Halo

The Halo series of novels is the uplifting story of how Moralists are really Evil and we need more Narcissists to save us from them. Evil people are incapable of understanding universal principles, or the whole concept of universality. They are incapable of understanding that other people matter independently of their use or similarity to yourself. That's what makes them Evil. They're so retarded they can't understand Neutrality, forget Goodness entirely, so believe everyone is secretly like them, just lying about it. Western economists even teach that everyone is really Evil in microeconomics 101.

So in Halo, the bad guys are Moralists doing a bunch of moralist things and using Moralist names and titles. Titles like prophet and charity. Activities like conquest and hegemonization and creating Uni-minds. And of course, these are the BAD guys. Meanwhile, the protagonists are sparkly grim-faced Uber-men. Nietzsche would approve wholly and unreservedly. Cause it's not like we need the army and the navy, no we just need these few Uber-men.

The final nail in the coffin? There is another entirely different story where Moralists are really Evil and we need more ... to save us from them. Only it's not Evil people, it's Good people, preferably Anarcho-Communists. That story is The Last Angel. And not only is this story entirely different in tone and content, but the Evil Moralists in it actually ACT Evil, because they're really Right-Wing Authoritarians masquerading as Moralists.

The writers of Halo don't understand Moralists or Morality beyond the fact they hate them. They can see their actions, sort of, and they hate Moralists for their actions. The writer of The Last Angel on the other hand ... he hates Moralists for being too similar to and too easily corrupted by RWAs. And since that's not nearly enough to condemn someone to death, he makes all the bad guys genuinely Evil, by making them RWAs, and teaches the real Moralists a nasty object lesson.

Differential judgement. The Narcissistic shits behind Halo just see Moralists as different and that's enough to hate them to death. The, probably Anarcho-Communist, writer behind The Last Angel understands the differences between RWAs and Moralists enough to wish death on the former and a punch in the face to the latter. Differential judgement is a sign you've got an inkling of a clue as to people's motivations, and have an idea whom you can live with and whom you can't.

It works on the flipside too. People who want to be nice to everybody, who want peace & lovingkindness, who think everybody deserves to live ... they show no differential judgement whatsoever. And these people are just as worthless as Narcissists. Almost as undeserving of living.

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.

First Contact With Human Cultures

First Contact with other human cultures is a mainstay of science-fiction. I started reading a Battlestar Galactica / Star Trek crossover when I realized something rather important.

Spock raised his eyebrow further. "This is your method of defusing, Captain?"

I agree with Spock, that Kirk's methodology is completely frakking lame. Especially since it's rather obvious from the Enterprise's first scans that they're dealing with refugees. The Galactica's fleet is battle-scarred and they have too high a population for mercenaries.

Do you know how you greet a fleet of wartorn human refugees? You send them a hail consisting of music. Specifically, Sol Invictus by audiomachine looping a couple times till everyone's listening to it. Then you greet them with,

"Welcome to your new home, if you wish it. Your epic journey is over. You are safe now, fellow humans."

over and over and over for an hour or until they finally get the message. Soothe their pride and their anger at the same time as you IGNORE it. Ignore all hails, all demands for introduction, all personal introductions, all posturing, all speechifying, all politicking. Until one of the magic words are spoken, "we need medical supplies / food" or "where do we go?" Then IMPERSONALLY offer them coordinates like you're offering them the steak or the salmon for dinner.

CONFUSION TO THE ENEMY. The very first principle of war. Can you think of any pompous warmongering asshole that would have the first clue how to respond to a message like this? I can't, therefore this strategy can't possibly lose. But it can win big.

When you want to express EMOTIONS, words are insufficient and they positively get in the way. Words suck. But music is awesome. So why not use it? And both 'reassurance' and 'belligerance' are emotions, therefore they can (and HAVE) been expressed by music.

People prefer face to face communications precisely because they can see someone's FACIAL EXPRESSIONS. What are the facial expressions of a starship? That convey emotions to those watching it? There are none. But music creates a fantastic substitute so long as you build up a library of emotional songs.

Emotions, and music, are both a tool and a weapon. And it's pathetic how they aren't used. How instead you have political speechifying by narcissistic assholes propping themselves up, claiming to "represent" this or that political unity. As if the self-description of the political entity could ever mean anything to a complete stranger who's never heard of it before!

Iron Laws of Storytelling

There are lots and lots of rules of storytelling that are good ideas. Things like 'do not do ninja slash'. But these are IRON laws that must NEVER be crossed otherwise you will instantly and totally alienate your intended audience.

In romance, the princess may never die. The prince may die and frequently does. But if you kill off the princess like Babylon 5 did to Talia Winters, then you're sending the message that love is worthless.

In action thrillers, the protagonist may never be overpowered. If they're overpowered compared to the villain then there is no risk or danger, thus there is no thrill or excitement.

In heroic adventures, the protagonist may never be hypocritical in their driving values. The protagonist may be a lying conniving psychopath, but they MAY NOT be a hypocrite. And if a supporting heroic protagonist is hypocritical then the protagonist MUST call them on it. Because tolerating hypocrisy sends the message that principles are worthless and that values are worthless. Imposing one's values on the world is what adventures are about.

In Mysteries ...

In Horror ...

I'm sure these are collected somewhere, and I wouldn't mind knowing about it. I was told two of them without any explanation why they're iron laws. In fact, the cretin who pointed out that "protagonists may never be overpowered" never qualified it as applying only to action-thrillers, so it never seemed like an iron law to me since I hate action thrillers. So I only just figured out that iron laws exist and *why* they exist.

Eliezer Yudkowsky Is A Plagiarist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Trek Is Predicated on Human Idiocy

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

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

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

Examples

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future

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

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

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

SETI types are Creationists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On 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.

Singularitarians Confuse SciFi Novels With Reality

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

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

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

So I have to wonder now, if futurists are just science-fiction fans who've confused fiction with reality, what other genres of confusion are there? Are goths people who confuse horror fiction with reality? Are there any people who believe in elves and wizards or are we all agreed those aren't "really real"? I'd really like to know exactly what determines whether people confuse a genre with reality or not. Because it doesn't seem like anyone believes in wizards. But you know, plenty of people confuse books on historical mythology (Torah, Bible, Koran) with reality, and the plotlines and characters of those books suck and aren't even remotely believable.

On the other hand, maybe that's the rule. Maybe the more the plotlines are incoherent and the more characters violate all the rules of human psychology, maybe that triggers the confusion. Because I can't think of any other traits that historical mythology and science fiction share. And if that's the rule, well Pastafarianism's never made much sense. Is it going to turn into a genuine religion within 50 years?

In any case, I'm only now starting to realize there are whole new depths of human stupidity that I've never even imagined before. And given how low my opinion of humans' cognitive abilities has always been ... wow. Holy fucking wow! I mean, I always thought that religiosity had something to do with child abuse. But apparently, just publishing something in a book written in a certain way is enough to trigger human credulity.

Life Creates Entropy

Some pretty smart people have gotten the notion that life opposes entropy, that it creates order and retards the heat death of the universe. That's not even remotely true. I suspect they have a weak grasp of entropy's relation to 'order' otherwise they would know how completely illusory the perception of life creating order is.

Information

You see, information, entropy, order, these are all words that mean exactly the same thing. They are physically identical things. Entropy is information. It's just that entropy is the kind of plentiful low-level information that the human sensory and nervous systems screen out as irrelevant. Our brains blank it out. Order meanwhile is also information, just high level - it's the kind of sparse information our brains find meaningful to watch out for.

Entropy is basically the physical universe's spam. Energy is the universe's hard drive capacity. And information is the sum total of what's on the hard drive. Gibbs free energy is the drive's free space, which you can move around from place to place at the cost of sacrificing some of it to hold more spam. And 'order' is user data.

Now to understand the whole thing you have to realize that information can never, ever be erased from the physical universe. Stephen Hawking thought you could in extreme circumstances and he was overwhelmingly, stupidly wrong. So when junk accumulates, it uses up hard drive capacity forever (ie, it obeys the second law of thermodynamics). At some point, all the space becomes unusable because it's filled with spam (the universe suffers heat
death).

And on the hard drive are life forms (AI) that create an enormous amount of junk data (called "heat" or "entropy") just to maintain a few bits of what they consider user data. Every time they "erase" a bit of user data, it becomes a gigabyte worth of junk data. But they're dumb so they're pleased. And it's not like they have much choice since they don't know how to use the computer too well (they're
low tech).

(Negentropy is just any mechanism that destroys information. So far, there aren't any.)

The upshot of all this is that living systems create megabits per second in order to preserve a few tens of bits of information around. The notion that the tens of bits are more important than the megabits each second is pure illusion and completely ridiculous.

Examples

Here,

(((1 watt) * (1 / (3 Ghz))) / (300 kelvin)) / Boltzmann constant = 8.04773744 × 10^10

A bunch of RAM operating at 3 gigahertz (ie, ridiculously fast) consuming 1 watt of power will pump 80 gigabits into the environment as heat. So the first question is just how much RAM would 1 watt power? Would it power 10 gigabytes? Maybe. Naaah.

The second issue is that if the average lifespan of data in the memory is 1 second, then the memory pumps out 10 gigabytes per third of a nanosecond * 3 billion = 28 exabytes per second, in order to sustain 10 gigabytes. Or if you divide both sides of the equation, you get that for every single byte of order, RAM pumps out 3 gigabytes of entropy.

The math just doesn't work people.

Biological systems use a lot less energy (ie, waste free energy by crapping lots of useless information on it), but then again, computer hardware uses up zero energy on "just living". Computers don't have digestive systems or musculatures. And electric turbines are more than 30% efficient while electric motors are more than 90% efficient. Both of those numbers are way, way above what biological bodies are able to achieve. Photosynthesis is only about 5% efficient.

But I don't have to guess. Here are the numbers for the human brain,

(((20 watt) * (1 / ((10^16) hertz))) / (300 kelvin)) / Boltzmann constant = 482,864

10^16 operations per second is generous. 20 watts is about average. So for every single bit operation the human brain performs, it pumps out half a million bits.

In the grand cosmological sense, the purpose of life isn't to fight entropy. The purpose of life is to create it.



For those who wish to learn more: reversible computation, Toffoli gates and entropy.

How Pandora Should End

Have I lowered myself to watch this amazingly stupid, inane, over-hyped piece of crap pandering to eco-zealots? Of course not. Yet I still feel I'm in a position to comment and offer insight on it based on the incredible amount of fanfiction I've read about it. I'm referring to two stories on FFNet Invasion of Pandora and Pandora's End.

And I say again, reading two stories about Pandora being incinerated is an incredible amount of devotion and benefit of the doubt I'm showing to this amazingly stupid movie. Though I'm willing to extend my show of devotion if someone will just write a story about Daleks showing up on Pandora screaming EXTERMINATE! and INCINERATE! Because let me tell you, that thought put a happy smile on my face last night as I went to sleep. It's definitely the kind of Happy Thought pure magic is made of.

What The Movie Is All About

Remember the civilians working on the Avatar project complaining about a fucking jarhead on their civilian, diplomatic project? And at the end of the day, instead of the jarhead negotiating a peace treaty with the aliens like he was supposed to do, what does he do? He betrays his entire species and dooms them to poverty and death.

Because battle and mass murder & death are "cool". Because humans ought to all die and only Amerindian anti-progress enviro-freaks ought to live. And treason is a-okay so long as it's for those causes. So yeah, I only realized yesterday the civilians were right: putting a fucking jarhead in charge doomed their species.

The real lesson of the movie isn't that eco-zealots are right. No, it's that jarheads are never to be trusted because they're all violent traitorous psychopaths concerned only with looking good. A statement that is definitely true of the air force by the way. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it characterizes the macho marines, the snobbish navy, or the ... well whatever the fuck the army is.

How To Improve The Movie

To improve Avatar, you first have to realize its most basic flaw. And that flaw isn't that it's pandering to eco-zealot gaia-fascist druid-fundamentalist nutbars. Nor is it that this stupid planet has an impossible biology. Nor is it even that it's blatantly anti-progress and anti-human. No, its most basic flaw is the whole ridiculous notion of a "war" between an interstellar civilization and a planet-bound species of no-tech primitives.

That's what the whole stupid movie is about, isn't it? The "war". And it is utterly fucking impossible because this is what a space-based civilization would actually do:

• mine the local asteroid belt (there is always one) to construct giant mirrors with a surface area totaling (1000 km)^2. ((1 micron) * ((1000 km)^2) * (7.85 tonnes)) per (cubic meter) in tonnes = 7 850 000 tonnes. It's basically a small solar sail and you won't need to mine more than a single asteroid.
• tow then set up the giant mirrors in orbit of the habitable planet.
• flash fry a square landing site, turning it into nice smooth glass by carefully redirecting a beam of sunlight of temperature 10^2 * 300 Kelvin = 30,000 kelvin onto a (100 km)^2 square area for 1 second.
• OR slow broil a square landing site by redirecting a beam of sunlight of temperature 1 * 300 kelvin onto a (1000 km)^2 square area for 1 day (so that at midnight the temperature consistently reaches above 100 celsius on the ground, all the water boils off, the jungle gets dessicated then it spontaneously ignites in a beautiful firestorm that sterilizes and breaks down all the biochemical poisons in the atmosphere).
• continue carving the landscape at will, pulverizing mountains and creating new riverbeds.
• wait a couple days for it all to cool off.
• land near the largest lake in the zone of death umm safety.
• start mining operations at the landing site.
• make contact with the natives and inform them of what you want by pointing to some mineral ores. (The advantage of the slow broil approach is now obvious, especially performed at night when it will be more spectacular. The disadvantage of slow broil is that it delivers thousands of times more energy to the landing site than flash fry.)
• incinerate whatever (100 km)^2 square on the grid that the natives attack from. One square for every casualty you incur.

Bingo, within a fortnight, antagonizing you will become a capital crime among the natives.

You know, I think my plan might be overkill by about a factor of 100. Which just goes to show how fucking easy it is to kill primitive tribal morons when you're in space!!

So yeah, if you get rid of that entire amazingly stupid "war" and let the Navi be incinerated then that would improve the movie tremendously. Or you could make a sequel based on that. You know, Earth saying "alright you scum suckers, so you want to get SERIOUS?"

If you're going to create a movie lionizing the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder that is "nature" then it might as well be the collective murder of uncivilized backwards tribal primitives.

The Hand of God

Oh yeah, that massive shaft of sunlight could just as easily have been redirected to the polar regions, melting the ice sheets and turning a continent like Antarctica inhabitable. A square 1000 km on a side is a fair amount of living space you know.

And if it were directed to the oceans, well you know the scene in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home where the space-whale probe starts boiling the oceans in order to sterilize the Earth? THAT is what it would look like.

I think there is a good reason why the hand of god in Populous 3 is represented by a shaft of sunlight.

Fantasy for Atheists

Atheism has really won a major victory when fantasy is being written for atheists. Witness,

• Serpent In Paradise - LOTR for Atheists
• The Last Ring-bearer - LOTR for Scientists
• The Salvation War - Dante's Inferno for Atheists
• Methods of Rationality- Harry Potter for Atheists
• A Thin Veneer - Babylon 5 for Atheists
• His Dark Materials - Narnia for Atheists

The psychologically defining trait of atheism isn't the disbelief in all powerful aliens, it's the refusal to accord them any special status. What else is Humanism but the capacity to judge gods' actions by human standards and their existence by human reason.

Note that Babylon 5's Lorien functioned as a higher god to whom the mortals appealed the angels' and demons' misdeeds. B5 was incredibly medieval in its philosophy - not unexpected from an American.

Honourable mention is made to Magestic where the protagonist refuses to accept or bow down to the all powerful remorseless force of Destiny.

Why Dune Can't Be Turned Into A Movie

I don't even remember how I got on a Dune kick right now. There are so many awesome lines, visuals and concepts in that movie. And yes I am talking about the movie you book snobs. What I do remember since it only happened 20 minutes ago is how I realized that Dune can never ever be turned into a movie.

I was reading about the making of the film and how David Lynch disowned the extended and narrated version of the film, the one that tried to fix the 'minor problem' of his original version being completely incomprehensible. That was when I realized of course it's incomprehensible, there's so many important new concepts in the movie!

Fluffier Than Helium

I will illustrate by comparing Dune to Star Wars. Star Wars has no background because it was never adapted from a book. This is what Star Wars boils down to:

• a hick Farmboy
• finds out he has Generic Psionics
• so a Complete Stranger decides to mentor Farmboy
• into an order of Psionic Paladins
• meanwhile, some Captured Princess sends a message
• to Mentor who takes his toys (robots and sword) and Protégé
• and they escape some Mooks to go to Princess' Prison
• where Mentor attacks Evil Paladin
• and while Mentor disappears
• Farmboy manages to free Princess
• Princess has blueprints of a Superweapon
• they attack Superweapon with air fighters launched from an ocean navy carrier
• Farmboy uses Psionics to destroy it

That's it. That's the entire movie right there, including all characters and all plot elements. Oh I've forgotten something? Some cherished little crap detail? That's because it's irrelevant. Once you comprehend those 13 points of the movie, none of which are remotely original, you've understood the entire movie.

And don't give me any crap about how Evil Paladin was Farmboy's father or how Generic Psionics is really psi+magic (ooh, magic lightning!) because that was all retconned. Even worse with Farmboy & Princess supposedly being siblings. It didn't stop Farmboy from putting the moves on Princess by the end of the movie, did it?

Denser Than Uranium

Dune is ... different. Here are the points you need to understand before you watch the movie:

• there's an ancient feudal space empire ruled by the Emperor
• House Atreides, House Harkonnen are major power brokers and enemies
• AI are forbidden as a matter of law and religious fiat
• humans have acquired super-human mental powers through drugs and training
• the Bene Gesserit have been running a multi-millenia breeding program to create a Physical God
• the Bene Gesserits have (known) powers of hypnotic voice, transmutation, and genetic memory
• Lord Atreides has a Bene Gesserit wife who is a central part of the breeding program
• Lord Atreides has a son with his wife
• the Spacing Guild controls all space travel
• they require Spice to fold space to achieve instantaneous travel
• the Spice extends Life, the Spice expands Awareness of both present and future
• a briefcase full of Spice is worth the price of a planet
• it can only be mined on a single planet in the Known Universe
• the planet Dune makes Hell look safe and comfortable
• the Emperor has decided to knock Atreides and Harkonen down a few pegs by setting them against each other

Not only are there more characters and plot elements before you can even watch Dune than there are throughout the entire Star Wars movie, but the least original of them is more original than the most original Star Wars element. Not like you need much originality to beat 'anonymous farmboy' or 'anonymous cheddar monk' or 'anonymous princess'. Hell, two of the "characters" are subservient robots. Tools!

But let's be fair, the least original elements of Dune I've listed are 'ancient feudal space empire' and 'the Emperor sets up two Houses against each other'. On the other side, the only original element of Star Wars is 'Princess has blueprints of Superweapon'. And that's only original for its time because nowadays there's nothing novel about Action Girls. In contrast, Machiavellian Emperors are a really old idea that's become novel again because few people are familiar with how monarchs reigned.

STILL Not Fully Comprehensible

The very first scene is Princess Irulan narrating. Why her? Why does she get screen time? It's because she's single, of marriagable age, and Paul Atreides marries her to legitimize his hold on power. Oh yeah, that didn't quite make it into the movie, did it? Yet you can't fully understand the first scene of the movie without knowing something they couldn't fit into the movie at all.

Why does Doctor Yueh betray Lord Atreides? Why is he even in a position to betray Lord Atreides? He's just a fucking doctor for fuck's sake! Oh it's because he's been conditioned as part of the Emperor's elite corps of incorruptibles. But it turns out he has been corrupted by the Baron Harkonnen who is holding Yueh's wife hostage. In fact, he's the first case of an incorruptible having been corrupted. None of that made it into the movie either.

And I haven't even mentioned the Sandworms. Or the Great Convention against atomics in the Landsraad. Or shields. Or lasguns' notoriously bad interaction with shields. Or Alia. Or Other Memories. Or Mentats. Or stillsuits. These are not irrelevant details. An irrelevant detail is how Lord Atreides' wife was the illegitimate daughter of Baron Harkonnen (showing the power of the Bene Gesserit to arrange this), or how the House Corrino heir was another Bene Gesserit candidate for Physical God. Those are irrelevant.

Science Fiction vs Fantasy

Dune has lots of deeply relevant intricacies because like any great science-fiction it aspires to a modicum of self-consistency and a lot of creativity. The SF stories that adapt best to movies are short stories like Total Recall and Minority Report. I'm not even counting anything remotely like Star Wars because those aren't science-fiction, they're space fantasies.

When you adapt SF novels, there's always too much material so you end up having to sacrifice something. Blade Runner sacrificed all the action - it's unrecognizable from the book, and the author considered the movie to complement the book. And Solaris sacrificed the themes - Stanislaw Lem was pretty disappointed that all his themes of Incomprehensibly Alien Aliens were pushed aside. I can't even imagine how Gateway or Foundation would have to be cut to be put in movie form.

Some people like to point out that fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter have been made into movies. Isn't Dune better? Doesn't it deserve to be made a movie at least as much as that fantasy dreck? No, no it does not. Dune isn't better, it's monumentally better. Fantasy is inherently recycling of themes, characters and plot elements everyone is already familiar with. Do you think Tolkien invented elves, dwarves, dragons and evil gods? Like fuck he did. He just described landscapes and obsessed with naming everything. A name isn't an idea!

In great science-fiction there is nothing recycled. The novel Dune now more than 40 years after its first publication is still entirely original. You can't do such a novel justice with a couple of movies or even a mini-series. Even if you stuck to just the first book like the twits who made Dune (2000) failed to do, it just isn't long enough.

How To Do Dune Justice

To do Dune justice you'd need a full 13-episode series around just the first book. The battle when the Harkonnen and Sardaukar re-invade Dune, killing all the Atreides, leaving Paul and Jessica to flee into the desert? That would be 2 episodes right there, minimum.

The Atreides setting up on Dune, introducing the basic ecology & economy and Paul getting odd messages from the locals, that's at least one episode. The Emperor deciding to set up Houses Atreides and Harkonnen? That's an episode.

There would need to be one episode dedicated solely to the vital importance of the spice - maybe some smuggler tries to get off-planet with a briefcase full of the stuff. In the last scene of that episode, you'd probably see the smuggler executed and his stash confiscated only to follow it as it's re-sold through official channels until it ends up in a Space Guild Navigator's tank.

There would have to be an episode set before the movie to explain Jessica's background and to explain the Bene Gesserits. You'd need to come up with a storyline, probably involving some minor political intrigue at the Emperor's court. The episode wouldn't be about the Bene Gesserit, it would just involve them somehow, maybe only as secondary characters.

That's the thing, not only would most of the scenes in Dune end up being episodes of the series, but most of the episodes would be about things that aren't in the book, their central characters not even in the book. The book would just be the over-arching plotline of the series. So the 3 hour long movie would be stretched to 13 hours. And I repeat, minimum.

Babylon 5 achieved more starting with much sparser and poorer source material.

Commercial Use Of A Stargate

I always thought the Stargate in the show was ludicrously underutilized. They don't use it for anything!

First of all, we would never ever tie up the Earth's Stargate by running a military exploration program through it. Hell, it's not even remotely secure. We'd establish a military base off-world and run the entire exploration program through that. That way nobody would really care if the military base had to use the nuclear self-destruct option. Hmm too bad, we'll need to build a new base.

Opening the Choke

Secondly, the Earth's Stargate would be dedicated to colonization and resource (wood, iron, petrol, grain, and fish) transport. And the way you would run the Stargate is not using trains or cars or pedestrians, which would be immensely stupid. Rather you would place the gate horizontally so that gravity helped you drop things into the sending gate and out of the receiving gate.

Check this out.

(((pi * ((3 m)^2)) * (10 m)) per second) * (1 year) = 8.92251061 × 10^9 m^3

That's 9 billion cubic meters that can flow through the Stargate each and every year. And that's on slow speed because all you have to do is set up a funnel on the sending gate shaped in such a way that what's falling through is in free fall for one second.

In order to maintain a steady flow through the funnel, you'd set up the gate so it was movable, so you would move it away from the funnel as soon as it shut down so you could restart it. That way the kawoosh doesn't disintegrate part of the stream of goods you're trying to send. Then when it's online you slide it right back into the stream of (wood, iron, petrol, grain, and fish).

Changing Land Usage

To grasp what impact this would have on Earth, consider the world annual fish production of 120 million tonnes. It would take ((120 million tonnes) / ((721 kg) per (cubic meter))) / (9 billion (cubic meters)) = 0.018492834 (1.8%) of the Stargate's capacity to pass this through.

The world's telecommunications companies would rejoice since they would no longer have to put up with asshole fishermen cutting their (meticulously mapped) expensive fiber optic cables. And it would be much easier to regulate off-world fisheries to prevent destruction of seabeds since they would be utterly dependent on the Stargate to get fishing boats and nets off-world, and their catch to market.

Or consider the world annual roundwood production of 3.3 billion cubic meters in 2003. That wouldn't take up half of the Stargate's capacity. That's right, we could more or less end all forestry on Earth if we had a Stargate and didn't waste it like the dumbfucks at Stargate Command. And as a bonus, only the very best hardwoods would be harvested and sent through. But they would still be cheap.

Or consider the world's total cereal production of 2000 million tonnes. So (2000 million tonnes) / ((770 kg) per (cubic meter)) = 2.5974026 × 10^9 m^3. That wouldn't take up a third of the capacity.

When you add it all up, there's still plenty of room for the world's iron ore production (1.7 billion metric tonnes) / ((2500 kg) per (cubic meter)) = 680 million m^3.

Within 5 years you would displace 90% of the agricultural land usage on Earth, leaving the Earth's agricultural land for non-transportable fruits, vegetables and nuts. Hmm, nuts are transportable ... There would be massive reforesting.

And why would you do this? Well, maybe to capture some of the over one trillion euros per year that would be flowing through the Stargate. And that's at slow speed.

Passengers

You'd think that passengers would be different. Well, they're not. Oh you can do things the dumb way by constructing custom trains and rolling them through the Stargate at a tempo of 40 per hour. That might get you up to 700 million trips per year. That would be dumb. And at 1000 euro per trip, that's only 700 billion per year of revenue. At 10,000 per passenger-seat, you won't find many takers.

But like I said, that would be dumb. The right way to send passengers through the Stargate is to fluidize them. Or better yet, to think of them as logs. Your job is to dump them vertically with the smallest cross-section possible through the Stargate and then into a lake of water. So it's wet suits and mini air respirators for the passengers. On the other hand, you achieve a throughput of

(pi*(300 cm radius of stargate)^2 / (pi*(50 cm width of shoulders of average man)^2 ) * 90% (the packing efficiency of circles on a plane) per second * 1 year = 4 billion trips per year.

Note that the receiving Stargates can be on any off-Earth planet. Because once you're off-Earth, efficiency no longer matters and you can just walk through your local gate to your final destination. You just need to make sure that Earth doesn't send all the passengers to a single planet - dividing them among 10 planets ought to do it.

Tubes

So the way you fluidize passengers is you build a tube system. At each Stargate you build 127 tubes going into or out of each Stargate. Each tube starts at a funnel which accepts standing passengers on little platforms. Once the passengers are in their wet suits and respirators and masks, they step on this little platform inside the funnel. Then when the Stargates are working and the tube systems are aligned, the passengers are dropped sequentially 1 pax per second into the tube. They're going pretty fast so they've got 8 meters of headway between them.

Inside the tube you're dragged along by the water and the air is steadily filtered out. Then your tube starts to turn around so that it joins up with all the other 126 tubes into this huge bundle. And it's this straight bundle of tubes that's aimed at the event horizon of the Stargate. So you shoot down through your tube for a minute or two then through the wormhole then into a precisely aligned tube on the receiving Stargate. At which point the tubes are unbundled, twisted around so all 127 are in a single row and everyone's dumped into a fast-flowing but deep river. An artificial river that's flowing through pipes drilled through a gently rising smooth rockface right in the river. So you get scooped along upwards onto bare rock and the water you're in gets sucked into the rock, leaving you high and dry.

And that's how you send 4 billion people a year through a 3 meter radius choke point. As a bonus, you're providing an exciting and novel experience that nets you a few trillion Euros a year, every year. If you only use 25% of the Stargate's transport capacity for passengers then you can still offer 1 billion trips per year (more than you could offer with custom trains using up 100% of capacity) while leaving enough capacity free to transport all of the wood, all of the fish, all of the iron, and all of the grain the Earth needs.