I Don't Read Academic Papers

Obfuscation

I've read Richard Gabriel before and I refuse to read any more from him, or any other obfuscator. You know, until now I didn't know why him and his ilk repulsed me so much. I had some vague explanations like "I'm overwhelmed with work" or "I'm done the intellectual phase of my life" but there are too many counter-examples to those.

A few minutes thinking about it in the proper framework, of this being a STALL (something I couldn't do no matter how much I wanted to because it violated my principles) and I pinpointed the reason why. It's because Truth and Understanding are core values for me which makes Clarity (related to their combination) a +2, which makes people like Gabriel a -2. Meaning, someone I HATE. The same for all the trash they write. So him, Paul Graham, and anything written in an academic paper form or on PDF are not saying anything I want to hear.

If they had anything meaningful, important and intelligent to say about the world, they wouldn't be doing their very best to appear to be two-faced flimflam artists. And every single last academic paper sounds like this because they eschew plain ordinary language in favour of pretentious passive-voiced historico-linguistic crap. Pretentious liars who want to APPEAR authoritative when I don't consider them authoritative at all.

But the worst for me are people like Richard Gabriel who show SOME of what I'm looking for. Their coming so close and yet landing so far off just makes them more frustrating.

Clarity

If someone isn't CLEAR then it's because they don't understand what they're saying OR they don't consider it important OR they don't consider you important. If someone is LENGTHY then it strikes down the last possibility, leaving only the first two.

Now, if someone doesn't understand what they're saying, why should you waste your time reading what they're saying? And if someone considers what they say to be unimportant, then why would you show them disrespect by failing to reciprocate their feelings, something you do when you read what they wrote?

Writers who aren't trying to communicate shouldn't be read.

As for books, the last ones I read turned out to be nonsense so ... they follow the same rule. To be precise, two of the last four books I've tried to read (A Theory of Justice and The Art of Interactive Programming) turned out to be nonsense. The amazing part is that I ended up with ironclad proof of this after only a few chapters. And the other two books (No Contest: The Case Against Competition, and The Seven Day Weekend) were monotonous because I already wholeheartedly agreed with their central thesis and didn't need a how-to in order to walk through all the implications. The first few chapters was enough for boredom to set in. Small wonder I haven't tried to read any book in years.

Finally, there is this notion among the weak that you need to encourage "critical thinking" by not saying anything. The so-called Socratic method. When in reality, Socrates was just a flimflam artist who spewed contradictions all the time. Well, it doesn't matter, because my mind is not so weak that critical thinking can be turned off. It doesn't need to be "encouraged" or "nurtured". Which is why I have nothing but contempt for those notions outside of a K-12 classroom setting. And as I'm not K-12, it's patronizing and condescending as hell.

To summarize, if someone obfuscates in their writings then they're an idiot so their writings are worthless, they're the kind of idiot who would condescend to their audience hence their writings are worthless, or their writings are just worthless and they know it. Clarity is the hallmark of communication. Unclear communication is no communication at all.

Power-Hunger Is Great

... so long as it's not from Evil people.

Power hunger is directly proportional to dissatisfaction with life. Or something like that. And since I consider this world Hell, I love it when people have their eyes wide open and see the world for the shithole it is. Power-hungry people who want to change this shithole for the better are my kind of people.

There is nothing evil about Power, it's a simple necessity to get nearly anything you want out of life. It's not like fame or freedom, which ARE evil. Fame being intrinsically evil and freedom being sought by apathetic people who are content letting others suffer. And money? Money IS power!

It's too bad that power is mostly sought by Evil assholes who want power for its own sake. Not to DO anything with it but merely to enjoy its possession. That too is evil because it deprives Good people of power. It deprives Good people of the ability to do Good things.

So power is great. The things that ordinary people say are better or less controversial than power? THOSE are the evil things. And like all great things, Evil people want to coopt and steal it.

I suppose it's like Heroism and Courage, which are also bad and evil, and all too frequently coopted by Evil people and Evil societies. So there's a lot of precedent.

I despise you

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

On Human Perfectibility: Nazi vs Communist

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.

People Who Waste My Time Calling Me A Troll

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

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.

90% of Software Projects Fail

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?

You Are All Evil Scum. Bye bye.

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.

Why I'm A Collectivist

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

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

GERMANY

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

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

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

THE GREATEST INVENTION

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

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

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

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

POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Reading Fantasy Makes My Humanist Brain Go Haywire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Life Projects

When I hit 20 my life projects were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Needless to say, I have more projects now.

Hypnotizability

Hypnotism is an interesting phenomenon in the sense that it's something that I am utterly appalled at which others see as no big deal. Hypnotism is to me much like a multiple car pileup is to other people. What makes it even more app umm "interesting" is that its fans yammer on about how thinking you can resist hypnotism isn't the same thing as resisting hypnotism. And this is correct in a trivial way, but I'll show why it should be false.

The subjective experience of hypnotism is that you're 'going along' with the hypnotist's suggestions of your own free will. Not that your will is being overridden or any such childish nonsense. No, you're just "going along". Kinda like the torturers in Milgram's Obedience Experiment were "just going along" with the dictates of the emotionless researcher who was commanding them to torture someone, even past the point of inflicting lasting harm.

Now this is rather interesting because it means I'm totally immune to hypnotism. Not because I'm going to "resist" it or because "my will is too strong" or any crap like that. But for the simple reason that the whole process fucking appalls me. The reason I can resist a hypnotist is because I'm never going to sit on a hypnotist's couch. The whole notion of obeying someone without question appalls me. Hell, if given a few minutes to think about it, I don't even follow up on my own promises if the circumstances change to the point where they're a really bad idea. Not only do I decide things for myself but I decide again and again.

And given what this ties into, the horrific Obedience Experiment, we would live in a much better world if fewer people "went along" with others. If they just decided things for themselves. Perhaps the reason this is such a poor world is because they don't have the mental capacity to do this. After all, if people are incapable of realizing that this world sucks and is horrific, why should they realize that their torturing someone is wrong?

Connections, or: My 1573 Pet Peeves

From time to time people ask me why I get worked up over an issue, like say solar power. Well, it's far more general than just energy issues. The thing is, I can see connections between very different fields. When I was an adolescent, I saw the connections between parenting and politics, politics and psychology & biology, and so on. And I couldn't stand, or understtand, how people were so stupid as to "focus" on only one little area to the detriment of everything else. It's all connected so if you don't understand everything then you understand nothing. And it's all connected in ways you can't imagine. There's even a direct connection between quantum mechanics and moral theory.

When I talk to people, I can tell a lot about their thoughts, their way of thinking and their values from things they don't mean to say and the way they speak. And remember, it's all connected. So a solar power enthusiast is someone who doesn't care about industry and doesn't care about economics. It's someone who doesn't care about industrial civilization. It's someone who doesn't care about humanity. They haven't made the effort to care.

And politics plays into it. Because when they talk, they give ammunition (political leverage, space, lebensraum) to the eco-zealots who are magical thinkers who literally want to destroy humanity. You think these people are fiction or exaggeration but I've met them. You probably have too except you don't know what to look out for. And think about this. The Nazis only wanted to destroy part of humanity. The eco-zealots want to destroy ALL of it.

The same for right-wingers, many of whom are mostly sane, who give ammunition to the militarists and the anti-human market fundamentalists. Who are literally mentally handicapped and whose vision would destroy any society they are handed the reigns to. There's all kinds of political connections in a public space. A whole web of thoughts and positions. And violently hacking at a little piece of it is going to tug on distant parts. And you may think they're unrelated but I see the connections. And I wonder how you can not see them.

Think Globally, Act Locally. It's not just a slogan, not for me.

Hating the world and the people in it

Look around you at the Earth and you'll see a world of genocide, mass murder, rape, neglect, infanticide, child abuse, sexual slavery, child sexual slavery, impoverishment, insanity, misery, death and slavery.

Who is responsible for this world? It's the people in it, the people who are psychotic and psychopathic, delusional and unfeeling. It isn't "economics" nor "technology" nor "physics" nor "human nature". Economics is what we make it, technology is sufficient, physics doesn't hinder us, and there is no single human nature.

Look around at the world, really look at it, and the only healthy response, the only response motivated by human feeling and reason, is hatred. Frustration with what it could be and deep loathing of what it is. And for this reason the only possible response to the people in this world, the people who make it the living hell it is today, is hatred too. Or just perhaps compassion. But never love.

One cannot love a world of misery unless one is greatly deranged. Nor can one love a world of masochists and sadists and psychotics and psychopaths without being deeply disturbed. One may freely hold hatred and contempt in one's heart, and when the planets align one may find compassion in it, but love of this world and communion with the people in it is nothing short of insanity.

Empathy and mental health do not mean that one is nice, polite, forgiving or accepting of one's fellow man. On the contrary, mental health in a sick world means that you regularly scream in rage and frustration, that one is "maladjusted" and "anti-social", that one hurls imprecations at the casual injustices of the world. And if this great swell of anger falls on other human beings then so be it.

No person can willingly take the pain of this world without being a martyr. And since martyrdom is a sign of insanity, no sane person can be a saint. What matters isn't sainthood but reason, empathy and justice. If you hate humanity for its shortfalls of reason, empathy and justice, then so be it.

If I were an Evil Emperor

1. I would not think that war solves every problems
   
2. I would not make a laughingstock of myself by posturing
   
3. I would shoot all obsequious yes-men
   
4. I would not open my economy to competition with a slave holding state
   
5. I would not consider the foundation of my industrial economy to be passé
   
6. I would not confuse price with value
   
7. I would not keep my colonies de-industrialized since they are my colonies and my power base
8. I would execute every shill economist and political scientist working for the good of some privileged class at the expense of the good of my empire
9. I would make an example out of anyone claiming my empire doesn't matter because the world is going to end within a few years
10. I would deal with everyone regardless of their ideology, I am strong enough to let people think they are free while manipulating them for my uses
11. I would execute the landed gentry, their existence demoralizes the workers who are the foundation of my empire