectacular. The disadvantage of slow broil is that it delivers thousands of times more energy to the landing site than flash fry.)
incinerate whatever (100 km)^2 square on the grid that the natives attack from. One square for every casualty you incur.

Bingo, within a fortnight, antagonizing you will become a capital crime among the natives.

You know, I think my plan might be overkill by about a factor of 100. Which just goes to show how fucking easy it is to kill primitive tribal morons when you're in space!!

So yeah, if you get rid of that entire amazingly stupid "war" and let the Navi be incinerated then that would improve the movie tremendously. Or you could make a sequel based on that. You know, Earth saying "alright you scum suckers, so you want to get SERIOUS?"

If you're going to create a movie lionizing the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder that is "nature" then it might as well be the collective murder of uncivilized backwards tribal primitives.

The Hand of God

Oh yeah, that massive shaft of sunlight could just as easily have been redirected to the polar regions, melting the ice sheets and turning a continent like Antarctica inhabitable. A square 1000 km on a side is a fair amount of living space you know.

And if it were directed to the oceans, well you know the scene in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home where the space-whale probe starts boiling the oceans in order to sterilize the Earth? THAT is what it would look like.

I think there is a good reason why the hand of god in Populous 3 is represented by a shaft of sunlight.

How To Talk To People And Why It's Not Worth It

2011-01-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

Most people think talking about a subject is about teaching and learning or (for the relativists) pushing one's point of view.

Some people grow cynical and think talking about a subject is about acquiring status and gaining reputation or even just looking good. These people think they are clever and know something other people don't.

Well, I am not so limited (and even if I were, I'm contrarian enough to abuse anyone stupid enough to care about my reputation) so I operate on many more levels and have been since at least 2000.

The game - arguing with facts and logic to prove a point. I include here in the game the entire meta-hierarchy of authority and epistemology.

The meta-game - proving a point so as to shape one's reputation.

The meta-meta-game - shaping one's reputation in order to reshape discourse.

The meta-meta-meta game - reshaping discourse in order to effect a quantitative change in society.

Nowadays that's where I stop because it's just for fun. In order to play the game seriously, for keeps, there has to be another meta-level to it.

The meta-meta-meta-meta game - effecting quantitative changes so as to reshape the permanent direction of society.

But really, thinking there's anything you can say in a discussion forum, or any other medium, to reshape the direction of society is quite conceited. Of course, it says something about me that it took me years to learn that lesson.

This lesson I'm now teaching falls under the category of "effecting a quantitative change in society". I hope to open a few minds but I don't expect it. I hope some of you learn 'this is what I could be doing' and 'there are no limits to my power if I think hard enough on it'.

A million people protesting out in the streets will have ... absolutely no effect. But a single person using their mind to find the fulcrum points of society, can use the leverage to lift it up in its entirety.

A bit of sage advice: those fulcrum points are pretty high up the meta-level hierarchy. It takes many years to identify them. I know exactly where they are. There are 5 easy ones that can be actioned by a single motivated individual, they are:

anarchistic catalog
anarchistic media
anarchistic OS
cooperative software foundation with interaction designers
medical expert system
negative interest currency and community land trusts
sortition - this one isn't as meta as it gets
mini UAVs - for drug smuggling
small portable nuclear power plants - because coal kills trains
automated construction - contour crafting and 3d printing
bioreactors - in vivo meat
stem cells and organ crafting
synthetic biology
mechanosynthesis
inverted skyscrapers

I think it's telling that every single last one of the fulcrums with the power to change society is a complex system. The low hanging fruit has all been taken - if you find another, it's probably poisoned.

Note that I didn't include object-oriented architectural design software because it's already been made and is out there. And AI, space travel, and direct reduction of steel are linear - their rewards are linear to their costs.

I am for obvious reasons being deliberately obscure on the first 3. I don't like it but I'm hoarding that knowledge for now. The main reason why is that if I explained the idea then my enemies (the landed aristocrats and other anti-human anti-progress assholes) would find a way to thwart it by following Worse Is Better. I'll explain the secondary reason why in my next series on Innovation.

Psych Model of Inter-Personality Interactions

2010-12-31T04:10:00.000-08:00

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

does opposition mean that at least one party is wrong? for example, nuclear and anti- advocates. pro-life vs pro-choice.
do you despise cultural, moral, and/or logical relativism?
if I make a glass of stuff chemically identical to apple juice from petrol, is it apple juice?
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?
hypothetically, if the laws of physics say nothing about the direction of time then what does that say about subjective experience?
are math and logic eternal? is reasoning timeless?
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

how would you measure creativity?
are good ideas rare or plentiful?
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?
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?
does a walk in the park clear your head or give you ideas?
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.)
do you detect a pattern in the above questions?
is thinking in statistical patterns second-nature to you?

Answers:

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.
rare
obviously sharing is good and it doesn't matter who thinks otherwise
yes, no, yes
ideas
fuzzy
yes
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

2010-12-31T04:00:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-28T10:03:00.000-08:00

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.