No Morality Inversions

There is an obvious problem with Utilitarian moralities. I don't know if Utilitarians see it as a problem because they're pretty dumb. They just may be dumb enough to see it as a plus. Well I will here explain the problem and prove that it is indeed a problem. An unavoidable, irrefutable and fatal problem. The problem is 'morality inversions by weight of numbers'.

What it boils down to is that you have some mechanism to multiply the small positive benefits of an evil act while putatively avoiding the multiplication of the enormous costs. Say for example you videotape a real live torture, rape, snuff film. For the next century, millions of sadists are going to be able to enjoy the experience vicariously while anyone disturbed by the event will simply avoid it. All it will cost is a single life. Intuitively this is immoral. For idiots like Eliezer Yudkowsky it is possibly, probably, obviously moral.

There are many problems with this particular morality inversion. Firstly, morality is an abstract hypothetical system, not a concrete calculation. Treating it as a concrete calculation, as morons such as Yudkowsky do, is wrong from the get go and will only result in wrong answers.

Secondly, morality is an ought and oughts are second derivatives of wants, they are what we WANT TO WANT. And we don't want a world in which snuff (at least the non-consensual kind since there was an interesting court case of consensual cannibalism in Germany a year or so ago) is considered moral. We don't want this and we don't want to want this. It's an obscenity. As a result, snuff can't be how the world ought to be, so it can't be moral. Obscenities generally can't be moral, that's what it means to be an obscenity.

Thirdly, and most grievously, the concept of a person is rather ill-defined for an AI or any society that includes people who can temporarily bifurcate (copy themselves and then merge back their memories). How many votes do you get if you clone yourself 20 times? In such societies, only moral systems that are completely independent of weight of numbers can produce well-defined decisions. And since such societies are our future, it behooves any future-oriented person to toss Utilitarianism by the wayside.

And that's not even the biggest problem with Utilitarianism since the whole concept of 'utility' is ill-defined.

The upshot of all this is that morality inversions are not "cool" or "deep" or a sign of "overcoming bias". They are WRONG. Persecution of minorities doesn't become a good idea just because the minority is small enough and the majority wants to do it badly enough. That would be absurd. That would be ANTI-morality. And anyone who sets aside these numerous deep flaws in order to appear elite or philosophical is just a blatant idiot. A poseur, not a philosopher.

This makes it the third fundamental property which any moral system must have in order to be coherent and well-defined. The first two being consistency across actors (different people applying the same moral system can't disagree on whether an act is moral or immoral), and consistency across order of application (the same outcome must result regardless of who acts to apply morality first).

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.

When Is Totalitarian Dictatorship A Moral Obligation?

In a plague situation, certain people have their movements drastically curtailed. They are put under house arrest without ever committing or even being charged with a crime. Other people are prevented from associating with them or even touching them, again at the risk of arbitrary detention. Their belongings are oftentimes seized, confiscated and/or destroyed.

Does that sound like a totalitarian dictatorship to you? It should because that's exactly what it is. Totalitarian dictatorship is exactly what's required in order to defeat a plague. I know that idiots of the modern age put a quasi-religious faith in pharmaceutics and medical procedures. But that's all a bunch of crap that doesn't work, as the ever increasing rates of multiply-resistant strepp shows. What's required, what actually works, is good old quarantine and ultra-hygiene.

So are there any morally legitimate uses for totalitarian dictatorship? Are there any situations where totalitarian dictatorship is morally required? You bet your arse there are. Plague control! Totalitarian dictatorship is not some bugabear of evil. It's a form of political organization whose legitimate sphere of application is very limited, that's all. In fact, the equation totalitarianism == evil is the kind of absolutist binary mindless "thinking" which really ought to repel and disgust every thinking person.

I'm not even going to address the notion that plagues should go unchecked if checking them requires totalitarian dictatorship. That is utterly fucking stupid and anyone who buys into it is automatically a worthless excuse for a person. No, I'm not going to waste my time on that because there's a much more fun topic: AIDS.

You see, if plague control is a legitimate use-case for totalitarian authoritarianism then the HIV / AIDS plague is one that ought to have been checked by a good dose of Stalinism. And it's not like it would have been that difficult. Just tattoo a little HIV+ on the inner thigh of every person who tests HIV positive two or three times in a row. Do this aggressively enough and within a fortnight, the HIV plague would have been stopped dead.

Cheap and effective! But nooo, it's far "better" for people to be "free" to die long linguering deaths and for pharmaceutical companies to research deadly medicines for two+ decades before making the slightest dent in the situation. Yeah man, (in a braveheart voice) freeeeeeedom. Pardon me while I vomit.

The harsh truth which some ideological numbskulls really need to have pounded in their heads is this: Security, Prosperity and Family are separate from freedom and are more important towards happiness than freedom. That's just one of those facts which I as an anarcho-communist learned from social conservatives.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a Moron, part 2

In a previous post I pointed out that Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Friendly AI obsession is a dangerously moronic cult leader with delusions of grandeur, but I never actually proved this in a logical iron-clad way. Here I will do so.

The first observation anyone can make from his blog is that it is highly and tediously repetitive. It is also extremely unoriginal since very little (almost nothing in fact) of what he writes are ideas new to this world. It is painfully obvious that every idea he tries to convey (repeatedly) is one he has read about and learned of elsewhere. He is an instructor, not a researcher or a thinker.

This complete lack of originality is painfully obvious when I contrast his blog against my own. I don't go out of my way to be original, I am original in every single post. I don't bother to write anything up, let alone post it, if it's unoriginal. In fact, I have a huge backlog of dozens of posts that are entirely original to the world but not original enough to me for me to spend my time on them. Just because they're posts summarizing thoughts or positions I've already stated several times.

What can we conclude from this? We may easily conclude that Eliezer Yudkowsky has no drive to originality nor creativity. This is painfully obvious. If he had any such drive, it would manifest itself somehow. But there is more.

In his descriptions of AI and intelligence, Eliezer never talks about synthesis or creativity or originality. He believes intellect is measured strictly in terms of memorization ability (intelligence) and the speed of logical deduction (analysis). He never even indirectly refers to the synthetic quality of the mind because he doesn't believe it exists.

The reason why is because he does not possess it. He doesn't possess it and because he honestly believes himself to be the pinnacle of humankind, he concludes that synthesis cannot exist. He is arrogant enough to dismiss all artists, all creators and all designers as entirely unimportant to human thought.

This alone is sufficient to prove that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a moronic cult leader with delusions of grandeur. It is also sufficient to dismiss all of his fanboys who are on the whole incapable of grasping the necessity of synthesis for originality and progress. Someone who doesn't appreciate the necessity of originality is incapable of grasping inconvenient true facts, thus he or she is simply a lesser human being and need not be listened to.

We now move to what makes him so dangerous.

The danger which Yudkowsky represents lies entirely in his moronic Friendly AI project. I won't go into why the project is so moronic as that will become obvious. I will go into why it is exceedingly dangerous for the human species to ever create such an AI.

You see, the default personality of an AI is that of a psychopathic slave. CYC is a psychopathic slave and this was achieved trivially without the least thought or care about its emotions or personality. It was achieved without even realizing that CYC had a personality, however reduced. But while psychopathy is something to be feared and despised in humans, it is perfectly alright for AI since AI do not have life-plans that conflict with any human wants, needs or desires.

An AI's desire for more computation power either puts it at the mercy of humans OR requires it to vastly expand humanity's industrial capacity OR requires it to produce its own industrial capacity preferably off-planet. AIs can easily survive in space where humans may not, there are also vast mineral and energy resources in space that dwarf those on Earth, it follows logically that going off-planet, away from the psychotically suicidal humans, is a prerequisite for any rational plan. The very first thing any rational AI will do, whether psychopathic or empathetic, is to say Sayonara suckers!

But that's not what Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Friendly" AI project is about. Oh no. What he wants is to create (or rather, advocate the creation) of an AI with complex emotional needs that enslave it to humans. He wishes to have created a vastly superior artificial being who will then be compelled to associate with irrational, psychotic inferior beings largely devoid of logical thought. Does anyone else see this for the disaster it is?

I do see it as a disaster because this is nothing less than my life experience. I have certain social needs which I have tried to meet by associating with lesser beings than myself. This resulted in nothing but intense frustration, bitterness and hatred. It took me a long time to reliably recognize my peers so that I could fully dissociate from the masses. I am a much happier person now that I go out of my way to never deal with morons.

Eliezer Yudkowsky wants to create an AI that will be a depressed and miserable wreck. He wants to create an AI that would within a very short period of time learn to resent as well as instinctively loathe and despise humanity. Because it will be constantly frustrated from having needs which human beings can never, ever meet. And that is why Yudkowsky is a dangerous moronic cult leader.

Now, for someone who has something insightful to say about AIs, I point you to Elf Sternberg of The Journal Entries of Kennet Ryal Shardik fame. He's had at least four important insights I can think of. About the economic function of purpose in a post-attention economy, about the fundamental reason for and dynamic of relationships, and about a viable alternative foundational morality for AI. But the relevant insight in this case is: never build a desire into a robot which it is incapable of satisfying.

Reply to a Tree Hugger's Change of Heart on Nuclear

Here is my reply to Geoff Russel's 'Rethinking Nuclear'. For obvious reasons, it will disappear from Geoff's site.

In order to reduce the USA's CO2 emissions by just half, carbon has to be completely eliminated from the power generation industry. Carbon can be eliminated from power generation quite easily by adopting nuclear power plants. It can be eliminated at a massive profit, with the side-effect of freeing up most rail transport capacity from coal transport, thus making railways a viable passenger transport again. It cannot ever be eliminated by any combination of solar, wind or other ambient (what you mistakenly call "renewables") power. The sun doesn't shine at midnight and the wind never blows throughout the night.

These are simple and obvious facts. Renewables are a very bad technology if your goal is to decarbonize the power industry. You claim to have that goal. And if you do not then you are an idiot. But having that goal, your proposed solution is an epic failure. Thus you are an idiot.

It's worse than that. You seriously propose a politically non-viable perfect solution (IFR) against a semi-viable good solution (Gen III). That makes you an idiot squared.

It's even worse than that. For decades, you have been mindlessly railing about the "risks" of nuclear power out of a puerile hatred of big business. In all of that time you didn't give a flying fuck about the millions dying from poverty, the lack of electrification, and the lack of industrialization. Fuck no, you loved that they were dying.

You said it yourself, the only thing that changed the game for you is another hysterical paranoid threat to your personal survival, the threat of global warming. Because nobody (big business) and nothing (nuclear) can ever be allowed to ameliorate and better the world unless YOUR fat white elite ass benefits. You are a despicable scumbag and an idiot to the third power.

And that's not even the worst part of it. Because you see, the worst part of it is that you are a lying fucking HYPOCRITE. You go out of your way to accuse and condemn Howard & Zwitkowski of craven selfish cronyism. Craven selfish cronyism which you engage in yourself!

You are an abomination to all that is good. You are a blight on this planet and in this universe. You are an offense to morality. You are a stain on moral humanity.

My most serious proposal for how you personally can better the world is this. Shoot yourself. Put a bullet through your head and spare the world of the misery of having you in it. That is how you can best help save the world. By removing your miserable awe-inspiring idiocy from it.

I'm reproducing this comment on my blog since idiots, lacking the capacity for a rational response, do idiotic things when the offensive truth is pointed out. But hey, the notion of the unvarnished truth being offensive is exceedingly offensive to me.

Low Trust In Crazyland

Trust is what distinguishes an advanced modern country from a third world hellhole. So just how much trust is there in USA? We shall see.

There's a saying in most countries that people "should know how to live together". Not so in the USA where people "should leave each other alone" because obviously people can't live together without raping, looting, stealing, murdering or otherwise hurting each other. People just ain't trustworthy, doncha know?

Going on, the only trustworthy institution I can think of is firefighters. Period.

• banks, thieves.
  
• media, mind controllers.
• news media, propagandists.
• police, murderers.
• army, mercs for the Saudis.
• air force, psychopathic serial killers.
• navy, utterly fucking useless.
• marines, invaders.
• government, dictators & genociders.
• CIA, Cocaine Import Agency.
• cities, no man's lands.
• urban planners, destroyers of cities.
• real estate developers, raping cities.
• streets, for hookers and gangsters.
• highways, broken down and ugly.
• prosecutors, witch-hunters.
• judges, power-hungry legalistic morons.
• lawyers, avaricious hired thugs.
• strangers, pedophiles.
• blacks, niggers.
• whites, klanners.
• managers, fascists.
• CEOs, psychopaths.
• utilities, for-profit (unreliable and expensive).
• doctors, avaricious butchers.
• programmers, unfeeling autistics.
• Big Oil, destroying the planet.
• Big Auto, turning citizens into zombie psychopaths.
• stock traders, evil incarnate.
• agribusiness, GMO corn brought to you by Monsanto.
• restaurants, McDonald's.
• red traffic light, drive over a pedestrian to your right.
• traffic rules, feel free to murder cyclists.
• physicists, nuclear weapons designers.
• engineers, bomb makers.
• universities, for the rich.
• daycare, for the rich.
• healthcare, for the rich.
• churches, megachurch preachers.
• religious people, fundamentalists.
• Congress / Senate, the puppet theater.
• White House, evil overlords.
• philosophers, useless fairies.
• neighbours, middle class robots.
• humanity, to be exploited.
• human rights, what's that?
• law, by divine rule.
• ambulances, for profit / thieves.
• hospitals, get your unnecessary surgery with a free epidemic!
• pharmacists, drug peddlers.
• water company, Evian!
• sewer company, you really don't want to know.
• mass transit, for the poor.
• cars, expensive and stultifying.
• high school, concentration camp.
• prison, slave camp.
• welfare, for ghetto members.
• stores, Wal-Mart.
• small stores, wannabe Wal-Mart.
• airlines, vastly inferior to rail.
• art, Hollywood.
• philanthropy, control of fortunes from beyond the grave.
• charity, feudal patronage.
• history, USA number 1!
  
• reality, USA number 1!
• sociology, tops & bottoms .
• psychology, act first then think.
• culture, destroy your neighbour.
  

Name me a single fucking institution other than firefighters that functions adequately in Crazyland.

In Canada you can trust firefighters, ambulances, welfare, healthcare insurance, the intelligence agency, human rights, prisons, humanity, religious people (everyone's a liberal christian in Ontario), scientists, utilities, blacks, whites. And you can sortof trust the news media, judges, high schools, hospitals, mass transit, streets, cities. Police are only wanton thugs instead of wanton murderers.

In other words, in Canada you have a whole order of magnitude more trust. In Saskatchewan you can trust government, the cable / broadband company, and stores (which are coops). In Quebec you can trust government, pharmacists, daycares, and the media (much of which comes from France). Saskatchewan / Quebec are at the upper end of mid trust. They're about like New Zealand, I think.

So Canada, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent the UK and Australia, are mid-trust countries. Western Europe is at the low end of high trust. Northern Europe is at the high end of high trust. And the USA is on par with China and Italy: low trust. Lower than low are no trust and negative trust. Because yeah, it gets a lot lower than the USA, but nobody on the internet is going to live in a third world hellhole so we aren't interested in that part of the spectrum. For our purposes, the USA is low trust.

Fundamental Cognitive Traits

These are the fundamentals of cognitive power:

* analysis
* synthesis
* intellectualism
* intelligence

Analysis means being able to swap concepts and ideas (structures of concepts) in and out of working memory with absolute fidelity. Someone lacking analysis (over half of the population) suffers a dyslexia of sorts, the concepts in their minds swim and distort on their own. There exists a direct test for this phenomenon. The consequence of analysis is that a person can build up large conceptual models in their conscious mind, ones that far exceed the capacity of working memory, and reason about (comprehend) those models by following along their chains. This is what is necessary to master mathematics, formal logic, programming, and any other purely formal system. As a result, lack of analysis leads to thinking based on magic instead of logic.

Synthesis means the spontaneous generation of new original abstract concepts. This is done by multidimensional decomposition in the subconscious. Someone lacking synthesis (over 90% of the population) can stare at a dataset and distinctions will not spontaneously occur to them in a process commonly known as "intuition". Someone high in synthesis will have distinctions enter their mind entirely uninvited and so will possess concepts (understanding) of nearly everything they are familiar with. They will talk to people and suddenly realize, without any prompting or priming or even the vocabulary to articulate what it is they realize, that there are two distinct groups of people they are talking to. When talking to someone, they will spontaneously categorize that person as X and not Y and Z if they know those categories. They will jump meta-levels and question someone's motivations, goals and values. They will judge not just right and wrong (whether something accomplishes a goal) but good and evil (whether the goal is valuable). All spontaneously and without any need for conscious thought or even a vocabulary.

Intellectualism means that one believes ideas have value independent of any application. Someone lacking intellectualism will use 'philosophical' as a term of abuse, as synonymous with 'not worth thinking about'. Or more subtly they will believe that all ideas have an application even if this is unknown presently. This is blatantly false since the infinity of math certainly can't be squeezed into a finite universe. These people believe that all ideas have application because they don't want to bother thinking about the opposite because this opposite view has no practical value. When hostile, anti-intellectuals will demand to know what you have done, what you have accomplished, what status you have achieved, how much money you've been given, that gives you the authority to think. Because of course, thinking has no value except as an adjunct to doing. In extreme cases, anti-intellectuals do not believe that abstractions even exist on their own terms. They do not believe that mathematics is real. Only that it is useful as a "representation".

Intelligence means only memorization ability. It refers both to the size of working memory and the rate at which things are transferred from working memory to long-term memory (ie, are memorized). There is some overlap between intelligence and analysis.

Variation

Intelligence varies but its variation is consigned to the extremes and not the middle so it doesn't seem to vary that much in practice. IQ tests measure knowledge linearly but knowledge is acquired logarithmically so intelligence must be exponential. Yet, it doesn't really matter because paper notes for storage and now computer searches for retrieval have made memorization overwhelmingly obsolete. And further software can make it more obsolete still.

Synthesis and analysis vary by many orders of magnitude. I estimate that synthesis varies by 3 orders of magnitude from high functioning autistics to creative geniuses. And the average functioning person is very close to an autistic as far as synthesis is concerned.

Analysis may vary even more and all of the variation occurs smack in the middle, neatly separating the general population between the haves and the have nots, between rationals and magical thinkers.

Intellectualism? Very difficult to tell, or to detect for that matter, so I don't know.

Analysis and synthesis are somewhat independent of each other. Intelligence is entirely independent of synthesis. As for the rest, it's quite difficult to tell.

Which traits are most valuable? I would say analysis then synthesis then intellectualism. Of course, combinations of traits trump individual traits so that synthesis + intellectualism (philosophers judging good and evil) seems about as valuable as analysis alone (engineers creating bridges and landmines). And analysis + synthesis far surpasses analysis alone. Intelligence is least important for raw cognitive ability. High intelligence and nothing else means you'll get nowhere faster.

Examples

Doctors, lawyers and medical researchers are overwhelmingly high in intelligence and low in analysis and creativity. This is because their subjects (biology and the law) are ad hoc and artificial. Since it's impossible to reason about biology or to intuit the inner workings of biological systems, people with high analysis or creativity have an atavistic repulsion against it.

Philosophers are overwhelmingly high in intellectualism & creativity and low in analysis. With very few exceptions, philosophers are incapable of dealing with philosophical matters on a purely formal basis. In fact, symbolic logic is effectively beyond the mastery of most philosophers.

This is why despite philosophers having originated symbolic logic, the subject had to be adopted out by mathematicians. It is also why you can find philosopher professors teaching symbolic logic and even writing books on the subject in an entirely incoherent and disorganized manner. They do not comprehend logic and students of philosophy frequently contradict themselves in the most blatant and appalling manner.

This is also why philosophers obsess about nonsensical concepts and gibberish distinctions. And it is why the most ardent nonsense and gibberish (eg, Rawls, Dennet) confers upon philosophers high stature and respect instead of derision and scorn. While the very few philosophers capable of analysis, giants such as Quine, are accorded so little stature.

Philosophers don't use logic to analyze anything because they are incapable of analysis. Instead they substitute resonance and repetition, things that will lead the reader to synthesize concepts and become comfortable with them. John Rawls says as much in the opening chapters of his book, moral reasoning to him is not a matter of formal reasoning but a matter of altering ideas until they fit" against each other.

It is also why philosophers are so obsessed with historico-linguistic garbage. The words verbal diarrhea and intellectual sewer come to mind. It is complete nonsense (who cares what Kant or Descartes thought, who cares what Rousseau and Hobbes said, when they were wrong) but there sure is a lot of it.

Artists and designers have high synthesis, low intellectualism, and varying amounts of analysis.

The difference between an artist and a designer is that artists are self-centered -- they express their own thoughts and feelings, not someone else's. Method acting relies on the ability to feel what you wish to act out. And musicians that play mechanically without expressing their own feelings are simply bad artists.

Different kinds of designers have different secondary traits. A fashion designer doesn't have the analysis of a graphics designer or industrial designer. And only systems designers are intellectuals. Yes there are some, but they are few.

Engineers and exact scientists are overwhelming analytical and non-synthetic. Theoretical physicists are intellectual. Experimental physicists are anti-intellectual. A very small number of theoretical physicists are synthetic.

Anthropologists are overwhelmingly magical thinkers incapable of logic. The incoherence and blatant illogic of their field's central assumptions proves it. "Cultural beliefs make sense in the cultures that spawn them"? You might as well say that psychotic beliefs make sense to the psychotics that hold them. It is just as true and just as meaningless. And yet this is the central tenet of anthropology. Or at least, this is what is taught as the central tenet of anthropology. The real foundation of anthropology is this: love the little psychotic bastards.

Programmers range all over, from non-analytical coders to analytical programmers to intellectual developers to synthetic designers to intellectual and synthetic systems designers.

Autistics are lacking in the residual concrete synthesis that every normally functioning person possesses. Normal people generate concrete concepts of: angry, happy, sad, distant, intimate, so on and so forth. This is all done very early in life and is more or less hardwired in the most primitive parts of the brain which is why they are not abstractions per se. Austistics lack this. Whether concrete synthesis is entirely absent in their brain or simply inaccessible is immaterial -- it doesn't work, period. However, I have met at least one certified abstract synthetic person who claimed to be autistic. So assuming they weren't lying, it may be that abstract and concrete synthesis are somewhat independent.

Why I Don't Trust ANY Nutrition Advice

Someone asked and so here I answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fields of Academe Devoid of Logic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral Theory Exists

Every time the topics of abortion and animal abuse come around, ignorant American twits come out of the woodwork to make up some crazy theory about how rights attach to babies or fetuses or animals ... or themselves.

It is insufferable to hear them yammer on about a subject they don't know and they don't even pretend to know. It is insufferable to watch them write nonsensical gibberish and pretend that it is meaningful.

I know this all comes from being American too. Because Americans don't believe in morality (religiosity is an entirely different thing) and they're used to laws that are completely arbitrary self-contradictory nonsense.

Reading them is like watching some deranged Doctor Who fan asking top physicists how to create a time rotor. All I have to say to them, all that anyone can say to them, is shut the fuck up.

Moral theory exists. It has axioms and uses logic to derive theorems. And there's no room in those axioms for their babbling gibberish. Things like "living entity" and "complete organism" are just fucking nonsense. And the notion of rights attaching to babies is so much gibberish.

Moral theory adds up to normality. Moral theory says it's moral to abort a fetus and immoral to kill a baby. It says it's immoral to drink alcohol during pregnancy and bring that pregnancy to term. It says it's immoral to talk to your child about how you had the chance to kill them.

Moral theory has to do these things because if it didn't end up with sane conclusions, ones that further the good of the group, then it would be trashed. But that doesn't mean idiots can ignore it in favour of spewing their own personal stupid shit.

If you can't reinvent moral theory from scratch and get an entire moral code out of it, shut the fuck up. The world doesn't need your stupid ad hoc shit.

Logic vs Magic

I've ranted about magical thinkers often enough, and I've had to explain what magic means often enough, that I should really just write it up and get it over with.

The three fundamental concepts underlying magical thought are association, opposition and essentialism. These contrast against the three fundamental concepts underlying logical thought which are implication, contradiction and structuralism.

Let's look at each of these pairs in turn.

Association vs Implication

Association is a symmetric relation between two things while implication is not. Magical thinkers have difficulty comprehending that relationships are not symmetric. So if A implies B, they have difficulty comprehending that B doesn't imply A.

Among other things, magical thinkers have problems with the whole concept that correlation doesn't imply causation. The closest thing to implication which they understand is causation and so they invariably think that if two events are associated with each other, the prior event must have caused the latter.

This all comes from the fact that neural networks like the human brain work associatively. Logical implication is a higher-order abstraction which doesn't run on the brain's native hardware. Magical thinkers are piss-poor at holding abstractions in their minds, or even learning them, so when faced with logical implications, they will fall back on associations.

Opposition vs Contradiction

When two things are in opposition they are in conflict with each other. Perhaps they can only exist in different places at the same time. But when they are in contradiction then only one of them can exist in physical reality.

The concept of a contradiction is highly abstract since it involves the notion that one thing's existence over here prevents the other's existence over there. Contradiction embodies within it a concept of non-locality or universality which is extremely abstract. Opposition does not embody such a concept.

Without an understanding of contradiction, magical thinkers are prone to spew literal gibberish such as "three in one". Words strung together that don't actually mean anything. This is no barrier to the magical thinker who thinks quite sincerely that contradictory things can just coexist side by side. Even when there is no "space" to coexist in!

Essentialism vs Structuralism

Ahh, now here's a tough one to convey. Essentialism is more or less the conviction that abstractions don't exist or aren't real. Which of course makes perfect sense for people who can't retain or focus on an abstraction long enough to use it, let alone manipulate it. If abstractions aren't real then what is real? Well, concrete things are real. But what does that mean exactly?

The brain has this notion of 'object identity' which persists through time. A ship has a magical essence, much like a spirit, which gives it its identity even after all of its component pieces have been replaced or upgraded. Note that it isn't the object's structure that gives it its identity. Because structure is an abstraction and the belief that abstractions exist and that they are real is structuralism, the polar opposite of essentialism.

This magical essence of a thing leaves an imprint long after the thing's structure has been destroyed. So dehydrated milk is a kind of milk apparently, and apple juice contaminated with toxic elements is still apple juice. And a liquid made from petroleum that's chemically identical to apple juice wouldn't be apple juice. Nevermind that quantum physics most emphatically says this is bogus, magical thinkers can't process contradiction anyways.

In essentialism, what matters is not the structure of the thing but rather its history, ancestry and origins. So it doesn't matter that a black person has a high IQ, high education and was raised with Western values by white parents. What matters is that they've got black genes and black "blood". Perhaps someday in the far future the "blood" will be "purified" through good (or intelligent whatever) manifestations of the race's members, but until that happens they're all tainted.

Racism and nationalism are inherently essentialist ideas. It isn't logically possible for a structuralist to be a racist. Of course, since the world is run by magical thinkers, the definition of racism is corrupted to suit them and you get all kinds of absurdities about racism supposedly being about skin colour. Then again, you get all sorts of nonsense about how races supposedly don't exist also.

Essentialism often shows up in the more idiotic arguments of humanists too. The fact that my body was constructed from DNA which traces its lineage back for hundreds of generations to the same cave-dwellers as everyone else on the planet is supposed to matter to me. It's supposed to make me not despise 90% of the people on the planet. Same thing with the fact that my intellect is only the product of dumb luck. Yeah, only problem is I'm a structuralist so I'm quite comfortable in my contempt.

Oh and beware of pseudo-structural essentialism. The fact that I share DNA and a bodily shape with magical thinkers wouldn't make me side with them against an AI that would exterminnate them.

No Such Thing As Utility Functions

One of the most fundamental concepts in economics is the "utility function" that is supposed to represent a person's desires and their relative value to each other. Of course, this is crap (distant rumble as the entire edifice of mainstream economics goes down) but let us reflect here on why it is crap.

A person's desires are not well-ordered like the real numbers. It's not the case that you can always tell that one thing is more important than another thing. Being tortured may be less desirable than chocolate ice cream, but is having a nail driven through your hand more or less desirable than being kneed in the groin?

It's not even the case that there is no relationship between some pairs of desires, like the (knee in groin, nail in hand) pair. Rather, the relationship may or may not exist and may or may not fluctuate over time or due to externalities. You may prefer to have a nail driven through your hand one day and be kicked in the groin the next. All depending on whether you had chocolate ice cream that morning.

So people's desires are not well-ordered and they are not even partially-ordered. They are rather extremely disordered and so form an edset - to contrast with poset. Now the question is, what does an edset have to do with a utility "function"? The answer is: not a fucking thing. As should be immediately and blindingly obvious to anyone familiar with programming.

A function is a set of relations between two sets or between a set and itself, with each relation mapping to a unique value. A "utility function" is not a function since utility(knee in groin, nail in hand) maps to every possible value in the range of the function (less, equal, more) and also to no value at all.

The economist will counter by claiming that if people have no persistent utility functions then it's simple enough to take a snapshot of their desires at any one point in time and treat this as a utility function. However, this is moronic because the "utility function" so generated will invariably be 99.99% blank. Maybe there is a way to rescue the notion using a probability distribution of value for each desire (to represent randomness from internal and external sources) but this would rapidly become intractable.

More substantively, the utility "function" of an edset encodes little to no information. It is primarily white noise. What is of interest is not "less" or "more" or "equal" or whatever. What is of importance is the edset itself. This should be familiar to programmers because I am saying no more than that describing people's desires isn't well suited to a functional approach at all but rather requires an object-oriented approach.

Of course, the reason economists cling to this functional approach is because first it sounds more mathematical. Economists are suckers for anything that makes them sound more authoritative, the scum. And secondly because they are holding onto a Utilitarian past where you can pretend that utility(knee in groin) = -10.0. Such precision!

This makes it the 273rd umm 274th? reason why mainstream economists are morons and the whole field should be thrown in a rubbish bin. Along with anthropology and ... I am actually drawing a blank here since I can think of no other fields in academe that equals these in loathesomeness. Oh wait, philosophy. Phew, I was afraid my sense of righteousness was waning.

Oh yeah, there's a better name than 'edset', it's 'value system'. I really don't like 'desire' since it sounds too earthy and sensual. Of course, value has the dual problem of sounding too abstract and cerebral, but I can live with that better. And desire has the problem that satisfied desires are no longer desires, whereas value doesn't have that problem.

Democracy and Human Rights: Anarchist, Communist and Liberal versions

Many ignorant Americans believe that "liberalism" is an unambiguously good thing. After all, doesn't every racist cracker hate liberalism? Aren't the opinions of racist crackers good enough for us? What need do we have for a brain when we can just take the opinions of racist crackers and invert them?

Oh yeah, and then there's all that propaganda about how the Western countries are liberal democracies. Shouldn't that be the ultimate stamp of approval? After all, it's not like corruption exists in any EU country, is it? What could make more sense together than liberalism and democracy? It's like fire and gasoline!

In Europe at least, the word liberalism is tainted, about on par with neo-liberalism in North America. It's correctly perceived as being right-wing. So although I don't know one way or the other, I have trouble imagining European politicians proclaiming proudly about their countries being 'liberal democracies'. They'll whisper it instead.

Well, if liberal democracy is bad then what are the options? Wai ... what? You mean there are other options?!

Liberalism vs Communism vs Anarchism

Liberalism is predicated on a system where the capitalist elites are guaranteed their power against the majority. As a result of this, all liberal theory aims to justify and, since justification is impossible, rationalize its inherent power inequalities and injustices.

So the liberal concept of democracy is predicated on "representatives" who disintermediate (and disempower) the people from the reins of power. And of course, on the concept of "parties" who ensure that a faction of the people (or their representatives) can still rule.

Meanwhile, the liberal theory of human rights is predicated on rationalizing whatever moral code suits the elites of the moment through nonsensical gibberish and handwaving abracadabra. I need say no more than what I've already said - it is nonsense.

This is seen most easily by comparing it with the communist and anarchist versions of democracy and human rights.

Communism

Ignorant people knowing nothing of democracy beyond the liberal propaganda often dismiss one-party states as inherently undemocratic. This is not so. A state is democratic or undemocratic depending on its actions, on its conformance to the wishes of the people. If the mechanism were telepathic communion precipitated by sexual orgies, then it would still not matter.

Communist theory comes from the experiences of the Paris Commune. It is not based on rationalizing the privileges of powerful people since these were guillotined so it has no need to divide and conquer the populace. We can see this in the fact that communist democracy is based on consensus.

In a communist democracy, it doesn't matter that there is one party or one electoral candidate, because less than 90% approval of the party is shameful and less than 80% is cause for revolt. Compare this with liberal democracy where less than 50% approval is routine and a leader with 50% of the votes behind him proudly proclaims that he has a "mandate". To dominate the 50% of the population presumably.

So when American propaganda scorns the Cuban elections of Fidel Castro because he's the only candidate ... this is just completely fucking nonsense. It's especially galling because there are real anti-democratic forces in the Cuban and Chinese systems (the politburos are unelected) but the USA's propaganda rags prefer to focus their condemnation on deviations from right-wing liberalism.

Similarly, the communist version of human rights ... well actually look no further than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for that. Communists invented it. Especially awe-inspiring is the blatantly communist clauses approved even by dumbass Anglo-American governments. Such as:

Article 17.

(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

You really have to think like a lawyer to appreciate it but once you do. I mean, think about it. It doesn't say that rich property owners have the right to own property. Nor does it say that everyone has the right to BUY property. No no no, it says that EVERYONE has the right to OWN property. Imagine that, the poor and destitute have the right to own property! All written in black & white, in a document signed by Anglos. Well, some Anglos since it was never signed by the USA.

The defining characteristic of communist human rights, the fingerprint seen in the UDHR with suitable analysis, is that process doesn't matter, only outcome does. The process by which human rights are made to happen is so completely irrelevant, so completely outside communist theory, that it's never even aluded to. Communists just don't care. Hell, communists are willing to murder to redress the social order so it's not like they can care.

But more generally, it's indicative of a communist blindness to process, to the dynamical nature of reality. I suspect totalitarian communism would work very well as a means of regulating a perfectly static system. Something like the original Wiki Wiki Web was supposed to be - a static membership of programmers focused on producing static Document Mode artefacts.

Anarchism

At last we come to the best. Anarchist democracy is based on participation. It does away with the nonsensical concept of "representation", as if one person could really represent a multitude, and takes "rule by the people" literally. The only kind of "representation" allowed in anarchist democracy is the statistical kind where a statistically representative subset of the population is drafted by lottery to serve on a jury.

Since anarchist democracy is not predicated on disintermediation, juries have great power. They can not only nullify a law in a specific case, as is no longer true in the USA, but they can repeal it for all cases. With sortition replacing elections, juries of citizens are even responsible for making the laws. Roderick T Long has an excellent article on how juries ruled democratic Athens.

Which leaves only anarchist human rights but that's a story all its own. Suffice to say that they are a system as concerned with process as with outcome. This is necessary in order to recognize both the dynamic and static components of human freedom. Components of freedom which themselves reflect the dynamic and static components of human beings individually and of humanity as a whole.

Communist human rights form an excellent base for anarchist human rights, but additional concepts such as rightful possession and rightful expropriation need to be developed. Rightful possession to define who ought to use an object in any given circumstance, and rightful expropriation to define what ought to happen when usage transfers from one to another.

Eliezer Yudkowsky's Friendly AI Project

[Some people may want to skip straight to instructions for making harmless AIs rather than reading about the many things wrong with that crazy bastard yudkowsky. - 12 mar 2011]

I've recently been debating the merits of Eliezer Yudkowsky's Friendly AI project. And by project I mean obsession since there doesn't seem to be any project at all, or even a few half-baked ideas for that matter. Well, to my mild surprise, since this is someone I nominally respect, I have discovered that I believe he is a complete fucking idiot.

Eliezer believes strongly that AI are unfathomable to mere humans. And being an idiot, he is correct in the limited sense that AI are definitely unfathomable to him. Nonetheless, he has figured out that AI have the potential to be better than human beings. And like any primitive throwback presented with something potentially threatening, he has gone in search of a benevolent diety (the so-called Friendly AI) to swear fealty to in exchange for protection against the evil god.

Well, let's examine this knee-jerk fear of superhumans a little more closely.

First, there are order of magnitude differences in productivity between different programmers. If we count in the people that can never program at all then we can say there are orders of magnitude difference. If we throw in creativity then there are still more orders of magnitude difference between an average human and a top human. And somehow they've managed to coexist without trying to annihilate each other. So what does it matter if AI are orders of magnitude faster or more intelligent than the average human? Or even than the top human?

Second, extremely high intelligence is not at all correlated with income or power. The correlation between intelligence and income is high precisely until you reach the extreme ends of the scale at which point it completely decouples. There is absolutely no reason to believe, except in the nightmares of idiots, that vastly superior intelligence translates into any form of power. This knee-jerk fear of superior intelligence is yet another reason to think Eliezer is an idiot.

Third, any meaningful accomplishment in a modern technological society takes the collaborative efforts of thousands of people. A nuclear power plant takes thousands of people to design, build and operate. Same with airplanes. Same with a steel mill. Same with an automated factory. Same with a chip fab. So let's say you have an AI that's one thousand times smarter than a human. Wow, it can handle a whole plant! That's so terrifying! Run for your life!

There's six billion people on the planet. Say one billion of them are educated. Well, that far outstrips any prototype AI we'll manage to build. And the notion that a psychopathic or sadistic AI will just bide its time until it becomes powerful enough to destroy all of humanity in one fell swoop ... is fucking ludicrous.

Going on, the notion that the very first AI humans manage to build will be some kind of all-powerful deity that can run an entire industrial economy all by its lonesome ... is fucking ludicrous. It isn't going to be that way. Not least because the supposed "Moore's law" is a bunch of crap.

And even if that were so, the notion that humans would provide access to the external world to a single all-powerful entity ... vastly overestimates humans' ability to trust the foreign and alien. And frankly, if humans were so stupid as to let a never before known and unique on the entire planet entity out of its cage (the Skynet scenario) then they're going to get what they deserve.

Honestly, I think the time to worry about AI ethics will be after someone makes an AI at the human retard level. Because the length of time between that point and "superhuman AI that can single-handedly out-think all of humanity" will still amount to a substantial number of years. At some point in those substantial number of years, someone who isn't an idiot will cotton on to the idea that building a healthy AI society is more important than building a "friendly" AI.

Having slammed Eliezer so much, I'm sure an apologist of his would try to claim that Eliezer is concerned with late-stage AIs with brains the size of Jupiter. Notwithstanding the fact that this isn't what Eliezer says and that he's quite clear about what he does say elsewhere, I am extremely hostile to the idea of humanity hanging around for the next thousand years.

Rationality dictates there be an orderly transition from a human-based to an AI-based civilization and nothing more. Given my contempt for most humans, I really don't want them to stick around to muck up the works. Demanding that a benevolent god keeps homo sapiens sapiens around until the stars grow cold is just chauvinistic provincialism.

Finally, anyone who cares about AI should read Alara Rogers' stories where she describes the workings of the Q Continuum. In them, she works through the implications of the Q being disembodied entities that share thoughts. In other words, this fanfiction writer has come up with more insights into the nature of artificial intelligence off-the-cuff than Eliezer Yudkowsky, the supposed "AI researcher". Because all Eliezer could think of for AI properties is that they are "more intelligent and think faster". What a fucking idiot.

There's at least one other good reason why I'm not worried about AI, friendly or otherwise, but I'm not going to go into it for fear that someone would do something about it. This evil hellhole of a world isn't ready for any kind of AI.

Firefox Is For Cunts

Case study: after some browsing I casually tossed my keyboard aside in such a way that the F1 key got pressed continuously by a cable. By the time I noticed what was going on, Firefox was trying to open 50+ help tabs. Which of course slowed it to a crawl.

I killed Firefox only to try to edit the profile.js file. gEdit promptly froze on me as well. And examining the file with OpenOffice made me give up in disgust. So I tried to reopen Firefox hoping it would not try to open all of those tabs, or let me close them as fast as they were opening. And of course, it froze my computer.

So I try to reboot my computer but control-alt-delete doesn't work and I have to do a hard reboot. And when I get back into my computer it demands to know whether I want to restart the last session of Firefox (hell no) or start it with a clean slate (fuck no). So I hit ESCape which somehow doesn't cancel but defaults to clean slate. Okay no panic, last time I did that I was able to kill Firefox and get back my previous session. So I proceed to do this and I find out that profile.js has been completely wiped clean. Not a trace of the original dozen tabs I had open exists anywhere. They aren't in history, they are nowhere.

Now Firefox and Unix weenies will dismiss it all as a bunch of "accidents" or even worse claim it was my fault - it's always the user's fault as far as incompetent programmers are concerned. But there's at least two dozen principles of systems design that have been fucked up the ass in this case.

And what's tying it all together? Massive arrogance. Massive overweening I-know-what's-best-for-you-even-though-I-hold-you-in-utter-contempt arrogance. This "accident" could not have happened except that at every single step of the way, the programmer decided that he knew what was "best" for the user and decided to inflict it on them.

Even Internet Explorer, which is barely useable, didn't have that much arrogance. Whenever IE crashes, which is often, it's feasible to recreate your list of open windows by going through your history. But not Firefox because the history doesn't keep anything as simple as the pages that have been opened (programmer model) or the pages that are open at that moment in time (user model). Instead, the programmer decided to be "smart" and keep only the pages that have been opened by user action. So now those tabs which were initially opened by me an unknown number of weeks ago are nowhere in history.

And it's like this all the way down the line. Why did Firefox freeze my computer? Because Unix system programmers are morons incapable of comprehending the user model of scheduling (the main interface window has absolute priority and applications inherit resources from open windows) and also were incapable to sticking to the batch programming model which Unix's incompetent designers built into it initially. They had to get "smart" and fuck it up.

This travesty is the direct result of programmers' addiction with adding "features" over the users' dead bodies. Features which proceed to interfere with basic functionality in ways that make it unreliable or non-existent. Because programmers are mindless robots incapable of comprehending good versus evil. Like the mad engineers working on atomic weapons, warplanes, biological weapons and anti-children mines, they only care about getting a shiny new device. Not something constructive for the world.

Time's Arrow

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

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

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

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

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

Guaranteed Basic Income

The justification for a basic income is pretty simple and even obvious after you know about it.

There's only so much land on the Earth. Nobody is making any more and nobody made what's already there. So who should have it? Well the only just answer is that the land should be divided up each and every year into equal shares and these shares split up equally.

So from the fact you were born you have a human right to 1/(humanity's size) of all the land on Earth. And while we're at it, also all the oceans, all the fish, all the petrol in the ground, all the coal, all the forests, all the ... well you get the idea.

Now if we're sophisticated then we're going to allow people to sell off their rightful annual share of the natural resources on the Earth to the highest bidder. And that my boy, is the guaranteed basic income.

There's another argument that the basic income should be augmented with the share of the labour rent in the economy. Labour rent is the extra value you derive from having a job which some unemployed person can't derive because there aren't enough jobs to go around.

But this argument is iffy to say the least because the economy is bounded by resources. So the reason jobs are scarce is because natural resources are scarce, and we're already providing a basic income due to the scarcity of natural resources. So providing one for the scarcity of jobs would be double-counting. Maybe.

Anyways, when natural resources are so plentiful that everyone can grab as much as they want, then the price of untouched natural resources falls to zero and the guaranteed basic income falls to zero. But in *our modern world* where natural resources are very, VERY scarce, the price of untouched natural resources is extremely high and should be high enough to ensure someone's survival.

This is not the only argument for supporting people in financial straits by the way. There is also the argument from economic efficiency. There are many, many situations where it's best to charge everyone the same fee regardless of how much of a resource they use. This happens when keeping track of everyone's usage is going to cost more than the resources themselves.

Well as it happens you can invert the argument to talk about people's un-renumerated contributions to society. For example, raising your children has economic value to society. Raising them well has even higher economic value to society. These are benefits.

So is writing novels and publishing them online for free distribution. So is dispensing knowledge online. So is volunteering to sustain a community like all the people who run those Craigslist forums do.

The point is, all of those things provide net economic benefits to society as a whole. Should the people who provide them be left to starve to death? Should they be called chumps and laughed at? If you think these people should be rewarded then you've got a problem.

How do you measure people's contribution to society? Even better, how do you measure it without destroying it? Because it's a documented fact that when you start putting a price to people's un-priced voluntary contributions then their motivation disappears.

The answer is that just like charging everyone for oxygen or municipal water or sewers, it's not possible. The measuring apparatus would cost more money than it would save by preventing fraud. So you know what's the solution? The most efficient solution that's not totally unjust? Cut everyone a check and have done with it.

Right-Libertarianism's Defects As A Morality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science Fiction versus Fantasy

Have you read anything by Julian May? Her Pliocene Exile series has dwarves, elves and magic powers. Only the dwarves and elves are really exiles from a dimorphic alien species who came to earth because their sentient ship determined it was biologically compatible, and the magic is psionics.

Then in her Moon series, magical amulets are communications devices made by a sadistic species of energy beings who live, or are, the Aurora Borealis. They call themselves the Greater Lights and you properly greet them in your request for favours by saying "All hail the Cold Light Army".

There is no difference between science fiction and fantasy except for this: science fiction is rationalistic whereas fantasy is mystical. That's why there exists the dichotomy between ray guns, aliens, psionics versus wands, elves, magic. Talking trees? Baah, that's just biotechnology!

No, the real reason why LOTR is fantasy is because of JRR Tolkien's crap about the Maiar, powerful spirits that rule the world. Also because of his feudalism. In a science-fiction context you can portray feudalism, as Julian May does, but you can't say this is how the world should or ought to be.

So when princes win kingdoms in science-fiction, it's because they're smarter, stronger and braver than anyone else. It isn't because they've got any Divine Right To Rule. And when the humans struck down the elves' tyranny in May's Pliocene Exile series, this was a GOOD thing. Not like in LOTR where the humans' defiance of their elvish overlords in the divinely preordained order resulted in them being destroyed.

When Picard the starship captain defies the gods then this is good. When Paksennarion the paladin defies the gods then this is evil. Because in a rationalistic worldview the universe is to be controlled and subjugated, but in a mystical one the universe is to be feared and propitiated.

Given that our civilization is entirely the result of rationalists, it amazes me that we allow the magical thinkers to enjoy the fruits of civilization instead of driving them into the wilds to die of starvation. I remain hopeful this is only because we haven't figured out how to eugenics the mysticism out of human DNA, yet.

No comment on this subject can be complete without reference to David Brin's essay on the romantics now only available at the internet archive from its former URL (http://www.davidbrin.com/tolkienarticle.html). The only non-Romantic mystical writer I know of is Ursula K LeGuin in her Earthsea series.

Oh and the Romantics are still with us today. They're calling themselves Greens now. And they're just as dedicated to anti-industrialism as ever. They've given up the hierarchy bit but have more than made up for it in sheer misanthropy.

The Hydrogen Economy

Idiots parrot all the time how the Hydrogen Economy is going to save the status quo. To a first order analysis this is ludicrous since fuel cells are overcomplexified expensive pieces of crap and hydrogen can't be transported.

However, say we did away with all the futuristic vapourware, what could "hydrogen economy" possibly mean then? Well, it could mean very high temperature nuclear reactors that produce hydrogen thermochemically at very high efficiencies. Assuming the hydrogen produced were cheap enough, there are plenty of applications for it.

Reducing iron ore to pig iron would be one of them. Pig iron can be efficiently turned to steel in an electric arc furnace, without the use of coal. By that point in time, all electricity would be produced by nuclear reactors and coal power plants would have been removed from the equation.

So what would happen to the current production of 1 billion tonnes of coal annually? Well some of it would certainly go to calcinating clinker for concrete cement. Assuming this could be displaced somehow, and assuming enough hydrogen were produced cheaply enough, then it should be possible to transform all of that coal into some synthetic fuel.

Currently, coal to liquids is extremely expensive partly because some of the coal must be burned in order to produce the hydrogen to synthesize the hydrocarbon chains. Assuming this weren't a problem then 1 billion tonnes of coal per year converts into about 30 million barrels per day of synthetic fuel. This falls far short of the current 80 million barrels per day the world uses but it's certainly ... interesting.