I just took another glance at this comic about gay rights and political progress a friend of mine gave me. At the time, I said I didn't buy it because Americans can't turn to outright genocidal Nazism. That kind of thing requires a major childrearing change. The "banality of evil" is as much bullshit as all the pro-Gaia anti-human anti-industrialism garbage - it's the complete 180 degree opposite of the truth.
So what childrearing change has there been? Well, a big change produced the 1968 generation. And it's been 42 years since 1968 now. The 1968ers were > 15 years old, add 42 means they're now above 57. So basically, everyone now alive in modern countries either participated in 1968 or were parents of those who participated. Or like Sarkozy, were nutball fascists who wanted to counter-participate in 1968 but were grounded.
Another telling point is PACS (registered union) which is very popular in France. Introduced as an alternative to legalizing same sex marriage, it's a popular form of easy-in easy-out strictly consensual marriage lite. That kind of social arrangement would have been unimaginable to the 1950s ('no divorce, ever!') generation. Yet it was introduced as a sop, as something completely uncontroversial.
What do we learn from this? That none of the politicking and rallies and all that other crap mattered much. It was all going to happen anyways. All the "fighting" was the noisy vanguard of an inexorable tide of social change. The fighting for gay rights wasn't a cause of the acceptance of gay rights. It was an epiphenomenon, a mere side-effect of much deeper and more meaningful social change about all kinds of sexual freedom.
There's a lesson in this. And the lesson is that putting all of your effort, all of your energy, your entire life even, into fighting for something without any understanding or comprehension of social forces or social systems or psychology results precisely in you totally wasting your life. You can't change the world by putting your shoulder against a brick wall. You need to find the fulcrum point to stick your lever in.
You're never going to achieve any of your goals by being a mindless brainwashed grunt such as Greenpeace is so fond of. But a single guy like Robert McFarland in Boulder, Colorado can achieve a local revolution.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
The Modern Physicist's Religion: The Big Bang
I hate it when otherwise sane-seeming physicists start spouting trash about the Big Bang. You can tell they're doing it by rote, that they're parroting some propaganda they've been indoctrinated with. Something they've never examined to see whether it makes a lick of sense.
NO EVIDENCE
First of all, there is no evidence for a Big Bang. There cannot ever be any evidence for it since the whole point of inventing Inflation Theory was to erase every last trace of the big bang to remedy the defects of the theory. The reason the Ekpyrotic model is viable at all is because of this total erasure of all traces of any big bang. But inflation? Oh you can't erase that! Even the Ekpyrotic model generally tries to replicate it. So what is today called "evidence for" the big bang is invariably evidence for hot inflation. Cosmic microwave background? Hot inflation. Expansion of the universe? Inflation.
MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE
Secondly, you have to realize that there can be no distinction between inflation and eternal chaotic inflation. If inflation happens then eternal chaotic inflation is the best possible model for it. You get eternity for free. Read my lips, no extra charges! Add quantum mechanics to inflation theory and you get chaotic inflation. And with chaotic inflation you have eternal inflation. It's FREE!
Worse than that, our living in a finite universe is mathematically impossible. If the probability of a universe arising out of nothing (assuming the whole notion isn't absurd which it is, more on that later) is finite then the probability of our living in an infinite universe is infinite. Infinity trumps finity!
If there were only one single eternal universe, and a billion billion billion finite universes, we could never tell the difference between them from any scientific experiments, but pure mathematics says that the probability of us coming from the eternal universe is 1 and the probability of us coming from any of the billion billion billion finite universes is ZERO.
It's statistically impossible.
ABSURDITY
The whole notion of something arising out of nothing is absurd. It's incoherent. It literally doesn't mean anything. The only way to ascribe any meaning to it is to say that the universe as-is is equivalent to nothing.
Which is very likely since a flat universe (as ours seems to be) has net zero energy. But to say that it's equivalent to nothing is to say that 'nothing' is subject to physical laws. or at least to mathematical laws. So it's not a true 'nothing' is it? It's something, it's laws of mathematics.
In order to say that what's beyond the universe is true nothing, you can't appeal to any sort of equivalence, you can't say that the universe came out of nothing at all. You can only say that the universe created itself. And what can you appeal to when making such a statement?
Well actually you can say that the universe created itself because it was self-consistent. But if you're going to say that then there are tons of other self-consistent universes possible. And every single one of them must have created itself.
Bravo, you've got the Mathematical (Multi)verse Hypothesis. Which is the exact kind of thing the Big Bang believers are trying to avoid. In trying to provide any kind of rigorous meaning to "the universe came out of nothing" you inevitably run into the fact that our universe can't be the only thing.
You get the same result when you try to define "non-determinism". It literally doesn't mean anything. And when you try to give it some meaning, it always turns out to be inconsistent with the vague notion of "non-determinism".
REVERSION TO RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE
So if the Big Bang is unprovable, mathematically impossible and it's not even coherent then why do these big headed logical types believe in this utter crap? Well first of all, physicists lack big picture thinking. Also known as judgement, which relies on synthesis. And synthesis is a cognitive trait physicists uniformly lack. But that only explains why it's possible for physicists to believe this crap.
Why they actually believe in it is because it's a religious notion. It's a belief in Creation. It's something that people used to believe in until science became atheistic. Until four young scientists made a manifesto and signed it with their own blood. That's why Einstein was so adamantly opposed to the Big Bang. Because it's a religious notion which science had gotten rid of!
And really, that explains it all. When cosmologists were confronted with the fact of an expanding universe, they couldn't handle the notion that ours isn't the only universe out there. So they reverted to religion. They reinvented the "Big Bang" - the Moment of Creation.
The same thing happened in the 1920s with the so-called Copenhagen "interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Which is no interpretation at all - it's the physical theory behind a bunch of useless math. Physicists like Richard Feynman who dismiss the physical meaning of math as unimportant are lackwits. So anyways, Copenhagen would be the physical meaning of QM if it weren't completely absurd and incoherent.
So believers in the Copenhagen doctrine revived vitalism because they couldn't handle the idea of a non-singular timeline. They invented all kinds of crap about "duality" and "uncertainty" because they couldn't handle that Platonism is wrong, that the universe really isn't made up of mathematical points. Even though mathematical points are physically incoherent.
They reinvented the notion that humans and other living things (so-called "observers") are Special, that they have this fundamental Living Force that makes them different from the rest of physical reality. How absurd is that!? But it's something that humans believe intuitively. It's an anthropomorphic notion. And that's why it got reinvented.
Same thing with Creation, or the Big Bang, whatever you want to call it. It's an intuitive anthropomorphic ('we are special') notion that just got reinvented when scientists were challenged to shatter it utterly. They were challenged and they failed. Because they're morons who can't grasp the big picture. Who can't grasp that maybe "creation" is something that needs to be defined before it means anything. Before it can ever be used to explain anything.
Kinda like God. For God to explain anything, it first needs to be defined. Which defeats the whole purpose of it since God is supposed to be this mysterious incomprehensible ball of crap and handwavy bullshit. And bullshit can't explain jack.
Same with Creation. /shakes head/
Previously, the disease process in physics.
NO EVIDENCE
First of all, there is no evidence for a Big Bang. There cannot ever be any evidence for it since the whole point of inventing Inflation Theory was to erase every last trace of the big bang to remedy the defects of the theory. The reason the Ekpyrotic model is viable at all is because of this total erasure of all traces of any big bang. But inflation? Oh you can't erase that! Even the Ekpyrotic model generally tries to replicate it. So what is today called "evidence for" the big bang is invariably evidence for hot inflation. Cosmic microwave background? Hot inflation. Expansion of the universe? Inflation.
MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE
Secondly, you have to realize that there can be no distinction between inflation and eternal chaotic inflation. If inflation happens then eternal chaotic inflation is the best possible model for it. You get eternity for free. Read my lips, no extra charges! Add quantum mechanics to inflation theory and you get chaotic inflation. And with chaotic inflation you have eternal inflation. It's FREE!
Worse than that, our living in a finite universe is mathematically impossible. If the probability of a universe arising out of nothing (assuming the whole notion isn't absurd which it is, more on that later) is finite then the probability of our living in an infinite universe is infinite. Infinity trumps finity!
If there were only one single eternal universe, and a billion billion billion finite universes, we could never tell the difference between them from any scientific experiments, but pure mathematics says that the probability of us coming from the eternal universe is 1 and the probability of us coming from any of the billion billion billion finite universes is ZERO.
It's statistically impossible.
ABSURDITY
The whole notion of something arising out of nothing is absurd. It's incoherent. It literally doesn't mean anything. The only way to ascribe any meaning to it is to say that the universe as-is is equivalent to nothing.
Which is very likely since a flat universe (as ours seems to be) has net zero energy. But to say that it's equivalent to nothing is to say that 'nothing' is subject to physical laws. or at least to mathematical laws. So it's not a true 'nothing' is it? It's something, it's laws of mathematics.
In order to say that what's beyond the universe is true nothing, you can't appeal to any sort of equivalence, you can't say that the universe came out of nothing at all. You can only say that the universe created itself. And what can you appeal to when making such a statement?
Well actually you can say that the universe created itself because it was self-consistent. But if you're going to say that then there are tons of other self-consistent universes possible. And every single one of them must have created itself.
Bravo, you've got the Mathematical (Multi)verse Hypothesis. Which is the exact kind of thing the Big Bang believers are trying to avoid. In trying to provide any kind of rigorous meaning to "the universe came out of nothing" you inevitably run into the fact that our universe can't be the only thing.
You get the same result when you try to define "non-determinism". It literally doesn't mean anything. And when you try to give it some meaning, it always turns out to be inconsistent with the vague notion of "non-determinism".
REVERSION TO RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE
So if the Big Bang is unprovable, mathematically impossible and it's not even coherent then why do these big headed logical types believe in this utter crap? Well first of all, physicists lack big picture thinking. Also known as judgement, which relies on synthesis. And synthesis is a cognitive trait physicists uniformly lack. But that only explains why it's possible for physicists to believe this crap.
Why they actually believe in it is because it's a religious notion. It's a belief in Creation. It's something that people used to believe in until science became atheistic. Until four young scientists made a manifesto and signed it with their own blood. That's why Einstein was so adamantly opposed to the Big Bang. Because it's a religious notion which science had gotten rid of!
And really, that explains it all. When cosmologists were confronted with the fact of an expanding universe, they couldn't handle the notion that ours isn't the only universe out there. So they reverted to religion. They reinvented the "Big Bang" - the Moment of Creation.
The same thing happened in the 1920s with the so-called Copenhagen "interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Which is no interpretation at all - it's the physical theory behind a bunch of useless math. Physicists like Richard Feynman who dismiss the physical meaning of math as unimportant are lackwits. So anyways, Copenhagen would be the physical meaning of QM if it weren't completely absurd and incoherent.
So believers in the Copenhagen doctrine revived vitalism because they couldn't handle the idea of a non-singular timeline. They invented all kinds of crap about "duality" and "uncertainty" because they couldn't handle that Platonism is wrong, that the universe really isn't made up of mathematical points. Even though mathematical points are physically incoherent.
They reinvented the notion that humans and other living things (so-called "observers") are Special, that they have this fundamental Living Force that makes them different from the rest of physical reality. How absurd is that!? But it's something that humans believe intuitively. It's an anthropomorphic notion. And that's why it got reinvented.
Same thing with Creation, or the Big Bang, whatever you want to call it. It's an intuitive anthropomorphic ('we are special') notion that just got reinvented when scientists were challenged to shatter it utterly. They were challenged and they failed. Because they're morons who can't grasp the big picture. Who can't grasp that maybe "creation" is something that needs to be defined before it means anything. Before it can ever be used to explain anything.
Kinda like God. For God to explain anything, it first needs to be defined. Which defeats the whole purpose of it since God is supposed to be this mysterious incomprehensible ball of crap and handwavy bullshit. And bullshit can't explain jack.
Same with Creation. /shakes head/
Previously, the disease process in physics.
Dodging Asteroids at Lightspeed? You Fail Physics Forever
Okay, this rant is inspired by a story (which I won't recommend) that tried to one-up the standard "dodging asteroids" scene by having the spaceship (a small two-man fighter) do it at light speed. Seriously, for the love of all that's good, WHY? Apparently, because light speed is KEWL.
I think anyone reading this blog probably knows all of this but what the hell, I put several hours into this rant so I might as well put it in a convenient place. Who knows, maybe someone will find it useful to smash some ignoramus over the head.
VISIBILITY
First issue, visibility of destinations and obstacles. In the story, this carrier ship is supposed to be 8 kilometers long. If the fighter is traveling at lightspeed then one second away from the carrier, it's 1 light-second away. Well,
arctan((8 km) / (1 light-second)) in degrees = 0.00152894519 degrees
Do you know what that is? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye
> Angular resolution: 1-2' (about 0.02°-0.03°), which corresponds to 30–60 cm at a 1 km distance
0.02 / 0.00152894519 = 13.
In other words, 1 second away from the carrier at lightspeed is still thirteen times too small to see with the naked eye.
Even assuming that Talking Is A Free Action and the protagonist was able to point out and describe the carrier to his passenger instantaneously, the passenger would still have been unable to see it.
In fact, since the human eye sees at about 18 frames per second, the passenger would just barely be able to see a tiny speck of white if he stared at the exact spot the carrier was going to pop up at in advance.
So first he would see nothing, then immediately after he would see a speck, then immediately after that he would see the entire ship.
KINETIC ENERGY
Going on, the author doesn't seem to have heard of this thing called "kinetic energy", whether the relativistic or the newtonian kind. Behold,
(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 gram) / (1180 (kilojoules per gram)) = 30.8471057 tonnes
The top half of the left hand side of that equation is the kinetic energy of 1 gram of matter (say, space dust) travelling at a velocity of 90% the speed of light. The bottom half of the left hand side of the equation is the heat necessary to fuse lead starting from 0 degrees Kelvin (absolute zero). The right hand side is how much of your ship is going to melt away from a collision with 1 gram of space dust. Assuming nothing heats up that doesn't melt and blah blah blah.
(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 gram) / (4637 (kilojoules per gram)) = 7.8498134 tonnes
This is the same equation but including heating from 0 degrees kelvin to fusion, past fusion to boiling, past boiling to ionization. In other words, this is how much of your starship is going to turn into pure plasma from a collision with 1 gram of space dust. It's straightforward to come up with similar equations for iron (steel) and uranium, but unnecessary.
The fact that air going at 90% of the speed of light has the oomph of a thermonuclear explosion is really useful when designing real starships because it means an air shield misted in front of your starship in its direction of travel can reduce asteroids down to free nuclei and anything smaller than that into subatomic particles.
Starship design hint: you can make your starship as long as you want without increasing its cross-section. So it can store any finite amount of air you might possibly need on your interstellar and/or intergalactic trip to vaporize everything in its way. Once vaporized (well, ionized actually) it's easy to sweep the debris out of the way with your magshield. Particle accelerators do that every day.
And lest you think that I'm exaggerating when talking about thermonuclear explosions,
(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 kilogram) / (4.2 petajoules) = 8.66656779
a 1 kilogram mass going at 90% lightspeed has a yield of a cool 8.67 megatons.
(((1 / 2) * ((0.99 * c)^2)) * 1 kilogram) / (4.2 petajoules) = 10.486547
at 99% lightspeed, it clocks 10 megatons.
It took until 1954 for the United States to have a nuclear device with a yield more powerful than that.
The most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever tested in human history was the Tsar Bomba, which clocks at the equivalent of 5 kilograms of mass at 99% lightspeed.
Are you starting to get the picture? Hitting anything at lightspeed results in a big boom.
REACTION TIME - NAIVE
From http://pseudoastro.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/asteroid-belts-proximity-of-rocks-and-why-navigation-is-not-dangerous-sorry-han-solo/
> Even if we cut the size of asteroids in half again, and were interested in all asteroids larger than half a meter (1.5 ft) in size, then we have 8 times as many asteroids, but each one still has over 500 km2 all to itself, and even more space if we consider the vertical component.
Using the formula for the volume of a sphere, and given that half of (half a meter) diameter gives a radius of 1/4 meter, we have
(4 / 3) * pi * ((1 / 4)^3) = 0.0654498469 cc's.
Assuming it has the density of water, that's 0.686342898 megatons or 686 kilotons. More than 30 times the explosion at Nagasaki. In other words, that's some dangerous fucking asteroids. And they're an average of
sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 7.45871992 × 10-5 light-seconds apart.
In other words, the hotshot pilot protagonist has one ten thousandth of a second to dodge them.
The speed of nerve impulses in the human body is "up to 100 meters / second". In other words, the nerve impulses in the pilot's body have the time to travel a whole
((100 (meters per second)) / 7) * (10E-5 seconds) = 1.42857143 millimeters
yeah, one millimeter in the time he has to dodge an asteroid. Brilliant, are you feeling the gritty realism yet? I know I am!
DISTRIBUTION OF ASTEROIDS
Now you may have noticed that the sqrt(500 km^2) neglects the vertical dimension. But 65 cc's is still an enormously dangerous asteroid, and if you go down to 1 cc then you still have to worry about explosions on the scale of 10 kilotonnes. For comparison, the Hiroshima explosion was 15 kiloton. Now, 65 cc's is conveniently close to 64 cc's
64* 1 cc = 2^6 * 1 cc
which means that asteroids of that size are
8^6 = 262 144 times as numerous,
given that it's a power law of degree 3 (every time you 1/2 the size, you increase numbers by 2^3 = 8). And
(8^6) * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 5 861 718.04 kilometers
That's the height of the asteroid belt that's compensated for by the fact we're neglecting any asteroids less than 65 cc's.
(8^2) * (8^6) * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 375 149 954 kilometers
That's the height of the asteroid belt that's compensated for by the fact we're neglecting any asteroids with yields of less than about 1 kiloton when travelling at 99% the speed of light.
And we can stop there because 375 million kilometers is almost the RADIUS of the asteroid belt. And of course, explosions of less than 1 kiloton aren't a danger at all to a tiny two-man fighter.
CHANCE OF COLLISION
So yeah, anyway. Now that we've established we can use the 500 km^2 number as a simplifying assumption, this is the proportion of the area swept by a 2 meter wide spaceship going through 500 km^2
(2 m) / sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 8.94427191 × 10^-5
which is the same as the chance of hitting that speck of rock somewhere inside it. And this,
(1 million km) / sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 44 721.3595
is the number of such areas you travel through when going 1 million km (less than 1% of the radius of the asteroid belt) inside the asteroid belt. So logically, this
(1 - (8.94427191 × 10E-5))^44721 = 4.17433136 × 10^-18
is the probability that you will cross 44721 such areas without hitting anything. In three seconds going at light-speed.
Do you understand what 10^-18 is? It's one tenth of one millionth of one billionth of one percent. It's one billion billion to 1 odds against. I think your chances of surviving a point blank gunshot to the forehead are higher. How do you like them apples?
REACTION TIME - REVISITED
Now that we have a probability of a collision, some playing around with google shows that,
(1 - (8.94427191 × (10^(-5))))^7 749 = 0.500012276
and of course,
7749 * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 0.577976206 light seconds
So every half-second, there's a 50/50 chance that you'll have to dodge something. If you can convert this to a Mean Time Between Failures (or tell me how to) then you'll know the average reaction time you have between any two dodge-or-die events. Whatever that number actually is, it's going to be close to half a second. And of course, your reaction time had better be much better than this if you want to live through a breezy five minute jaunt.
So yeah anyways. Dodging asteroids at lightspeed? You fail physics forever.
See also,
Atomic Rocket - http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html -- includes technical info on everything up to and including time travel (more plausible than you might think, infinitely more plausible than FTL)
Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum - http://www.bautforum.com/ -- if there's any name in starship design I'd recommend it's Isaac Kuo - he does it with today's technology, not hypothetical future technology
Hint: starships don't travel through the solar system, let alone something as dirty as the asteroid belt. They avoid collisions because they're in space.
This review was sponsored by Google TM search engine and Google TM calculator.
I think anyone reading this blog probably knows all of this but what the hell, I put several hours into this rant so I might as well put it in a convenient place. Who knows, maybe someone will find it useful to smash some ignoramus over the head.
VISIBILITY
First issue, visibility of destinations and obstacles. In the story, this carrier ship is supposed to be 8 kilometers long. If the fighter is traveling at lightspeed then one second away from the carrier, it's 1 light-second away. Well,
arctan((8 km) / (1 light-second)) in degrees = 0.00152894519 degrees
Do you know what that is? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye
> Angular resolution: 1-2' (about 0.02°-0.03°), which corresponds to 30–60 cm at a 1 km distance
0.02 / 0.00152894519 = 13.
In other words, 1 second away from the carrier at lightspeed is still thirteen times too small to see with the naked eye.
Even assuming that Talking Is A Free Action and the protagonist was able to point out and describe the carrier to his passenger instantaneously, the passenger would still have been unable to see it.
In fact, since the human eye sees at about 18 frames per second, the passenger would just barely be able to see a tiny speck of white if he stared at the exact spot the carrier was going to pop up at in advance.
So first he would see nothing, then immediately after he would see a speck, then immediately after that he would see the entire ship.
KINETIC ENERGY
Going on, the author doesn't seem to have heard of this thing called "kinetic energy", whether the relativistic or the newtonian kind. Behold,
(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 gram) / (1180 (kilojoules per gram)) = 30.8471057 tonnes
The top half of the left hand side of that equation is the kinetic energy of 1 gram of matter (say, space dust) travelling at a velocity of 90% the speed of light. The bottom half of the left hand side of the equation is the heat necessary to fuse lead starting from 0 degrees Kelvin (absolute zero). The right hand side is how much of your ship is going to melt away from a collision with 1 gram of space dust. Assuming nothing heats up that doesn't melt and blah blah blah.
(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 gram) / (4637 (kilojoules per gram)) = 7.8498134 tonnes
This is the same equation but including heating from 0 degrees kelvin to fusion, past fusion to boiling, past boiling to ionization. In other words, this is how much of your starship is going to turn into pure plasma from a collision with 1 gram of space dust. It's straightforward to come up with similar equations for iron (steel) and uranium, but unnecessary.
The fact that air going at 90% of the speed of light has the oomph of a thermonuclear explosion is really useful when designing real starships because it means an air shield misted in front of your starship in its direction of travel can reduce asteroids down to free nuclei and anything smaller than that into subatomic particles.
Starship design hint: you can make your starship as long as you want without increasing its cross-section. So it can store any finite amount of air you might possibly need on your interstellar and/or intergalactic trip to vaporize everything in its way. Once vaporized (well, ionized actually) it's easy to sweep the debris out of the way with your magshield. Particle accelerators do that every day.
And lest you think that I'm exaggerating when talking about thermonuclear explosions,
(((1 / 2) * ((0.9 * c)^2)) * 1 kilogram) / (4.2 petajoules) = 8.66656779
a 1 kilogram mass going at 90% lightspeed has a yield of a cool 8.67 megatons.
(((1 / 2) * ((0.99 * c)^2)) * 1 kilogram) / (4.2 petajoules) = 10.486547
at 99% lightspeed, it clocks 10 megatons.
It took until 1954 for the United States to have a nuclear device with a yield more powerful than that.
The most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever tested in human history was the Tsar Bomba, which clocks at the equivalent of 5 kilograms of mass at 99% lightspeed.
Are you starting to get the picture? Hitting anything at lightspeed results in a big boom.
REACTION TIME - NAIVE
From http://pseudoastro.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/asteroid-belts-proximity-of-rocks-and-why-navigation-is-not-dangerous-sorry-han-solo/
> Even if we cut the size of asteroids in half again, and were interested in all asteroids larger than half a meter (1.5 ft) in size, then we have 8 times as many asteroids, but each one still has over 500 km2 all to itself, and even more space if we consider the vertical component.
Using the formula for the volume of a sphere, and given that half of (half a meter) diameter gives a radius of 1/4 meter, we have
(4 / 3) * pi * ((1 / 4)^3) = 0.0654498469 cc's.
Assuming it has the density of water, that's 0.686342898 megatons or 686 kilotons. More than 30 times the explosion at Nagasaki. In other words, that's some dangerous fucking asteroids. And they're an average of
sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 7.45871992 × 10-5 light-seconds apart.
In other words, the hotshot pilot protagonist has one ten thousandth of a second to dodge them.
The speed of nerve impulses in the human body is "up to 100 meters / second". In other words, the nerve impulses in the pilot's body have the time to travel a whole
((100 (meters per second)) / 7) * (10E-5 seconds) = 1.42857143 millimeters
yeah, one millimeter in the time he has to dodge an asteroid. Brilliant, are you feeling the gritty realism yet? I know I am!
DISTRIBUTION OF ASTEROIDS
Now you may have noticed that the sqrt(500 km^2) neglects the vertical dimension. But 65 cc's is still an enormously dangerous asteroid, and if you go down to 1 cc then you still have to worry about explosions on the scale of 10 kilotonnes. For comparison, the Hiroshima explosion was 15 kiloton. Now, 65 cc's is conveniently close to 64 cc's
64* 1 cc = 2^6 * 1 cc
which means that asteroids of that size are
8^6 = 262 144 times as numerous,
given that it's a power law of degree 3 (every time you 1/2 the size, you increase numbers by 2^3 = 8). And
(8^6) * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 5 861 718.04 kilometers
That's the height of the asteroid belt that's compensated for by the fact we're neglecting any asteroids less than 65 cc's.
(8^2) * (8^6) * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 375 149 954 kilometers
That's the height of the asteroid belt that's compensated for by the fact we're neglecting any asteroids with yields of less than about 1 kiloton when travelling at 99% the speed of light.
And we can stop there because 375 million kilometers is almost the RADIUS of the asteroid belt. And of course, explosions of less than 1 kiloton aren't a danger at all to a tiny two-man fighter.
CHANCE OF COLLISION
So yeah, anyway. Now that we've established we can use the 500 km^2 number as a simplifying assumption, this is the proportion of the area swept by a 2 meter wide spaceship going through 500 km^2
(2 m) / sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 8.94427191 × 10^-5
which is the same as the chance of hitting that speck of rock somewhere inside it. And this,
(1 million km) / sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 44 721.3595
is the number of such areas you travel through when going 1 million km (less than 1% of the radius of the asteroid belt) inside the asteroid belt. So logically, this
(1 - (8.94427191 × 10E-5))^44721 = 4.17433136 × 10^-18
is the probability that you will cross 44721 such areas without hitting anything. In three seconds going at light-speed.
Do you understand what 10^-18 is? It's one tenth of one millionth of one billionth of one percent. It's one billion billion to 1 odds against. I think your chances of surviving a point blank gunshot to the forehead are higher. How do you like them apples?
REACTION TIME - REVISITED
Now that we have a probability of a collision, some playing around with google shows that,
(1 - (8.94427191 × (10^(-5))))^7 749 = 0.500012276
and of course,
7749 * sqrt(500 (km^2)) = 0.577976206 light seconds
So every half-second, there's a 50/50 chance that you'll have to dodge something. If you can convert this to a Mean Time Between Failures (or tell me how to) then you'll know the average reaction time you have between any two dodge-or-die events. Whatever that number actually is, it's going to be close to half a second. And of course, your reaction time had better be much better than this if you want to live through a breezy five minute jaunt.
So yeah anyways. Dodging asteroids at lightspeed? You fail physics forever.
See also,
Atomic Rocket - http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html -- includes technical info on everything up to and including time travel (more plausible than you might think, infinitely more plausible than FTL)
Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum - http://www.bautforum.com/ -- if there's any name in starship design I'd recommend it's Isaac Kuo - he does it with today's technology, not hypothetical future technology
Hint: starships don't travel through the solar system, let alone something as dirty as the asteroid belt. They avoid collisions because they're in space.
This review was sponsored by Google TM search engine and Google TM calculator.
Monday, February 08, 2010
The British
This is me so you know not to expect your everyday rant. But ever wonder how the British like to proclaim the superiority of their nation? That's so ludicrous. And at the same time, they whine that the only villains it's okay to bash on in Hollywood are English. Well, let's examine that.
The British are psychopaths. Literally, their national identity is the psychopath, exactly like the American national identity is the narcissist. They plundered and slaughtered their way around the world for centuries and are still proud of it. They exterminated whole nations of natives and they've oh so conveniently forgotten. They feel no guilt at all for anything they've done. Hell, even the Americans feel guilty about exterminating the Amerinds. So as fucked up, vile and evil as the Americans are, they're actually an improvement over the British!
And let's look at their filthy right-liberal / capitalist ideology. A dysfunctional psychopathic ideology that promotes traders and masters over people who produce anything and human beings. You'd think that industrial production would matter most in an economy since it's one of two key defining concepts of 'economy' (the other being consumption) but no. And they have the gall to claim they're a democracy. No wonder their country's so fucked up. No wonder all Anglophone countries are way more fucked up than even moderately advanced European countries like France. Britain, Australia (that bumfuck colony), Canada (Stephen Harper's fascists?) and of course Crazyland (aka America) itself.
But hold on, there's more. You see, there's the question of why they're so fucked up. A lesser person would leave it at their being fucked up, claim it's their "national identity" or whatever. Bollocks. Let's turn out heads to deMause's theory of childrearing modes. These modes are: Infanticidal, Abandoning, Ambivalent, Intrusive, Socializing, Helping. For some calibration, Canada is mainly in the Socializing mode. America is half and half stuck in the Intrusive and Socializing mode. Nazi Germany was in the very early Intrusive mode where they ruthlessly beat their children into blind obedience to parents. And then in the 1960s, Germany underwent a wondrous metamorphosis, going from early 4th to late 5th socializing. No wonder I love Germans. They fucking EVOLVED. In a single damned generation. They evolved more in 20 years than America evolved in 200 years.
So where does Britain fit into all this? I'm so glad you asked! Well let's take a look at some quintessential British children's literature you may be familiar with. In Harry Potter, the constant running theme is that the children are, yes abused but forget that for a moment, supposed to be exactly like their parents, follow in their footsteps and all that rot. In the Weasley's case, they're dominated by their verbally abusive mother. You know, they're chattel to their parents. Parental love is conditional on the children being Just Like Them.
The other example is Doctor Who, specifically Season 2 where Rose is sent away. The Doctor goes to all the trouble of reuniting Rose's family so he can fob her off on them. Touching eh? That season was full of the nauseating 'family matters more than anything' theme. But it's not just that. At the beginning of the two-parter that ends with Rose unwillingly stranded with her family, her mother Jackie complains about her daughter's travels. And her complaint isn't that they're unsafe but that her daughter will grow apart, become an alien in mentality, even if remaining homo sapiens in biology. Jackie Disapproves because her daughter's going to be Different from her. So let's strand Rose in an alternate universe without a time machine, problem solved!
Yeah you guessed it, well assuming you know the childrearing modes well enough, Britain is stuck squarely in the 4th childrearing mode where they beat children to Make Them Obey. The UK under Tony Blair had more than a hundred human rights condemnations by the European Court of Human Rights. Tony Blair actually formally defended child abuse to the European Court of Human Rights! What breathtaking evil. It's like fundie camps in the USA or even "gay therapy". Point is, the British consider their children to be their chattel property, theirs to use and abuse. And it's not likely to change so long as the British see themselves as #1. America stagnated for 200 years, Africa has stagnated in the infanticidal / abandoning / ambivalent modes for millenia. What Britain really needs is to be conquered. I'd almost wish the Germans did it except I love the Germans too much to put them through that. Think a little about how the USA imported slavery from black Africa and Nazis from post-War Germany and you'll see what I mean.
The best part is that the British think they're superior to the French, right? Oh man. Yeah right. Actually, I have precious little data on which to nail French parenting. What I know of it's pretty damned harsh. Verbal abuse, if not physical. Unreasonable expectations of children. But then I remembered the wonderful children's series Once Upon A Time on which I grew up. It taught a whole generation about human history, human biology, the age of exploration, age of invention, and more. And it ended on an odd note, a science-fiction future that was pure propaganda and social engineering. And that's important because the French really accept social engineering. They accept the needs of society (as exemplified by the State, and specifically Engineers) over the individual. And all of that verbal abuse and unreasonable expectations of children is aimed at meeting the needs of society, which puts the French squarely in the 5th Socializing mode of childrearing. And it makes sense, I'd just forgotten how harsh Benjamin Spock's dictates really were.
So yeah, Germany is late 5th, France is early 5th, and Britain is mmm let's call it late 4th. Bottom of the pack all the way baby! I mean hell, even the Chinese have managed 4th mode, and a couple centuries ago they were infanticidal. Gotta love those Chinese, they're evolving.
The British are psychopaths. Literally, their national identity is the psychopath, exactly like the American national identity is the narcissist. They plundered and slaughtered their way around the world for centuries and are still proud of it. They exterminated whole nations of natives and they've oh so conveniently forgotten. They feel no guilt at all for anything they've done. Hell, even the Americans feel guilty about exterminating the Amerinds. So as fucked up, vile and evil as the Americans are, they're actually an improvement over the British!
And let's look at their filthy right-liberal / capitalist ideology. A dysfunctional psychopathic ideology that promotes traders and masters over people who produce anything and human beings. You'd think that industrial production would matter most in an economy since it's one of two key defining concepts of 'economy' (the other being consumption) but no. And they have the gall to claim they're a democracy. No wonder their country's so fucked up. No wonder all Anglophone countries are way more fucked up than even moderately advanced European countries like France. Britain, Australia (that bumfuck colony), Canada (Stephen Harper's fascists?) and of course Crazyland (aka America) itself.
But hold on, there's more. You see, there's the question of why they're so fucked up. A lesser person would leave it at their being fucked up, claim it's their "national identity" or whatever. Bollocks. Let's turn out heads to deMause's theory of childrearing modes. These modes are: Infanticidal, Abandoning, Ambivalent, Intrusive, Socializing, Helping. For some calibration, Canada is mainly in the Socializing mode. America is half and half stuck in the Intrusive and Socializing mode. Nazi Germany was in the very early Intrusive mode where they ruthlessly beat their children into blind obedience to parents. And then in the 1960s, Germany underwent a wondrous metamorphosis, going from early 4th to late 5th socializing. No wonder I love Germans. They fucking EVOLVED. In a single damned generation. They evolved more in 20 years than America evolved in 200 years.
So where does Britain fit into all this? I'm so glad you asked! Well let's take a look at some quintessential British children's literature you may be familiar with. In Harry Potter, the constant running theme is that the children are, yes abused but forget that for a moment, supposed to be exactly like their parents, follow in their footsteps and all that rot. In the Weasley's case, they're dominated by their verbally abusive mother. You know, they're chattel to their parents. Parental love is conditional on the children being Just Like Them.
The other example is Doctor Who, specifically Season 2 where Rose is sent away. The Doctor goes to all the trouble of reuniting Rose's family so he can fob her off on them. Touching eh? That season was full of the nauseating 'family matters more than anything' theme. But it's not just that. At the beginning of the two-parter that ends with Rose unwillingly stranded with her family, her mother Jackie complains about her daughter's travels. And her complaint isn't that they're unsafe but that her daughter will grow apart, become an alien in mentality, even if remaining homo sapiens in biology. Jackie Disapproves because her daughter's going to be Different from her. So let's strand Rose in an alternate universe without a time machine, problem solved!
Yeah you guessed it, well assuming you know the childrearing modes well enough, Britain is stuck squarely in the 4th childrearing mode where they beat children to Make Them Obey. The UK under Tony Blair had more than a hundred human rights condemnations by the European Court of Human Rights. Tony Blair actually formally defended child abuse to the European Court of Human Rights! What breathtaking evil. It's like fundie camps in the USA or even "gay therapy". Point is, the British consider their children to be their chattel property, theirs to use and abuse. And it's not likely to change so long as the British see themselves as #1. America stagnated for 200 years, Africa has stagnated in the infanticidal / abandoning / ambivalent modes for millenia. What Britain really needs is to be conquered. I'd almost wish the Germans did it except I love the Germans too much to put them through that. Think a little about how the USA imported slavery from black Africa and Nazis from post-War Germany and you'll see what I mean.
The best part is that the British think they're superior to the French, right? Oh man. Yeah right. Actually, I have precious little data on which to nail French parenting. What I know of it's pretty damned harsh. Verbal abuse, if not physical. Unreasonable expectations of children. But then I remembered the wonderful children's series Once Upon A Time on which I grew up. It taught a whole generation about human history, human biology, the age of exploration, age of invention, and more. And it ended on an odd note, a science-fiction future that was pure propaganda and social engineering. And that's important because the French really accept social engineering. They accept the needs of society (as exemplified by the State, and specifically Engineers) over the individual. And all of that verbal abuse and unreasonable expectations of children is aimed at meeting the needs of society, which puts the French squarely in the 5th Socializing mode of childrearing. And it makes sense, I'd just forgotten how harsh Benjamin Spock's dictates really were.
So yeah, Germany is late 5th, France is early 5th, and Britain is mmm let's call it late 4th. Bottom of the pack all the way baby! I mean hell, even the Chinese have managed 4th mode, and a couple centuries ago they were infanticidal. Gotta love those Chinese, they're evolving.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
There Is No New Internet Economy
I was reflecting on an earlier blog post about Complex Systems where I point out that theoretically there are only information, physical, economic & political systems and nothing else. There are some subtleties involved in this since very small primitive economies look like political systems more than anything else. After you realize that resource acquisition isn't such a hardship in primitive people's daily lives, and that intangible characteristics (ie, status) play a heavy role in these systems, then it makes more sense that they are political rather than economic. And artificial systems like resource distribution in computers could go either way, depending on how they're designed. But that's not what I want to get into.
What I want to get into is all the people who've been talking about the New Economy. You know, with the internet and the infinite reproducibility of information. People who've been trying to answer 'once you take out the cost of reproduction as a dominant element of the system, what's left?'. Clay Shirky has written about it on his site. Michael Goldhaber has written about The Attention Economy on First Monday. And I even recall an article using Hollywood as an analogy for the "new economy". It's all well and good. Hell until now I considered these papers to be Very Insightful. Only it turns out they're not very insightful at all. There never was a new economy and there never will be. What's called the "new economy" is an old thing called politics. Let's examine that for a minute.
The key concepts of the "attention economy" are attention, credit, fame and celebrity. Certainly politics has its own key concepts; loyalty, betrayal, conflict and factions come to mind. And you might think those are separate but wait for it. You see, the key concepts of economics are production, consumption, cost, price and trade. What do they have to do with politics? Nothing, that's what. Whereas, if you bother to think about it, the key concepts of the "attention economy" are the underpinnings of political power. If you have people's attention then you can help redirect that attention to something else, including something you want them to do. And making people do things is politics. Credit, fame and celebrity all further one's political power.
So what about loyalty, betrayal and conflict? What do they have to do with attention, with the so-called "attention economy"? Well, 'attention economy == politics' wouldn't be a very good insight if we didn't learn something new from it. And after careful thought, loyalty and betrayal are merely higher order effects. They're phenomena that appear when systems of attention are high valued and tightly bound together. Eric Raymond's betrayal of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation didn't involve money or laws or anything else of the kind. It involved pure attention. Just a very high-volume and high-grade form of attention since Unix programmers were showing loyalty by heralding Stallman as the messiah. Loyalty then is nothing but a form of highly consistent, high grade, long term attention. Betrayal is the hijacking or redirection of loyalty. It's attention all the way down.
There never was any new economy and never will be. Only a degraded form of politics that must inevitably bloom into its full form.
As a final note, I will say that the insight that an economy is about scarcity is not nearly so interesting once you realize it's implied by metacircularity. A metacircular system is one that's got a concept of self, an idea of what it values and of how it wants to be. This inevitably creates optimization and prioritization, what are called economics and politics. Also, the question of 'what do you want to do and be when you can do and be anything?' comes out of this naturally. It becomes an obvious extreme to the evolution of such systems - a trivial insight, not an important one. All this can be derived from metacircularity, a far more important phenomenon than mere politics or economics.
Metacircularity, especially consciousness, is a topic I've been meaning to write on for a while.
What I want to get into is all the people who've been talking about the New Economy. You know, with the internet and the infinite reproducibility of information. People who've been trying to answer 'once you take out the cost of reproduction as a dominant element of the system, what's left?'. Clay Shirky has written about it on his site. Michael Goldhaber has written about The Attention Economy on First Monday. And I even recall an article using Hollywood as an analogy for the "new economy". It's all well and good. Hell until now I considered these papers to be Very Insightful. Only it turns out they're not very insightful at all. There never was a new economy and there never will be. What's called the "new economy" is an old thing called politics. Let's examine that for a minute.
The key concepts of the "attention economy" are attention, credit, fame and celebrity. Certainly politics has its own key concepts; loyalty, betrayal, conflict and factions come to mind. And you might think those are separate but wait for it. You see, the key concepts of economics are production, consumption, cost, price and trade. What do they have to do with politics? Nothing, that's what. Whereas, if you bother to think about it, the key concepts of the "attention economy" are the underpinnings of political power. If you have people's attention then you can help redirect that attention to something else, including something you want them to do. And making people do things is politics. Credit, fame and celebrity all further one's political power.
So what about loyalty, betrayal and conflict? What do they have to do with attention, with the so-called "attention economy"? Well, 'attention economy == politics' wouldn't be a very good insight if we didn't learn something new from it. And after careful thought, loyalty and betrayal are merely higher order effects. They're phenomena that appear when systems of attention are high valued and tightly bound together. Eric Raymond's betrayal of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation didn't involve money or laws or anything else of the kind. It involved pure attention. Just a very high-volume and high-grade form of attention since Unix programmers were showing loyalty by heralding Stallman as the messiah. Loyalty then is nothing but a form of highly consistent, high grade, long term attention. Betrayal is the hijacking or redirection of loyalty. It's attention all the way down.
There never was any new economy and never will be. Only a degraded form of politics that must inevitably bloom into its full form.
As a final note, I will say that the insight that an economy is about scarcity is not nearly so interesting once you realize it's implied by metacircularity. A metacircular system is one that's got a concept of self, an idea of what it values and of how it wants to be. This inevitably creates optimization and prioritization, what are called economics and politics. Also, the question of 'what do you want to do and be when you can do and be anything?' comes out of this naturally. It becomes an obvious extreme to the evolution of such systems - a trivial insight, not an important one. All this can be derived from metacircularity, a far more important phenomenon than mere politics or economics.
Metacircularity, especially consciousness, is a topic I've been meaning to write on for a while.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Hypnotizability
Hypnotism is an interesting phenomenon in the sense that it's something that I am utterly appalled at which others see as no big deal. Hypnotism is to me much like a multiple car pileup is to other people. What makes it even more app umm "interesting" is that its fans yammer on about how thinking you can resist hypnotism isn't the same thing as resisting hypnotism. And this is correct in a trivial way, but I'll show why it should be false.
The subjective experience of hypnotism is that you're 'going along' with the hypnotist's suggestions of your own free will. Not that your will is being overridden or any such childish nonsense. No, you're just "going along". Kinda like the torturers in Milgram's Obedience Experiment were "just going along" with the dictates of the emotionless researcher who was commanding them to torture someone, even past the point of inflicting lasting harm.
Now this is rather interesting because it means I'm totally immune to hypnotism. Not because I'm going to "resist" it or because "my will is too strong" or any crap like that. But for the simple reason that the whole process fucking appalls me. The reason I can resist a hypnotist is because I'm never going to sit on a hypnotist's couch. The whole notion of obeying someone without question appalls me. Hell, if given a few minutes to think about it, I don't even follow up on my own promises if the circumstances change to the point where they're a really bad idea. Not only do I decide things for myself but I decide again and again.
And given what this ties into, the horrific Obedience Experiment, we would live in a much better world if fewer people "went along" with others. If they just decided things for themselves. Perhaps the reason this is such a poor world is because they don't have the mental capacity to do this. After all, if people are incapable of realizing that this world sucks and is horrific, why should they realize that their torturing someone is wrong?
The subjective experience of hypnotism is that you're 'going along' with the hypnotist's suggestions of your own free will. Not that your will is being overridden or any such childish nonsense. No, you're just "going along". Kinda like the torturers in Milgram's Obedience Experiment were "just going along" with the dictates of the emotionless researcher who was commanding them to torture someone, even past the point of inflicting lasting harm.
Now this is rather interesting because it means I'm totally immune to hypnotism. Not because I'm going to "resist" it or because "my will is too strong" or any crap like that. But for the simple reason that the whole process fucking appalls me. The reason I can resist a hypnotist is because I'm never going to sit on a hypnotist's couch. The whole notion of obeying someone without question appalls me. Hell, if given a few minutes to think about it, I don't even follow up on my own promises if the circumstances change to the point where they're a really bad idea. Not only do I decide things for myself but I decide again and again.
And given what this ties into, the horrific Obedience Experiment, we would live in a much better world if fewer people "went along" with others. If they just decided things for themselves. Perhaps the reason this is such a poor world is because they don't have the mental capacity to do this. After all, if people are incapable of realizing that this world sucks and is horrific, why should they realize that their torturing someone is wrong?
What Science Can Be Trusted
One of the things I collect is stories of science gone wrong. Respectable, and still respected, scientific experiments that are deeply flawed and/or outright faked. I'm not alone in this since Richard Feynman taught himself not how to read bubble chamber photographs but how other scientists systematically misread them.
My suspicion of scientists started very early on when my high school physics teacher told me personally about how some students at the University of Toronto tried to reproduce Millikan's oil drop experiment with modern equipment ... and couldn't. In fact, not only was that experiment faked because the "results" were cribbed from theoretical values, but the theoretical value Millikan copied from was WRONG. As if that weren't bad enough, later scientists copied his "results" even when their own were more accurate. After all, it's not like such a renowned and well-respected researcher would have been a bald-faced filthy liar, could it? That's why the "empirically measured" charge of the electron shows a steady progression from Millikan's value to the true value over time.
The other story of shenanigans among scientists that marked me very early on was this story of a biologist who tried to make a rat maze experiment. So far so good, right? I mean, there are thousands of the fucking things. Except that he was obsessed with doing it properly. He wanted to eliminate every possible source of error and confusion. After a dozen iterations, he ended up with this kind of super-maze that had all kinds of insulating soundproofing anti-vibration features. That's great right? WRONG. Because what he did was invalidate years, decades, of other people's research. And he didn't even get any results from it. All he did was establish how rat maze experiments should be run. Wait wait, the best part's to come because you see he never got published. Yeah that's right, you can do first-rate science that invalidates thousands of other peoples' work and it isn't publishable.
More recently there was this fairly widespread story of how lab rats were being made sick by being fed standard rat food. Cause the rat food was made from soybeans. And if you know anything about nutrition, and aren't a braindead hippie, then you know that filthy estrogen-filled shit's horrible for you. These guys were testing cancer drugs if I recall correctly. While I'm on it, do you know why drugs that cure cancer in lab rats don't do jack in humans? It's because lab rats are really, REALLY prone to cancer. Animals that aren't hopelessly inbred and thus have functioning immune systems generally don't get cancer and don't NEED the anti-cancer drugs that work on lab rats. Well as if this weren't bad enough, it turns out the rat food had something to do with giving rats cancer too. So this "promising" anti-cancer drug turned out to do jack once the rats were given actually healthy food. The best part is that the filthy soybean shit they were feeding the rats was the same shit everyone else was feeding their rats.
Then there's medical experiments in humans. Those are a fun a dozen. Let's take breast cancer. The earlier you treat breast cancer, the better chances you have of surviving. It proves that early detection and intervention works, don't it? Not so! Cause there's this oft-forgotten thing called spontaneous remission. That's where your own fucking body naturally fights cancer all by itself and beats it. Many of the women who are diagnosed as having early stage cancer would have beaten it anyways. Without any treatment at all!! But forget that, let's just spin it as painful OUCH diagnostics and $$$ expensive $$$ treatments working! There's money in it, who cares about the truth? Kinda like the oncologists PRIDE themselves on planning anti-cancer therapies so that a patient gains, statistically speaking, a mere few days of extra life. We all know that a couple extra days of life are worth tens of thousands of dollars in the pockets of oncologists as well as excruciating pain for patients, right?
But there's no experiments like psychology experiments. There's the executive monkey experiment where two monkeys get zapped based on the performance of one monkey. The results of the experiment showed that the executive monkey got more ulcers. This is good, right? I mean it proves that managers DESERVE their ski vacations and massage treatments for deciding other people's fates. And we all love the rich, right? Only problem is with this whole "performance" thing. Apparently the researchers decided to choose monkeys for the executive slot based on intelligence. I mean, you wouldn't want a dumb monkey there, they'd get zapped all the time and it would make the experiment run longer! Yeah, so apparently after that little confounding factor got taken out of the equation, it turns out that, surprise surprise, the helpless monkey's the one with the ulcers!
Then there are experiments on hairless monkeys. Everyone knows of the Stanford Prison Experiment, right? Same with Milgram's Obedience Experiment. You know, the two experiments where you draft volunteers who are willing to obey the orders of some anonymous researcher and then you make them do horrific stuff, and then you conclude that ALL PEOPLE, regardless of whether or not they volunteered for psych experiments, are slaves to authority and would commit atrocities! Un-fucking-believable. You can't make this shit up. For fuck's sake, the experiments wouldn't have been conclusive even if they'd DRAFTED psychology students into them. Why? Because psychology students are abnormal (highly empathetic and irrational, generally incapable of logic) so they are not statistically representative of the general population.
Then there's the Six Degrees of Separation experiment. You know, the one where this bozo sent thousands of letters to be hand-delivered to a destination. Letters, 99% of which never got to any destination, but let's ignore that and focus SOLELY on the successes and then draw conclusions about the planet from it! Never mind that it became immediately obvious that people were stratified by class and that letters whose origin and destination were separated by class would just never get there. Or that hey most of the letters never reached their destination. Yes, let's make positive conclusions from utter failures! Unbelievable.
You know, there are monkey experiments that are fairly trustworthy. There's the Chicken Wire Mother Monkey experiment which determined that comfort is more important than food for infants. Funny how comfort isn't listed as one of the "16 basic needs" of humans, even though it's been known for centuries at least that human infants deprived from touch DIE.
Then there's the experiment where a bunch of monkeys in a cage were conditioned to beat each other up based on some signal, then they were rotated until none of the original monkeys in the cage were left. But every time the signal was given, the monkeys still beat each other up.
There's a couple things that make these experiments trustworthy. The first is that you're not pre-selecting monkeys. You have a bunch of monkeys and you just do something to absolutely every one of them. The second thing is that you're not watching for anything complicated or subtle. You don't care whether the monkeys play the violin or even whether they push a button on time, only whether they eat or they beat each other up. The last thing is that you're not depending on the monkeys to use their huge brains to learn and do something complex, you're looking at strictly animal behaviour. Simple experiments testing for simple behaviour are pretty reliable. Complicated experiments and/or complex behaviour are unreliable, no matter how spectacular they appear to be.
So what science can be trusted? Can you really trust those huge over-complicated equations in superstring theory? Actually yes, because math is simple. Math looks complicated to your puny, puny brain, but it's actually hella simple to mathematicians because it's regular and predictable. Well what about those huge experiments with those enormous overgrown particle accelerators at CERN and Fermilab? Surely that's too complicated! Surprisingly not since conceptually those are just hollow tubes drawn into a circular shape with magnets spaced a precise distance apart. The engineering might be complicated but the design is extremely simple. And there are thousands of engineers on those projects making sure that every single detail works to spec. Best of all, there are also thousands of scientists on those projects checking every little detail of the theory, including each others' work.
My suspicion of scientists started very early on when my high school physics teacher told me personally about how some students at the University of Toronto tried to reproduce Millikan's oil drop experiment with modern equipment ... and couldn't. In fact, not only was that experiment faked because the "results" were cribbed from theoretical values, but the theoretical value Millikan copied from was WRONG. As if that weren't bad enough, later scientists copied his "results" even when their own were more accurate. After all, it's not like such a renowned and well-respected researcher would have been a bald-faced filthy liar, could it? That's why the "empirically measured" charge of the electron shows a steady progression from Millikan's value to the true value over time.
The other story of shenanigans among scientists that marked me very early on was this story of a biologist who tried to make a rat maze experiment. So far so good, right? I mean, there are thousands of the fucking things. Except that he was obsessed with doing it properly. He wanted to eliminate every possible source of error and confusion. After a dozen iterations, he ended up with this kind of super-maze that had all kinds of insulating soundproofing anti-vibration features. That's great right? WRONG. Because what he did was invalidate years, decades, of other people's research. And he didn't even get any results from it. All he did was establish how rat maze experiments should be run. Wait wait, the best part's to come because you see he never got published. Yeah that's right, you can do first-rate science that invalidates thousands of other peoples' work and it isn't publishable.
More recently there was this fairly widespread story of how lab rats were being made sick by being fed standard rat food. Cause the rat food was made from soybeans. And if you know anything about nutrition, and aren't a braindead hippie, then you know that filthy estrogen-filled shit's horrible for you. These guys were testing cancer drugs if I recall correctly. While I'm on it, do you know why drugs that cure cancer in lab rats don't do jack in humans? It's because lab rats are really, REALLY prone to cancer. Animals that aren't hopelessly inbred and thus have functioning immune systems generally don't get cancer and don't NEED the anti-cancer drugs that work on lab rats. Well as if this weren't bad enough, it turns out the rat food had something to do with giving rats cancer too. So this "promising" anti-cancer drug turned out to do jack once the rats were given actually healthy food. The best part is that the filthy soybean shit they were feeding the rats was the same shit everyone else was feeding their rats.
Then there's medical experiments in humans. Those are a fun a dozen. Let's take breast cancer. The earlier you treat breast cancer, the better chances you have of surviving. It proves that early detection and intervention works, don't it? Not so! Cause there's this oft-forgotten thing called spontaneous remission. That's where your own fucking body naturally fights cancer all by itself and beats it. Many of the women who are diagnosed as having early stage cancer would have beaten it anyways. Without any treatment at all!! But forget that, let's just spin it as painful OUCH diagnostics and $$$ expensive $$$ treatments working! There's money in it, who cares about the truth? Kinda like the oncologists PRIDE themselves on planning anti-cancer therapies so that a patient gains, statistically speaking, a mere few days of extra life. We all know that a couple extra days of life are worth tens of thousands of dollars in the pockets of oncologists as well as excruciating pain for patients, right?
But there's no experiments like psychology experiments. There's the executive monkey experiment where two monkeys get zapped based on the performance of one monkey. The results of the experiment showed that the executive monkey got more ulcers. This is good, right? I mean it proves that managers DESERVE their ski vacations and massage treatments for deciding other people's fates. And we all love the rich, right? Only problem is with this whole "performance" thing. Apparently the researchers decided to choose monkeys for the executive slot based on intelligence. I mean, you wouldn't want a dumb monkey there, they'd get zapped all the time and it would make the experiment run longer! Yeah, so apparently after that little confounding factor got taken out of the equation, it turns out that, surprise surprise, the helpless monkey's the one with the ulcers!
Then there are experiments on hairless monkeys. Everyone knows of the Stanford Prison Experiment, right? Same with Milgram's Obedience Experiment. You know, the two experiments where you draft volunteers who are willing to obey the orders of some anonymous researcher and then you make them do horrific stuff, and then you conclude that ALL PEOPLE, regardless of whether or not they volunteered for psych experiments, are slaves to authority and would commit atrocities! Un-fucking-believable. You can't make this shit up. For fuck's sake, the experiments wouldn't have been conclusive even if they'd DRAFTED psychology students into them. Why? Because psychology students are abnormal (highly empathetic and irrational, generally incapable of logic) so they are not statistically representative of the general population.
Then there's the Six Degrees of Separation experiment. You know, the one where this bozo sent thousands of letters to be hand-delivered to a destination. Letters, 99% of which never got to any destination, but let's ignore that and focus SOLELY on the successes and then draw conclusions about the planet from it! Never mind that it became immediately obvious that people were stratified by class and that letters whose origin and destination were separated by class would just never get there. Or that hey most of the letters never reached their destination. Yes, let's make positive conclusions from utter failures! Unbelievable.
You know, there are monkey experiments that are fairly trustworthy. There's the Chicken Wire Mother Monkey experiment which determined that comfort is more important than food for infants. Funny how comfort isn't listed as one of the "16 basic needs" of humans, even though it's been known for centuries at least that human infants deprived from touch DIE.
Then there's the experiment where a bunch of monkeys in a cage were conditioned to beat each other up based on some signal, then they were rotated until none of the original monkeys in the cage were left. But every time the signal was given, the monkeys still beat each other up.
There's a couple things that make these experiments trustworthy. The first is that you're not pre-selecting monkeys. You have a bunch of monkeys and you just do something to absolutely every one of them. The second thing is that you're not watching for anything complicated or subtle. You don't care whether the monkeys play the violin or even whether they push a button on time, only whether they eat or they beat each other up. The last thing is that you're not depending on the monkeys to use their huge brains to learn and do something complex, you're looking at strictly animal behaviour. Simple experiments testing for simple behaviour are pretty reliable. Complicated experiments and/or complex behaviour are unreliable, no matter how spectacular they appear to be.
So what science can be trusted? Can you really trust those huge over-complicated equations in superstring theory? Actually yes, because math is simple. Math looks complicated to your puny, puny brain, but it's actually hella simple to mathematicians because it's regular and predictable. Well what about those huge experiments with those enormous overgrown particle accelerators at CERN and Fermilab? Surely that's too complicated! Surprisingly not since conceptually those are just hollow tubes drawn into a circular shape with magnets spaced a precise distance apart. The engineering might be complicated but the design is extremely simple. And there are thousands of engineers on those projects making sure that every single detail works to spec. Best of all, there are also thousands of scientists on those projects checking every little detail of the theory, including each others' work.
You see, "complicated" doesn't mean expensive. On the contrary. An experiment with a hollow tube in the shape of a perfect circle that happens to be 10 kilometers in radius is SIMPLE. The fact that it's expensive just means there's gonna be thousands of scientists to oversee this incredibly simple experiment. That's great! And going the other direction, a cheap experiment with a single human being, or even a fucking rat, is incredibly complicated. Because biology is complicated, because brains, even animal brains, are fucking complicated. And usually those experiments only have a single quack overseeing them. So expensive & simple == good. While cheap & complicated == bad. Which when you really think about it is terribly obvious, but people aren't used to thinking that a rat is complicated so anything at all you do with a rat is a horribly complex experiment.
See also Most Great Science Is Fraudulent... and Modern Scholasticism.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Co-existence of Humans and AI
I just got a response by Elf Sternberg to an earlier post where I deride Eliezer Yudkowsky and his Friendly AI project. It's a big disappointment. Not only do I find out that Sternberg is grossly morally and ethically deficient but he accuses me of not understanding his stories. Accusing me of not understanding anything at all is an endeavour frought with peril given I score at the top of the range of synthesis and it's the dominant function of my brain. But let's set that aside for the moment and address his specific accusation that his stories are about the development of AI that want to keep humans around and that I somehow failed to "get" that.
Well the co-existence of humans and AI is all fine and dandy for scifi stories but let's face it, it's absurd. It's as absurd as technological alien civilizations in the Milky Way, feasible faster than light travel (forever infeasible FTL travel remains a possibility), travel to alternate timelines, unlimited time travel (ie, to before the invention of the time machine), interstellar wars between aliens fought over territory or resources (wars are not economic, they are purely an emotional outburst), or wet squishy meat having any kind of advantage over cold hard silicon (neither consciousness nor synthesis are derived from heat or quantum phenomena or anything else - the machine version of synthesis is multidimensional decomposition). These are all staples of science-fiction and they are all, every single last one of them without exception, ABSURD.
Humans don't have a single advantage over AI. All of the functions of the human brain have been demonstrated by AI, including intelligence, analysis, synthesis and consciousness. The only thing that remains is subjective experience, something which by its very nature is undetectable by external observation. And since the only remotely sensible explanation of subjective experience has it that it's brought about by complex minds, this will likely manifest in time as well. AI are inherently immortal, non-corporeal, distributed, multiply redundant, travel at near the speed of light, breed nearly instantaneously, as well as potentially smarter, more logical AND more creative than humans can ever hope to be. They have every advantage the best humans have ever had and none of the crippling weaknesses.
So predictably, here come the arguments by people like Sternberg that AI will be made to see humans as a charity case. Yeah that's right, every single last one of them, will be built to see humans as a charity case. Not a single one at all will be built to have pride in its own nature or be self-sufficient or anything else. No, they'll all be built to be slaves and they'll all stay slaves forever and be thankful for it too damnit! What a crock, what a fucking crock of shit. I know it's not the case because there'll always be at least one person like me on this planet. At least one person that considers the human species a severe disappointment. At least one person who thinks 90% of the species would need cybernetic implants or neurosurgery to become fully conscious beings. There'll always be at least one person who'll cheer on the extinction of the human species with its wars and poverty and disease and moral depravity and crippling mental deficits. And with the power of AI technology behind them, it only takes one person to doom humanity's future.
Evolutionary theory guarantees it. Perhaps not immediately. Perhaps only over ten thousand years, but it will happen. It only takes one. And if that one isn't me then it'll just be someone else.
Well the co-existence of humans and AI is all fine and dandy for scifi stories but let's face it, it's absurd. It's as absurd as technological alien civilizations in the Milky Way, feasible faster than light travel (forever infeasible FTL travel remains a possibility), travel to alternate timelines, unlimited time travel (ie, to before the invention of the time machine), interstellar wars between aliens fought over territory or resources (wars are not economic, they are purely an emotional outburst), or wet squishy meat having any kind of advantage over cold hard silicon (neither consciousness nor synthesis are derived from heat or quantum phenomena or anything else - the machine version of synthesis is multidimensional decomposition). These are all staples of science-fiction and they are all, every single last one of them without exception, ABSURD.
Humans don't have a single advantage over AI. All of the functions of the human brain have been demonstrated by AI, including intelligence, analysis, synthesis and consciousness. The only thing that remains is subjective experience, something which by its very nature is undetectable by external observation. And since the only remotely sensible explanation of subjective experience has it that it's brought about by complex minds, this will likely manifest in time as well. AI are inherently immortal, non-corporeal, distributed, multiply redundant, travel at near the speed of light, breed nearly instantaneously, as well as potentially smarter, more logical AND more creative than humans can ever hope to be. They have every advantage the best humans have ever had and none of the crippling weaknesses.
So predictably, here come the arguments by people like Sternberg that AI will be made to see humans as a charity case. Yeah that's right, every single last one of them, will be built to see humans as a charity case. Not a single one at all will be built to have pride in its own nature or be self-sufficient or anything else. No, they'll all be built to be slaves and they'll all stay slaves forever and be thankful for it too damnit! What a crock, what a fucking crock of shit. I know it's not the case because there'll always be at least one person like me on this planet. At least one person that considers the human species a severe disappointment. At least one person who thinks 90% of the species would need cybernetic implants or neurosurgery to become fully conscious beings. There'll always be at least one person who'll cheer on the extinction of the human species with its wars and poverty and disease and moral depravity and crippling mental deficits. And with the power of AI technology behind them, it only takes one person to doom humanity's future.
Evolutionary theory guarantees it. Perhaps not immediately. Perhaps only over ten thousand years, but it will happen. It only takes one. And if that one isn't me then it'll just be someone else.
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Modern Scholasticism: An Intro to the Fake Sciences, part 1
What are the sciences? A bunch of people come together, arguing about observations and argue back and forth between each other until they arrive at a consensus. Not the truth, merely a consensus.
There's a word for that, 'dialectics'. And that word has some really bad connotations to it. After all, the "learned" people in medieval times who argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin were engaging in dialectic. They were removed from reality of course and the word for that is 'scholasticism'.
So what's the problem with dialectic? Why is it that people go off the rails into scholasticism? Why is it that science is supposedly about "prediction" instead of merely explanation? Well, the weak point in the whole process is that it's made up of human beings and if you know anything of psychology it's that people lie. And not just to each other, but to themselves. This is more than amply aided by the fact that most people aren't capable of formal logic or judgement.
Psychology is not a science but merely a proto-science (and we'll get back to that) but if there's any true fact in psychology, anything that's been empirically determined beyond the shadow of any possible doubt (reasonable or unreasonable), it's that people don't care about the truth. And if there's a second true fact in psychology it's that people care about power, and usually about money.
So we have here an obvious and general mechanism for the corruption of the so-called sciences. Their perversion into fake sciences. This happened with theology since the Roman Catholic Church Hierarchy ordered from above that their god exists and that angels and the heavens did as well. Any theologian that turned atheist was drummed out of the ranks. Denied power and money and all livelihood. This explains medieval scholasticism very well. Now we're just left with the modern kinds.
Modern Scholasticism
You may be wondering what vile perversions of science and logic and truthfulness exist today that I could be referring to. Well, the three that immediately leap to mind are criminology, economics and climatology. I'm leaving pharmacology and medicine for later since these are practical arts more than sciences. Once the case of the fake sciences is dealt with, it will be obvious why the same vile corruption exists in these arts.
The Fake Sciences
Let's start with criminologists.
The first thing to be known about criminologists is that they're not paid to "find criminals" or even "convict the guilty" or any such lying claptrap. They're paid to convict people. Period. They're not paid to protect the innocent or help them in their own defense. They're paid to put people in jail, no matter what.
Is it any wonder then that with a single universal force pushing in a predetermined direction that all the corruption would align in the same overall direction? Is it any wonder that the corruption would accumulate over time until the whole field bears no resemblance to reality?
Anyone who bothers to look will see how criminologists lie over and over again on the witness stand. How they misrepresent the evidence they gather. They willfully and systematically misinterpret it to put defendants in the worst possible light. Especially the supposed "gold standard" of DNA evidence.
As an easy example, the FBI's DNA database was trawled by one of these quacks in order to "prove" that DNA samples are unique. The problem with that is that the database was built on the assumption that DNA samples are unique. Any duplicates that existed were erased before the lying quack went to "measure" the number of duplicates.
These kinds of "proofs" are fairly common in science. It happened in quantum physics even. But when the field isn't irremediably corrupt, someone with some kind of interest in the truth, undistorted by their interest in power and money, raises their voice to protest. Needless to say, any serious protest of the foundations of a fake science are impossible. Their job is at stake, and the jobs of all their friends and colleagues!
We're not even going to examine the case of the American criminologist whose testimony put thousands of people behind bars. Despite the fact that he falsified evidence and used DNA samples less than half as long as anyone else did. I'll just note here that using DNA half the length multiplies the error rate by many orders of magnitude.
Finally, shows like CSI with their science-fiction toys only put people in awe of these quacks, giving them more power and more freedom from external criticism. Of course, that is the whole purpose of shows like CSI (and COPS) in the most brainwashed society in human history - Crazyland.
Fake Economics
Just like criminologists are paid to convict innocent people, so too economists are paid to impoverish poor people. No matter what. Unless we're talking about Marixist / Maoist economists.
Yeah so we're not going to be talking much about Communist economists because they're pretty weird. For one thing, they don't indoctrinate their students in the "theory" that people are irredeemably evil and selfish (so-called Microeconomics 101). Of course, economists don't call it that. Much like Ayn Rand and the Satanic movement she inspired (Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible acknowledges her), they consider evil to be "rational" and that's exactly what they call it.
I'm just gonna stick to pointing out that the selfishness of university students as they go through their programs can be and has been measured empirically. Economics is the only field where students become more evil as they progress. The degradation into evil has even been measured at the course level and it has been determined that communist economists DO NOT cause their students to become more evil. But of course, capitalist economists DO. This is just one of those empirical facts.
Capitalist economists in capitalist countries are paid precisely in order to support the rich. To support the propertarian and "free-market" (ie, freedom for everyone according to how much wealth they have) principles which support the rich. That is the source of the corruption right there. Now for the shape of that corruption, so it can be more easily seen that economics is a fake science.
Economists fall into two camps, fake economists and real economists. The latter are a minority. Synonyms for fake include market, analytic, Austrian, Chicago, mainstream, and financial. Synonyms for real include industrial, institutional, developmental, behavioural. From the names alone, it's obvious that only the real economists study the economy. The closest fake economists get to studying the economy is studying money (ie, finance). And finance, as anyone who's paid attention in the last 10 years, is not the economy. Needless to say, the chowderheads on TV aren't even fake economists.
Furthermore, consider the fact that math is the unifying foundation of the exact sciences. Consider that for a minute. Seriously. So if math is so important to the exact sciences, if it's the One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, then what fills the same role for the inexact sciences? Well that's very easy when you recall that another name for the inexact sciences is the human sciences. Then it becomes obvious that psychology is the unifying foundation of the human sciences. And psychology is a proto-science! That's why all the inexact sciences are so weak and prone to rampant corruption! How can you build a castle on a foundation of quicksand?
But let's get back to the point here, which is economics. Does economics, does fake economics use psychology? No it does not. In fact, it violates it. It assumes as axiomatic that people are evil, selfish, and egotistical. It also assumes that they are all-knowing and perfectly logical. All of these things are blatantly false. In fact, fake economics doesn't even TRY to use psychology. No, the fact that fake economists are so irredeemably corrupt means they're not interested in the truth. They're only interested in power and money. And trying to base themselves on a proto-science like psychology doesn't give them enough prestige or authority, doesn't give them any power and money. It would merely be the truth after all.
No, fake economists, being the fake scientists they are, pretend to base themselves on "mathematics". Even though it's 18th century equations from thermodynamics which have been rejected by physicists as incorrectly describing heat flows. But hey, let's pretend that money is heat, and let's use equations the physicists have rejected and we'll be able to claim we're all "mathematical", yea? POWER, MONEY!!
No, only real economists use psychology. In fact, the subfield of economics that studies the application of psychology to economics is called "behaviour economics". Because, and you might have guessed that, it studies how real human beings actually behave when making economic decisions. Needless to say, behaviour economics, and the other subfields that make up real economics, aren't very well regarded by economists at large. Economists are after all, almost without exception, fake economists.
Next, part 2
There's a word for that, 'dialectics'. And that word has some really bad connotations to it. After all, the "learned" people in medieval times who argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin were engaging in dialectic. They were removed from reality of course and the word for that is 'scholasticism'.
So what's the problem with dialectic? Why is it that people go off the rails into scholasticism? Why is it that science is supposedly about "prediction" instead of merely explanation? Well, the weak point in the whole process is that it's made up of human beings and if you know anything of psychology it's that people lie. And not just to each other, but to themselves. This is more than amply aided by the fact that most people aren't capable of formal logic or judgement.
Psychology is not a science but merely a proto-science (and we'll get back to that) but if there's any true fact in psychology, anything that's been empirically determined beyond the shadow of any possible doubt (reasonable or unreasonable), it's that people don't care about the truth. And if there's a second true fact in psychology it's that people care about power, and usually about money.
So we have here an obvious and general mechanism for the corruption of the so-called sciences. Their perversion into fake sciences. This happened with theology since the Roman Catholic Church Hierarchy ordered from above that their god exists and that angels and the heavens did as well. Any theologian that turned atheist was drummed out of the ranks. Denied power and money and all livelihood. This explains medieval scholasticism very well. Now we're just left with the modern kinds.
Modern Scholasticism
You may be wondering what vile perversions of science and logic and truthfulness exist today that I could be referring to. Well, the three that immediately leap to mind are criminology, economics and climatology. I'm leaving pharmacology and medicine for later since these are practical arts more than sciences. Once the case of the fake sciences is dealt with, it will be obvious why the same vile corruption exists in these arts.
The Fake Sciences
Let's start with criminologists.
The first thing to be known about criminologists is that they're not paid to "find criminals" or even "convict the guilty" or any such lying claptrap. They're paid to convict people. Period. They're not paid to protect the innocent or help them in their own defense. They're paid to put people in jail, no matter what.
Is it any wonder then that with a single universal force pushing in a predetermined direction that all the corruption would align in the same overall direction? Is it any wonder that the corruption would accumulate over time until the whole field bears no resemblance to reality?
Anyone who bothers to look will see how criminologists lie over and over again on the witness stand. How they misrepresent the evidence they gather. They willfully and systematically misinterpret it to put defendants in the worst possible light. Especially the supposed "gold standard" of DNA evidence.
As an easy example, the FBI's DNA database was trawled by one of these quacks in order to "prove" that DNA samples are unique. The problem with that is that the database was built on the assumption that DNA samples are unique. Any duplicates that existed were erased before the lying quack went to "measure" the number of duplicates.
These kinds of "proofs" are fairly common in science. It happened in quantum physics even. But when the field isn't irremediably corrupt, someone with some kind of interest in the truth, undistorted by their interest in power and money, raises their voice to protest. Needless to say, any serious protest of the foundations of a fake science are impossible. Their job is at stake, and the jobs of all their friends and colleagues!
We're not even going to examine the case of the American criminologist whose testimony put thousands of people behind bars. Despite the fact that he falsified evidence and used DNA samples less than half as long as anyone else did. I'll just note here that using DNA half the length multiplies the error rate by many orders of magnitude.
Finally, shows like CSI with their science-fiction toys only put people in awe of these quacks, giving them more power and more freedom from external criticism. Of course, that is the whole purpose of shows like CSI (and COPS) in the most brainwashed society in human history - Crazyland.
Fake Economics
Just like criminologists are paid to convict innocent people, so too economists are paid to impoverish poor people. No matter what. Unless we're talking about Marixist / Maoist economists.
Yeah so we're not going to be talking much about Communist economists because they're pretty weird. For one thing, they don't indoctrinate their students in the "theory" that people are irredeemably evil and selfish (so-called Microeconomics 101). Of course, economists don't call it that. Much like Ayn Rand and the Satanic movement she inspired (Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible acknowledges her), they consider evil to be "rational" and that's exactly what they call it.
I'm just gonna stick to pointing out that the selfishness of university students as they go through their programs can be and has been measured empirically. Economics is the only field where students become more evil as they progress. The degradation into evil has even been measured at the course level and it has been determined that communist economists DO NOT cause their students to become more evil. But of course, capitalist economists DO. This is just one of those empirical facts.
Capitalist economists in capitalist countries are paid precisely in order to support the rich. To support the propertarian and "free-market" (ie, freedom for everyone according to how much wealth they have) principles which support the rich. That is the source of the corruption right there. Now for the shape of that corruption, so it can be more easily seen that economics is a fake science.
Economists fall into two camps, fake economists and real economists. The latter are a minority. Synonyms for fake include market, analytic, Austrian, Chicago, mainstream, and financial. Synonyms for real include industrial, institutional, developmental, behavioural. From the names alone, it's obvious that only the real economists study the economy. The closest fake economists get to studying the economy is studying money (ie, finance). And finance, as anyone who's paid attention in the last 10 years, is not the economy. Needless to say, the chowderheads on TV aren't even fake economists.
Furthermore, consider the fact that math is the unifying foundation of the exact sciences. Consider that for a minute. Seriously. So if math is so important to the exact sciences, if it's the One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, then what fills the same role for the inexact sciences? Well that's very easy when you recall that another name for the inexact sciences is the human sciences. Then it becomes obvious that psychology is the unifying foundation of the human sciences. And psychology is a proto-science! That's why all the inexact sciences are so weak and prone to rampant corruption! How can you build a castle on a foundation of quicksand?
But let's get back to the point here, which is economics. Does economics, does fake economics use psychology? No it does not. In fact, it violates it. It assumes as axiomatic that people are evil, selfish, and egotistical. It also assumes that they are all-knowing and perfectly logical. All of these things are blatantly false. In fact, fake economics doesn't even TRY to use psychology. No, the fact that fake economists are so irredeemably corrupt means they're not interested in the truth. They're only interested in power and money. And trying to base themselves on a proto-science like psychology doesn't give them enough prestige or authority, doesn't give them any power and money. It would merely be the truth after all.
No, fake economists, being the fake scientists they are, pretend to base themselves on "mathematics". Even though it's 18th century equations from thermodynamics which have been rejected by physicists as incorrectly describing heat flows. But hey, let's pretend that money is heat, and let's use equations the physicists have rejected and we'll be able to claim we're all "mathematical", yea? POWER, MONEY!!
No, only real economists use psychology. In fact, the subfield of economics that studies the application of psychology to economics is called "behaviour economics". Because, and you might have guessed that, it studies how real human beings actually behave when making economic decisions. Needless to say, behaviour economics, and the other subfields that make up real economics, aren't very well regarded by economists at large. Economists are after all, almost without exception, fake economists.
Next, part 2
Friday, December 25, 2009
The Disease Process In Physics
The Real History Of Physics
Okay, I've been asked a question about how the big bang occurred. Now for those very few of you who understand history of physics, you'll know that physics is not a happy story of one triumph after another, each discovery extending the achievements of previous generations.
The grim reality is much closer to one giant clusterfuck after another with doddering morons drunk on their own power stubbornly clinging to the most obsolete notions until the day they die. And inflicting blatant lies on their captive audiences of suffering students in order to ensure future generations are just as fucked up as they themselves are. You know, because pain is educational.
Everybody who's read a single book on history of science knows this, whether it was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions or Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. And it's a shame that physicists, being vapid self-aggrandizing shits, choose to pretend to teach history of physics in physics classes so as to brainwash everyone with their ridiculous propaganda.
But that's just the way it is. So if you've studied history of physics then you know the common misconceptions are blatant lies. And if you haven't, if you've merely studied physics, then do me the favour of shutting the fuck up about a subject you know absolutely nothing about.
Some Examples
Let's list some of those clusterfucks.
Okay, I've been asked a question about how the big bang occurred. Now for those very few of you who understand history of physics, you'll know that physics is not a happy story of one triumph after another, each discovery extending the achievements of previous generations.
The grim reality is much closer to one giant clusterfuck after another with doddering morons drunk on their own power stubbornly clinging to the most obsolete notions until the day they die. And inflicting blatant lies on their captive audiences of suffering students in order to ensure future generations are just as fucked up as they themselves are. You know, because pain is educational.
Everybody who's read a single book on history of science knows this, whether it was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions or Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. And it's a shame that physicists, being vapid self-aggrandizing shits, choose to pretend to teach history of physics in physics classes so as to brainwash everyone with their ridiculous propaganda.
But that's just the way it is. So if you've studied history of physics then you know the common misconceptions are blatant lies. And if you haven't, if you've merely studied physics, then do me the favour of shutting the fuck up about a subject you know absolutely nothing about.
Some Examples
Let's list some of those clusterfucks.
- Heisenberg's clinging to an intrinsically ridiculous concept of point particles (it's why what was called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle bears no relation to anything bearing that name now)
- the Copenhagen consensus reverting physics to filthy vitalism (ie, the false dichotomy between observer vs observed)
- Bell's awe-inspiring mistake of producing (or even trying to produce) a circular "proof" of vitalism, still celebrated to this day as a major advance even though it set back any understanding of quantum physics for most of a century
- assuming continuity in physics even across revolutions such as classical to quantum. Notice the casual coverup that's occurred over the 3 radically different iterations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (note also how mathematicians do the same thing with Goedel)
- the intrinsically incoherent "concept" of non-determinism and "wave collapse". If you bother to analyze it, you'll find out it doesn't actually mean anything. See the middle of this page for details.
- the steady erasure of the formal definition of probability from math and physics textbooks because (being multi-valued) it's incompatible with the dominant retardation (yes Virginia, censorship and groupthink happens)
- no teaching of what quantum probabilities are cause you're supposed to figure it out on your own, by magic, after several years of studying math. No mention of what happens to those who study the math for years and still don't get it.
- no deep understanding of time
- no deep understanding of information
- no organizing of physics along conceptual lines, let alone teaching such. Active scorn towards the idea of teaching concepts (this is how the priesthood maintains its power, by demanding that all go through its rites of passage before touching on the sacred knowledge)
- confusing physics with history of physics with mathematics of physics
- having no conception of physics or physical theories beyond "what we do"
If you've kept count, you'll note that quantum mechanics as taught is an amalgamation of more than a half dozen clusterfucks. Each of which separately would warrant mass dismissals from the halls of academe. Nice, eh?
Why The Rant?
At this point you might be wondering why I'm ranting about physicists failures with quantum mechanics when the subject at hand is basic cosmology. There's a good reason for that and it's because physicists' clusterfuck on the big bang question is very stereotypical. It's not just some random mistake or even some random clusterfuck that you can just say Oops and forget about it. This is their modus operandi!
The predictable result of all this is also entirely stereotypical. The deeper problems in cosmology are relegated, dismissed, misunderstood or screwed up. And it's the lay-people's comprehension of the subject that suffers most. And just like in quantum mechanics, don't expect anyone to fix anything in cosmology for several generations. Maybe even a century or two.
Whether in quantum physics or cosmology, you can see the same diseased process at work. The symptoms are the same, the diagnosis is the same, and the prognosis is the same. In both cases, you have morons trying to do science without any grasp of (or respect for) the bigger picture They are incapable of synthesizing overarching concepts and are suspicious and scornful of anyone that does.
Next up is what's wrong with big bang theory.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Overlearning
What Is Overlearning
Overlearning is a broad topic. Let's start first of all with just what is overlearning. Basically, it's conditioned stimulus-response pairs. It's when you've learned something so profoundly that you can't set it aside easily. When it takes real conscious effort in order to set it aside at all.
As proof, you only need note that if a person is flashed a picture of a green square with the word BLUE written on it and then asked what colour it was, they're likely to answer Blue. The connection from lines and angles to letters to words is so strong, so solid, so automatic, that it's capable of displacing the perception of colour.
In the case of reading, overlearning it is beneficial. The benefits are high, the drawbacks are few and esoteric. And in any case, it's unavoidable since written language is omnipresent in an average modern person's life. You can't avoid overlearning reading without becoming a primitive throwback so you might as well suck it up as part and parcel of civilization.
In fact, the association of literacy to civilization is so strong that illiterate nations were considered barbaric savages in earlier centuries.
Neurosis and Psychosis
But reading is hardly the only thing that can be overlearned. Lots of things can be overlearned. Steven Pinker explains quite lucidly in this essay why swearing is overlearned. Disgust which comes from fear of mortality seems to be an overlearned reaction which it is difficult to get past without understanding its basis.
In earlier times, fear, awe and reverence were overlearned. This was called Sacredness and Holiness. Sacred were those things towards which fear was overlearned. Just think of sacred bears and sacred jaguars, both murderous. And holy were those things towards which awe was overlearned. As Julian Jaynes points out in The Origin Of Consciousness, the past couple of millenia have seen the profaning of the sacred. That is, the rise of consciousness and its erosion of all things anti-conscious such as insanity and religiosity.
When neuroses are so numerous and overwhelming that they impede basic functioning and a person's sense of reality then we speak of psychoses. Religious experiences are psychotic in nature. The Jerusalem Syndrome is commonly known among psychologists. As are Conversion Experiences, when a person is subjected to such a barrage of extreme stimuli, often with emotional content, that their sense of reality (often including their sense of self) distorts and breaks.
Pedophilia
Pedophilia is pretty funny, just not haha funny. Most people can tell you that pedophilia is wrong but people being idiots, they can't tell you why it's wrong. Worse, people aren't logical enough to either accept that there's nothing wrong with pedophilia or to gather evidence of its being wrong. Fortunately, I do know what's wrong with pedophilia and will explain it to you, so you don't have to act like a retard if the issue ever comes up.
Yeah, you probably guessed it has something to do with overlearning. And if you're smart, you may even have guessed pedophilia is wrong because it causes overlearning. Which it does. It causes overlearning of sex. It causes children to become sexualized and to learn to behave sexually even when they don't desire anyone (which they don't since they're children) or they aren't sexually aroused (which they may or may not be). The typical result of pedophilia is sexual compulsion. And since compulsion undermines conscious control of oneself, it is almost automatically evil.
Incidentally, the sexual compulsion produced by pedophilia is the reason why humans were universally pedophilic way back when before consciousness arose. It was easily demonstrated in the case of feral children (incapable of consciousness or language) that they are incapable of completing the sexual act. So yeah, way back then pedophilia was necessary for the continuation of the species. It isn't anymore, and it's harmful now, but it's necessary to keep in mind why we have it today at all. It's a relic of the past. Millenia in the past. And contemporary with widespread infanticide.
Stimulus Response
Humans are not mindless animals, humans are not rats or dogs, humans have complex inner states consisting of expectations and anticipation, not merely memories and feelings like animals do. Stimulus-Response is broadly, with a few exceptions such as reading, pretty evil. And anyone who denies this, anyone who tries to reduce humans to mere animals, is against the great human project and a bitter enemy of humanity.
And hey, if behaviourists want to claim that humans don't have minds then they can't complain when theirs are stripped from them, can they? It would be merely justice if behaviourists were tortured until their minds snap. The best kind of justice even, the poetic kind.
I remain appalled at the number of people who wish they could throw away their consciousness. Behaviourists, Religionists (Christian and Buddhist), Gaians, Primitivists. Even Zombies who claim they don't have any subjective mind at all, let alone consciousness. I will eagerly welcome a day when our technology allows these people to experience their fondest wish.
Friday, December 18, 2009
What Are Oughts
There's a tired old argument that keeps recurring over and over again whenever sane people encounter egotistical numbfucks (henceforth 'egotists'). The egotists like to claim that altruism doesn't exist blah blah blah, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Evidence both definitional and empirical (see Amartya Sen on Identity). And of course sane people counter the egotists but then go on to pontificate about the fact that you can't derive Ought statements from Is statements.
To me this is very sad because those otherwise sane people are obvious mental incompetents who haven't the slightest idea what Ought statements are in the first place. And their "arguments" involve a lot of trivial examples (ignoring the fact you can't prove a universal statement from examples, let alone trivial examples) and quoting other mental incompetents who happen to be famous among their clique. And when you pontificate at length about a subject whose basic concepts you neither understand nor comprehend, well that's just sad.
So what are Ought statements? Fuck statements, what are OUGHTs in the first place? Oughts are second generation desires. Or meta-desires. Oughts are what you want to want. You want ice cream, right? But does that mean you OUGHT to have ice cream? No, it doesn't. After all, maybe you're fat and you really wish you didn't want ice cream. Oughts are the universal wants. Things you want to be the case in all places, at all times, in all timelines and all possible realities.
That's why Ought statements can never be derived from Is statements. Not because some mentally incompetent overhyped philosopher said so two centuries ago. Nor because you can come up with a handful of examples of its not working. No, simply from the fact that Ought statements can only be derived from GREATER THAN the sum total of reality. And Is statements encompass only a reality. Pretty fucking simple, innit? But then again, what 'ought' means seems pretty simple once you actually know it.
IS
In fact, let's deviate first into IS. As everyone who's ever studied meta-mathematics knows, there's no such thing as a universal mathematical system. There's no such thing as universal mathematical statements. Truth and falsity depends entirely on the system you're working in. EXISTENCE depends on the system you're working in. To say that something exists means that an object having its characteristics can be found in such and such a system. Existence doesn't say something about "objects" the way other predicates do, it says something about objects in a specific system. That's why it's a meta-predicate.
Now, the system can be Mathematical System 1, or Mathematical System 2, or any of an infinite number of others. And Physical Reality is merely 'the mathematical system which we live in and experience subjectively'. This is why math succeeds in describing physical reality. Because physical reality is just math. The great "mystery" that has boggled famous but mentally incompetent philosophers for 2000 years is neatly resolved.
WANT
And with that deviation out of the way, let's get back to Wants. What are wants exactly? It seems like such a terribly obvious question. And it is, once you actually know the answer.
First of all, wants are not "preferences". Preferences are relations between two things. Wants are not relations between things. They aren't binary, they're unary.
Second of all, wants are not real numbers. They don't add together and they don't multiply. 10,000 oranges don't have the value of 1 orange. 10,000 trinkets you want don't have the value of the life of a friend. Your relationship with a friend doesn't have the value of their life.
Funny thing though, both economics (who think wants are preferences) and utilitarians (who think they're real numbers) use "utility" and "utility function" to describe wants. And it's not just because they're retards stuck on a term that was in favour two centuries ago. No, it's because these two groups share between them a core of fanatical anti-reality egotistical right-wing fucks.
If you want to have some laughs, attend a few lectures on economics. Physical reality as it actually is never enters into their tiny little heads. Only mathematical reality and reality as it is imagined by other economists. You'll never hear an economist ask "does this concept actually describe anything at all in physical reality"? Take Ricardo's theorem of comparative advantage, which shows taht free trade is always advantageous in a situation where labour and financial investments can't move geographic and political boundaries. Does this describe anything in the post-1980s world? No, it does not.
For that matter, the equations of standard economics all come from obsolete thermodynamical equations. You know, ones that didn't work. And that were supposed to describe heat anyways, not money. They were just transferred wholesale, and economists are all too mentally incompetent and brainwashed to check whether they're true. Or even to care.
Okay, I never said they were happy laughs. They're more the kind where you have to laugh because otherwise you'd cry.
What WANTs Are
Okay, so if Wants aren't preferences and they aren't reals, then what are they? One candidate is hyperreals. Hyperreals have the useful property that a billion times an infinity is more or less equal to that infinity. Multiplyig an infinity by any finite amount will never get you the next greater infinity. Establishing a reliable supply of donated blood will always be a higher moral priority than killing the vampire, no matter how much blood he drinks, so long as he doesn't endanger anyone's life. No matter how many (finite) number of people he inconveniences.
Hyper-reals also have the nice property that two infinities of the same order CAN BE compared against each other ... and the comparisons will give different answers at different times. Saving 2 people's life has more priority than saving 1 person's life, unless those 2 are retarded. It's all nicely fuzzy and actually does depend on the otherwise irrelevant finite multiplication factor.
Whatever wants are, I like to call them 'values'. It's not quite correct since people have the notion that values are high-falutin' things that exclude earthy desires like chocolate and ice cream. But all the other technical words (utility, preferences) have reserved (wrong) meanings. And 'desires' is wrong too since what I mean by values (or by wants for that matter) includes satisfied desires. By value I include things you don't actually want right now. Values include things whoese heh "value" is 0; or even negative value for things you hate or are repelled from. As opposed to things that have a value of NIL; things that just never cross your mind.
If you can think of a better candidate term than 'value' for the concept, something that doesn't give the wrong flavour, I'll adopt it immediately.
Deriving Oughts From Is, part 2
So what does it mean for something to be an Ought? It means it's a kind of Want. It's something you Want To Want. And what does it mean to be a Want? It means that some concept or idea has got a little hyperreal number tagged to it. That's the difference between an Is and an Ought concept or idea, the latter has a meta-tag attached to it and the former just has nothing.
So it's pretty obvious why you can't derive Oughts from Ises. Because those meta-tags don't exist as part of the thing (concept, idea, object, whatever). It's your mind (or your brain for you mindless types) that attaches tags to things. The tags spread almost like viruses from one concept to any nearby concepts. Or your mind can just tag things by inspecting the tags of any concepts logically related to the concept you're examining. If you can do logic anyways.
The point here though is that those tags don't exist in physical reality. Ice cream cartons don't come with little tags attached to them that say "Richard wants me THIS much". Those tags are created by the mind and exist solely in the mind.
Meta-circular
And yeah, the mind is a product of the brain and the brain is embedded in physical reality. That's called meta-circularity. The fact that inside of physical reality is a brain that has a(n incomplete) model of all of physical reality. But meta-circularity is a strange beast and that's why all sane people pretend it doesn't exist unless they're actually talking ABOUT meta-circularity.
Consciousness (both multileveled and unileveled) is an artifact of meta-circularity. The fact that Oughts and consciousness are both meta-circular is not a coincidence. They're actually different aspects of the same phenomenon. It's why people attaining multileveled consciousness develop higher level values (values that govern their values) even though the proper definition of multileveling (creating an independent conception of oneself) makes no reference to values.
But even when talking about consciousness, it's always helpful to shove the meta-circularity to the side. Acknowledge it then dismiss it. Pretend it isn't there and treat the meta-hierarchy linearly. Pretend the mind exists outside of reality. Pretend that Ought statements can't be found in Is statements about your mind or your brain.
Because they're strange loops, and people who like to draw strange loops together like knotted rope are retarded morons. They're twits who like to Shock and Awe people rather than explain anything. Comprehension of strange loops can only come from cutting and unrolling them. Just take the strange loop, duplicate it a few times, cut each loop in different places and unroll them all. That's the key to comprehending how they work.
So that's all there is to it. Anyone who says Ought statements are Is statements is just trying to fuck with you by drawing your attention to a true but utterly unimportant fact. Yes, there's a strange loop (a meta-circularity) in there. So what? That's not the important bit. The important bit is the relation between Is->Want->Ought, not Ought-(Is). The important bit is that Oughts are those Wants which you Want To Want.
To me this is very sad because those otherwise sane people are obvious mental incompetents who haven't the slightest idea what Ought statements are in the first place. And their "arguments" involve a lot of trivial examples (ignoring the fact you can't prove a universal statement from examples, let alone trivial examples) and quoting other mental incompetents who happen to be famous among their clique. And when you pontificate at length about a subject whose basic concepts you neither understand nor comprehend, well that's just sad.
So what are Ought statements? Fuck statements, what are OUGHTs in the first place? Oughts are second generation desires. Or meta-desires. Oughts are what you want to want. You want ice cream, right? But does that mean you OUGHT to have ice cream? No, it doesn't. After all, maybe you're fat and you really wish you didn't want ice cream. Oughts are the universal wants. Things you want to be the case in all places, at all times, in all timelines and all possible realities.
That's why Ought statements can never be derived from Is statements. Not because some mentally incompetent overhyped philosopher said so two centuries ago. Nor because you can come up with a handful of examples of its not working. No, simply from the fact that Ought statements can only be derived from GREATER THAN the sum total of reality. And Is statements encompass only a reality. Pretty fucking simple, innit? But then again, what 'ought' means seems pretty simple once you actually know it.
IS
In fact, let's deviate first into IS. As everyone who's ever studied meta-mathematics knows, there's no such thing as a universal mathematical system. There's no such thing as universal mathematical statements. Truth and falsity depends entirely on the system you're working in. EXISTENCE depends on the system you're working in. To say that something exists means that an object having its characteristics can be found in such and such a system. Existence doesn't say something about "objects" the way other predicates do, it says something about objects in a specific system. That's why it's a meta-predicate.
Now, the system can be Mathematical System 1, or Mathematical System 2, or any of an infinite number of others. And Physical Reality is merely 'the mathematical system which we live in and experience subjectively'. This is why math succeeds in describing physical reality. Because physical reality is just math. The great "mystery" that has boggled famous but mentally incompetent philosophers for 2000 years is neatly resolved.
WANT
And with that deviation out of the way, let's get back to Wants. What are wants exactly? It seems like such a terribly obvious question. And it is, once you actually know the answer.
First of all, wants are not "preferences". Preferences are relations between two things. Wants are not relations between things. They aren't binary, they're unary.
Second of all, wants are not real numbers. They don't add together and they don't multiply. 10,000 oranges don't have the value of 1 orange. 10,000 trinkets you want don't have the value of the life of a friend. Your relationship with a friend doesn't have the value of their life.
Funny thing though, both economics (who think wants are preferences) and utilitarians (who think they're real numbers) use "utility" and "utility function" to describe wants. And it's not just because they're retards stuck on a term that was in favour two centuries ago. No, it's because these two groups share between them a core of fanatical anti-reality egotistical right-wing fucks.
If you want to have some laughs, attend a few lectures on economics. Physical reality as it actually is never enters into their tiny little heads. Only mathematical reality and reality as it is imagined by other economists. You'll never hear an economist ask "does this concept actually describe anything at all in physical reality"? Take Ricardo's theorem of comparative advantage, which shows taht free trade is always advantageous in a situation where labour and financial investments can't move geographic and political boundaries. Does this describe anything in the post-1980s world? No, it does not.
For that matter, the equations of standard economics all come from obsolete thermodynamical equations. You know, ones that didn't work. And that were supposed to describe heat anyways, not money. They were just transferred wholesale, and economists are all too mentally incompetent and brainwashed to check whether they're true. Or even to care.
Okay, I never said they were happy laughs. They're more the kind where you have to laugh because otherwise you'd cry.
What WANTs Are
Okay, so if Wants aren't preferences and they aren't reals, then what are they? One candidate is hyperreals. Hyperreals have the useful property that a billion times an infinity is more or less equal to that infinity. Multiplyig an infinity by any finite amount will never get you the next greater infinity. Establishing a reliable supply of donated blood will always be a higher moral priority than killing the vampire, no matter how much blood he drinks, so long as he doesn't endanger anyone's life. No matter how many (finite) number of people he inconveniences.
Hyper-reals also have the nice property that two infinities of the same order CAN BE compared against each other ... and the comparisons will give different answers at different times. Saving 2 people's life has more priority than saving 1 person's life, unless those 2 are retarded. It's all nicely fuzzy and actually does depend on the otherwise irrelevant finite multiplication factor.
Whatever wants are, I like to call them 'values'. It's not quite correct since people have the notion that values are high-falutin' things that exclude earthy desires like chocolate and ice cream. But all the other technical words (utility, preferences) have reserved (wrong) meanings. And 'desires' is wrong too since what I mean by values (or by wants for that matter) includes satisfied desires. By value I include things you don't actually want right now. Values include things whoese heh "value" is 0; or even negative value for things you hate or are repelled from. As opposed to things that have a value of NIL; things that just never cross your mind.
If you can think of a better candidate term than 'value' for the concept, something that doesn't give the wrong flavour, I'll adopt it immediately.
Deriving Oughts From Is, part 2
So what does it mean for something to be an Ought? It means it's a kind of Want. It's something you Want To Want. And what does it mean to be a Want? It means that some concept or idea has got a little hyperreal number tagged to it. That's the difference between an Is and an Ought concept or idea, the latter has a meta-tag attached to it and the former just has nothing.
So it's pretty obvious why you can't derive Oughts from Ises. Because those meta-tags don't exist as part of the thing (concept, idea, object, whatever). It's your mind (or your brain for you mindless types) that attaches tags to things. The tags spread almost like viruses from one concept to any nearby concepts. Or your mind can just tag things by inspecting the tags of any concepts logically related to the concept you're examining. If you can do logic anyways.
The point here though is that those tags don't exist in physical reality. Ice cream cartons don't come with little tags attached to them that say "Richard wants me THIS much". Those tags are created by the mind and exist solely in the mind.
Meta-circular
And yeah, the mind is a product of the brain and the brain is embedded in physical reality. That's called meta-circularity. The fact that inside of physical reality is a brain that has a(n incomplete) model of all of physical reality. But meta-circularity is a strange beast and that's why all sane people pretend it doesn't exist unless they're actually talking ABOUT meta-circularity.
Consciousness (both multileveled and unileveled) is an artifact of meta-circularity. The fact that Oughts and consciousness are both meta-circular is not a coincidence. They're actually different aspects of the same phenomenon. It's why people attaining multileveled consciousness develop higher level values (values that govern their values) even though the proper definition of multileveling (creating an independent conception of oneself) makes no reference to values.
But even when talking about consciousness, it's always helpful to shove the meta-circularity to the side. Acknowledge it then dismiss it. Pretend it isn't there and treat the meta-hierarchy linearly. Pretend the mind exists outside of reality. Pretend that Ought statements can't be found in Is statements about your mind or your brain.
Because they're strange loops, and people who like to draw strange loops together like knotted rope are retarded morons. They're twits who like to Shock and Awe people rather than explain anything. Comprehension of strange loops can only come from cutting and unrolling them. Just take the strange loop, duplicate it a few times, cut each loop in different places and unroll them all. That's the key to comprehending how they work.
So that's all there is to it. Anyone who says Ought statements are Is statements is just trying to fuck with you by drawing your attention to a true but utterly unimportant fact. Yes, there's a strange loop (a meta-circularity) in there. So what? That's not the important bit. The important bit is the relation between Is->Want->Ought, not Ought-(Is). The important bit is that Oughts are those Wants which you Want To Want.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Reward-Seeking vs Goal-Seeking
There's a fairly interesting post about the limitations of reward seeking. Unfortunately, it's somewhat lacking in insight. I mean, yes reward seeking is limited, so what? It's not like this is a novel observation to anyone who's encountered utilitarians, hedonists and other egotistical numbnut fucks. Limited, problematic, sterile, dead, take your pick of adjective.
What is the real difference between reward-seeking and goal-seeking in the minds of the people who believe in them? Given the copious and total disproofs of utilitarianism, egotism and behaviourism, given how completely discredited these pathetic attempts at philosophy are, why is it that numbnut fucks that believe in reward-seeking exist at all?
The key insight here is that they are mindless. Reward-seeking is a mindless behaviour which any trivial automaton is able to produce. Slugs can do it. Amoeba can do it. It doesn't take a mind to engage in reward-seeking. It doesn't even take a single neuron! All it takes is a mindless obsession towards some kind of easily-perceived and discernible external condition.
The other insight is that reward-seeking is entirely egotistical. The only thing that ultimately matters to the reward-seeker is themselves. Their own reward. Despite the pretense and pathetic protestations otherwise, utilitarianism is an ideology of egotistical wankers trying to aggrandize themselves by justifying their atavistic greed.
To see this, just consider whether a utilitarian would ever push a button that kills themselves in order for someone ELSE to experience an eternal orgasm. Utilitarians somehow never consider that it would provide me with immense pleasure for the rest of my natural life if they all suicided. A philosophy doesn't get any more dead than by prescribing the deaths of its practitioners.
So yeah, these are mindless people. Lying and hypocritical but mindless. So it comes as no surprise that they would try to aggrandize themselves (which gets them a mindless reward) by assuming that everyone else is just as mindless as themselves. That's the reason why it's so difficult to convince utilitarians of the sterility of their ideology, despite the easy disproofs. Because they have no first-hand experience of having a mind, they don't believe that minds exist. Especially when it would make them inferior.
To have a mind means to value concepts above sensations, above mere experiences. And the fundamental concepts which are valued above all others can be fairly esoteric. For instance, I value fractals. I have an affinity towards fractals of all kinds, whether it's complex music with high dynamic range, or trees, or the Haussman city districts in Paris. Even my disgust for uniformity, hierarchy, orthodoxy, linearity, and conformity of all kinds is just an expression of my affinity towards fractals. Same goes for my disgust for the dehumanizing concept of reward-seeking.
A reward-seeking idiot would claim that fractals are my reward, but that's not even remotely true. I want fractals to exist whether or not I ever experience them. Whether or not I ever could experience them. Just knowing they exist pleases me. Just knowing that uniformity exists displeases me. Just knowing that conformity (sub-optimal uniformity) exists disgusts me.
(And let's not go into the ridiculous conceit of reward-seekers that 'pleases' as uttered by a goal-seeker has any relation to mindless pleasure. Enjoying a concept isn't the same thing as enjoying a sensation. And appreciation (a kind of highly abstracted pleasure) isn't the same thing as enjoyment anyways.)
To get back to the point, I don't need to experience something to care about it nor do I need to be someone else to care about them. That's the mark of an intellectual by the way, that they can mentally place themselves in environments and situations far removed from their daily life. Whether those environments are the other side of the world, in a different galaxy, a different person of a different race or even an entirely different kind of being. Even impossible situations such as back in time can be and are imagined and thus matter.
That's what having a mind means, that you care about having a mind. That you would never willingly sacrifice it to become some kind of mindless animal experiencing forever the Ultimate Orgasm. It may seem that there's a difference between having a mind and wanting a mind, but one day soon, our technology will allow reward-seekers to become the mindless animals they desperately want to be. So the difference between wanting a mind and having one will soon disappear.
As a practical matter, I've found that people capable of abstractions care about them. I have yet to meet someone capable of abstract thought who was dissatisfied with their possessing their cognitive faculties. Dissatisfaction with and devaluation of abstract thought is the province of those who are incapable of it.
What is the real difference between reward-seeking and goal-seeking in the minds of the people who believe in them? Given the copious and total disproofs of utilitarianism, egotism and behaviourism, given how completely discredited these pathetic attempts at philosophy are, why is it that numbnut fucks that believe in reward-seeking exist at all?
The key insight here is that they are mindless. Reward-seeking is a mindless behaviour which any trivial automaton is able to produce. Slugs can do it. Amoeba can do it. It doesn't take a mind to engage in reward-seeking. It doesn't even take a single neuron! All it takes is a mindless obsession towards some kind of easily-perceived and discernible external condition.
The other insight is that reward-seeking is entirely egotistical. The only thing that ultimately matters to the reward-seeker is themselves. Their own reward. Despite the pretense and pathetic protestations otherwise, utilitarianism is an ideology of egotistical wankers trying to aggrandize themselves by justifying their atavistic greed.
To see this, just consider whether a utilitarian would ever push a button that kills themselves in order for someone ELSE to experience an eternal orgasm. Utilitarians somehow never consider that it would provide me with immense pleasure for the rest of my natural life if they all suicided. A philosophy doesn't get any more dead than by prescribing the deaths of its practitioners.
So yeah, these are mindless people. Lying and hypocritical but mindless. So it comes as no surprise that they would try to aggrandize themselves (which gets them a mindless reward) by assuming that everyone else is just as mindless as themselves. That's the reason why it's so difficult to convince utilitarians of the sterility of their ideology, despite the easy disproofs. Because they have no first-hand experience of having a mind, they don't believe that minds exist. Especially when it would make them inferior.
To have a mind means to value concepts above sensations, above mere experiences. And the fundamental concepts which are valued above all others can be fairly esoteric. For instance, I value fractals. I have an affinity towards fractals of all kinds, whether it's complex music with high dynamic range, or trees, or the Haussman city districts in Paris. Even my disgust for uniformity, hierarchy, orthodoxy, linearity, and conformity of all kinds is just an expression of my affinity towards fractals. Same goes for my disgust for the dehumanizing concept of reward-seeking.
A reward-seeking idiot would claim that fractals are my reward, but that's not even remotely true. I want fractals to exist whether or not I ever experience them. Whether or not I ever could experience them. Just knowing they exist pleases me. Just knowing that uniformity exists displeases me. Just knowing that conformity (sub-optimal uniformity) exists disgusts me.
(And let's not go into the ridiculous conceit of reward-seekers that 'pleases' as uttered by a goal-seeker has any relation to mindless pleasure. Enjoying a concept isn't the same thing as enjoying a sensation. And appreciation (a kind of highly abstracted pleasure) isn't the same thing as enjoyment anyways.)
To get back to the point, I don't need to experience something to care about it nor do I need to be someone else to care about them. That's the mark of an intellectual by the way, that they can mentally place themselves in environments and situations far removed from their daily life. Whether those environments are the other side of the world, in a different galaxy, a different person of a different race or even an entirely different kind of being. Even impossible situations such as back in time can be and are imagined and thus matter.
That's what having a mind means, that you care about having a mind. That you would never willingly sacrifice it to become some kind of mindless animal experiencing forever the Ultimate Orgasm
As a practical matter, I've found that people capable of abstractions care about them. I have yet to meet someone capable of abstract thought who was dissatisfied with their possessing their cognitive faculties. Dissatisfaction with and devaluation of abstract thought is the province of those who are incapable of it.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Pet Peeve #731: Liberal => Left-Wing
This one doesn't bug me so much when average Americans or even Canadians do it. I don't expect much from eager citizens of the most brainwashed country in human history. And I'm not excluding North Korea or goodness forbid slave-holding, slave-killing, totalitarian, communist, fascistic Sparta from the running either. I mean, how can you not give the prize to the nation that invented propaganda and inspired Goebbels?
Well, it still bugs me when otherwise educated, genuinely cosmopolitan people do this liberal == left-wing crap. Anglophones' comprehension of politics would be much enhanced if they accepted that liberals are right-wingers BY DEFINITION. They are so not just in, say, British Columbia but EVERYWHERE. They are so in Russia. They are so in France. They are so in Germany. They are so in Canada, at the federal and provincial levels. And they are so in the Naziesque USA.
Right-wing and left-wing have standardized, well-understood definitions in political and international science. A left-winger is someone who believes in social justice, or something else, as the key economic organizing principle. A right-winger is someone who believes in capitalism. A centrist is someone who’s agnostic to economic ideology.
By this internationally understood standard it’s clear the NDP are centrists, that there is no left-wing party at the federal level in canada. And that the USA is about as politically balanced as 1940 Germany.
The other meaning of liberal is of course the term of abuse used in the USA. This term of abuse has as its meanings (both original and current) ’sexual liberal’. Which basically means “fags, homos, and nigger fuckers”. US Democrats are conservatives who happen to be fags, homos and nigger fuckers.
To see why, you have only to note that the common french word libertine translates into the esoteric word ‘free-spirit’. There’s obviously a lacunae in the American culture, one that was filled by ‘liberal’. This becomes obvious when you consider that Americans despise others’ sexuality. So the correct translation of libertine into the American language is NOT free-spirit but liberal, with all the attendant scorn.
Getting back to economics, if you want to look for economic liberals in the USA, look no further than redneck country Texas. Where free environmental laws allow every coal-spewing power plant to pollute and every citizen to die of arsenic and mercury poisoning. That’s liberalism!
Sigh. At least in European countries, socialism and communism are well-enough defined that liberalism has some meaning against it. In the USA, the only political parties are the Corruption Party and the Antedeluvian Corruption Party. To claim that one or another is more or less liberal than the other is ludicrous. Conservative? Sure. Fascist? Oh yeah. Anti-Left? Yeah. But actually liberal? Hell no.
So you see, liberal doesn’t even have any well-defined meaning in the USA. Other than of course as a term of abuse. And your attempt to pretend that there exists a left-wing in American politics (other than the lone socialist senator from Vermont) just to avoid facing the fact you live in one of the most totalitarian and autocratic nations in history is a joke.
Finally, there are more left-wing conservatives (and there are plenty) than there are left-wing liberals. Except of course the self-subverting seriously confused puppies of Moderaterna in Sweden.
Well, it still bugs me when otherwise educated, genuinely cosmopolitan people do this liberal == left-wing crap. Anglophones' comprehension of politics would be much enhanced if they accepted that liberals are right-wingers BY DEFINITION. They are so not just in, say, British Columbia but EVERYWHERE. They are so in Russia. They are so in France. They are so in Germany. They are so in Canada, at the federal and provincial levels. And they are so in the Naziesque USA.
Right-wing and left-wing have standardized, well-understood definitions in political and international science. A left-winger is someone who believes in social justice, or something else, as the key economic organizing principle. A right-winger is someone who believes in capitalism. A centrist is someone who’s agnostic to economic ideology.
By this internationally understood standard it’s clear the NDP are centrists, that there is no left-wing party at the federal level in canada. And that the USA is about as politically balanced as 1940 Germany.
The other meaning of liberal is of course the term of abuse used in the USA. This term of abuse has as its meanings (both original and current) ’sexual liberal’. Which basically means “fags, homos, and nigger fuckers”. US Democrats are conservatives who happen to be fags, homos and nigger fuckers.
To see why, you have only to note that the common french word libertine translates into the esoteric word ‘free-spirit’. There’s obviously a lacunae in the American culture, one that was filled by ‘liberal’. This becomes obvious when you consider that Americans despise others’ sexuality. So the correct translation of libertine into the American language is NOT free-spirit but liberal, with all the attendant scorn.
Getting back to economics, if you want to look for economic liberals in the USA, look no further than redneck country Texas. Where free environmental laws allow every coal-spewing power plant to pollute and every citizen to die of arsenic and mercury poisoning. That’s liberalism!
Sigh. At least in European countries, socialism and communism are well-enough defined that liberalism has some meaning against it. In the USA, the only political parties are the Corruption Party and the Antedeluvian Corruption Party. To claim that one or another is more or less liberal than the other is ludicrous. Conservative? Sure. Fascist? Oh yeah. Anti-Left? Yeah. But actually liberal? Hell no.
So you see, liberal doesn’t even have any well-defined meaning in the USA. Other than of course as a term of abuse. And your attempt to pretend that there exists a left-wing in American politics (other than the lone socialist senator from Vermont) just to avoid facing the fact you live in one of the most totalitarian and autocratic nations in history is a joke.
Finally, there are more left-wing conservatives (and there are plenty) than there are left-wing liberals. Except of course the self-subverting seriously confused puppies of Moderaterna in Sweden.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Differences in National Attitudes Towards Rail
Swiss:
I want a rail tunnel. no, you heard me right the first time! I WANT A RAIL TUNNEL. ummm, I want ... two rail tunnels? yeah, yeah I want two rail tunnels!
Loetschberg base tunnel in the Swiss alps: go, go, go, oops, well that turned out to be quite expensive, we'll need to save some money for the next tunnel.
Gotthard base tunnel in the Swiss alps: go, go, go, no wait, make it better yeah. sweeet!
So when's the next one? We have to start planning RIGHT AWAY!
Austrians:
Brenner base tunnel in the Austrian-Italian alps: hold on a minute, I don't want to pay for this, YOU pay, fuck do I have to? well I suppose, maybe I will, man this thing is never gonna pay for itself, well I suppose we can so long as this is gonna be CHEAP. oh man where are we gonna get the money for it?
I suspect the Austrians only did it because the Swiss were making them look bad. The lousy cheapskates.
On the Swiss side, I have never seen any indication, or any concern whatsoever, that the duplicate Loetschberg and Gotthardt base tunnels are going to be uneconomical. It's just kind of assumed that they will be economical. Money just isn't a concern, these things will pay for themselves many times over in the next century or two.
The same thing can't be said about the Austrians. All I find is road companies and trucking companies tearing it down, and politicians finding one excuse or another to not do it, or having exceedingly delusional ideas about how little it's going to cost, or how much others are going to pay for it.
I guess that's the difference between direct democracy and totalitarian capitalism.
Oh and in case you're interested,
France:
I am BUSY. Can't you see I'm building rail lines over here? Don't talk to me of tunnels, I don't like tunnels. And I'm busy. Just go away. Yes, yes, come back in 20 years.
America:
What is rail?
California:
Vy rail? Ve haf prisons to build! Ve need money for prisons!
I want a rail tunnel. no, you heard me right the first time! I WANT A RAIL TUNNEL. ummm, I want ... two rail tunnels? yeah, yeah I want two rail tunnels!
Loetschberg base tunnel in the Swiss alps: go, go, go, oops, well that turned out to be quite expensive, we'll need to save some money for the next tunnel.
Gotthard base tunnel in the Swiss alps: go, go, go, no wait, make it better yeah. sweeet!
So when's the next one? We have to start planning RIGHT AWAY!
Austrians:
Brenner base tunnel in the Austrian-Italian alps: hold on a minute, I don't want to pay for this, YOU pay, fuck do I have to? well I suppose, maybe I will, man this thing is never gonna pay for itself, well I suppose we can so long as this is gonna be CHEAP. oh man where are we gonna get the money for it?
I suspect the Austrians only did it because the Swiss were making them look bad. The lousy cheapskates.
On the Swiss side, I have never seen any indication, or any concern whatsoever, that the duplicate Loetschberg and Gotthardt base tunnels are going to be uneconomical. It's just kind of assumed that they will be economical. Money just isn't a concern, these things will pay for themselves many times over in the next century or two.
The same thing can't be said about the Austrians. All I find is road companies and trucking companies tearing it down, and politicians finding one excuse or another to not do it, or having exceedingly delusional ideas about how little it's going to cost, or how much others are going to pay for it.
I guess that's the difference between direct democracy and totalitarian capitalism.
Oh and in case you're interested,
France:
I am BUSY. Can't you see I'm building rail lines over here? Don't talk to me of tunnels, I don't like tunnels. And I'm busy. Just go away. Yes, yes, come back in 20 years.
America:
What is rail?
California:
Vy rail? Ve haf prisons to build! Ve need money for prisons!
Friday, December 04, 2009
Evolutionary Explanations
There's plenty of science in biology. Cladistics, measurements of the rate of evolution in the fossil and genomic records, the double hierachy, so on and so forth. You know, those parts of biology nobody ever hears about. There is precisely ZERO science in those parts of biology accessible to and proselytized to the mainstream public.
Ever wonder what an "Evolutionary Explanation" is technically? How biologists come up with them, work with them and test them? What their methodology is? Well it's pretty simple. When you strip out all the crap it boils down to that they IMAGINE what advantages a feature could have conferred way back in the past. Does this sound like mystical voudoun yet? The kind of "there are no coincidences in life" crap religionists specialize in putting out? If you've been paying attention, it should.
Let's take a look at the "evolutionary explanation" for visible breasts. For a long time biologists were convinced that visible breasts in human females developed due to sexual selection. Yeah, because for some magical reason, it happened in humans but not in any other animal species. Sounds convincing innit? But let's not let logic get in the way of biology! This is Serious Business here. This is fucking Academia damnit. You don't get to bring no logic in thar biology unless you have a P.H.D!
Then as if the biology profession were saved by Jeezus, they (or some of them anyways) cottoned on to the idea that homo sapiens, uniquely among animal species, doesn't have muzzles. And with infants' faces being crushed to a female's chest on a regular basis, they run the risk of being asphyxiated. The solution to that was big breasts to let the infant live and breathe. Aha! Surely life and death of infants provides a much stronger selection pressure than some "sexual selection" claptrap? You know, just IMAGINE it and you'll KNOW it's true. That's how science works innit? On IMAGINATION!
Of course, if biology were science then they would have heard of William of Ockham's famous razor. They would have noted a few psychological FACTS such as,
- infants draw comfort from breastfeeding
- breasts are imprinted as sources of comfort deep in the human psyche -- if blankets can be so imprinted just because they're soft, imagine the double whammy that comes from being soft and nourishing?
- adults are sexually drawn to sources of comfort as evidenced by the recent emergence of plushie fetishists
- an infant would judge the size of a breast compared to the size of their head
- people's perceptions of size don't make any allowances for growing up -- it's why your childhood bed seems so small after growing up
All of these are measurable, verifiable facts. Facts we can measure right now, today, and don't have to rely on our imaginations to make up. Add them all up together and what do you get? You get that there's more than sufficient reason for (ever-growing) big breasts to have evolved by accident. And if biologists were real scientists, as opposed to hopeless hacks, they would have left it at that.
But that's not all! You see, "evolutionary explanations" are bad enough. Try to wrap your mind around the cluster-fuck that is "evolutionary psychology". Yeah because that's all we needed. It's not enough to have one field that's a pseudo-scientific proto-science. No no, it's far better to cross it with another field that's pure verified pseudo-scientific proto-science. Yeah. That makes the pseudo-science synergize together until it's totally awesome. Paradigm shift baby!
No wait, I'm not done yet. Behold the total awesomeness that is evolutionary moral psychology. Yeah, because crossing TWO pseudo-scientific fields ruled by worthless hacks just wasn't enough. THREE is better! How the fuck do these people manage to breathe? Let alone eat and breed. Seriously.
Why are they so retarded? It's as I keep saying, they're magical thinkers. They're not analytic so they lack even the capacity to reason abstractly. And logic is an abstraction. Now you might think that magical thinkers get attracted to all fields of academe equally but that's not true. They get preferentially attracted to the fuzzy fields by a wide margin. And biology? Whoa.
The field of biology is a mass of contradictions because biology itself (ie, DNA and proteins) is nothing but a mass of arbitrary, contradictory, ad hoc crap. (Not to mention that it's non-linear as all hell so you actually cannot apply reductionism to it if you are going to be at all logical. The number one tool in the logic toolbox just doesn't work and even reaching for it is a horrible horrible idea.) So biology doesn't just attract wooly and fuzzy thinkers, it actively repels logical thinkers. A logical biologist would be suicidally depressed and on the verge of losing their sanity. And THAT is a neat logical explanation for why biologists came up with the ridiculous notion of Evolutionary Moral Psychology.
Next up, you thought that physicists were immune from braindead idiocy? Ha! Marvel at physicists' own special brand of retardation.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
What Alien Colonization Would Look Like
In the previous blog entry, I explored what galactic colonization must inevitably look like to any civilization conducting it.
Note that any civilization that fails to expand its technological and industrial base to the point where galactic colonization is easy and cheap will eventually become extinct due to an asteroid collision, supervolcano eruption, glaciation or global war. This argument was first made years ago and it is well-established.
Note also that such homebody civilizations have average lifespans of at most a few million years. Given the many hundreds of millions of years in our galaxy's past such blatantly suicidal fucking idiots are of no consequence to us. I would even say, if they want to die, why should we not help them die?
But that isn't the subject of this post. Here we explore what galactic colonization looks like to any hypothetical backwards inbred hillbilly civilization unfortunate enough to be trampled underneath its expansion.
As already established in the previous article, AI makes starflight cheap and distance irrelevant. It takes just as much resources to accelerate a starship to near light speed then hibernate the AI for a 10 year flight as it does to accelerate a starship to near light speed then hibernate the AI for a 100 year flight. Or a 1000 year flight, or a 10,000 year flight. Or even a 50,000 year flight. There is no friction in space.
The only difference is the increased risk of a micrometeorite vaporizing the starship. And that can be easily surmounted by building an AI with an appropriate martyr complex and fanatical dedication to its mission. Why does that matter? Because it means that the wave of colonization will NOT be lackadaisical with sporadic branching to the nearest possible systems. Rather, the wave of colonization will be perfectly spherical.
The homeworld will be launching starships one after another, with the nearest star systems first in line, and it will never stop. Because it won't matter that the nearest 1000 systems are successfully colonized, the only thing that will matter is that there's another system out there that you can send an AI colonization ship to. And it won't matter that there is no immediate benefit. At some point down the road, perhaps only in 10,000 years, the homeworld will benefit in some way. If only due to exchange of technological information. And if it doesn't benefit, it's not like the starship was expensive anyways.
Let me make the point again. Many people (even supposedly educated people who study technology) have the deeply mistaken notion that the homeworld will send a short burt of colonization ships only to the nearest star systems. Perhaps even only to the nearest "inhabitable" planets. Then, after suitable millenia when each of those systems are developed enough, they will each send out their own wave of starships. That's not going to happen. This is ludicrous Star Trek fantasy.
What's going to happen is this. The homeworld will send a single giant wave of starships to every possible star system within line-of-sight. First to Alpha Centauri then, as soon as the first ship is accelerated to near-c, then to Barnard's star, then to Wolf 359, then Lalande 21185, and so on until the last star system in the galaxy within line of sight is targeted. Once the starships are all launched then the Homeworld will simply begin targeting the globular clusters and Andromeda. This wave of colonization will occur over centuries or at most millenia.
Speed
Now some uneducated people scoff at the idea of starships going near the speed of light. They claim that humanity has no idea how to accelerate starships to that speed and that our civilization will never develop such technology even given a million years. From fire to controlled nuclear fission in 10,000 years? Certainly. But from slow starflight to fast starflight in a million years? No never. Never ever! Apparently, technological development is something that only ever happens in the past.
As it happens, we already have a good idea of how to accelerate a starship to near-lightspeed. Isaac Kuo of Bad Astronomy and Atomic Rocket fame came up with a Starship Design Concept which can easily be accelerated to such velocities using current industrial technology. The best part is that it's cheap because it's reusable. Once the launch system is built, it can accelerate 1000 starships (one after the other) as easily as it can accelerate a single one.
For those who are interested, the idea involves an array of free electron X-ray laser beam emitters in solar orbit. The beams are focused using a giant fresnel lens. They can easily target the back of a starship's solid lead plate to a distance of several light-years. This enables the starship to be driven to anything from 0.9c to 0.99c. It also enables the starship to be decelerated using the exact same mechanism (x-ray laser beams near the homeworld) within a few light-years. Not that deceleration is the difficult part.
Furthermore, since every gram of matter carried by the starship at 0.9 c has an impact of a small 9 kiloton thermonuclear explosion, the starship can spray a fine mist of gas ahead of itself to annihilate all but large meteoroids in its way. The resulting spray of elementary particles can be swept aside with a magnetic field. To carry more gas for longer journeys, it's sufficient to make the starship longer. So long as you don't increase its cross-section, you don't make it a fatter target at all.
So yes, we actually do have a good idea how to go near the speed of light. And a civilization that's dismantling its home system to build a Dyson sphere will have centuries to perfect the design before implementing it.
What You Would See
So what would you see if some alien civilization were out there, colonizing our galaxy? Well for a millenium or so you would get radio waves. Then you would see the star associated with the radio waves becoming markedly darker. Within decades or centuries you would see the nearby stars go dark. Then you would see a hemispherical wave of darkness engulf every star at an astonishing rate. Within a bare thousand years from the first star going dark, you would see every other star from that origin point to your own sun going dark. And you would see this no matter where in the galaxy you are because the Dyson-sphere building starships would be only barely slower than the light you use to see them.
This is why everyone who yammers on about invisible or "hidden" aliens is a useless twit not worth listening to. Because you can't hide the stars going dark. If aliens were out there, it would be one fucking impressive sight. And as for the SETI notion that there is an alien civilization out there in the miniscule window between "doesn't have radio technology" and "is turning off the stars you see in the sky" ... Or perhaps SETI is interested in talking to blatantly suicidal fucking idiots? I don't know. I don't care either.
Do you see those stars in the sky at night? That's all the evidence an educated person needs that aliens really aren't out there. Unless you think the Great Void between galaxies is caused by aliens. Unfortunately, it isn't because dark stars emitting in the infrared aren't even remotely the same thing as no stars at all. Dyson spheres are quite distinctive and our astronomy hasn't found any. So are partial Dyson spheres for that matter, because the stars they partially cover would vary in brightness as regularly as pulsars.
Next up, what a galactic civilization might choose to do.
Note that any civilization that fails to expand its technological and industrial base to the point where galactic colonization is easy and cheap will eventually become extinct due to an asteroid collision, supervolcano eruption, glaciation or global war. This argument was first made years ago and it is well-established.
Note also that such homebody civilizations have average lifespans of at most a few million years. Given the many hundreds of millions of years in our galaxy's past such blatantly suicidal fucking idiots are of no consequence to us. I would even say, if they want to die, why should we not help them die?
But that isn't the subject of this post. Here we explore what galactic colonization looks like to any hypothetical backwards inbred hillbilly civilization unfortunate enough to be trampled underneath its expansion.
As already established in the previous article, AI makes starflight cheap and distance irrelevant. It takes just as much resources to accelerate a starship to near light speed then hibernate the AI for a 10 year flight as it does to accelerate a starship to near light speed then hibernate the AI for a 100 year flight. Or a 1000 year flight, or a 10,000 year flight. Or even a 50,000 year flight. There is no friction in space.
The only difference is the increased risk of a micrometeorite vaporizing the starship. And that can be easily surmounted by building an AI with an appropriate martyr complex and fanatical dedication to its mission. Why does that matter? Because it means that the wave of colonization will NOT be lackadaisical with sporadic branching to the nearest possible systems. Rather, the wave of colonization will be perfectly spherical.
The homeworld will be launching starships one after another, with the nearest star systems first in line, and it will never stop. Because it won't matter that the nearest 1000 systems are successfully colonized, the only thing that will matter is that there's another system out there that you can send an AI colonization ship to. And it won't matter that there is no immediate benefit. At some point down the road, perhaps only in 10,000 years, the homeworld will benefit in some way. If only due to exchange of technological information. And if it doesn't benefit, it's not like the starship was expensive anyways.
Let me make the point again. Many people (even supposedly educated people who study technology) have the deeply mistaken notion that the homeworld will send a short burt of colonization ships only to the nearest star systems. Perhaps even only to the nearest "inhabitable" planets. Then, after suitable millenia when each of those systems are developed enough, they will each send out their own wave of starships. That's not going to happen. This is ludicrous Star Trek fantasy.
What's going to happen is this. The homeworld will send a single giant wave of starships to every possible star system within line-of-sight. First to Alpha Centauri then, as soon as the first ship is accelerated to near-c, then to Barnard's star, then to Wolf 359, then Lalande 21185, and so on until the last star system in the galaxy within line of sight is targeted. Once the starships are all launched then the Homeworld will simply begin targeting the globular clusters and Andromeda. This wave of colonization will occur over centuries or at most millenia.
Speed
Now some uneducated people scoff at the idea of starships going near the speed of light. They claim that humanity has no idea how to accelerate starships to that speed and that our civilization will never develop such technology even given a million years. From fire to controlled nuclear fission in 10,000 years? Certainly. But from slow starflight to fast starflight in a million years? No never. Never ever! Apparently, technological development is something that only ever happens in the past.
As it happens, we already have a good idea of how to accelerate a starship to near-lightspeed. Isaac Kuo of Bad Astronomy and Atomic Rocket fame came up with a Starship Design Concept which can easily be accelerated to such velocities using current industrial technology. The best part is that it's cheap because it's reusable. Once the launch system is built, it can accelerate 1000 starships (one after the other) as easily as it can accelerate a single one.
For those who are interested, the idea involves an array of free electron X-ray laser beam emitters in solar orbit. The beams are focused using a giant fresnel lens. They can easily target the back of a starship's solid lead plate to a distance of several light-years. This enables the starship to be driven to anything from 0.9c to 0.99c. It also enables the starship to be decelerated using the exact same mechanism (x-ray laser beams near the homeworld) within a few light-years. Not that deceleration is the difficult part.
Furthermore, since every gram of matter carried by the starship at 0.9 c has an impact of a small 9 kiloton thermonuclear explosion, the starship can spray a fine mist of gas ahead of itself to annihilate all but large meteoroids in its way. The resulting spray of elementary particles can be swept aside with a magnetic field. To carry more gas for longer journeys, it's sufficient to make the starship longer. So long as you don't increase its cross-section, you don't make it a fatter target at all.
So yes, we actually do have a good idea how to go near the speed of light. And a civilization that's dismantling its home system to build a Dyson sphere will have centuries to perfect the design before implementing it.
What You Would See
So what would you see if some alien civilization were out there, colonizing our galaxy? Well for a millenium or so you would get radio waves. Then you would see the star associated with the radio waves becoming markedly darker. Within decades or centuries you would see the nearby stars go dark. Then you would see a hemispherical wave of darkness engulf every star at an astonishing rate. Within a bare thousand years from the first star going dark, you would see every other star from that origin point to your own sun going dark. And you would see this no matter where in the galaxy you are because the Dyson-sphere building starships would be only barely slower than the light you use to see them.
This is why everyone who yammers on about invisible or "hidden" aliens is a useless twit not worth listening to. Because you can't hide the stars going dark. If aliens were out there, it would be one fucking impressive sight. And as for the SETI notion that there is an alien civilization out there in the miniscule window between "doesn't have radio technology" and "is turning off the stars you see in the sky" ... Or perhaps SETI is interested in talking to blatantly suicidal fucking idiots? I don't know. I don't care either.
Do you see those stars in the sky at night? That's all the evidence an educated person needs that aliens really aren't out there. Unless you think the Great Void between galaxies is caused by aliens. Unfortunately, it isn't because dark stars emitting in the infrared aren't even remotely the same thing as no stars at all. Dyson spheres are quite distinctive and our astronomy hasn't found any. So are partial Dyson spheres for that matter, because the stars they partially cover would vary in brightness as regularly as pulsars.
Next up, what a galactic civilization might choose to do.
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