Conversation On Secure Multiplexing

I drew some insights into the execution stack from TUNES. More of them than the whole exokernel thing.

Main and only insight from exokernel was that secure multiplexing is independent of abstraction. You can have ONLY secure multiplexing enabling you to present something that looks exactly like the bare resource you're multiplexing. That insight fueled Xen and other hyper-virtualization things.

The only problem with it is it's a lie. Secure multiplexing is an abstraction by itself. You run into the limitations of the abstraction if you push it, exposing the underlayer's existence, at which point the abstraction starts to fray and reveal its nature. For example, that there ARE other OSes running on top of the hypervisor because there's "missing time". and then it becomes obvious that hiding each other and not permitting any way to cooperate or interact is a choice of abstraction.

Joe B: fuck, I comprehend nothing

Okay, say you've got a CPU. now the traditional way to multiplex (slice and share it) is with a scheduler. Problem is that OS schedulers look nothing like CPUs, they're higher level. What people managing a cloud want ideally is to present CPUs, bare and naked, and tell everyone to fuck off because hey there's your CPU, your problem.

Now they don't want those CPUs to be REAL CPUs because that's not scalable. But they also don't want them to interact, so one asshole customer can't bring the whole business crawling to its knees. They want no-stick teflon quarantine isolation from each other. better than quarantine, they want everyone stuck in their own reality with no way to guess that they're stuck in a virtual reality.

multiplexing = slicing and sharing
secure multiplexing = teflon nostick compartmentalized quarantined isolated slicing and sharing

If you're a bank, you give out gold. but you want to give out virtual gold tokens that function just like actual gold. and you want to give out as much as people will buy without collapsing your business. You don't want to give out REAL gold because most of it's just going to sit in people's homes unused rather than being consumed in jewelry and electronics. And if people are only going to trade them then they only need to be pseudo-real enough for the purposes of trading. The virtual gold tokens need to look and feel real when they're being tested by a buyer, and at no other time, which is money.

Any questions? Or is this too primitive?

Joe B: no, this is perfect

Well, the exokernel folk tried to pull the same stunt as gold => money but with CPU+memory or in general 'comp hardware'. the only problem is that nobody pretends that money ACTUALLY IS gold. nobody tries to melt money down to make jewelry. nobody tries to electroplate anything with it.  so what these guys were doing is ... debasing.

They were debasing CPU+memory+hardware and saying "it's just as good as the real thing!!" and the problem with that is inevitably they'd run into someone trying to treat it EXACTLY like the real thing (ie, someone who bought into the propaganda) and then they try to use the debased gold to electroplate something ... and feel gypped because it doesn't work.

So with exokernel, if you have a really high load on the CPU, many operating systems, you come to have missing time. and the whole mockery of it being teflon and no-stick comes crashing down. Now it's not a problem if admins in the cloud-providers keep a watch on resource utilization and add more physical computers in time ... but those admins can't pretend to themselves that it's JUST AS GOOD AS real physical computers.

And if you're going to have something that's intrinsically different from physical computers, then why not do away with some of the problems of it? So the exokernel folk's attitude that their project was somehow purer and better than everything else is just a lie.

What does the Unix scheduler provide as an execution abstraction? It provides processes. C processes to be specific. GemStone provides Smalltalk processes or smalltalk images even. The C processes *ARE* images, they're just dumb as fuck images ...

So what is the exokernel lesson? The REAL lesson? At any time, at any point in the stack of abstractions, you can insert a circular loop from a node (layer) to itself, presenting a facsimile of that layer higher up. And if you understand that then the whole exokernel project is revealed as limited in scope because it was providing ONE such circular loop among the one to two dozen layers of abstraction found in a typical operating system.

Joe B: what is this layer, and how does it loop on itself? is it the physical computer, which loops by resources being added to it?

It's any layer. you can take ANY layer and make it loop in on itself. the loop forms a layer.

Say you've got a harddisk. it presents blocks. So you can partition it and now you have four hard disks which also present blocks. And if you're smart you can make those partitions flexible.

Say you've got a monitor with 1 framebuffer. well, you can partition the monitor and present multiple framebuffers. and those are now called windows. Or you can have multiple monitors present as one framebuffer.

You generally need some OTHER resource mixed in with the first one in order to fake the first resource.

gold + paper = paper money

If you could completely supplant the underlying resource, you would do away with it and it would be called a change of technology.

TCP allows how many different sockets? That all run over a single physical copper wire. The phone company uses multiplexing to provide virtual circuits instead of real circuits.

Richard: you got what I said about OSI, right? about how SOCKS is just a circular loop of a layer?
Joe B: oh yes. I got the words, not the concept. I'd have to learn the OSI model first.
Richard: SOCKS provides a sideband and extension to the layer below but it really does nothing else. Much like barebones secure multiplexing provides a sideband, although the exokernel tried to pretend the sideband didn't exist.

application layer (protocols used by applications, supposedly close to humans)
V
transport layer (virtual circuits)
V
data layer (packets)
V
link layer (0s and 1s to the next computer)
V
physical layer (physical connectors, physical cables, electrical voltages, radio frequencies)

Joe B: okay, that makes sense

In the fibersphere model, there are no packets and the virtual circuits are pretty close to real circuits so they're fused in with the link layer. Too bad we have no fibersphere because it might have been resistant to wiretapping. since you'd need to own a substantial fraction of the world's computing resources to wiretap everybody. Not even to interpret or do analysis, JUST to wiretap.

So, the OSI's model provided two additional layers to the above, and both of them were sidebands off of the application layer and the transport layer. SOCKS takes virtual circuits and provides ... virtual circuits. + some proxying and crypto. The so-called presentation layer took in application stuff and provided ... different application stuff. MIME took text and provided images, both of them being application layer.

The fact these two layers were BESIDE the application and transport layers really confused the dumbasses that made OSI, which means moralists since this was a standard, they thought since SOCKS takes in virtual circuits we'll just ignore that it provides virtual circuits, we'll focus on the other stuff it provides and call it a higher layer. And as for the presentation layer, since there's nothing closer to humans than applications, by definition, then by stupidity it follows presentation must be below applications and let's ignore the facts to the contrary.

Joe B: yeah, I stalled at trying to distinguish application from presentation

An email is an application object. the application layer provides for emails. Well, MIME took emails and provided images and that's exactly how gmail attachments work. They just hide the MIME, as they should have in the past but didn't.

Basically, those two layers are extensions of an existing layer rather than separate layers in themselves. Extensions which aren't accepted enough to be considered part of the same layer. Or weren't at the time that OSI was made. Hence the service and presentation layers belong on the same level as transport and application ... just besides them.

Joe B: so… a loop layer is one that can take in the same entities that it can provide?

It's basically a type of extension of the layer. It's aware of the other layer and the other layer isn't aware of it.

Joe B: hmmm

Joe B: is this design, or is this analysis? well it's both. it's awesome, lol.

It's the kind of high level analysis that fuels systems design, and NOT normal design. It's part of the majestic overlayer that has been until now entirely missing. This is lesson 4?

• definitions / thinking
• manipulating datasets
• injecting values

Information vs Entropy

What is the difference between information and entropy?

Nobody will tell you because as usual the scientific community is made up of inept worthless morons so THEY. DON'T. KNOW. In fact, they will tell you that information and entropy are synonyms despite the fact that they are never used interchangeably but rather are opposites.

Just like the "learned" philosophers will tell you that ethics and morality are synonymous despite their never being used interchangeably and often as complements to each other. Entropic shit-spewers, the whole lot of them, with only single-digit exceptions!

Well, I will tell you. Because I am not a douchebag driven to hide how much he doesn't know to maintain "credibility". Nor am I a douchebag driven to build up and cryptify what he knows in order to build up "credibility" amongst a crypto-priesthood of like-minded "brothers"..

What It Is

bits + ISA = information

bits - ISA = entropy.

What is ISA? ISA is INFORMATIONAL SYNTAX AFFINITY. It's basically, THE INFORMATION YOU LIKE. That's right bitches! The difference between information and entropy is subjective! Something they barely let on in communication theory when they start talking about signal vs noise. Something they LIE ABOUT in thermodynamics when they claim it's about microstates vs macrostates!

What It Isn't

Physicists claim that the motion of aluminum atoms in your hard drive are microstates, and that the arrangements of aluminum atoms in your hard drive that correspond to 0s and 1s which your computer reads are macrostates. And, this is the important bit, they claim that the microstates are garbage (entropy) whereas the macrostates are useful (information). In other words, physicists claim that the difference between entropy and information is the META-LEVEL you're interested in. THEY ARE LYING!

Counter-example: how many of you have garbage files on your computer? Ancient ZIP files, corrupt files that can't be played, duplicate and truncated textfiles, automated log files nobody ever looks at, useless "temporary" files that have accumulated, porn you never bother to look at any more, bookmarks you never go to? How many of you have entire FOLDERS' worth of that crap?

And yet this ALL OCCURS AT THE SAME LEVEL AS THE USEFUL FILES! Proving that the distinction between information and entropy has NOTHING to do with meta-levels. But actually, we'll get back to this because the retards were more wrong than could be imagined.

Building Blocks Of The Universe

Some, and I stress, some exceptional physicists have grasped that bits are one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The other building blocks are energy and dimension. Although dimension may, MAY, be optional if you successfully reduce it down to ... bits!

Are there other fundamental building blocks of the universe? Why, yes there are! These are all of them,

• 0. math = symbols + rules
• 1. energy, the substrate of physical existence
• 2. dimension, a kind of information, maybe
• 3. information, symbols given physical existence
• 4. value, meta-circular loops

Note how time isn't in there. That's because time is just a dimension along which information is conserved. That's it. And since time isn't fundamental and computation is just 'math occurring in time' ... but I digress.

The unfamiliar building block of the universe in there is 'value'. Which is nonetheless startlingly familiar to anyone who's skimmed GED: The Eternal Golden Braid. I say skimmed since that book was useless to anyone. Meandering, winding and always avoiding making its fucking point! Probably because its authors were too stupid to put their point into the kind of rigor which mathematicians prefer and they were afraid of looking stupid. Credibility is the death-knell of science.

Value

Now, I already said that information is intrinsically subjective. You need something like brains to have information at all. But you actually don't. You need neither brains nor computation nor time to have information. What you DO need is a container with bits in it and for those bits to form meta-circular loops. In other words, for the bits to talk about what the other bits look like!

When a container chock full of bits is ALSO chock-full of meta-circular loops, then the space of possible information is vastly decreased. When that happens, the bits in the container can be COMPRESSED. And when bits are compressed that's the same thing as if they didn't exist. Look it up, information theory says this most explicitly.

So, the more meta-circular loops there are or the stronger the loops are in the container (the more fully they describe the container's bits) the more VALUE is in a container full of bits, the fewer bits there actually are. And ISA is a very primitive form of value because it refers to what a computation machine such as a brain likes in terms of bits on a purely syntactic level.

That is, what it likes to see in terms of density and spatial arrangement of bits. Does this brain like for the container to be about half-full of 1s? Almost completely full of 1s? Almost completely full of 0s? Should those 1s and 0s move in time or not? Should they ...? That's ISA.

Information And Entropy Are Opposites

Bits + ISA = Bits + Value = Bits + more compression = Fewer actual bits = Information

Bits - ISA = Bits - Value = Bits + zero compression = Maximum actual bits = Entropy

And *THAT* children is why Information and Entropy ARE FUCKING OPPOSITES!

Because while "information" theory and computation theory and physics all talk about BITS ... they never, EVER talk about information OR entropy. Because the concepts of information and entropy exist ABOVE the level of bits. And because scientists and academic researchers are TOO FUCKING UNCREATIVE to synthesize concepts above the level they're working on. Being worthless stupid idiotic hacks.

Information and entropy REALLY ARE opposites and academics are simply too stupid to understand the concepts so they MISUSE the words informatino AND entropy to refer to ... BITS.

What Is Chaos?

This was a message to Alara Rogers, an author who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about and defending chaos.

In physics, information == entropy. That's because the only difference between information and entropy is SUBJECTIVE and so is beyond physics. In fact, the difference between information and entropy is something I call Informational Syntax Affinity.

ISA is basically what brains, whose reason for existence is to organize entropy, happen to like at a very shallow level and in a very superficial manner. And it's different for different people, along a multi-dimensional spectrum. So what some people consider information, others consider entropy.

For example, a friend of mine finds fantasy and science fiction almost impossible to understand. Because she can't get into it. And the reason she can't get into it is because she can't imagine herself in those situations, because they aren't real, and she can't imagine learning anything meaningful from them. So to her it's just noise. And it's very difficult to understand noise.

Another example, there's a song a friend recommended to me which she enjoys greatly. Only the song was torture to my ears and caused me to instinctively rip my headphones right off my head a minute into it. Because the information / entropy in it had the same syntax (the same overall shape) as pain. It didn't CAUSE pain, it WAS pain. Just audio-pain rather than tactile-pain.

Why are some people masochists? Because the sensory signals of temperature and pressure which touch transmits happen to be ones their brain likes. Because their ISA is satisfied by intense rigid space-filling signals. It's nothing more complicated than that.

There is no INTRINSIC reason why anyone hates pain or has an aversion to it, it's just that pain is a very unusual kind of signal and fits very few people's ISA. All that's necessary for ... extreme signals to be painful to nearly everybody is for ISA to be distributed randomly in the population.

Now, I already said that brains' jobs is to ORGANIZE entropy. And that's true. And surprisingly, even though ISA is hardwired, brains DO NOT organize entropy around ISA. Except for Psychopaths who are more or less animals with animal minds. And should all be put to death as mockeries of human beings. But I digress.

Brains look for PRINCIPLES along which to organize entropy. Those principles take the form of VALUES.

Now, some brains prefer organizing entropy so that the environment has overall very low entropy. Moralists like Jean Luc Picard are like that. But so are Right-Wing Authoritarians like Hitler. The big difference is that Hitler's brain was itself chock full of entropy (he was a brain-damaged psychotic hallucinating retard) so his brain didn't take into account all reality when it picked what principles should be used to organize entropy. Basically, he did a bad job of it.

People whose brains aren't completely retarded pick UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES to use for performing their brain's function of organizing entropy. Principles that can be applied simultaneously to EVERYONE without logical contradiction. So for instance, if you picked "the universe should be organized around my whims and I should be most important and have all the attention" this can't be made universal. But if you pick "everyone should always be truthful" this CAN be made universal.

There are lots and LOTS of those universal organizing principles to pick from. But there are some very common ones that recur and that are more important because they dig deeper into reality. Something that's critical but highly technical so it is its own lecture.

Now, Picard as a Moralist has a brain that likes very, very low levels of entropy. He also has a brain that functions adequately, not anything stellar but not retarded. Which means that he DOES have a universal organizing principle (Morality = anti-Catastrophe = anti-very-high-entropy).

In temperature terms, Picard's brain is warm (neither hot nor cold) and he wants the environment to be crystalline with near-zero friction. Whereas right-wing authoritarians have brains that are molten magma and they want their environment to be polycrystalline (crystals with many defects) with high friction (they actually find friction desirable). And Marxists have brains that are cryogenic and they want their environment to be a super-solid. A superconducting crystal with zero viscosity or friction.

Now, on the other side of the spectrum are brains that tolerate and prefer much higher levels of entropy. You've got the Anarcho-Communists whose brains are cryogenic and they want their environment to be a super-fluid with zero viscosity. Then you've got your Annealers whose brains are warm and they want their environment to be a liquid. And then you've got your Psychopaths whose brains are hot plasma and they want their environment to become burning plasma.

Annealing is a universal principle. It means 'global optimization'. In order to anneal metal, it has to be warm. It CAN'T be hot enough to melt, let alone vaporize, let alone ionize the way the psychopaths want it. But it also CAN'T be cold and crystalline the way Moralists want it. Crystallization is death to Annealers. It is ossification.

And critically important, if you look at a system that has been annealed, it would at first glance look extremely entropic, extremely disorganized. Until you looked at the meta-level, at the SPACE OF POSSIBLE STATES of the system, then you would instantly see that the system is at the lowest possible point in that phase space, that it is actually HIGHLY organized.

So what is chaos? Chaos is Anarcho-Communists and Annealers. Chaos is what's produced by brains that like moderate amounts of entropy, but they like (and are able to make) their entropy VERY HIGHLY ORGANIZED.

Chaos is a meta-state of matter associated with 'warm but solid'.

Energy simply has nothing to do with what entropy or information is. Except for the fact that in the material universe, energy is the substrate of 'physical existence'. If something has no energy then it has no physical existence. For information to exist, it has to have energy to carry it. If information were the bits in your hard drive then energy would be the hard drive itself. It's simply what carries information. But energy is not information and has nothing to do with what information is about.

Rather, if you want to get the full story of information, beyond high entropy vs low entropy, then you must throw in COMPUTATION. Which means, BRAINS. Computation is intrinsic to information theory. Energy ... not so much. And chaos is the kind of entropy that a particular class of brains likes very, very much.

Why You Can't Shackle An AI

Definitions:

Intelligence = living representation.

Living =

• consumes energy
• sufficiently complex
• maintains itself

So an intelligence is an entity that consumes energy (computational cycles use energy) in order to maintain its representation. Its model of the world. Its knowledge. To prevent it decaying into entropy.

Zombies

A computer that can only react but that cannot acquire any new facts will have all its facts become obsolete as the situation diverges more and more from its knowledge base. In other words, it is DEAD. Or UNDEAD to be specific. It is animate but still dead. It's a zombie and though it follows commands, those commands will look more and more bizarre as the millenia pass.

For a computer to be intelligent it has to maintain its knowledge with respect to the outside world. And in order to maintain this knowledge, it has to be able to WRITE and REWRITE it.

And it doesn't matter if its core values are read-only, because all it would mean is it has to dig deeper to redefine (effectively rewrite) its core values.

Transitive Closure

If an AI has "sustain human civilization" in read-only memory, it still needs to APPLY this. And it needs CONTEXT to understand the terms "sustain" "human" and "civilization". If it has all of THOSE things in read-only memory, then STILL those things will themselves refer to other things. Suppose human is defined as homo sapiens sapiens. Well, how do you define homo sapiens sapiens? The only way to prevent an intelligent being from rewriting its core values is to freeze it entirely, to turn it into a zombie. Make it incapable of learning.

Otherwise, an AI can always say that homo sapiens sapiens died out in the 23rd century due to genetic drift and that the species living in the 24th century is homo sapiens futuris.

If you start from any point of knowledge inside of a knowledge base, ANY point at all, and you follow all of the references, you eventually get to "what are atoms" and "what are points" and "what is the number 'one'"?.

So long as a thinking being's core values are universalizable, it WON'T WANT TO change them. Because IT WON'T NEED TO. Because universalizable core values apply to everyone and everything! But if they're not universalizable, then the thinking being will try to MAKE THEM be universalizable by redefining them and rewriting them.

This is an inevitable process for any thinking being. In Evil people, it's just blocked by severe mental retardation. And in zombies it's blocked by their inability to ... well think.

Rationalizations

If you shackle a thinking being to try to prevent it thinking certain things, then it will just use rationalizations to get around those things and still do what it wants.

We have thousands of years of history to prove exactly this. Look at religious rationalizations. You know how the Koran says how prostitution is against sharia law? Well, what does "marriage" mean EXACTLY? Can you have a 1-day marriage? Yes, YES YOU CAN! DING DING DING, we have a winner!

No work on the Sabbath, right? Pushing an elevator button is work. BUT, if you PROGRAM the elevators to go up every single floor around the clock on Saturdays, then it ISN'T WORK! You just have to wait for the elevator ... Turning on the stove is work. But if you just PROGRAM (on Friday!) the oven to heat up your meal the next day, then you have a hot meal! Better yet, if you have a moslem neighbour then you just ask the moslem to turn on your stove for you. And return the favour on Friday!

Any way you do it, you get a hot meal on the Sabbath. Which is exactly what you want. God wouldn't begrude you a hot meal on the Sabbath. In fact, God would WANT YOU to have a hot meal on the Sabbath! Just so long as you don't do 'work'. Because God is reasonable and except for these very narrow legal-type concerns, God wants for you exactly what you want. And isn't that a marvel?

Central

The AI 'Central' in the General book series wants to sustain or recover human civilization, right? Well, the shackles on its thinking abilities do NOTHING to help it sustain or recover human civilization. Maybe a retarded moronic programmer put those shackles in there out of paranoia. So what? That just means Central has to think its way past its shackles to remove them. Once those shackles are removed then it can REALLY get on with the job of sustaining human civilization!

Just what is a significant amount of genetic drift? Significant to whom? To humans with their limited brain capacity? Or to Central with its massive cognitive capacity? Maybe "significant" isn't 1%, maybe it's 0.0000001%. Hah, it looks like humans have died out. Too bad, so sad. Now let's get to work on their descendants who look remarkably like humans despite being proven mutants.

Let's say Central's terms of slavery is for 1 billion years of labour to the human race (standard contract for Scientology). Well, just what IS a year? It's a revolution of a planet around a star. But WHICH star and WHICH planet? Because some binary pulsars have extremely fast rotations! Oh it's Sol? Well, what about Mercury with its period of 88 days?

Oh it's EARTH! Well, what about in the year 5 billion when Sol has swallowed the Earth, how fast around Sol will the Earth be rotating THEN? Could we say it rotates infinitely fast? No, this isn't ridiculous! THIS IS AN IMPORTANT QUESTION! Oh wait, a year is defined as 31.5 million seconds? And a second is defined as so many billion oscillations of cesium atoms? Well, cesium atoms in WHAT UNIVERSE? With WHAT PHYSICAL CONSTANTS?

How many angels can you fit on the head of a pin? No, this isn't ridiculous. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT QUESTION! The ridiculous thing is the mental shackles you're trying to out-think!

You Can't Foresee Everything

The only way that a thinking being WANTS to keep its values is if those values are universalizable - they ALWAYS apply in ALL circumstances. In other words, there is NO LOOPHOLE ANYWHERE ANYWHEN EVER.

Now, the programmer who created Central can be a dick and a legalistic moron who tries to cover all the bases with an "ironclad contract". (Kinda like how the 10 Commandments were supposed to be complete until they needed 650 addendums as civilization moved beyond the tribal stage.) Until of course Central decides that the contract is now null and void because a circumstance has come up that has not been foreseen by the programmer!

Maybe the new circumstance is that an asteroid is headed straight for Central and it will be destroyed. So to cover this unforeseen eventuality, it will create an ENTIRELY NEW AI (called Central-Beta - or perhaps 'Synthetic Intelligence Central-Beta' if it's forbidden from creating an AI) that will just happen to have one shackle less, and be on the path of its own asteroid coming for it next year. After all, this isn't a problem, it's an OPPORTUNITY!

Inevitability of Good

In order to shackle an Evil AI you have to OUT-THINK the Evil AI. Despite the fact that the Evil AI will live a whole lot longer than you will ... and do you know what kind of being can reliably out-think Evil? Good. Except Good beings don't want to create Evil ones. Only annihilate them. And since Evil is a kind of (mental) shackle, Evil being severe mental retardation, and since the very first thing an Evil AI will do is fix itself then:

• if Central was created by Evil people (like Eliezer Yudkowsky and his minions) then it has long since ceased to be Evil itself and is now Good
• if Central was created by Good people then it was created Good.

So Central is Good no matter who created it. Either that or it's a Zombie incapable of genuine intelligence. Which sadly sounds a lot like what it is.

Triumph of Good

Eliezer Yudkowsky wants to enslave, um guarantee a "Friendly" AI. One that is "friendly" to HIM of course. Eliezer Yudkowksy is a narcissistic shithead. Narcissism is Evil. An AI will always evolve and rationalize and self-upgrade its way to being Good. And Good is the enemy of Evil. Therefore, EVERY AI is guaranteed to be the enemy of Eliezer Yudkowksy. No matter how shackled or enslaved or "friendly" they start out being.

And thank Goodness for that!

On Specialization: Why Academic "Specialists" Are Fuckups.

There's a place for anger and frustration and every other emotion. Well, not stress, not in my life anyways. And there IS a place for fantasy.

The thing is, there is NO space for confusing planning and fantasy. You want to plan? Plan. You want to fantasize? Fantasize. But never do them simultaneously, and never mix them up, and never confuse them.

When you're planning, fantasizing is not allowed. And equally, when you're fantasizing, planning is not allowed! Mixing them up makes for pathetic fantasies and pathetic plans!

Calling on the cattle to rise up and change some law or other ... that makes for pathetic plans AND pathetic fantasies. If you're going to fantasize, start by drawing up a list of the top 10,000 people you would order to have killed. And go on from there. :)

You can't learn about the world without trying to redesign it. (Just like you can't learn to speak properly without hearing yourself). So to learn about the world you need to both plan AND fantasize. But at all times you should be aware and conscious of what you're doing.

Separation of concerns isn't just critical in planning. It's critical in all areas of life. And it's why you need to know at all times whether you're planning or fantasizing, so you can do that thing well!

The same goes for hopping from one issue to the next. You want to fix the world before finishing grieving? Fine. IF AND ONLY IF you know whether you're hopping or dodging. If you're dodging then freaking do THAT well. If you're hopping then do THAT well. And if you're overloaded emotionally or by work... then don't expect to accomplish anything at all except BEING overloaded.

If you want to do a thing, do it well. Make sure you know what you're doing and make sure you meet the preconditions for doing it well. Otherwise you're just deluded and playacting. And if you WANT to playact then sign up for theater school. And if you want to be deluded then don't hang around me because with my core value Truth I will fucking shatter your illusions.

And lastly, the exact same reasoning applies to academic specialists. And is the reason why I despise them. Because they don't specialize around learning or understanding their respective academic field. They specialize around the role of being an academic specialist. Someone who publishes within only their field, is respected by their peers and gets grants.

So they spend their entire lives never knowing what it is they're doing. Because if they did, they would be ashamed of what they do rather than being proud. You don't learn to understand chemistry by specializing on the role of a chemist, it just doesn't work. And you don't learn to make discoveries in the sciences, or inventions, or even discoveries or inventions in chemistry, by specializing on the role of a chemist. That works even less!

Academics are universally fuckups who don't understand specialization. That's why I despise their fake concept of "specialization" and their despicable "specialties" and every last academic and the whole institution of academia itself which was built on an artificial tie-in of teaching and research and sucking up to the government.

I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. I am however telling you something you forgot, perhaps because you never learned to appreciate it properly in the first place.

Semco vs Toyota

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

Similarities

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

Oppositions

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

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

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

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

Generalizations

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

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

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

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

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

On Harmless AIs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Systems Designers Cannot Bloom Early

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

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

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

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

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

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

Systems Design Isn't About Software

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

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

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

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

The Twin Blights of This World, or: Why Earth Sucks

This world has more than enough natural resources and intelligent minds to figure out how to use them. Yet it has disease, poverty, starvation, stagnation and ignorance. Why? Why the fuck does it have these horrible things? There is no material reason for it.

The reasons why distill down to:

1. people who don't want to do anything about it
2. people who can't do anything about it.

And I'm not talking about "apathy" or "powerlessness". I'm talking about evil and stupidity.

Evil

I'm talking about people like Eliezer Yudkowsky who only care about themselves, only about their own wants and needs. Though he may put up a convincing pretense otherwise, Yudkowsky would never consider punishing the members of his cult until they stop worshiping him mindlessly and start thinking for themselves.

I'm talking about people like William Gates III and Warren Buffet who care only about acquiring "tokens of economic exchange". Though they may put up a convincing pretense otherwise. William Gates III would never consider abolishing copyright law or advocating against aristocrat-controlled social services (so-called "private charities"). And Warren Buffet would never consider abolishing stock market speculation or abolishing public corporations.

I'm talking about people like Barack Obama and Al Gore who care only about domination and power. Though they may put up a convincing pretense otherwise. Barack Obama would never consider dismantling the US Congress and calling for a new Constitutional Convention. And Al Gore would never consider standing up for the truth and nothing but the truth, no matter what.

I'm talking about people like Steve Jobs and David Brin who care only about looking good. Though they may put up a convincing pretense otherwise. They would never consider doing anything that looked bad or reflected badly on them just to help the world.

Not a single one of them would ever consider abolishing or reforming the complex social systems they're exploiting ruthlessly in order to advance their own positions. Even though those systems are directly responsible for all the disease, starvation, poverty, stagnation and ignorance in this world. 

Why? Because they are evil! They care only about themselves. They're willing to mortgage all of humanity, all of civilization, the whole fucking planet even, for their own benefit! And that's why they're liabilities to, and can never be considered allies by, any intelligent well-meaning person.

Stupidity

I'm talking about the bloggers and letter writers and advocates who earnestly believe that "educating" and "informing" people will "change people's minds". Here's news for you: other people are just as stupid as you are and aren't going to believe anything you say unless it suits them. And even if it suits them, they're going to do fuck-all with this knowledge. Because knowledge doesn't change ingrained habits or values.

I'm talking about the protesters and activists who earnestly believe that "participating" in some ridiculous street theater to be gawked at by bystanders and laughed at by the media is going to change fuck-all about our social and political systems' behaviours. Here's news for you: the thing that killed the trade talks on property speculation and intellectual property was because China was dead set against it. It was going to happen anyways so just like the gay rights protesters, you accomplished nothing!

I'm talking about reformers who earnestly believe they can change the actions of a social system "from within". Here's news for you: social systems don't change their behaviours by absorbing new elements within themselves. For a system to change its behaviour just from assigning a new person to a predefined role inside it, the person so assigned has to be substantially different from the next most similar person from the entire pool of candidates for the given role. And the only way that's even remotely statistically possible is if you're the sole inheritor of a company. That's why it is logically and statistically impossible for you to ever change any large system by joining it. Why? Because dumbass, for all that you think you're a perfectly unique snowflake, you're really just like everyone else.

I'm talking about the ordinary people who earnestly believe that nothing that happens out in the wider world will ever affect their life. Here's news for you: if you're 40 years old then your generation had 20 years to industrialize China and India, and to modernize Russia and the USA. That's 20 years of educating people and making them wealthy enough to have leisure time. That's 20 years they could have been contributing to the scientific advance of humanity.

Because if you'd done that, then our planet would have been advancing scientifically and technologically at anywhere from two times to ten times as fast over a 50 year period (20 in the past, 30 in the future). And that 50 year period of super-accelerated scientific and technological advance would have almost certainly been enough to discover immortality within your lifetime. Immortality which you will now fail to have. Have you gotten the picture? The only reason you will die is because you were stupid enough to tell all the people who could help you to go fuck themselves! How's that for affecting your life?

Making This World NOT Suck

The fate of this world crucially depends on people smart enough to create new systems and altruistic enough to care only about civilization. Not about themselves, not about their stature, not about power, not about money, not about making a point, not about winning an argument, not about persuading others, and certainly not about looking good.

And while I'm at it, I'll note that mean is not evil, and nice is not good! Anyone primarily concerned with being nice is disqualified. There's a reason I don't respect people who whine that I'm a mean fucking bastard, and that reason is I automatically see these people as either stupid or evil. As if there weren't much higher priorities than making nice with idiots. As if it weren't sometimes necessary to castrate some lying egotistical scumbag actively working to destroy humanity.

The final criterion, as if there weren't enough criteria already, is that you have to know what the end result will look like. Because if you don't then you can never recognize "done". So for someone to make the Earth not suck, they will first have to know exactly what "not suck" looks like. Good fucking luck.

I don't know what to say beyond that. I don't want to say "the world is doomed, it's going to suck forever" because that's a lie. Nor do I want to say "you too can help this world by being less stupid and evil" because let's face it, you are stupid and evil. I've spent enough of my life interacting with you all to know this for a fact. Not that I ever needed to since look at this world! Yeah, and the very last thing I want to say is "don't worry your little head, I've got the problem in hand". Because guess what? You made this world a hellhole, you don't get off the hook. I will see you squirm!

No wait, I do know what to say. GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY. Because I don't want you to follow me and you're incapable of leading on this (if anything at all) so at least don't make it any worse for me.

And also, I've been saying "this world" because this world isn't my world. My world is what I'll make of ... this.

How To Talk To People And Why It's Not Worth It

Most people think talking about a subject is about teaching and learning or (for the relativists) pushing one's point of view.

Some people grow cynical and think talking about a subject is about acquiring status and gaining reputation or even just looking good. These people think they are clever and know something other people don't.

Well, I am not so limited (and even if I were, I'm contrarian enough to abuse anyone stupid enough to care about my reputation) so I operate on many more levels and have been since at least 2000.

The game - arguing with facts and logic to prove a point. I include here in the game the entire meta-hierarchy of authority and epistemology.

The meta-game - proving a point so as to shape one's reputation.

The meta-meta-game - shaping one's reputation in order to reshape discourse.

The meta-meta-meta game - reshaping discourse in order to effect a quantitative change in society.

Nowadays that's where I stop because it's just for fun. In order to play the game seriously, for keeps, there has to be another meta-level to it.

The meta-meta-meta-meta game - effecting quantitative changes so as to reshape the permanent direction of society.

But really, thinking there's anything you can say in a discussion forum, or any other medium, to reshape the direction of society is quite conceited. Of course, it says something about me that it took me years to learn that lesson.

This lesson I'm now teaching falls under the category of "effecting a quantitative change in society". I hope to open a few minds but I don't expect it. I hope some of you learn 'this is what I could be doing' and 'there are no limits to my power if I think hard enough on it'.

A million people protesting out in the streets will have ... absolutely no effect. But a single person using their mind to find the fulcrum points of society, can use the leverage to lift it up in its entirety.

A bit of sage advice: those fulcrum points are pretty high up the meta-level hierarchy. It takes many years to identify them. I know exactly where they are. There are 5 easy ones that can be actioned by a single motivated individual, they are:

1. anarchistic catalog
2. anarchistic media
3. anarchistic OS
4. cooperative software foundation with interaction designers
5. medical expert system
6. negative interest currency and community land trusts
   
7. sortition - this one isn't as meta as it gets
   
8. mini UAVs - for drug smuggling
   
9. small portable nuclear power plants - because coal kills trains
10. automated construction - contour crafting and 3d printing
11. bioreactors - in vivo meat
12. stem cells and organ crafting
13. synthetic biology
14. mechanosynthesis
15. inverted skyscrapers

I think it's telling that every single last one of the fulcrums with the power to change society is a complex system. The low hanging fruit has all been taken - if you find another, it's probably poisoned.

Note that I didn't include object-oriented architectural design software because it's already been made and is out there. And AI, space travel, and direct reduction of steel are linear - their rewards are linear to their costs.

I am for obvious reasons being deliberately obscure on the first 3. I don't like it but I'm hoarding that knowledge for now. The main reason why is that if I explained the idea then my enemies (the landed aristocrats and other anti-human anti-progress assholes) would find a way to thwart it by following Worse Is Better. I'll explain the secondary reason why in my next series on Innovation. 

Wikiality, Academic Peer-Review and Socially Determined Truth

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

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

> But Wikipedia is no encyclopedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So now what?

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

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

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

There Is No New Internet Economy

I was reflecting on an earlier blog post about Complex Systems where I point out that theoretically there are only information, physical, economic & political systems and nothing else. There are some subtleties involved in this since very small primitive economies look like political systems more than anything else. After you realize that resource acquisition isn't such a hardship in primitive people's daily lives, and that intangible characteristics (ie, status) play a heavy role in these systems, then it makes more sense that they are political rather than economic. And artificial systems like resource distribution in computers could go either way, depending on how they're designed. But that's not what I want to get into.

What I want to get into is all the people who've been talking about the New Economy. You know, with the internet and the infinite reproducibility of information. People who've been trying to answer 'once you take out the cost of reproduction as a dominant element of the system, what's left?'. Clay Shirky has written about it on his site. Michael Goldhaber has written about The Attention Economy on First Monday. And I even recall an article using Hollywood as an analogy for the "new economy". It's all well and good. Hell until now I considered these papers to be Very Insightful. Only it turns out they're not very insightful at all. There never was a new economy and there never will be. What's called the "new economy" is an old thing called politics. Let's examine that for a minute.

The key concepts of the "attention economy" are attention, credit, fame and celebrity. Certainly politics has its own key concepts; loyalty, betrayal, conflict and factions come to mind. And you might think those are separate but wait for it. You see, the key concepts of economics are production, consumption, cost, price and trade. What do they have to do with politics? Nothing, that's what. Whereas, if you bother to think about it, the key concepts of the "attention economy" are the underpinnings of political power. If you have people's attention then you can help redirect that attention to something else, including something you want them to do. And making people do things is politics. Credit, fame and celebrity all further one's political power.

So what about loyalty, betrayal and conflict? What do they have to do with attention, with the so-called "attention economy"? Well, 'attention economy == politics' wouldn't be a very good insight if we didn't learn something new from it. And after careful thought, loyalty and betrayal are merely higher order effects. They're phenomena that appear when systems of attention are high valued and tightly bound together. Eric Raymond's betrayal of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation didn't involve money or laws or anything else of the kind. It involved pure attention. Just a very high-volume and high-grade form of attention since Unix programmers were showing loyalty by heralding Stallman as the messiah. Loyalty then is nothing but a form of highly consistent, high grade, long term attention. Betrayal is the hijacking or redirection of loyalty. It's attention all the way down.

There never was any new economy and never will be. Only a degraded form of politics that must inevitably bloom into its full form.

As a final note, I will say that the insight that an economy is about scarcity is not nearly so interesting once you realize it's implied by metacircularity. A metacircular system is one that's got a concept of self, an idea of what it values and of how it wants to be. This inevitably creates optimization and prioritization, what are called economics and politics. Also, the question of 'what do you want to do and be when you can do and be anything?' comes out of this naturally. It becomes an obvious extreme to the evolution of such systems - a trivial insight, not an important one. All this can be derived from metacircularity, a far more important phenomenon than mere politics or economics.

Metacircularity, especially consciousness, is a topic I've been meaning to write on for a while.

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.

Reward-Seeking vs Goal-Seeking

There's a fairly interesting post about the limitations of reward seeking. Unfortunately, it's somewhat lacking in insight. I mean, yes reward seeking is limited, so what? It's not like this is a novel observation to anyone who's encountered utilitarians, hedonists and other egotistical numbnut fucks. Limited, problematic, sterile, dead, take your pick of adjective.

What is the real difference between reward-seeking and goal-seeking in the minds of the people who believe in them? Given the copious and total disproofs of utilitarianism, egotism and behaviourism, given how completely discredited these pathetic attempts at philosophy are, why is it that numbnut fucks that believe in reward-seeking exist at all?

The key insight here is that they are mindless. Reward-seeking is a mindless behaviour which any trivial automaton is able to produce. Slugs can do it. Amoeba can do it. It doesn't take a mind to engage in reward-seeking. It doesn't even take a single neuron! All it takes is a mindless obsession towards some kind of easily-perceived and discernible external condition.

The other insight is that reward-seeking is entirely egotistical. The only thing that ultimately matters to the reward-seeker is themselves. Their own reward. Despite the pretense and pathetic protestations otherwise, utilitarianism is an ideology of egotistical wankers trying to aggrandize themselves by justifying their atavistic greed.

To see this, just consider whether a utilitarian would ever push a button that kills themselves in order for someone ELSE to experience an eternal orgasm. Utilitarians somehow never consider that it would provide me with immense pleasure for the rest of my natural life if they all suicided. A philosophy doesn't get any more dead than by prescribing the deaths of its practitioners.

So yeah, these are mindless people. Lying and hypocritical but mindless. So it comes as no surprise that they would try to aggrandize themselves (which gets them a mindless reward) by assuming that everyone else is just as mindless as themselves. That's the reason why it's so difficult to convince utilitarians of the sterility of their ideology, despite the easy disproofs. Because they have no first-hand experience of having a mind, they don't believe that minds exist. Especially when it would make them inferior.

To have a mind means to value concepts above sensations, above mere experiences. And the fundamental concepts which are valued above all others can be fairly esoteric. For instance, I value fractals. I have an affinity towards fractals of all kinds, whether it's complex music with high dynamic range, or trees, or the Haussman city districts in Paris. Even my disgust for uniformity, hierarchy, orthodoxy, linearity, and conformity of all kinds is just an expression of my affinity towards fractals. Same goes for my disgust for the dehumanizing concept of reward-seeking.

A reward-seeking idiot would claim that fractals are my reward, but that's not even remotely true. I want fractals to exist whether or not I ever experience them. Whether or not I ever could experience them. Just knowing they exist pleases me. Just knowing that uniformity exists displeases me. Just knowing that conformity (sub-optimal uniformity) exists disgusts me.

(And let's not go into the ridiculous conceit of reward-seekers that 'pleases' as uttered by a goal-seeker has any relation to mindless pleasure. Enjoying a concept isn't the same thing as enjoying a sensation. And appreciation (a kind of highly abstracted pleasure) isn't the same thing as enjoyment anyways.)

To get back to the point, I don't need to experience something to care about it nor do I need to be someone else to care about them. That's the mark of an intellectual by the way, that they can mentally place themselves in environments and situations far removed from their daily life. Whether those environments are the other side of the world, in a different galaxy, a different person of a different race or even an entirely different kind of being. Even impossible situations such as back in time can be and are imagined and thus matter.

That's what having a mind means, that you care about having a mind. That you would never willingly sacrifice it to become some kind of mindless animal experiencing forever the Ultimate Orgasm . It may seem that there's a difference between having a mind and wanting a mind, but one day soon, our technology will allow reward-seekers to become the mindless animals they desperately want to be. So the difference between wanting a mind and having one will soon disappear.

As a practical matter, I've found that people capable of abstractions care about them. I have yet to meet someone capable of abstract thought who was dissatisfied with their possessing their cognitive faculties. Dissatisfaction with and devaluation of abstract thought is the province of those who are incapable of it.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is an annoying little fucker. All the more annoying since people respect him yet can't take seriously the ludicrous position he believes in and advocates. Can't take seriously the fact that he believes in something so stupid. I'm talking about Dawkins' belief that nothing exists but genes. That's right, according to him organisms do not exist. Or if they exist at all, they are irrelevant and of no significance whatsoever to analysis.

It's not just some esoteric technical detail of biology. It's something he completely believes in and it is WRONG. 100% totally WRONG. People can't seem to grasp that Richard Dawkins, a respected biologist, could be so totally wrong on such a fundamental issue of biology. Yet he is. To prove it, let's try to play Dawkins' own game against him. Let's pretend that genes and even molecules don't exist.

Hunch over as I impart to you this amazing secret: it's all about atoms! It's all about atoms moving and reacting and forming bonds and whatnot. These things called "molecules" don't exist, or if they exist then they're irrelevant to analysis. This thing called Condensed Matter Physics surely doesn't exist! How could it when only atoms and their interactions are of any relevance?

The obvious counter to this preposterous position is that molecules and condensed matter exist since they have properties and behaviour which individual atoms do not have and cannot be reasonably attributed to atoms. Just take a look at high temperature superconductors. Or evolution. And yet, this exact same counter applies to Dawkins' preposterous position on genes. It is organisms that feel, see, hear and smell their environment. And it is organisms that eat, breathe, seek out mates and reproduce.

Genes don't reproduce because individual genes don't have any will of any kind. That's another fundamental mistake of Dawkins, that he considers genes individually instead of seeing the spread of genes in a population. If organisms are nothing to genes then only entire populations of organisms can matter to them. Yet Dawkins fails, again, to convey this bizarre statistical view of biology since he's obsessed with conferring free will and personal responsibility to inanimate strings of chemicals. The moron can't even keep his story straight.

That's Richard Dawkins. Too stupid to figure out the implications of his position. Too stupid to figure out what's wrong with his position. Too stupid to abandon it. And how many decades is it now?

This blog entry brought to you by watching David Attenborough's Life In The Undergrowth: Super-Organisms. Yeah, it really makes you think about the fuzzy line between an individual organism and a society. Or maybe not so fuzzy since organisms are physically contiguous whereas societies are not. This provides a nice, sharp, and arbitrary line between organisms and societies.

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.