Internal FTL May Be Possible

I ran into an article about making wormholes which pointed out that there is nothing in principle wrong with them. More importantly, the mathematicians' distaste for topology changes which I had unthinkingly assimilated is bullshit. There is no justification whatsoever in physics for wormholes not to exist. Mathematicians might not like them but fuck em.

Then again, maybe I hadn't assimilated mathematicians' distaste of topology changes too much. My main objection to wormholes has always been the unthinking unquestioned claim that a wormholes' insides have no geometry. That travel inside a wormhole is instantaneous because there is no distance between the wormhole mouths. When you start taking geometry seriously and dismissing topology, such a claim becomes bloody fucking stupid.

But just because faster-than-light travel through wormholes doesn't look even remotely likely, it doesn't mean it's impossible. And what's interesting about wormholes is that in order to create a wormhole between two points light years apart, you need to transport the wormhole mouth at sublight speeds. Unless you've got a warp drive of course since a wormhole mouth is just a bunch of warped spacetime and not matter.

That's where things get interesting because it means wormholes can't be used by a civilization to expand faster than light, only to travel faster than light internally inside the civilization's boundaries. And that makes wormholes really, really interesting because they don't violate the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox is bad enough when confined to sub-light speeds. It's bad enough that it proves conclusively and without a doubt that aliens do not exist. If a civilization could expand at FTL speeds, that would mean aliens don't exist in the entire universe. Something which is not even remotely credible. Hence the Fermi Paradox proves that FTL cannot be a feasible method of civilization expansion.

But, wormholes don't offer any way for a civilization to expand faster than the speed of light, only to stay unified as a civilization as it expands. And that makes them rather interesting. Because they're feasible. Maybe. Whether they're possible at all is an independent question. As I already said, I don't think they are, but it would be fun to discover otherwise.

Most Great Science Is Fraudulent, And Nearly All Scientists Are Frauds

Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram's Authority Experiment

A lot of hay is made over the Stanford Prison and Milgram Authority Experiments especially when someone wants to conclude that people are naturally submissive and sadistic. The truth is they're fraudulent and junk science. The truth is that Asch's Conformity Experiments perfectly explains the results of those other experiments as junk science.

How? Easy. The most basic requirement of any psychological experiment is that the subjects of the experiment are willing to take part in a psychology experiment. They are all, without exception, willing to obey the experimenter. Now that doesn't sound like a proper randomized sample of a population, does it?

At least, it doesn't if you know there exist iconoclasts in the general population, breakers of sacred idols, murderers of sacred cows, people who will dissent for the sake of dissent, people who will instinctively refuse to obey just because you made it an order. There are such people and I know it very well, being one of them. But the douchebags who call themselves "scientists" and "academics" and "psychologists" and "experts in the human mind" seem oblivious to this.

(For the record, I consider taking part in a psychology experiment [playing the part of a monkey for the edification of an ignorant jackass] about as distastefully intimate as prostitution. And since I have a high-class mind I would want to be paid in a manner similar to a high class escort. I think about 1000$ an hour would ensure my willingness to go along voluntarily. Since this much money would corrupt the results, the only way an experimenter could get an honest response out of me would be without my knowledge.)

But why should a few loners, dissenters, disgruntled radicals and revolutionaries mean anything about the Stanford Prison experiment? Doesn't the majority hold sway? Doesn't what happened in those experiments prove there is a natural sadistic desire in "human nature"? NO! Because the Asch conformity experiment proves that it takes only one, ONLY ONE person to utterly shatter a consensus. Once you have that one person, that one iconoclast in the group, the haze of conformity lifts as everyone suddenly finds they are permitted to think for themselves.

All the Stanford Prison Experiment tells us is that when iconoclasts are weeded out of a population, what's left is going to do what the experimenter expects them to do, what he tells them to do. Even though the experimenter will claim he was "surprised" by their viciousness and he "never expected" the situation to devolve so quickly. And all Milgram's experiment tells us is that after 20 years of brainwashing in obedience training, people are going to have a difficult time disobeying.

Six Degrees Of Separation

Another famous experiment is the so-called "six degrees of separation" where an experimenter sent out a bunch of letters, most of which never made it to their destinations, and then "concluded" based on his few positive results that everyone is connected in a graph of degree 6. Of course this is fraudulent since the data never supported the conclusion.

And very shortly after it was discovered that people are separated by class barriers so that it's all but impossible to find links from lower to upper class. Or in the USA, between the white and the nigger class. Blacks aren't a class, but niggers are, even though you aren't allowed to say it because of so-called "political correctness" (more lying and fraud).

Physics too

A lot of pretentious assholes are going to claim that things are entirely different in physics. But that's false. The problem with all these experiments is that they assume their own conclusions. Which is of course what Thomas Kuhn calls "normal science" as opposed to revolutionary science.

You see, physicists do it too! You can see this mindless unthinking unquestioning lying crap happening with the so-called Copenhagen consensus wrought by force of authority of Niels Bohr (may he rot in hell). You can also see it in Bell's theorem which "proved" its own vitalistic assumption by concluding that if you start by preparing a number of "identical" systems you will then get very strange results.

Vitalism is alive and well in modern quantum physics where it relies on the notion that experimenters are outside of the physical universe, outside of the phenomena they're studying.

Millikan

And then there's always the good old Millikan's oil drop experiment which was blatant and simple fraud of the most obvious kind. You see, the experiment couldn't be replicated using modern equipment. You just can't calculate the charge of the electron with any accuracy using the kind of setup Millikan used. What you can do however is assume your data fits the predicted result and eliminate any "outliers". It gets pretty fucking embarrassing though if the predicted result turns out to have been wrong, if you "saw" something that could never exist.

Of course, Millikan was such a famous scientist, had so much authority, that he must obviously have been correct, rather than a simple but highly embarrassing fraud. So over the course of a few decades, the "experimental results" of the charge of the electron steadily crept towards their modern (real) values as experiments got steadily more "accurate". So it wasn't only Millikan that was a fraud, it was also every physicist after him. Frauds, every single last fucking one of them.

Sociology

And fraud is still alive and well in science today what with the sociology experiment published in First Monday where the metric used implicitly included ostracism. Of course, the dumbfuck experimenters (all half dozen of them!) none of them want to admit that their experiment was worthless shit that measured the (patently obvious!) ostracism of generalists by specialists in the sciences. Of course not, since it was their thesis that generalists are less "productive", since you see, they don't like generalists. How stupider does it get than a bunch of prejudiced assholes measuring exactly how much an obviously prejudiced against group is actually prejudiced against? And that's stupid even without the prejudiced assholes then concluding the prejudiced against group is really inferior.

Psychology vs Anthropology

And let's not go into Lloyd deMause whose theory of the history of childrearing casually assumes that all anthropologists everywhere are frauds of the most vicious lying kind. Every single last fucking one of them, excepting only those anthropologists who have had psychological training and thus are really amateur psychologists. The most damning part of deMause's theory is that I believe him. There isn't the slightest doubt in my mind that the whole field of anthropology is ruled by quacks and charlatans who blithely and eagerly fake their data so as to maximize sympathy for the murderous infanticidal "noble" savages they think are precious.

After all, to anthropologists, primitiveness, ignorance, stupidity and rampant disease aren't to be eradicated. They are to be "studied" which is really a codeword for honest admiration. Anthropologists are anti-human eco-freaks, exactly as twisted up inside as the zealots that want to destroy all electric power plants so that humans freeze to death. All to save their precious fucking forests. Wishful thinking that since if power plants shut down, humans would NOT freeze to death, they would burn down every last fucking forest for wood fuel instead.

The fact these morons can't even realize that their "plans" are antithetical to their own goals, that even coal power plants are better than so-called "biomass", that SCALABILITY is more important than "sustainability" in a world with 6 to 9 billion humans who WILL survive no matter what, that is damning. Eco-zealots are fucking retarded moronic fuckers who think it's perfectly alright if an asteroid causes a mass extinction that happens to end the human species for lack of advanced space technology. After all, mass extinctions are "natural" and enhance "biodiversity" and are the "revenge of Gaia, the Mother-Earth".

And anthropologists take after them. They sound like them, they talk like them, they think like them. And that's damning to all anthropology.

What It All Means

The fact that an abomination like anthropology exists and is honoured by scientists and academics alike rather than derided and scorned as the useless fraudulent lit crit shit it really is .... that's damning to all science.

After all, the Sokal hoax proved to everyone that scientists are perfectly capable of scorning and deriding people who undermine the authority of the exact sciences. When lit crit assholes undermined exact scientists' authority, the latter counter-attacked.

What does it say then that those same exact scientists can't be moved, can't be bothered, when a field like anthropology "merely" spits on the truth? It says scientists only care about their authority, and will piss on the truth themselves if that's what it takes to remain in power.

It says Scientists. Are. Frauds.

Every last fucking one of them.

Because if scientists weren't frauds then anthropology wouldn't be permitted to exist.

Because if scientists weren't frauds then they would take an interest in psychology and bully and egg the proto-science until it developed formal, rigorous theories of the mind, until it became a REAL science.

Because if scientists weren't frauds then they wouldn't hush up their embarrassments and their failures, they would encourage the questioning of mainstream theories for its own sake and hold high every slightest misstep and stumble done by an eminent scientist as proof that you can't follow authority figures blindly.

But they don't do any of those things. Because they're only interested in their own power. And nothing else matters.

My Life Projects

When I hit 20 my life projects were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Needless to say, I have more projects now.

How An-Syn Plays Out In Real Life

This is a précis of my model of those personality attributes that are tied to cognitive differences.

Table of Analytics.

systems researcher or mathematical philosopher
     UI programmer (+syn)                           mathematician (+int)
 engineer, physicist, software developer, economist (*)

Table of Synthetics.

systems designer
   graphics designer (+ana)                  philosopher (+int)
fashion designer, writer, artist (*/**)

*: in order of increasing egomania
int: intellectual, values ideas for their own sake

I used to think that people like Willard van Orman Quine, who chose a profession as a mathematician-philosopher, did so because they grew up before computers existed. But I was wrong. I now know of at least one mathematical-philosopher in the modern age.

And according to my personality interaction model, people at the top get along best with people from the other table for some unknown reason (+), then the left hand branch in their own table, and last with oddballs. Oddballs are people who don't trust the form of cognition they possess.

So for example, programmers who trust synthesis more than analysis, or writers who trust analysis more than synthesis. They don't have the form of cognition they trust so this can take a hit on their ego but more importantly they're more willing to recognize and accept people who do have the form of cognition they trust.

Being told "there's no such thing as analysis / synthesis" or even better "analysis / synthesis is unimportant" is roughly equivalent to "there's no such thing as homosexuality" and "get over it, it's not like being homosexual is important in any way".

+: I don't have the slightest theory why this would be but it is a fact with much empirical evidence supporting it. Nearly all of the data points I could gather support it. Those data points not supporting it are ambiguous in proportion to how much they violate the trend.

**: Engineers serve society. Physicists serve their profession. Economists serve the rich. And software developers serve themselves.

Elements Of Excellent Photo Gallery Design

I just ran into this website, which is the only site on the entire fucking web that has done photo galleries correctly. I cannot overstate its uniqueness or importance. It is the only well-designed photo site on the entire web! The only one. Gaze upon it in awe as I did and behold its majesty!

When I saw the main page I got the impression it was made by a really good graphics designer. Because it looks really good and clean. The attention to detail is exquisite and exactly what you'd expect from an amazing graphics designer.

1. the background is subtle and washed out
2. the composition of the photo that makes up the background is amazingly well-suited to a background page with its star present but off-side
3. the colour choices of the background photo harmonize with those of the home page - it's all blues with the only exceptions being the star and the name of the site
4. the playful descriptions with arrows draw the eye towards the menu options without being desperate, condescending or stuck-up - imagine what it would look like if there were only arrows with no descriptions, or alternatively if the descriptions were in a formal typed font
5. the menu options are underlined but not in a forced way, because the coloured bar is underneath them like a thick fat yet subtle and tasteful underline
6. the underline doesn't draw attention to itself by being vivid or sharp yet succeeds in drawing the eye to what it underlines in a perfectly natural way
7. the name of the site is in bright vivid letters to make it distinctive, and it's repeated because it's that important
8. the photo examples from new galleries cycle - at first I thought too fast but now I think just right
9. no euphemisms are used for the paid portion of the site which conveys refreshing honesty and directness
10. and the lack of minimization / maximization games (euphemisms like "member" or "join" but repeated all over the place) is tasteful and elegant

And then I saw the photo gallery and I was in awe. Because its behaviour is absolutely correct. You don't see that with mere graphics designers.

1. wasted space between photos is minimized with just enough to create boundaries
2. the grey colour that makes up the boundaries is exactly the same shade of grey water as in the home page - minimizes cognitive disruption
3. there are no elements other than the photos and the scroll bar
4. there are no active elements
5. none of the scrolling is hierarchical, you don't have to back out to go to the next photo or to see what's ahead
6. you can see all the photos in the gallery at once in miniature in the scroll bar
7. the scroll bar is vertical which allows the mousewheel to come into play
8. and harmonizes with the vertical pan motion you frequently use to see photos of people
9. the scroll bar is always visible, something that's difficult to achieve if the scroll bar is at the bottom of the screen but easy when it's at the right
10. even without the mousewheel, moving the mouse vertically the height of a screen is easier than moving it horizontally its entire width
11. scrolling the photo and scroll bar are overloaded functions, which is bad, however at least you CAN do both without repositioning the mouse, which is good
12. there are only just enough photos in a gallery so that the scroll bar will still fit entirely in a screen
13. and since this is the height of a screen, all of the photos in the gallery are accessible through a simple hand motion
14. while the scroll bar fills up the entire vertical extent of the screen - which it wouldn't if it were horizontal and limited to a simple hand motion, not with today's wide screens anyways
15. the designer is arrogant enough to disable all of the default or normal ways of doing things and demand you do it their way, using the scroll bar, so that you appreciate what a great site this is

The web was invented two decades ago and this is the first site I've encountered that has done photo galleries right. I think this says something about programmers' skills, talents, judgement and competence. Something exceedingly bad across the board.

Note that all of the galleries' behaviours and arrangement on this site ought to be encoded and determined by the web browser, not by the site owner. The instant you have a photo gallery with portraits, it should always, always look exactly like this. And when you have a photo gallery with landscapes then the only deviation is the scrollbar goes along the bottom of the screen. Because the rule is that the scroll bar should never, EVER form a visual boundary in the middle of a photo. There are no better options. The only open variable is the shade of the background between photos.

The only things missing in that gallery are two active things. The current photo should be outlined in yellow or highlight & washed out in white, or both. And there should be keystrokes to go to the previous and next photos in the list as well as first and last. And the behaviour of 'next' at the last photo should either be the next gallery or cycle back to the first photo.

On the Constancy of Human Nature, part 2

One of my favourite authors is under the unfortunate and deeply mistaken impression that there is something called human nature. He wrote to me:

> Human nature from the perspective of evolutionary-psychology *is* a constant. It's the society we live in and how that effects how our genetic predispositions towards certain behavior that changes.

This is fatuous, silly, foolish, stupid, empty-headed and ludicrous nonsense. It is actually worse than your proposition that fusion power is the wave of the future. Allow me to disillusion you of not one but three completely-fucking-wrong foundational ideas you hold which underpin your first sentence alone.

Myth 1: there is such a thing as "evolutionary psychology" in the sciences.

Truth: there is not. Psychology is a proto-science that does not meet the standards of rigour and formality that a real science must. Nonetheless, many of its practitioners (but not even a majority of them!) try to address objectively real phenomena of the mind. The same thing goes for biology although a greater proportion of biologists try to address objectively real phenomena - perhaps even a majority.

However, so-called "evolutionary biology" which tries to "explain" particular evolutionary pathways through pure guesswork is not a science at all nor is it in any way scientific. What it is is a bunch of handwaving nonsense and Just So storytelling. A bunch of arbitrary and irrational Bad Explanations. Neither correct nor incorrect, but simply bad - unworthy of any consideration as they are strictly pre-scientific. Evolutionary biology is not a proto-science, it is a fake science.

What do you get when you couple the massive uncertainty of a proto-science (psychology) with another proto-science (say, biology)? You get a pseudo-science. And what do you get when you couple a proto-science with a pseudo-science? You get something worthy of the death penalty. It is an INSULT to TRUTH for you to even utter the words "evolutionay psychology" thus lending that hogwash the smallest modicum of credibility by acknowledging its existence.

Myth 2: there is something like a singular "human nature" that is genetically determined

Truth: all three parts of this ridiculous notion are empirically false.

First, there is no singular "human nature" by ANY possible meaning of the term. Neither personality nor personality types nor even the basic substrate of cognition of human beings is singular. There is absolutely nothing which all human minds share in common, not at any moment in history and certainly not throughout history.

Nothing makes this more obvious than looking at a primitive neolithic human mind, a mind incapable of the simplest abstractions like counting to 3. And if that isn't enough then there's the empty minds of feral human-animals that are incapable of language or complex learned behaviour or even primitive consciousness. And as if that weren't bad enough, there is the plurality of cognitions available.

I am capable of both analysis (logic) and synthesis (spontaneous, broadband creativity). Analysis is the form of cognition encoded in artificial intelligences such as CYC. Synthesis, the capacity for multidimensional decomposition, is the form of cognition encoded in every neural network no matter how primitive. The noted natural language machine learning engines all function on the basis of multidimensional decomposition.

There exists no other forms of cognition other than analysis and synthesis. And more importantly, not all humans are capable of both forms of cognition. Being capable of both, I see the lack of either (and usually both) in human beings as a huge yawning gap in people's minds.

Consider the ridiculous claims of a singular "human nature" against the empirical fact that what people use to think isn't the same from person to person.

Second, the set of things (actions, behaviours, desires, motivations, drives, whatever) that are ingrained in human beings from birth is EMPTY. Humans have no instincts. Newborns do have a few simple reflexes such as automatically grasping whatever's in their hands and taking a big breath then holding it when put underwater. This is why infants don't automatically drown when put in water.

Let us digress for a moment on the question of what an instinct is. An instinct is a behaviour that never had to be learned. If it had to be learned then it's not an instinct! Dogs burying bones is an instinct. Dogs leaving shit in public places is an instinct. Cats buring their shit is an instinct. If you have to train a behaviour out of a puppy, then it's probably an instinct.

Humans have no instincts. But what about love, Richard? Love is not an instinct! As a matter of empirical fact, maternal love is a modern invention and so can't possibly be an instinct. And filial love grows out of the mother's nourishment and taking care of the newborn so it too isn't an instinct!

The closest thing to a hardwired instinct humans have is empathy. And empathy can't really be counted an instinct because exactly like analysis and synthesis, it is a general computing substrate. Empathy doesn't dictate any behaviours or thoughts or drives or motivations or anything else.

My empathy for instance is a tool that I use to exquisite effect in order to destroy people that disgust me. If you were thinking that empathy means "peace & loving kindness" you can forget it. Empathy is just knowing what makes others tick by automatically and subconsciously being able to simulate their minds using your own brain. Empathy is precisely limited by your own knowledge and cognitive capacity.

Third, genes don't code for shit in human neuroanatomy. Our species' genome has about 25000 genes of which about 6% are unique to chimps and humans. That's only 1500 genes of which most are going to be chimp genes. Meanwhile, we have about 100 billion neurons. What genes code for is a general computing substrate as Henry Markram explains in Supercomputing The Brain's Secrets.

Myth 3: human biology and human psychology can be cleanly differentiated and do not straddle each other.

Truth: the multiple feedback cycles going both ways between human biology and human psychology as well as the blurred regions between the two make any kind of categorization of "culture vs nature" a ridiculous exercise for pseudo-scientific nitwits touring the talk show circuits.

In fact, this is ridiculous on its face as even a cursory glance at height charts over historical periods will reveal. Why height charts? Because humans a few centuries ago were shrimps. And this hasn't changed due to evolution but due to better nutrition and hygiene. Both things which cause the development of stronger immune systems and greater cranial capacity.

The Flynn Effect, a sustained increase in the average IQ scores of populations by 3 points every decade for the last 120 years, ever since records began ... proves our ancestors were dim-witted fucking idiots. Our parents are on average 6 IQ points stupider than we are. In fact, we have detailed records showing how people in generations past were much less accustomed to abstraction than we are. Even simple abstractions like 'mammal' would be unfamiliar to them, things they do not use in everyday life.

It is a meaningless and anti-scientific exercise to try to categorize nutrition OR hygiene in the ridiculous "nature vs culture" obsolete fake-debate which stupider generations than ours were obsessed with. Square pegs round holes, people!

Myth 4: human psychology must be explained in terms of other things such as biology and culture.

Truth: human psychology is axiomatic. There is no explanation for human psychology other than more human psychology. There CANNOT BE any explanation for human psychology other than itself for the very simple reason that psychology as a field of science is the only possible root and basis of EVERY social science.

Every science dealing with human beings that lacks a rigorous basis in psychology is a proto-science at best. Every social "science" that CLAIMS a basis other than psychology ... is a lying pseudo-science. So-called "mainstream" economics (also known as market, analytic, Austrian, Chicago, and financial) is pure pseudo-scientific gibberish and hogwash. Neither industrial nor developmental economics claim any rigorous basis in anything. And behavioural economics looks for a basis in psychology, although it's hardly rigorous yet.

If you need another example of the social sciences' dependence on psychology, I need only point to deMause's work on the history of childrearing. In his work, he explains many social artifacts by tracing them back to childrearing styles, the psychology of the parents that used them and the psychology of the children that evolved from it. The ultimate explanation for all social phenomena is psychology, and the only explanations for psychological phenomena are ... more psychology.

Just as it is ridiculous to try to find an "explanation" for mathematics in the exact sciences since the latter uses and depends on the former. So too it is ridiculous to try to find a "cultural" or "environmental" or any other "explanation" for psychology in the social sciences. The social sciences all use and depend on psychology. Perhaps there is an explanation for psychology in mathematics. More likely there isn't. Psychology simply is. Either get used to it or shut the fuck up.

Wikiality, Academic Peer-Review and Socially Determined Truth

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

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

> But Wikipedia is no encyclopedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So now what?

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

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

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

"Jimbo" Wales' smarmy smile

[Nov 13: somebody obviously talked to his publicist since the photo-advert has been changed to something more open and less freakish]

Have you seen "Jimbo" Wales' face on that donations advert in wikipedia? What does that facial expression say to you?

It says to me

• "I hold you in contempt"
• "I am your superior and I condescend to smile to you"
• "although it's more of a smirk"
• "give me money you peon"
• "I want money for my 6 figure salary"
• "give me money so that I may continue to look down on you and dismiss you, the people who made wikipedia, in favour of the bootlicks and lickspittles that lick my arse and kick you down and spit on you"

And of all things, it says this to me most loudly:

• "I am uncomfortable treating you like human beings or as if I cared what you thought in any way, shape or form. because deep down I despise you"
• "except not so deep down I guess"

The more I think about it, the more his smile says to me. None of it good. Given he's ostensibly begging inferiors (and he does consider us all to be his inferiors, people of absolutely no consequence) to give him money, yeah he's not very comfortable with it. It'd be kinda like a millionaire begging for money on a street corner.

And before you bother, yes it is a fact that "Jimbo" Wales holds mere wikipedia contributors (let alone readers) in utter contempt. He holds his fellow co-founder of wikipedia in enough loathing to try to write him out of history. The only people he likes are the cultish assholes and power-mongers who routinely lick his arse. Those are the ones he calls "top wikipedians" and claims "create 90% of content" a claim which is factually ridiculous on its face.

An empirical analysis has determined that 90% of content that survives is made by transients who never bother making a second contribution. Jimbo's cherished "top contributors" are responsible only for transient edits to category names that happen to affect thousands of pages simultaneously. These cherished "administrators" of Jimbo's (jackboots is more accurate) are responsible for all those loathesome [citation required] tags littering Wikipedia like so much garbage.

So yeah, apparently Jimbo's incapable of dealing with anybody else as an equal. His partner he backstabbed and the transient people Wikipedia depends on that don't need him in any way he dismisses entirely. Only lickspittle / jackboots get any recognition from him - those smegheads get catered to by Jimbo's exquisitely tailored totalitarian monarchy. So yeah, getting put into a position where he is the inferior would raise that hated banner of equality he dreads.

I might as well declare here that I despise everything that Wikipedia stands for: mob rule, group-think, liberal bourgeois orthodoxy, a combination of false authority and politically correct blandness (the so-called NPOV), truth by consensus (wikiality), clique-ishness, and fascistic oppression of dissenters. I yearn to see the day when Wikipedia will be torn down and destroyed and its top "wikipedians", SchutzStaffel to a body of lies, are hunted down and killed like the Gestapo members they actually are.

Orwellism isn't limited to the USA

So-called "third way" politics in the last decade meant right-wingers using left-wing rhetoric. It was loathesome crap. Fortunately it was self-limiting since "third way" politicians couldn't get away with their lies when their subjects were suffering for it.

More worrying is so-called "civil society" which refers to NGOs paid for and ruled by aristocrats. (They follow the corporate model with shareholders after all, not the cooperative model at all.) What "civil society" means as an ideal is the opposition to responsible government (whether democratic or dictatorial) in favour of rule by aristocrats ... through the back door.

The development of "civil society" is a scourge on any country that has it. China most recently has been beset by nutballs promoting weak ambient power sources (so-called "renewables"). South Korea has been beset by anti-nuclear nutballs.

While we're on the topic, so-called "renewables" are another Orwellism since there is nothing particularly renewable about power derived from thermonuclear reactions in the Sun that doesn't apply to fission power derived from burning already radioactive remnants of supernovae.

Remnants that can be found in plenty both in the granite that makes up all mountains and in the seawater of every ocean. Cheaply enough to be economical too, if we had to go that route. And since the Sun will become unusable in a mere 5 billion years whereas thorium should still be usable for ten billion of years, fission is actually MORE "renewable".

This scourge of "civil society" has brought about calamity in nation after nation. Witness the so-called "environmental" (another Orwellism! they're really the anti-industrial / anti-human movement) NGOs in Germany which flourished so well under Nazism.

Thanks to its "environmental" movement, Germany has a psychotic national energy policy, one totally divorced from physical reality. Billions of euros are being forcibly taken from ratepayers and taxpayers in order to "pay" for "investments" that produce neither electricity nor reduce CO2 emissions.

And it's not just money going down the drain or Germans being impoverished thanks to the ideals of fascists. It's also Germany's nuclear know-how that's stagnating and being dismantled instead of flourishing and sharpening. It's also tens of thousands of Europeans having their lives shortened thanks to German coal plants.

The so-called "environmental" NGOs only reveal themselves as the bought and paid for aristocratic, anti-human scum they are when they fail to protest coal plants (in the USA) or natural gas plants (in Germany) despite both of these putting out copious greenhouse gases.

No, Orwellism isn't limited to the USA. It's found all over the world. Because of course there are magical-thinking idiots willing and eager to buy that double-speaking tripe the world over.

Orwellism is also found in every subject. History for example. How many people know Sparta as the loathsome North Korea-esque cesspit of oppression it really was? How many people know Plato and Socrates as the lying anti-democratic pieces of shit they really were?

Apparently George Lucas was right, people are not only magical-thinking idiots, they're the kinds of idiots that desperately want to be ruled by kings. And you know what? I sincerely desire they get exactly what they wish for. Because I want to see their faces when they're being lashed and I get to tell them 'I told you so you dumb motherfucker'.

Fantasy for Atheists

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

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

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

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

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

On The Supposed Constancy Of Human Nature

An oft repeated lie by anthropologists and other liberal arts scum is that "technology advances but human nature is a constant".

That's such a load of crap. In just the last 40 years rape has all but disappeared from the civilized world (check the stats!). And it's all thanks to pornography redirecting men's sexual energy away from actual women. Something women aren't thankful for, surprise surprise.

For comparison, in medieval times, every city woman would have been gang raped by street children at least once. And in ancient times they didn't even see anything unusual, let alone wrong, with rape - it was so common.

It works exactly the same way as violent crimes going down when violent movies are showing, and child molestations going down when child pornography is legal. As it was briefly in Sweden and Denmark when they took down obscenity laws. So we can all be thankful that the internet makes all things available to everyone now regardless of the wishes of authoritarians.

Violent movies (unlike first person shooters) don't actually train people to become better criminals, they just satisfy criminal appetites. Satisfied criminal appetites don't bloom into criminal activity. All the academics masturbating about how this "whets criminal appetites" can shove their scholastic number-of-angels-on-a-pin lying crap "arguments" up their ass.

Let's not forget these are the same psych- social- academic numbnuts that came up with the cathartic "letting out your aggression" theory without ever checking whether it works. It doesn't! All "catharsis" does is it lowers the psychological barriers to violent action.

It's funny how catharsis is supposed to be good for potential victims or "mild" aggressors (with whom it's okay to sympathize) but satisfying appetites is bad for potential perpetrators. The truth is that acting anything out is bad because it trains you, but watching it done is okay. Huh, acting and watching are different, and victim vs perpetrator doesn't matter, who could have guessed? Just about everybody with a brain.

Going on, child abuse has also declined markedly across the board to the point where spanking children is frowned upon in most of the civilized world and illegal in the most advanced countries. Similarly, homicide and suicide are down thanks to the much reduced naked obedience to authority that's the product of the 1968 revolution.

That's another thing, the 1968 revolution. Holy fucking shit. Anyone who doesn't know it and claims to know human beings or society is an idiot. The same goes for anyone who underestimates it.

So yeah, the notion of human nature remaining constant, let alone being universal, is such an appalling and unbelievable load of anti-human crap. What it's basically saying (falsely) is that we're all doomed to be Nazis forever. That is a hateful fucking lie. Hell, not even Americans could ever be Nazis. It's just not true that Americans are as psychologically backwards and primitive as the average African.

And yet, anthropologists really believe this hateful lying shit. Because of course they detest their own societies and are in love with the "noble savage". Ugh. Just one more reason to execute the anthropology departments and incinerate their accumulated "work" before starting from scratch using physicists. Even restarting with psychologists would be an enormous improvement. That's really saying something.

Why Dune Can't Be Turned Into A Movie

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

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

Fluffier Than Helium

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

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

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

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

Denser Than Uranium

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

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

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

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

STILL Not Fully Comprehensible

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

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

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

Science Fiction vs Fantasy

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

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

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

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

How To Do Dune Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

GDP projections: mindlessly drawing lines on a chart

In Brian Wang's latest mindless China boosting he claims that China's economic growth will continue at high tempo for at least another two decades. He doesn't base this claim, a claim on which all his projections depend, on any facts, he just assumes it to be true.

In fact, he's made clear in a previous post on the topic that he thinks losing 2 percentage points of growth over the coming decades is a worst-case scenario which he can't even imagine any reason for. This is because he is a fucking retard.

How Brian Wang Thinks (and I use the term loosely)

Nevermind that he misuses the word 'synthesis' to mean 'logical deduction' and 'collating of disparate facts', neither of which has anything at all to do with anything done by an artist, designer or philosopher.

I find that incredibly offensive but it's relevant here because it tells us where and how he got his notions from. He got them from economists, those notorious line drawers who understand fuck-all about reality, nothing about science, and less than nothing about any real-world economies.

For fuck's sake, economists think money and banking are what make up economies. And they dismiss the real-world economic behaviour of real human beings as "irrational" and "not economics". Their pretentious "economic models" are just some kludged up math equations stolen from 18th century thermodynamics. Not modern thermodynamics but strictly 18th century notions of thermodynamics which were quickly proven very wrong.

What Brian Wang's done is poll what economists (those empty-headed morons) say about China's economy and then copied their technique of mindlessly drawing lines (well "curves" because that way you can be more pretentious and mathemagical) on a graph. I'll prove it.

China's Demographics

China's GDP growth in the last 35 years has depended on uneducated peasants migrating to cities to become factory workers. This is called Urbanization. In the last 35 years, China's urban population has risen from roughly 160 million to 600 million. I say roughly since China is notorious for lying about these statistics much the way every Western government lies about unemployment figures.

So (600-160)/160 = 2.75. Over a period of 35 years, China's economy has more than doubled just from Urbanization alone. In fact, since 1.029^35 = 2.71, over 2.9 percentage points of China's economic growth over that 35 year period is attributable to urbanization alone. Assuming the uneducated peasants don't participate in the economy at all. A ridiculous assumption but hardly unprecedented in economic circles.

Is Urbanization in China going to continue? Yes but at a much reduced rate. In the last 35 years, China's urban population nearly tripled. In the next 20 years it's projected (lines have been drawn on a graph) to increase by 50%. That's 1.02^20 = 1.485. So that's 1.029-1.020 = 0.9 percentage points knocked out right there.

If you do away with the ridiculous assumption that uneducated peasants don't participate in the economy, things don't look so bad. But you still have to account for the fact that China's population increased by more than half in the past 35 years. Those uneducated peasants have to eat you know. And China's population is only projected to increase by 10% before it peaks within 20 years. Since 1.012^35 = 1.518 and 1.005^20 = 1.105, that's 0.7 percentage points knocked out right there.

Now, I'm not going to add 0.9 and 0.7 together to get 1.6, that would be double counting. But it's obvious China will lose at least 1 percentage point from the greatly reduced population and urban worker growth rates. That's in the very best case scenario. As I said before, Brian Wang thinks this is a worst-case scenario. His worst-case scenario takes into account only demographic change and nothing else.

Beyond Demographics - now we're talking real economics

Because of course, projections of China's economic future get worse the more factors you take into account. Back in 1981, China implemented this thing called the Responsibility System which means that farmers and company managers were responsible for losses and profits of their production. As expected, this provided a massive economic boost. Is this something China is likely to be able to repeat? No it is not. It's something China will never be able to repeat.

(Except by moving to an anti-authoritarian coop workplace system, but that would cause China's authoritarian regime some rather large political problems.)

It gets worse. Because you see, for the last 10 years China has been busily assimilating any and all high technology in the world, including but not limited to semiconductors, high speed trains, nuclear power plants, supercritical coal power plants, rocketry, automobile construction, marine ship construction. In fact, China is considering building nuclear container ships and is on the verge of becoming independent in nuclear power plants. Not bad for a country that still had a steam locomotive in regular service less than 5 years ago.

Can China reproduce its past assimilation of new technologies by copying starship Jumpspace engines and asteroid mining technology from the Centauri and Vorlon empires? No because they are fucking fictional. The best that China can hope for is to roll out the technology it's already acquired more widely. By say replacing inefficient coal power plants with more efficient ones. Oh right, it's already been doing that for the last 10 years. And yes, it will keep doing that ... with progressively smaller returns on investment.

And then it gets much worse. You see, there is another country that pursued the same export-oriented labour-intensive then shift to high-tech long-term economic strategy that China is now pursuing. It's not like China invented the idea after all. It's a tried and true pattern. Well, that country is South Korea. As it happens, South Korea never managed to achieve the phenomenal growth rates China did and its long-term average in its best growth phase was at least 3 percentage points lower than China's.

Does that mean China has got some kind of special magic going? No, because I'm not the kind of dumbass that believes in magic. Nor am I a racist that believes, as Wang certainly does, that Chinese are naturally superior.

What it means is that China has been using its raw economic clout to ... um 'acquire' high technology from every other country in the world. Something South Korea never managed. Not for free anyways - South Korea paid for the technology it acquired. China just demands it as a cost of doing business. But as already noted, there isn't anymore technology left for China to hustle from other countries. It's already got everything, including things like maglev that nobody else is using.

The only other possible explanations are 1) China's economic growth going in had been suppressed in a way South Korea's hadn't been (unlikely), 2) China went into its growth phase with more educated and healthier people (it did thanks to starting growth 20 years late), 3) having a communist government really does help (yes but not when the capitalists are playing smart industrialist), 4) China is fudging its economic figures. Personally, I'm banking on #2 and #0 (health and technology) but what's interesting is that none of the explanations for higher-than-south-korea growth rates are sustainable. In fact, health-wise China isn't doing too well lately compared to South Korea.

Even the very worst of economists (supposedly) understand the difference between intensive economic growth and extensive economic growth. China is currently in an extensive economic growth phase where it's putting already-existing (labour) resources to work. And long, long before it hits Western levels of per-capita GDP it will have moved to an intensive economic growth phase. By which I mean that its economic growth will crash.

South Korea

I want to finish this by getting back to South Korea, especially the part where I said "and then it gets much worse". South Korea isn't a line on a graph that exists only in some moron's imagination. It's a real country with a real (industrial) economy - not a fictional economy like the USA's, Ireland's, Iceland's or China's recent property bubbles. And South Korea is roughly 20 years ahead of China so what's happened in the last 20 years to South Korea is rather instructive to anyone who wants to predict China's future.

Now, South Korea's highest growth phase occurred in the 60s and 70s, back when the world economy was still booming and not in chronic depression since the likes of Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl and Gorbachev (all horrible leaders in their own unique ways). What happened to South Korea in the 2000s doesn't make things look very promising. Worse yet, South Korea is extremely urbanized, so it's not going to grow that way anymore. I suppose that's good news for China since it's going to be urbanizing well into the latter half of this century. But really it just means that China is backwards and it's going to be dealing with uneducated peasants that much longer.

There is something incredibly fishy in China's economic figures. It doesn't make any sense at all that China could sustain a higher economic growth rate than South Korea's while ending up with a poorer real-world outcome. China was about 20 years behind South Korea when they began their respective economic growth phases, and it remains more than 20 years behind South Korea today. And this despite having better demographics, better health and better access to technology. It's probably due to China's bloated foreign-exchange reserves which are 2.5 times larger than South Korea's on a GDP per capita basis. Clearly China's government has fucked over its own citizens and the world in order to acquire global financial power.

And with that last insight, maybe China can afford to prop up its economic growth rates. Assuming it's willing to lose most of its financial power.

An Open Rant To Brian Wang, the Mindless Chink Booster and Preacher

A personal response prompted by http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/nuclear-fission-nuclear-fusion.html since the bastard has a habit of deleting negative responses on his blog. Yes, I took great umbrage to his "we will triumph through the power of our ignorance" stance on FTL at one point, as I think any sane person must.

Rant Begins

It's amazing how stupid you still are about space, hyping up blatantly un-feasible systems like fusion and antimatter and totally neglecting awesome, kickass and entirely practical systems like Isaac Kuo's x-ray laser drivers.

Why? Because they don't fit into your Star Trek future where you have tramp freighter captains that can ram a starship right into our planet with us having no defenses. What's your solution to that problem? Ignore it and pray to the Machine God that everything will work out okay. Meanwhile, preach resignation and futility! You're such a fucking dumbass it's incredible. Like some kind of crazy UFO / suicide cult leader.

It's amazing how stupid you are to confuse Hawking saying "not impossible in theory" with "feasible engineering-wise". You call yourself an engineer? Fucking pathetic. The Fermi Paradox proves that faster than light travel may be "possible in theory" all you want, but it can never, ever be feasible in any kind of engineering sense. Not even if FTL required as little as the power of a supernova. Because if it were so feasible then some alien civilization would have colonized this galaxy in the past 12.3 billion years. 

But when basic logic conflicts with your hype, your hype wins.

You do the same thing with Lunar Development. You claim that helium-3 is a valid reason to go to the moon. Bullshit! Mining helium-3 would cost billions a tonne. Yet the stuff is only worth 100,000$ a tonne if it's to be competitive with fission fuel. So you would be taking a loss of greater than 99% with Helium-3 or having a return on investment of -99.999%. Congrats retard.

Lunar development is one of your pet projects so you use fusion power to justify it. Fusion power is one of your pet projects so you use lunar development to justify it. Yet you're too fucking stupid to realize your logic is circular. And you're way too stupid to realize that of these two projects neither is economical. What kind of a fucking engineer are you?!

And while I'm at it, you've also never once mentioned that putting domes over cities would cut out rain which would make the cities involved filthy and increase their cleaning costs. You've reprinted that story at least three times with ever more elaboration and you've never once mentioned the obvious. Don't you have any fucking common sense?

How can you expect to be convincing when you totally fail to mention anything negative even when it's blatantly fucking obvious to absolutely everyone?! Just hope people are stupid enough to not notice it, is that it? Just hope they're not wondering and suspicious about the costs of artificially cleaning a city?

And for anyone wondering at the title, it's because Brian Wang is a Chinese racist and it shows. And just as his mindless boosterism can be aggravating when it falls afoul of common sense, fundamental physics or elemental logic, yes his racism and mindless China boosting is aggravating too. The only thing worse than boosting backwards, uneducated and psychologically un-evolved people like the Chinese is the even worse Indians. The Germans are bad enough, and they're the best there is in western Europe. China? You're talking about at least three notches lower.

What's the point of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Looking for pictures of Earthrise over the moon, I ran across this comment by a refreshingly non-brainwashed person:

> So I know that Buffy has always been known as a show that has a lot of depth, and responds well to analysis, but I just wasn’t able to see it in the episode we watched in class.

> I have several friends who are die-hard Buffy fans, and I’ve always heard of it in relation to its exploration of gender issues. However, when I saw the episode in class (my first), I didn’t really get it. I mean sure, it has a badass female protagonist who can stand up for herself, but so do plenty of other things. Maybe its just because the show is 13 years old, but I don’t see what it did that was so special.

Here's my answer to that question.

The point about Buffy is that a girl can be a brainless ditz and even an abusive bitch yet still be lauded as a great leader. The more she moans, complains and whines, the more heroic she is. The great "gender reversal" of the show is that women can assault and rape their significant others and get away with it scot free, because it shows they're "strong". Just as strong as men!

[Of course, the REAL point about Buffy is that Joss Whedon's got a peculiar sexual fetish for young strong bitchy girls who show naked feet which he's managed to broadcast all over television. But I doubt you want to think about that so let's pretend it's purely political. And speaking of politics,]

In a word, it's misandry. Something that's become disgustingly common in the last few decades when women suddenly decided they wanted an equal share of modern technological society despite not having contributed a single iota to the advance of science, technology, or industry in the entire 100,000 years the human species has been alive. For instance, obstetrics didn't start progressing until men got involved in it - not a coincidence.

In fact, women don't have the slightest clue what they're good for besides pumping out babies so now that we don't really care (or want) to pump babies anymore, they've suddenly (it's a coincidence!) decided they've been the victims of oppression by males in every single society on Earth for the last 10,000+ years. As proof consider that a minority of murder victims are women - in a just world only men would ever die or drop out of school or suffer in any way. Since men acceding to women's desires to not accomplish anything in public life obviously makes women victims, their victim status entitles them to victimize in turn. An eye for an eye, that's fair right?

The reason women don't know what they're good for isn't because they're good for nothing, it's because they're stupid so they can't figure it out themselves. I'm going to give away the secret here though: women are responsible for all the psychological advances which permit and encourage the existence of modern civilization. There's quite a bit of difference between the medieval societies of Pakistan or India which have nukes and the 19th century French who didn't. The French were vastly more socially and psychologically advanced, that's what. A mere century ago, India still practiced infanticide - think about that.

Of course, the feminazis don't like to dwell on that because all that psychological advance is tied to having babies and raising children. Something they don't want. And it's no coincidence at all that they're ugly (google Andrea Dworkin if you want nightmares) or lesbians. I mean, it's not like more than 99% of 19th and early 20th century feminists were lesbians. I'm sure it was no greater than 90%. And I'm sure the percentage of lesbians has gone way down now they've accepted ugly fat man-hating bitches into their ranks.

Yes, I have a bit of a problem with anyone buying into the notion of "let's undermine the progressive half of the population out of spite, bitterness and sour grapes". Sue me.

I have an even bigger problem with the fact that according to statistics there is one third as many women who are my intellectual equals as men. How the fuck are you supposed to find a significant other who's your match in those circumstances? Yes I'm bitter, but I don't want to wreck the world because of it.

Fusion Will NEVER Be Viable

I've never been interested in fusion because I knew it wouldn't be viable for at least 50 years. Why bother worrying or hyping about it when it's crap? Well, I just did a spot of research into it and what I've found is simply amazing.

The main line of research is crap because the fuel they need to use (tritium) would cost millions per kilogram. This compares extremely poorly to uranium which can be had for less than 100$ per kg. Even extracting uranium from seawater costs less than 1000$ per kilogram.

Note that there isn't much conversion needed since all proposed fusion processes produce energy per kilogram of fuel at rates roughly equivalent to fission of uranium.

Let's not forget the fact that D-T fusion produces 30 times (*) the amount of neutron radiation per kilogram as uranium fission. Neutron radiation is the kind that causes things to become radioactive. I hope you love nuclear waste because D-T fusion makes fission look waste-free.

The yo-yos who want to go to the moon to mine Helium-3 say crap like "that 25-tonne load of He3 would worth on the order of $75 billion today, or $3 billion per tonne". Of course, this is a blatant lie. Helium-3 isn't worth $3 billion per tonne, it costs $3 billion per tonne. What it's actually worth if you're using it as fuel in a fusion power plant is less than $50,000 per tonne, or 60,000 times less than they're claiming.

This doesn't mean that helium-3 mining can't happen economically. It just can't happen with chemical rockets. You need nuclear (fission) rockets to get to the moon and mine that helium-3 economically. And I'm really assuming here that it'll be economical, but if you're going to be using nuclear fission rockets, if nuclear fission has gained that much political and social respectability, then why bother with a fusion reactor at all?

Why harness the power of a twinkling little star when you can harness the power of a supernova? That's where all Uranium comes from, from the r-process running up the neutron drip line, from the blazing heart of an exploding stellar super-giant. The hype around fusion defies comprehension even as mindless sun worship. Don't people realize our sun is nothing, nothing, compared to something that outshines a galaxy. It's like wishing to cuddle up to a candle when you have a roaring bonfire next to you.

But that's not where the fun ends with fusion research. You see, there's an "alternative" line of research which advertises being able to use everyday normal crap like Borax (boron) and that its reactors will be so cheap they could be built in someone's garage ....

Well problem is they can only do that if the fuel is totally pure. Boron must be purified from 80% to >99.7%, otherwise those dippy little reactors built in people's garages will kill everybody near them. The best part is that even though Borax costs $2 per kilo, pure boron costs around $5000-10,000 per kilogram depending on its purity. And you want to use that for fuel? Yeah, that's not going to happen. Don't expect any economies of scale either since industry is already making the stuff in massive quantities.

But the fun doesn't end there. You see, pure boron in fusion reactors wouldn't cut it. No siree, you need pure boron-11. Because if you shoved any boron-10 (which is 20% of natural boron) into your garage-built fusion reactor, it would ... kill everyone around it. What you really want is pure boron-11 and as it happens we do have plenty of boron-11 around since boron-10 is used as a neutron radiation absorbent by ... the nuclear fission industry.

So you see, it's beautiful. It really is. If you try to build fusion reactors to replace fission reactors then those fusion reactors won't have any fuel. The only way we'd ever have little fusion reactors in people's garages is if we have giant fission plants in every city.

*: deuterium (2 nucleons) + tritium (3 nucleons) -> helium-4 (4 nucleons) + 1 neutron for 20% of mass. In comparison, uranium (235 nucleons) + neutron -> a smorgasbord of stuff + 2.5 neutrons on average, for a net production of 1.5 neutrons (0.6% of mass) on average.

Commercial Use Of A Stargate

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

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

Opening the Choke

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

Check this out.

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

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

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

Changing Land Usage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passengers

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

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

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

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

Tubes

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

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

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

Richard Dawkins' Magical Gene

I figured out what pisses me off so much about Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. It's because he's a magical thinker and magical thinking is stamped right through his thesis.

Richard Dawkins thinks that individual strings of nucleotides in individual organisms compete against other strings of nucleotides in the same organism. He thinks these utterly mindless, thoughtless and passive strings of information are "selfish" and that they "seek to replicate themselves". He thinks these strings, no different from the string 0103202010102310001 have a will, have something that they want.

Of course, none of that is true. The big problem is that it's not even true as a metaphor. You see, Richard Dawkins thinks of genes as constrained within organisms. He thinks the string 0103202010102310001 in organism Dave Thompson has a magical essence which will get passed on to Dave Thompson's biological children, and maybe Dave Thompson's other cells in the case of genes that manage to duplicate themselves across chromosomes.

But that's all crap. The truth is that the string 0103202010102310001 in Dave Thompson has no magical essence, has no essence of any kind. It is exactly identical as the string 0103202010102310001 in Chen Xian Lue on the other side of planet. Exactly identical. So when you talk about genes, it's completely illogical to talk about "the gene 0103202010102310001 in Dave Thompson" or even "the individual gene in such and such organism". When you talk about genes, the MEANING of "the individual gene" is "all of the strings matching this in all of the organisms on the planet".

When you imagine an individual string of nucleotides in an organism, the correct way to think about it isn't that they are selfishly competing against all other strings of nucleotides. Because if you're going to drag in competition into this, you can equally say that each string of nucleotides is a fanatical cooperator with all other matching strings of nucleotides across every organism on the planet. At most you can only say that strings of nucleotides are competing against non-matching strings of nucleotides. And even that is only a metaphor.

Consider what would happen in an environment with 90% infant mortality if a gene guaranteed 90% survival at the cost of 10% of infants that would die because their entire DNA liquefied. Basically, consider what would happen if 10% of copies of a gene sacrificed themselves for the other 90%. They would be wildly successful!

Yet this little insight completely passed Richard Dawkins by. If Dawkins understood what genes are in the first place, he would never have entitled his oeuvre "the selfish gene" because "selfish" is hopelessly reductionist and inaccurate to describe something that is by its nature fanatically cooperative. Assuming it had a will at all, which it doesn't.

Richard Dawkins is a fairly mindless little freak who believes in magic. As biologists must be since Biology is fairly mindless & random and makes no sense at all. What is infuriating about him is that he got one thing right (that natural selection means genes compete against non-matching genes) and used this truth to push forth a much greater lie (that there are these things called genes contained inside you). And the lie is the exact opposite of the truth since genes aren't contained inside you. They're spread out across all organisms.

Fighting For Gay Rights Accomplished Nothing

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.

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.