Human Agency

The authors reviewed data from three large U.S. studies and found that the risk of suicide for adults who drank two to four cups of caffeinated coffee per day was about half that of those who drank decaffeinated coffee or very little or no coffee.

Now there is retarded research worthy of an Ig Nobel prize.

These imbecilic cretins don't even contemplate that the arrow of causation runs the other way around. No it can't be human agency at fault. It can't possibly be that depressed people cease giving a fuck about coffee just like they cease giving a fuck about everything else. Including but not limited to sleep, hygiene, water and food. No, it can't be that depressed people willingly cut their caffeine intake because it has lower priority than not starving to death, which already requires more effort and motivation than they can bring to bear!

It's funny how in physics, they assume human agency, whereas in medicine they assume none. When you're studying the universe, humans are apparently sitting outside of the universe and not subject to its laws. Whereas when you're studying human beings, the human mind doesn't exist at all. The worst part is these utterly retarded cretins are par for the course. They are totally representative of the scientific community and of academe. As proof, consider the so-called Copenhagen "interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Or John Steward Bell's retarded claims that so-called super-determinacy (ie, physics applies to the human brain) is uncomfortable to think about therefore it can't possibly be true. A ludicrous claim which his famous "Bell's theorem" relied upon as an assumption.

The sad truth is that all the authority figures you cretins all look up to are retarded mongoloids who should be executed en masse to teach them a lesson in doing proper fucking science! Why do you think the mythical "scientific method" says to predict in advance? It's because scientists are incapable of not lying to themselves (and others) and because they're incapable of thinking. All they're good for is running experiments, ritualistically running calculations that have been agreed to by everyone, and then reporting the results. Anything fuzzy that actually requires grey matter, things like INTERPRETATION, are beyond the ken of any but the very, very best scientists. And even they manage to spout some great honking idiocies. And that's what they should stick to. Things that a chimp could do if a chimp could understand language.

The purpose of consciousness is not to learn or to act but to INHIBIT learning and action. Everything else can be dealt with by the subconscious. People drive home asleep for goodness' sake! The purpose of consciousness is to model behaviors which would lead to your death so that you DO NOT DO THEM. Scientists are obviously all uniformly lacking in consciousness, they are obviously no better than chimps, since they are totally lacking in the consciousness necessary to inhibit them from pursuing useless science and proudly publishing bogus results. With their own names attached to the papers! Unless ... unless science is so corrupt, so thoroughly rotten to its dark Evil heart, and its rituals are all so completely pointless, useless, and ineffectual that fraudulent, lying and useless papers will never get scorned and result in career death. Take your pick, either scientists are all mindless chimps or they are all corrupt & Evil. Personally, I ask "why choose?" I believe they're lacking in consciousness and conscience both.

Advice to a Student of History

No doubt you've already read some of Ancient Engineers [at powells], History of Childhood, Political Consequences of Child Abuse, Origin of Consciousness, Athens: Government by Jury and Referendum, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama, Environmentalism 400 BC, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, How To Get Rich by Jared Diamond.

Or how the Boyar Russians managed to run a nation with complex trade relations with absolutely no money using sheer politics, how Egypt's welfare might be tied to the supplanting of its negative interest currency by the Romans, Mikhail Bakunin's predictions of red and black dictatorships arising which were borne out. And for fun, the fiction of Sylvia Volk. Whichever ones you've read, I highly recommend the others.

You will not have read about any of Deng Xiaoping, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Hugo Chavez Frias; Nestor Ivanovych Makhno, Douglas Engelbart; Sakichi Toyoda, Ricardo Semler. As you have no reason to suspect they are related. Their relation is that each of them tried (and often succeeded) in lifting an entire country up one step on the ladder of Tribal Feudal Industrial Networked society. That is, they tried singlehandedly to alter the history of an entire country in a permanent, irreversible and fundamental way.

No doubt you know that history is not a science as it offers no theories, only narrative. (Anthropology meanwhile is an anti-science.) Well, psychohistory is a science. And some of Jared Diamond's stuff almost qualifies. Economics, sociology, psychology and politics are sciences too, if dismal ones. You will not be able to guess that all of these sciences have as their foundation micro-psychology, in the same way as chemistry and astronomy are both founded on physics. Without micro-psychology, the driving force for progress in psychohistory theory seems random and doesn't really make sense.

How Science Really Works

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.

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

Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram's Authority Experiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six Degrees Of Separation

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

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

Physics too

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

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

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

Millikan

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

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

Sociology

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

Psychology vs Anthropology

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

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

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

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

What It All Means

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

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

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

It says Scientists. Are. Frauds.

Every last fucking one of them.

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

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

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

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

On the Constancy of Human Nature, part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Modern Physicist's Religion: The Big Bang

I hate it when otherwise sane-seeming physicists start spouting trash about the Big Bang. You can tell they're doing it by rote, that they're parroting some propaganda they've been indoctrinated with. Something they've never examined to see whether it makes a lick of sense.

NO EVIDENCE

First of all, there is no evidence for a Big Bang. There cannot ever be any evidence for it since the whole point of inventing Inflation Theory was to erase every last trace of the big bang to remedy the defects of the theory. The reason the Ekpyrotic model is viable at all is because of this total erasure of all traces of any big bang. But inflation? Oh you can't erase that! Even the Ekpyrotic model generally tries to replicate it. So what is today called "evidence for" the big bang is invariably evidence for hot inflation. Cosmic microwave background? Hot inflation. Expansion of the universe? Inflation.

MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE

Secondly, you have to realize that there can be no distinction between inflation and eternal chaotic inflation. If inflation happens then eternal chaotic inflation is the best possible model for it. You get eternity for free. Read my lips, no extra charges! Add quantum mechanics to inflation theory and you get chaotic inflation. And with chaotic inflation you have eternal inflation. It's FREE!

Worse than that, our living in a finite universe is mathematically impossible. If the probability of a universe arising out of nothing (assuming the whole notion isn't absurd which it is, more on that later) is finite then the probability of our living in an infinite universe is infinite. Infinity trumps finity!

If there were only one single eternal universe, and a billion billion billion finite universes, we could never tell the difference between them from any scientific experiments, but pure mathematics says that the probability of us coming from the eternal universe is 1 and the probability of us coming from any of the billion billion billion finite universes is ZERO.

It's statistically impossible.

ABSURDITY

The whole notion of something arising out of nothing is absurd. It's incoherent. It literally doesn't mean anything. The only way to ascribe any meaning to it is to say that the universe as-is is equivalent to nothing.

Which is very likely since a flat universe (as ours seems to be) has net zero energy. But to say that it's equivalent to nothing is to say that 'nothing' is subject to physical laws. or at least to mathematical laws. So it's not a true 'nothing' is it? It's something, it's laws of mathematics.

In order to say that what's beyond the universe is true nothing, you can't appeal to any sort of equivalence, you can't say that the universe came out of nothing at all. You can only say that the universe created itself. And what can you appeal to when making such a statement?

Well actually you can say that the universe created itself because it was self-consistent. But if you're going to say that then there are tons of other self-consistent universes possible. And every single one of them must have created itself.

Bravo, you've got the Mathematical (Multi)verse Hypothesis. Which is the exact kind of thing the Big Bang believers are trying to avoid. In trying to provide any kind of rigorous meaning to "the universe came out of nothing" you inevitably run into the fact that our universe can't be the only thing.

You get the same result when you try to define "non-determinism". It literally doesn't mean anything. And when you try to give it some meaning, it always turns out to be inconsistent with the vague notion of "non-determinism".

REVERSION TO RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE

So if the Big Bang is unprovable, mathematically impossible and it's not even coherent then why do these big headed logical types believe in this utter crap? Well first of all, physicists lack big picture thinking. Also known as judgement, which relies on synthesis. And synthesis is a cognitive trait physicists uniformly lack. But that only explains why it's possible for physicists to believe this crap.

Why they actually believe in it is because it's a religious notion. It's a belief in Creation. It's something that people used to believe in until science became atheistic. Until four young scientists made a manifesto and signed it with their own blood. That's why Einstein was so adamantly opposed to the Big Bang. Because it's a religious notion which science had gotten rid of!

And really, that explains it all. When cosmologists were confronted with the fact of an expanding universe, they couldn't handle the notion that ours isn't the only universe out there. So they reverted to religion. They reinvented the "Big Bang" - the Moment of Creation.

The same thing happened in the 1920s with the so-called Copenhagen "interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Which is no interpretation at all - it's the physical theory behind a bunch of useless math. Physicists like Richard Feynman who dismiss the physical meaning of math as unimportant are lackwits. So anyways, Copenhagen would be the physical meaning of QM if it weren't completely absurd and incoherent.

So believers in the Copenhagen doctrine revived vitalism because they couldn't handle the idea of a non-singular timeline. They invented all kinds of crap about "duality" and "uncertainty" because they couldn't handle that Platonism is wrong, that the universe really isn't made up of mathematical points. Even though mathematical points are physically incoherent.

They reinvented the notion that humans and other living things (so-called "observers") are Special, that they have this fundamental Living Force that makes them different from the rest of physical reality. How absurd is that!? But it's something that humans believe intuitively. It's an anthropomorphic notion. And that's why it got reinvented.

Same thing with Creation, or the Big Bang, whatever you want to call it. It's an intuitive anthropomorphic ('we are special') notion that just got reinvented when scientists were challenged to shatter it utterly. They were challenged and they failed. Because they're morons who can't grasp the big picture. Who can't grasp that maybe "creation" is something that needs to be defined before it means anything. Before it can ever be used to explain anything.

Kinda like God. For God to explain anything, it first needs to be defined. Which defeats the whole purpose of it since God is supposed to be this mysterious incomprehensible ball of crap and handwavy bullshit. And bullshit can't explain jack.

Same with Creation. /shakes head/

Previously, the disease process in physics.

Dodging Asteroids at Lightspeed? You Fail Physics Forever

Okay, this rant is inspired by a story (which I won't recommend) that tried to one-up the standard "dodging asteroids" scene by having the spaceship (a small two-man fighter) do it at light speed. Seriously, for the love of all that's good, WHY? Apparently, because light speed is KEWL.

I think anyone reading this blog probably knows all of this but what the hell, I put several hours into this rant so I might as well put it in a convenient place. Who knows, maybe someone will find it useful to smash some ignoramus over the head.

VISIBILITY

First issue, visibility of destinations and obstacles. In the story, this carrier ship is supposed to be 8 kilometers long. If the fighter is traveling at lightspeed then one second away from the carrier, it's 1 light-second away. Well,

arctan((8 km) / (1 light-second)) in degrees = 0.00152894519 degrees

Do you know what that is? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye

> Angular resolution: 1-2' (about 0.02°-0.03°), which corresponds to 30–60 cm at a 1 km distance

0.02 / 0.00152894519 = 13.

In other words, 1 second away from the carrier at lightspeed is still thirteen times too small to see with the naked eye.

Even assuming that Talking Is A Free Action and the protagonist was able to point out and describe the carrier to his passenger instantaneously, the passenger would still have been unable to see it.

In fact, since the human eye sees at about 18 frames per second, the passenger would just barely be able to see a tiny speck of white if he stared at the exact spot the carrier was going to pop up at in advance.

So first he would see nothing, then immediately after he would see a speck, then immediately after that he would see the entire ship.

KINETIC ENERGY

Going on, the author doesn't seem to have heard of this thing called "kinetic energy", whether the relativistic or the newtonian kind. Behold,

(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 gram) / (1180 (kilojoules per gram)) = 30.8471057 tonnes

The top half of the left hand side of that equation is the kinetic energy of 1 gram of matter (say, space dust) travelling at a velocity of 90% the speed of light. The bottom half of the left hand side of the equation is the heat necessary to fuse lead starting from 0 degrees Kelvin (absolute zero). The right hand side is how much of your ship is going to melt away from a collision with 1 gram of space dust. Assuming nothing heats up that doesn't melt and blah blah blah.

(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 gram) / (4637 (kilojoules per gram)) = 7.8498134 tonnes

This is the same equation but including heating from 0 degrees kelvin to fusion, past fusion to boiling, past boiling to ionization. In other words, this is how much of your starship is going to turn into pure plasma from a collision with 1 gram of space dust. It's straightforward to come up with similar equations for iron (steel) and uranium, but unnecessary.

The fact that air going at 90% of the speed of light has the oomph of a thermonuclear explosion is really useful when designing real starships because it means an air shield misted in front of your starship in its direction of travel can reduce asteroids down to free nuclei and anything smaller than that into subatomic particles.

Starship design hint: you can make your starship as long as you want without increasing its cross-section. So it can store any finite amount of air you might possibly need on your interstellar and/or intergalactic trip to vaporize everything in its way. Once vaporized (well, ionized actually) it's easy to sweep the debris out of the way with your magshield. Particle accelerators do that every day.

And lest you think that I'm exaggerating when talking about thermonuclear explosions,

(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 kilogram) / (4.2 petajoules) = 8.66656779

a 1 kilogram mass going at 90% lightspeed has a yield of a cool 8.67 megatons.

(((1 / 2) * ((0.99 * c)^2)) * 1 kilogram) / (4.2 petajoules) = 10.486547

at 99% lightspeed, it clocks 10 megatons.

It took until 1954 for the United States to have a nuclear device with a yield more powerful than that.

The most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever tested in human history was the Tsar Bomba, which clocks at the equivalent of 5 kilograms of mass at 99% lightspeed.

Are you starting to get the picture? Hitting anything at lightspeed results in a big boom.

REACTION TIME - NAIVE

From http://pseudoastro.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/asteroid-belts-proximity-of-rocks-and-why-navigation-is-not-dangerous-sorry-han-solo/

> Even if we cut the size of asteroids in half again, and were interested in all asteroids larger than half a meter (1.5 ft) in size, then we have 8 times as many asteroids, but each one still has over 500 km2 all to itself, and even more space if we consider the vertical component.

Using the formula for the volume of a sphere, and given that half of (half a meter) diameter gives a radius of 1/4 meter, we have

(4 / 3) * pi * ((1 / 4)^3) = 0.0654498469 cc's.

Assuming it has the density of water, that's 0.686342898 megatons or 686 kilotons. More than 30 times the explosion at Nagasaki. In other words, that's some dangerous fucking asteroids. And they're an average of

sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 7.45871992 × 10-5 light-seconds apart.

In other words, the hotshot pilot protagonist has one ten thousandth of a second to dodge them.

The speed of nerve impulses in the human body is "up to 100 meters / second". In other words, the nerve impulses in the pilot's body have the time to travel a whole

((100 (meters per second)) / 7) * (10E-5 seconds) = 1.42857143 millimeters

yeah, one millimeter in the time he has to dodge an asteroid. Brilliant, are you feeling the gritty realism yet? I know I am!

DISTRIBUTION OF ASTEROIDS

Now you may have noticed that the sqrt(500 km^2) neglects the vertical dimension. But 65 cc's is still an enormously dangerous asteroid, and if you go down to 1 cc then you still have to worry about explosions on the scale of 10 kilotonnes. For comparison, the Hiroshima explosion was 15 kiloton. Now, 65 cc's is conveniently close to 64 cc's

64* 1 cc = 2^6 * 1 cc

which means that asteroids of that size are

8^6 = 262 144 times as numerous,

given that it's a power law of degree 3 (every time you 1/2 the size, you increase numbers by 2^3 = 8). And

(8^6) * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 5 861 718.04 kilometers

That's the height of the asteroid belt that's compensated for by the fact we're neglecting any asteroids less than 65 cc's.

(8^2) * (8^6) * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 375 149 954 kilometers

That's the height of the asteroid belt that's compensated for by the fact we're neglecting any asteroids with yields of less than about 1 kiloton when travelling at 99% the speed of light.

And we can stop there because 375 million kilometers is almost the RADIUS of the asteroid belt. And of course, explosions of less than 1 kiloton aren't a danger at all to a tiny two-man fighter.

CHANCE OF COLLISION

So yeah, anyway. Now that we've established we can use the 500 km^2 number as a simplifying assumption, this is the proportion of the area swept by a 2 meter wide spaceship going through 500 km^2

(2 m) / sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 8.94427191 × 10^-5

which is the same as the chance of hitting that speck of rock somewhere inside it. And this,

(1 million km) / sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 44 721.3595

is the number of such areas you travel through when going 1 million km (less than 1% of the radius of the asteroid belt) inside the asteroid belt. So logically, this

(1 - (8.94427191 × 10E-5))^44721 = 4.17433136 × 10^-18

is the probability that you will cross 44721 such areas without hitting anything. In three seconds going at light-speed.

Do you understand what 10^-18 is? It's one tenth of one millionth of one billionth of one percent. It's one billion billion to 1 odds against. I think your chances of surviving a point blank gunshot to the forehead are higher. How do you like them apples?

REACTION TIME - REVISITED

Now that we have a probability of a collision, some playing around with google shows that,

(1 - (8.94427191 × (10^(-5))))^7 749 = 0.500012276

and of course,

7749 * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 0.577976206 light seconds

So every half-second, there's a 50/50 chance that you'll have to dodge something. If you can convert this to a Mean Time Between Failures (or tell me how to) then you'll know the average reaction time you have between any two dodge-or-die events. Whatever that number actually is, it's going to be close to half a second. And of course, your reaction time had better be much better than this if you want to live through a breezy five minute jaunt.

So yeah anyways. Dodging asteroids at lightspeed? You fail physics forever.


See also,

Atomic Rocket - http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html -- includes technical info on everything up to and including time travel (more plausible than you might think, infinitely more plausible than FTL)

Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum - http://www.bautforum.com/ -- if there's any name in starship design I'd recommend it's Isaac Kuo - he does it with today's technology, not hypothetical future technology

Hint: starships don't travel through the solar system, let alone something as dirty as the asteroid belt. They avoid collisions because they're in space.

This review was sponsored by Google TM search engine and Google TM calculator.

What Science Can Be Trusted

One of the things I collect is stories of science gone wrong. Respectable, and still respected, scientific experiments that are deeply flawed and/or outright faked. I'm not alone in this since Richard Feynman taught himself not how to read bubble chamber photographs but how other scientists systematically misread them.

My suspicion of scientists started very early on when my high school physics teacher told me personally about how some students at the University of Toronto tried to reproduce Millikan's oil drop experiment with modern equipment ... and couldn't. In fact, not only was that experiment faked because the "results" were cribbed from theoretical values, but the theoretical value Millikan copied from was WRONG. As if that weren't bad enough, later scientists copied his "results" even when their own were more accurate. After all, it's not like such a renowned and well-respected researcher would have been a bald-faced filthy liar, could it? That's why the "empirically measured" charge of the electron shows a steady progression from Millikan's value to the true value over time.

The other story of shenanigans among scientists that marked me very early on was this story of a biologist who tried to make a rat maze experiment. So far so good, right? I mean, there are thousands of the fucking things. Except that he was obsessed with doing it properly. He wanted to eliminate every possible source of error and confusion. After a dozen iterations, he ended up with this kind of super-maze that had all kinds of insulating soundproofing anti-vibration features. That's great right? WRONG. Because what he did was invalidate years, decades, of other people's research. And he didn't even get any results from it. All he did was establish how rat maze experiments should be run. Wait wait, the best part's to come because you see he never got published. Yeah that's right, you can do first-rate science that invalidates thousands of other peoples' work and it isn't publishable.

More recently there was this fairly widespread story of how lab rats were being made sick by being fed standard rat food. Cause the rat food was made from soybeans. And if you know anything about nutrition, and aren't a braindead hippie, then you know that filthy estrogen-filled shit's horrible for you. These guys were testing cancer drugs if I recall correctly. While I'm on it, do you know why drugs that cure cancer in lab rats don't do jack in humans? It's because lab rats are really, REALLY prone to cancer. Animals that aren't hopelessly inbred and thus have functioning immune systems generally don't get cancer and don't NEED the anti-cancer drugs that work on lab rats. Well as if this weren't bad enough, it turns out the rat food had something to do with giving rats cancer too. So this "promising" anti-cancer drug turned out to do jack once the rats were given actually healthy food. The best part is that the filthy soybean shit they were feeding the rats was the same shit everyone else was feeding their rats.

Then there's medical experiments in humans. Those are a fun a dozen. Let's take breast cancer. The earlier you treat breast cancer, the better chances you have of surviving. It proves that early detection and intervention works, don't it? Not so! Cause there's this oft-forgotten thing called spontaneous remission. That's where your own fucking body naturally fights cancer all by itself and beats it. Many of the women who are diagnosed as having early stage cancer would have beaten it anyways. Without any treatment at all!! But forget that, let's just spin it as painful OUCH diagnostics and $$$ expensive $$$ treatments working! There's money in it, who cares about the truth? Kinda like the oncologists PRIDE themselves on planning anti-cancer therapies so that a patient gains, statistically speaking, a mere few days of extra life. We all know that a couple extra days of life are worth tens of thousands of dollars in the pockets of oncologists as well as excruciating pain for patients, right?

But there's no experiments like psychology experiments. There's the executive monkey experiment where two monkeys get zapped based on the performance of one monkey. The results of the experiment showed that the executive monkey got more ulcers. This is good, right? I mean it proves that managers DESERVE their ski vacations and massage treatments for deciding other people's fates. And we all love the rich, right? Only problem is with this whole "performance" thing. Apparently the researchers decided to choose monkeys for the executive slot based on intelligence. I mean, you wouldn't want a dumb monkey there, they'd get zapped all the time and it would make the experiment run longer! Yeah, so apparently after that little confounding factor got taken out of the equation, it turns out that, surprise surprise, the helpless monkey's the one with the ulcers!

Then there are experiments on hairless monkeys. Everyone knows of the Stanford Prison Experiment, right? Same with Milgram's Obedience Experiment. You know, the two experiments where you draft volunteers who are willing to obey the orders of some anonymous researcher and then you make them do horrific stuff, and then you conclude that ALL PEOPLE, regardless of whether or not they volunteered for psych experiments, are slaves to authority and would commit atrocities! Un-fucking-believable. You can't make this shit up. For fuck's sake, the experiments wouldn't have been conclusive even if they'd DRAFTED psychology students into them. Why? Because psychology students are abnormal (highly empathetic and irrational, generally incapable of logic) so they are not statistically representative of the general population.

Then there's the Six Degrees of Separation experiment. You know, the one where this bozo sent thousands of letters to be hand-delivered to a destination. Letters, 99% of which never got to any destination, but let's ignore that and focus SOLELY on the successes and then draw conclusions about the planet from it! Never mind that it became immediately obvious that people were stratified by class and that letters whose origin and destination were separated by class would just never get there. Or that hey most of the letters never reached their destination. Yes, let's make positive conclusions from utter failures! Unbelievable.

You know, there are monkey experiments that are fairly trustworthy. There's the Chicken Wire Mother Monkey experiment which determined that comfort is more important than food for infants. Funny how comfort isn't listed as one of the "16 basic needs" of humans, even though it's been known for centuries at least that human infants deprived from touch DIE.

Then there's the experiment where a bunch of monkeys in a cage were conditioned to beat each other up based on some signal, then they were rotated until none of the original monkeys in the cage were left. But every time the signal was given, the monkeys still beat each other up.

There's a couple things that make these experiments trustworthy. The first is that you're not pre-selecting monkeys. You have a bunch of monkeys and you just do something to absolutely every one of them. The second thing is that you're not watching for anything complicated or subtle. You don't care whether the monkeys play the violin or even whether they push a button on time, only whether they eat or they beat each other up. The last thing is that you're not depending on the monkeys to use their huge brains to learn and do something complex, you're looking at strictly animal behaviour. Simple experiments testing for simple behaviour are pretty reliable. Complicated experiments and/or complex behaviour are unreliable, no matter how spectacular they appear to be.

So what science can be trusted? Can you really trust those huge over-complicated equations in superstring theory? Actually yes, because math is simple. Math looks complicated to your puny, puny brain, but it's actually hella simple to mathematicians because it's regular and predictable. Well what about those huge experiments with those enormous overgrown particle accelerators at CERN and Fermilab? Surely that's too complicated! Surprisingly not since conceptually those are just hollow tubes drawn into a circular shape with magnets spaced a precise distance apart. The engineering might be complicated but the design is extremely simple. And there are thousands of engineers on those projects making sure that every single detail works to spec. Best of all, there are also thousands of scientists on those projects checking every little detail of the theory, including each others' work.

You see, "complicated" doesn't mean expensive. On the contrary. An experiment with a hollow tube in the shape of a perfect circle that happens to be 10 kilometers in radius is SIMPLE. The fact that it's expensive just means there's gonna be thousands of scientists to oversee this incredibly simple experiment. That's great! And going the other direction, a cheap experiment with a single human being, or even a fucking rat, is incredibly complicated. Because biology is complicated, because brains, even animal brains, are fucking complicated. And usually those experiments only have a single quack overseeing them. So expensive & simple == good. While cheap & complicated == bad. Which when you really think about it is terribly obvious, but people aren't used to thinking that a rat is complicated so anything at all you do with a rat is a horribly complex experiment.

See also Most Great Science Is Fraudulent... and Modern Scholasticism.

Modern Scholasticism: An Intro to the Fake Sciences, part 1

What are the sciences? A bunch of people come together, arguing about observations and argue back and forth between each other until they arrive at a consensus. Not the truth, merely a consensus.

There's a word for that, 'dialectics'. And that word has some really bad connotations to it. After all, the "learned" people in medieval times who argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin were engaging in dialectic. They were removed from reality of course and the word for that is 'scholasticism'.

So what's the problem with dialectic? Why is it that people go off the rails into scholasticism? Why is it that science is supposedly about "prediction" instead of merely explanation? Well, the weak point in the whole process is that it's made up of human beings and if you know anything of psychology it's that people lie. And not just to each other, but to themselves. This is more than amply aided by the fact that most people aren't capable of formal logic or judgement.

Psychology is not a science but merely a proto-science (and we'll get back to that) but if there's any true fact in psychology, anything that's been empirically determined beyond the shadow of any possible doubt (reasonable or unreasonable), it's that people don't care about the truth. And if there's a second true fact in psychology it's that people care about power, and usually about money.

So we have here an obvious and general mechanism for the corruption of the so-called sciences. Their perversion into fake sciences. This happened with theology since the Roman Catholic Church Hierarchy ordered from above that their god exists and that angels and the heavens did as well. Any theologian that turned atheist was drummed out of the ranks. Denied power and money and all livelihood. This explains medieval scholasticism very well. Now we're just left with the modern kinds.

Modern Scholasticism

You may be wondering what vile perversions of science and logic and truthfulness exist today that I could be referring to. Well, the three that immediately leap to mind are criminology, economics and climatology. I'm leaving pharmacology and medicine for later since these are practical arts more than sciences. Once the case of the fake sciences is dealt with, it will be obvious why the same vile corruption exists in these arts.

The Fake Sciences

Let's start with criminologists.

The first thing to be known about criminologists is that they're not paid to "find criminals" or even "convict the guilty" or any such lying claptrap. They're paid to convict people. Period. They're not paid to protect the innocent or help them in their own defense. They're paid to put people in jail, no matter what.

Is it any wonder then that with a single universal force pushing in a predetermined direction that all the corruption would align in the same overall direction? Is it any wonder that the corruption would accumulate over time until the whole field bears no resemblance to reality?

Anyone who bothers to look will see how criminologists lie over and over again on the witness stand. How they misrepresent the evidence they gather. They willfully and systematically misinterpret it to put defendants in the worst possible light. Especially the supposed "gold standard" of DNA evidence.

As an easy example, the FBI's DNA database was trawled by one of these quacks in order to "prove" that DNA samples are unique. The problem with that is that the database was built on the assumption that DNA samples are unique. Any duplicates that existed were erased before the lying quack went to "measure" the number of duplicates.

These kinds of "proofs" are fairly common in science. It happened in quantum physics even. But when the field isn't irremediably corrupt, someone with some kind of interest in the truth, undistorted by their interest in power and money, raises their voice to protest. Needless to say, any serious protest of the foundations of a fake science are impossible. Their job is at stake, and the jobs of all their friends and colleagues!

We're not even going to examine the case of the American criminologist whose testimony put thousands of people behind bars. Despite the fact that he falsified evidence and used DNA samples less than half as long as anyone else did. I'll just note here that using DNA half the length multiplies the error rate by many orders of magnitude.

Finally, shows like CSI with their science-fiction toys only put people in awe of these quacks, giving them more power and more freedom from external criticism. Of course, that is the whole purpose of shows like CSI (and COPS) in the most brainwashed society in human history - Crazyland.

Fake Economics

Just like criminologists are paid to convict innocent people, so too economists are paid to impoverish poor people. No matter what. Unless we're talking about Marixist / Maoist economists.

Yeah so we're not going to be talking much about Communist economists because they're pretty weird. For one thing, they don't indoctrinate their students in the "theory" that people are irredeemably evil and selfish (so-called Microeconomics 101). Of course, economists don't call it that. Much like Ayn Rand and the Satanic movement she inspired (Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible acknowledges her), they consider evil to be "rational" and that's exactly what they call it.

I'm just gonna stick to pointing out that the selfishness of university students as they go through their programs can be and has been measured empirically. Economics is the only field where students become more evil as they progress. The degradation into evil has even been measured at the course level and it has been determined that communist economists DO NOT cause their students to become more evil. But of course, capitalist economists DO. This is just one of those empirical facts.

Capitalist economists in capitalist countries are paid precisely in order to support the rich. To support the propertarian and "free-market" (ie, freedom for everyone according to how much wealth they have) principles which support the rich. That is the source of the corruption right there. Now for the shape of that corruption, so it can be more easily seen that economics is a fake science.

Economists fall into two camps, fake economists and real economists. The latter are a minority. Synonyms for fake include market, analytic, Austrian, Chicago, mainstream, and financial. Synonyms for real include industrial, institutional, developmental, behavioural. From the names alone, it's obvious that only the real economists study the economy. The closest fake economists get to studying the economy is studying money (ie, finance). And finance, as anyone who's paid attention in the last 10 years, is not the economy. Needless to say, the chowderheads on TV aren't even fake economists.

Furthermore, consider the fact that math is the unifying foundation of the exact sciences. Consider that for a minute. Seriously. So if math is so important to the exact sciences, if it's the One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, then what fills the same role for the inexact sciences? Well that's very easy when you recall that another name for the inexact sciences is the human sciences. Then it becomes obvious that psychology is the unifying foundation of the human sciences. And psychology is a proto-science! That's why all the inexact sciences are so weak and prone to rampant corruption! How can you build a castle on a foundation of quicksand?

But let's get back to the point here, which is economics. Does economics, does fake economics use psychology? No it does not. In fact, it violates it. It assumes as axiomatic that people are evil, selfish, and egotistical. It also assumes that they are all-knowing and perfectly logical. All of these things are blatantly false. In fact, fake economics doesn't even TRY to use psychology. No, the fact that fake economists are so irredeemably corrupt means they're not interested in the truth. They're only interested in power and money. And trying to base themselves on a proto-science like psychology doesn't give them enough prestige or authority, doesn't give them any power and money. It would merely be the truth after all.

No, fake economists, being the fake scientists they are, pretend to base themselves on "mathematics". Even though it's 18th century equations from thermodynamics which have been rejected by physicists as incorrectly describing heat flows. But hey, let's pretend that money is heat, and let's use equations the physicists have rejected and we'll be able to claim we're all "mathematical", yea? POWER, MONEY!!

No, only real economists use psychology. In fact, the subfield of economics that studies the application of psychology to economics is called "behaviour economics". Because, and you might have guessed that, it studies how real human beings actually behave when making economic decisions. Needless to say, behaviour economics, and the other subfields that make up real economics, aren't very well regarded by economists at large. Economists are after all, almost without exception, fake economists.

Next, part 2

The Disease Process In Physics

The Real History Of Physics

Okay, I've been asked a question about how the big bang occurred. Now for those very few of you who understand history of physics, you'll know that physics is not a happy story of one triumph after another, each discovery extending the achievements of previous generations.

The grim reality is much closer to one giant clusterfuck after another with doddering morons drunk on their own power stubbornly clinging to the most obsolete notions until the day they die. And inflicting blatant lies on their captive audiences of suffering students in order to ensure future generations are just as fucked up as they themselves are. You know, because pain is educational.

Everybody who's read a single book on history of science knows this, whether it was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions or Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. And it's a shame that physicists, being vapid self-aggrandizing shits, choose to pretend to teach history of physics in physics classes so as to brainwash everyone with their ridiculous propaganda.

But that's just the way it is. So if you've studied history of physics then you know the common misconceptions are blatant lies. And if you haven't, if you've merely studied physics, then do me the favour of shutting the fuck up about a subject you know absolutely nothing about.

Some Examples

Let's list some of those clusterfucks.

• Heisenberg's clinging to an intrinsically ridiculous concept of point particles (it's why what was called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle bears no relation to anything bearing that name now)
• the Copenhagen consensus reverting physics to filthy vitalism (ie, the false dichotomy between observer vs observed)
• Bell's awe-inspiring mistake of producing (or even trying to produce) a circular "proof" of vitalism, still celebrated to this day as a major advance even though it set back any understanding of quantum physics for most of a century
• assuming continuity in physics even across revolutions such as classical to quantum. Notice the casual coverup that's occurred over the 3 radically different iterations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (note also how mathematicians do the same thing with Goedel)
• the intrinsically incoherent "concept" of non-determinism and "wave collapse". If you bother to analyze it, you'll find out it doesn't actually mean anything. See the middle of this page for details.
• the steady erasure of the formal definition of probability from math and physics textbooks because (being multi-valued) it's incompatible with the dominant retardation (yes Virginia, censorship and groupthink happens)
• no teaching of what quantum probabilities are cause you're supposed to figure it out on your own, by magic, after several years of studying math. No mention of what happens to those who study the math for years and still don't get it.
• no deep understanding of time
• no deep understanding of information
• no organizing of physics along conceptual lines, let alone teaching such. Active scorn towards the idea of teaching concepts (this is how the priesthood maintains its power, by demanding that all go through its rites of passage before touching on the sacred knowledge)
• confusing physics with history of physics with mathematics of physics
• having no conception of physics or physical theories beyond "what we do"

If you've kept count, you'll note that quantum mechanics as taught is an amalgamation of more than a half dozen clusterfucks. Each of which separately would warrant mass dismissals from the halls of academe. Nice, eh?

Why The Rant?

At this point you might be wondering why I'm ranting about physicists failures with quantum mechanics when the subject at hand is basic cosmology. There's a good reason for that and it's because physicists' clusterfuck on the big bang question is very stereotypical. It's not just some random mistake or even some random clusterfuck that you can just say Oops and forget about it. This is their modus operandi!

The predictable result of all this is also entirely stereotypical. The deeper problems in cosmology are relegated, dismissed, misunderstood or screwed up. And it's the lay-people's comprehension of the subject that suffers most. And just like in quantum mechanics, don't expect anyone to fix anything in cosmology for several generations. Maybe even a century or two.

Whether in quantum physics or cosmology, you can see the same diseased process at work. The symptoms are the same, the diagnosis is the same, and the prognosis is the same. In both cases, you have morons trying to do science without any grasp of (or respect for) the bigger picture They are incapable of synthesizing overarching concepts and are suspicious and scornful of anyone that does.

Next up is what's wrong with big bang theory.

Why I Don't Trust ANY Nutrition Advice

Someone asked and so here I answer.

Because medical science in general and nutrition in specific has suffered too many fads, too much ideology and way too many reversals to be considered credible. You're not just dealing with the complexity of the human body, something which is FAR from mastered. You're ALSO dealing with the complexity of food.

Take fats. There is not one skerrit of evidence ANYWHERE that fats are bad for your health. Some retarded imbecile just decided they were and imposed his ideology on everyone when he was the head of the medical committee on the subject. And that was before we knew about all the different kinds of fats. So picture this, some retard saying that eating what makes up most of the human body after water is BAD for you.

There is a rule about complex systems you know. It's not possible to make complex systems perform better by measuring (creating reductive linear metrics of) their variable outputs. But it IS possible to make them perform better by measuring their PERSISTENT inputs. The things the system doesn't routinely react against and so can't "improve" by making a tradeoff against something else.

So when the Finnish education ministry decided to publish measures of schools, that degraded education. But when the Finnish polity decided to publish the tax records of their politicians and to kick out any tax cheats and evaders? That improved their government.

Now consider the medical science establishment as a giant complex system. And consider not the variable inputs such as money going into the system. Or the variable outputs such as papers produced. No, forget all that crap. Consider only the quality of the MINDS in the system, categorized on a standard such as Bloom's taxonomy of cognition.

What is that quality? Piss poor. You're looking at high IQ imbeciles here. Deeply irrational morons incapable of logic, plodders incapable of any creativity, but capable of memorizing lots of useless arbitrary facts. These are people who can do the work but not have the slightest comprehension (because that requires analysis) nor understanding (because that requires synthesis) of what they do.

So here is my diagnosis: the system is shit and so I do not trust it.

Fields of Academe Devoid of Logic

An expansion on Academia Is Shit Actually, the title should be 'fields of academe devoid of a single person even capable of logic' but that's too long. So obviously anthropology, history, psychology, so on and so forth. Let's examine the evidence:

Anthropology is an anti-science that objects to truth (!!) and holds that contradictory belief systems are equally valuable (!!). Its cherished nugget is that psychotics' belief systems "make sense from the point of view of the" psychotic. I do not exaggerate.

History has given up on being a science. The last great theory of history in history was Marxism. Afterwards, the only theory of history has been psychohistory which is outside history proper. It got especially bad when all the theories of agriculture were shot down. Now there aren't any explanatory theories of anything.

Psychology hasn't got any theory of mind nor any understanding of what the mind is. If you've ever met psychologists, you know they are deeply irrational. Their subject matter is deeply irrational and they can't see the patterns behind it. The DSM-III was written by clinicians, who are limited by direct contact with empirical reality, but the DSM-IV was written by teachers and researchers and it is telling!

According to the DSM-IV, there's no such thing as psychopathy but there is an "anti-social personality disorder" that includes anybody weird that doesn't want to play nice with society, like political dissidents. Also according to the DSM-IV pedophilia does NOT include people who are merely sexually aroused by pre-pubescents. They're only pedophiles if they feel guilty about it or if they get busted on charges of pedophilia. So to cure a pedophile you have to make them feel okay about it and keep them out of the hands of the law. ALSO according to the DSM-IV, multiple personality disorder does not exist. The problem you see is that people with multiple personalities believe they have multiple personalities, not that they have them.

Biology - molecular. Do I really need to go into that? There is absolutely no rhyme or reason behind molecular biology. Hell, there's no rhyme or reason behind chemistry, so molecular biology? No, it's all ad hoc crap. I'm talking about the subject matter (the physical reality) being ad hoc crap. Why? Because what kind of person do you think that subject matter would attract?! It attracts people incapable of logic. People who don't have a problem with A => C AND B => C AND A + B => NOT C or whatever.

Molecular biology is like C++ except 10,000 times worse. Not only can it never be understood but it can never be comprehended. The only way you can ever model any part of a cell is on a computer, because an accurate model can never fit into your mind. So molecular biologists are people who feel perfectly comfortable with the fact they 1) need to memorize reams of arbitrary ad hoc facts, 2) will never comprehend the subject.

And as the nail in the coffin, I point you to the fact that the Central Dogma of Biology was overturned but biologists refuse to accept that fact. See, they've accepted that the Central Dogma is false, but they've got this story now about how they never believed it in the first place. What took physicists 100 years and 5 generations, the biologists did in 20 years and 1 generation. Meaning, the same people who believed the dogma are the ones who don't believe it now.

Biology - ecology. Do I really need to go on? This is the field where people, in all seriousness, make up Just So stories. Absolutely every artifact in every species has a pat answer and that answer is always that it benefited the species to have it. Gorillas give birth to females in times of stress? That's because it benefits the species to be conservative. Some big cat gives birth to males in times of stress? That's also because it benefits the species to be conservative. Logical contradictions and counter-examples are blatantly ignored.

Other biology - it's not that there aren't meaningful questions to ask. For instance, why do cells exist at all? It's that those questions were abandoned. Apparently it was too difficult to come up with reasonable theories for those questions so biologists prefer to leave them unasked. The only work in the area seems to be on slime moulds.

The incidence of 'capacity for logic' in the general population is somewhere south of 1/2. But it's not all that rare so let's say 1/3rd. And yet in fields like biology, it plummets to a few percentage points. And then in anthropology it's beneath the threshold of detectability.

Philosophy has an astonishingly low incidence of capacity for logic. This is the field that originated logic. It's a fucking embarrassment that the incidence rate is south of 90%. But from the material produced by its practitioners, it's obvious that logic isn't a major force. Definitely below 30%. Below 10% even. The best thing to do for the field would be to burn it all and restart it from scratch with different people.

I haven't even gone into the humanities. You think that lit crit came out of nowhere?

Time's Arrow

Scientific American has an article about time's arrow this month. I've written about this subject a month ago and I've known about it for years. This is all yawn-inducing crap. And yet I regularly see so-called scientists oohing and aahing about it in pretend amazement while giving the subject a pretentious name like "The Cosmological Arrow Of Time". There is nothing special about the human perception of time being asymmetric.

Human bodies and human minds are computational devices so it's really obvious that they should work from a low-entropy state to a high-entropy state. After all, general computation has this nasty habit of producing entropy. So much so that it all-but requires the production of entropy to happen. Hence why complex computations like human minds only happen in ways that allow for the production of lots of entropy.

Furthermore, the low-entropy state of the big bang doesn't need any explanation - it's just a quirk of our universe. To the extent that it needs an explanation then the Anthropic Principle is explanation enough. If our universe didn't have a low-entropy end somewhere (ie, a "past") then it could never support complex computations like human minds to observe it.

All this painfully-forced "amazement" on the part of physicists is another example of how difficult certain people (the physicists involved) find it to believe that their subjective impressions have no relation to the laws that govern the universe. Here the subjective impression of time "flowing" versus the physical reality of its being a static dimension with the quirky property of conserving information. Elsewhere the subjective impression of being indivisible versus the quantum mechanical fact of decoherence.

Even physicists start cooing like idiots when reality starts demanding they give up some cherished notion they grew up with. It's painful to watch. The only thing more painful is when perfectly obvious facts like the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis are rejected out of hand. Or when something like Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems gets brutally butchered.

Right-Libertarianism's Defects As A Morality

Dave on reddit gave an excellent explanation of Why So Many Programmers Are Right-Libertarians, bringing up many good points. It wasn't a complete explanation though, so I brought up the couple more points I could think of. I also took the opportunity to chronicle my own insights into moral theory while doing that. And since I've been putting off writing part 2 of Morality for so long, long enough that there's a part 3 planned now, I figured this would at least be something.

[Dave] missed the fact that right-libertarians are extremely superficial thinkers. If they were REALLY good at following logical implications all the way down the chain of reasoning then they would inevitably run into the fact that absolute property rights justify slavery. And from this single reductio ad absurdum the whole system that spawned this atrocity collapses.

Not that this is the only problem there since without a moral system to give it meaning, the term "coercion" is hollow. Is it coercion to stop someone from coercing you? If you say yes then you annihilate the concept of coercion. If you say no then you must define a morality that prioritizes interpersonal actions by different actors so as to answer which are less coercive than others'.

The right-libertarians' axiom of "I was there first" is ludicrous as a morality since it violates the second basic self-consistency check which every moral system must pass to merit the name. A moral system must not adjudicate different outcomes depending on point-of-view or order of events. A moral system is ONE system, one viewpoint, for ALL of the group.

(The second basic self-consistency check is really a lemma off of the first self-consistency check. Which itself is a theorem that stems pretty directly from the definition of a morality as the rules which a group should obey for the benefit of the group. The theorem is this: since the group is the entity that reasons about and applies the rules, there can't be an internal inconsistency in the application of the rules when the group applies the rules. The lemma just extends this to time order by noting that logic transcends time.)

To get back on topic, you also have to add in the fact that right-libertarians are incapable of creativity. Because if they were capable of creativity they would have an independent conception, one not arrived at by deductive reasoning, of social justice. And this conception of social justice would be in direct violent conflict with right-libertarian precepts on a constant basis.

There do exist perfectly logical and coherent systems but they aren't well-known so you essentially have to create them. That's what I ended up doing using possession as a basis and weaving human rights together with procedural freedom. I ended up having to recreate the whole foundation of human rights too.

The thing is, creation comes from creativity and that's something all but exceptional programmers lack. A person certainly doesn't demonstrate the least shred of creativity by parroting others' systems of thought whole.

I recommend you examine the philosophy and politics entries on my blog. Especially the one on morality.

I'll leave you with a little fact. What mathematics is to all the hard sciences, the language which underlies all the other fields and unifies them together. So too psychology is to all the social sciences. If you don't know psychology, and by and large economists don't, then you can say nothing about systems of human beings.

Universal Principles, or Why Chemistry Is An Inferior Body Of Knowledge

Qualities of a Body of Knowledge

What are some relevant qualities by which we may judge the quality of a body of knowledge? We can start with the ratios of rules to facts and of facts to phenomena. We'll go on with the universality of principles, the extent of knowledge, and the simplicity & organizing power of concepts. So when we look at chemistry, what do we see?

In chemistry, there are too many rules for the facts we know. There are too many facts for the phenomena we know. Rules are so far from universal that they can never be called principles - as proved by the fact you can't name a single one that belongs entirely to chemistry. Knowledge of phenomena is very limited. And all concepts are ad hoc, baroque and with limited power.

Principles of Chemistry

But what about "Ka x Kb = Kw" and "all endothermic reactions speed up with increasing temperature"?

The problem with those principles is that they are very far from universal. Although chemicals can be acids or bases, most of them are neither. How exactly is it meaningful to talk about the pH of Uranium Oxide? Or steel? And as for reactions, the problem there is that chemical reactions consume themselves and so they have a nasty tendency of being intermittent. We're not talking then about something that persists but rather something that flickers to life and then winks out. Most chemicals are not in the middle of a reaction!

Concepts of Chemistry

What exactly are the fundamental concepts of chemistry anyways? The chemical bond is one. Unfortunately, talking about the universal laws of bonding would just be a repetition of quantum electrodynamics and electrostatic attraction.

Valence shell electron theory is a staple of chemistry. It explains the periodicity of Mendeleev's table. But Mendeleev's table itself explains nothing further. It only talks about how some chemicals are similar to other chemicals, not why they are the way they are in the first place.

Chemistry doesn't explain why there's two electrons to an orbital (physics does that) and it doesn't explain the shapes or numbers of orbitals (physics sortof does that). Hell, it's not even possible to account for the colour of gold without dragging general relativity into the mix!

Actually, if anything has any claim to being a fundamental concept of chemistry, it's orbitals. That's because orbitals are critical in chemistry yet they are far too complex to compute using physics. They're an emergent property.

Pity the orbitals don't really matter in the far reaches of chemistry. Certainly, everything is made out of them, but it doesn't seem to matter. Probably because when it comes down to it, there's only a few of them that matter at all.

Let's compare with physics.

A Brief Look At Physics

Absolutely everything in the physical universe is made out of energy. For something to even exist, it has to be made out of energy.

Do you know why photons can only travel at the speed of light? It's because if they didn't then there would be a reference frame in which they are at rest. And since their rest mass is zero, this would mean they have absolutely no energy. Thus there would be a reference frame in which a photon does not exist and another in which it does exist. And that's absurd.

Literally, Physical Existence = Energy.

Space then is a near-universal. Everything exists in space except for space itself. Space may or may not be a property that emerged from superstrings.

Information is another near-universal. Everything that exists save possibly space itself holds information in order to exist. The laws of thermodynamics are laws about information. 'entropy' can be defined as 'information we don't care about' thus neatly demonstrating why it has no role in the fundamental laws of physics. Information is a conserved quantity which follows specific laws.

From these concepts alone, it is possible to formulate a theorem about the maximum possible rate of computation in a volume of space at any non-zero temperature. Any attempt to compute more would require more energy, which would increase the energy density past the point a black hole would form which would disconnect you from the heat sink and destroy your ability to compute anything. That is a pretty fantastic thing when you think about it.

And Back To Chemistry

Chemistry has nothing like it. There are a few different orbitals and there are a few types of bonds ... but there seem to be too few types of bond to matter and the different orbitals hardly matter. So no universal laws and no universal theorems. I'm not sure why chemistry is so fragmented but it's a shame.

And that's why chemistry is an inferior body of knowledge.