Design Principles vs Engineering "Principles"

So today I've had Newspeak programming language recommended to me a second time. On its web page the people behind it claim Newspeak is going to be "designed as a principled" language.

The big problems with that claim are first, I see no evidence of any design on that page. And second, nothing they talk about can be even loosely described as principles.

That page, and that language, are the results of typical Engineers' confusion of ... everything related to design. They speak of design when they are incapable of it. They speak of principles when they don't even know the meaning of the term. I suppose I'll have to explain exactly what the terms mean.

Engineers

It's sad that I have to explain the meanings of basic terms in the English vocabulary but I can't say it's unexpected given that I've had to explain how engineers' thought processes are different from, and inferior to, designers. And what exactly (spontaneous) creativity means that makes it blatantly fucking obvious engineers are incapable of it.

The first observation is that engineers don't operate in the realm of ideas. They are not intellectuals. They do not value ideas for their own sake. This is a straightforward consequence of the fact they can't synthesize original ideas. Why value what you can't do? It would hardly make you feel good about yourself. And so very few people care about the truth more than feeling good.

The question naturally arises, what realm do they operate in? Well, they operate in the realm of externally observable behaviours. They are actually proud of this and claim this makes them superior people when the truth is they are cognitively deficient. It's a bit like a paraplegic being proud of using a wheelchair and claiming there's nothing a legged person can do that they can't.

Engineers' Perception of Systems

What does any of that have to do with systems? Everything! Because engineers don't operate in the realm of ideas, they don't conceive of systems as being systems of ideas to be understood. To an engineer, a complex political, social or software system isn't to be understood. Rather, a system is merely to function. It merely needs to ACT in a certain way.

To an engineer, a software system that's been "architected" as a Big Ball of Mud (like Unix) isn't an obvious failure. Rather, one must determine whether or not the Big Ball of Mud is a failure empirically, by seeing whether or not it does what you want to do.

If the big ball of mud does what the engineer wants it, in his very limited imagination, to do then it's a success! And anyone who says otherwise by virtue of having a greater imagination is a "troll" (*) to be hated. And anyone who says otherwise by virtue of having a lower annoyance threshold is a "luser" to be scorned. And goodness help you if you're both!

Similarly, to an engineer, writing spaghetti code is not ipso facto a failure. Yes it's going to be unmaintainable, but this obvious truth is not at all obvious to an engineer. Rather, one must measure the maintainability of spaghetti code empirically. And if it happens that generally such systems are unmaintainable well, that's a heuristic. Something that happens to be true, most of the time, not something that is true axiomatically and/or proven from first principles.

Designers' Perception Of Systems

To a designer, the above is all so much unbelievable, ridiculous bullshit. It's all FALSE at every possible level of resolution. To a designer, a system is to be understood. And this fact is axiomatically true. If a system can't be understood then it's obviously either not been designed at all or been badly designed. This is the most obvious and simplest theorem of any and every designer.

Given this theorem, a big ball of mud isn't any kind of architecture for the exact same reasons why the broken down ruins left over from artillery shelling don't constitute architecture. It is fucking obvious! And for the exact same reason, spaghetti code can't be considered any kind of success. No matter how well it behaves. No matter how maintainable it turns out to be.

Any system that can't be understood is a failure! Automatically. Axiomatically!!

Engineers vs Designers

What it boils down to is that when engineers make "principles" about a system they're planning, these end up being of the form "everything can do X" or "everything has Y" where X and Y are concrete artifacts. Hence, "in Newspeak, every object will be an Actor". These rules may or may not be easier to understand locally, but almost always they make the system as a whole more difficult to understand globally.

Meanwhile, when designers make general rules about a system, they end up saying fuzzier things like "the system is homoiconic". Design principles are typically more difficult to understand since they are more abstract, usually fuzzy and never concrete. But they will always, always make it easier to understand the system as a whole. So, "everything is an Actor, hence the system is wildly non-deterministic" is NOT something that should be construed as a design principle.

This is why systems planned mainly or solely by engineers can't be considered designed. Let alone well-designed. Rarely has any effort been made to make them comprehensible as a whole. And any effort engineers have spared seems paltry compared to the obsessive focus a designer would invest. These systems also have a nasty tendency to be incomprehensible to anyone but an engineer. And then only by stepping through them laboriously. This is clearly unacceptable.

Design vs Engineering

The difference between design and engineering is usually waved away by engineers claiming that design is just interface engineering, but that just shows how engineers are incapable of grasping design. Design is a synthetic faculty. Engineering is an analytic one. If you want to see the difference, look no further than any house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright versus reading the Building Code.

It's actually something of a sick joke to claim that underlying local rules (what engineers call principles) actually are overarching principles. It just goes to show that engineers are incapable of the synthesis required to understand the meaning of the word "principle" in the English language. Principle means higher level and not more fundamental. These things are pretty much opposite.

Since there is an important difference between design and engineering. And since the difference is fundamental. And since engineers can't do design if you put a gun to their heads, even though they claim to be able to. And since designers can't do engineering if you put a gun to their heads, even though they claim it's beneath them and would slit their own throats if forced to. A decision has to be made between them to decide who has primacy over the other.

Who would you rather be the bitch of the other?

Who Should Plan?

Now this question has a rather important context so let's state it properly. If you're one of the end users of the world, and keeping in mind that even if you're a programmer then you use many orders of magnitude more software than you actually create, would you rather that engineers or that designers planned software systems?

Personally, I think there really ought to be a law that would allow any competent designer to shoot engineers whenever they get uppity. I think this is totally reasonable considering that good engineers are a dime a dozen and competent systems designers are rare as Archaeopteryx teeth. So just to equalize the massive imbalance in numbers between engineers and designers, you need to hand designers overwhelming power.

Actually, you would need to do this even if designers were plentiful since on any software project you need about 2 designers for every 10 engineers. Yet the few designers need to have as much input as the many engineers. Then again, if systems designers were plentiful, we wouldn't be living in a crapsack world (**) so probably the imbalance would redress itself without resorting to shooting assholes with delusions of adequacy.

*: troll: 1) a person who through sheer peevishness and desire to do evil says the world is less than perfect so as to harm the self-evident Harmony all humans enjoy with each other, with feral animals, and with natural disasters. 2) a person who challenges group-think. 3) a dissident.

**: Hmm, I guess this makes me a Knight in Sour Armour.

Mezzanine: Hyped Up Electronic Whiteboard

Tell me if this presentation means anything to you. They make a big deal of moving images between screens, which is of course the most stupidly derivative thing imaginable.

They say "optimized for big data sets and real time" as if this means something. Because if it means something to end users then I haven't the foggiest clue what it is.

Just like I don't have the foggiest clue what a "spatial environment operating system" is supposed to mean. My money's on it just being an empty meaningless marketroid-invented buzzword.

As far as I can tell, this is an electronic whiteboard. Of course, XEROX PARC has been playing with those things for at least a decade under the rubric of Ubiquitous Computing.

But no, this can't be an electronic whiteboard because it's supposed to be "revolutionary" and "the future of computing". Garbage!

As near as I can tell, this is totally useless hyped up prestige crap aimed at idiots with too much money to spend. So-called "executives" seeking expensive status symbols.

Just like the multi-touch was a status symbol for hoteliers.

OOUIs and Naked Objects

I was reading Erik Naggum's take on so-called "free software", a perspective I agree with entirely. It's interesting to see how his prediction has been borne out. Though I wouldn't go so far as to say "free" software has destroyed inventiveness, since I think C/C++ and lately Java have done more than enough of that. Annihilating inventiveness I mean, not being inventive!

But I agree with him that "free" software is entirely dictatorial and very, very far from free. And I even have a good idea how to remedy this. But that's not the point. The point is that it inspired me to check out the license for GNU Smalltalk since I was planning to maybe use it. Yes it has no GUI but this is a plus for me. No, it has no IDE, but I can get around this by porting from Dolphin. It's either that or Pharo.

The Point

Well, the license to GNU Smalltalk seems sensible, but that's not the point either. The point is that I started reading the documentation for fun. And I found this little gem in it:

The Smalltalk programming language is an object oriented programming language. This means, for one thing, that when programming you are thinking of not only the data that an object contains, but also of the operations available on that object. The object's data representation capabilities and the operations available on the object are “inseparable”;

And that's important because for years I've struggled with what the fuck is a "naked objects" UI framework. I've read about it. I think it's a fantastic idea. And this is an improvement over "OOUI" which I hadn't the faintest clue what the fuck it meant, although it sounded good too.

So I knew what a naked objects framework did, and I had some ideas on how it did it. But I never had an Aha moment and I could never explain in any principled way what it was about or why to have one. Yes, I understood the practical advantages well, but I consider such "understanding" strictly third rate. The pathetic bleating of people who are incapable of understanding anything.

So What Is It?

It turns out it's all very simple. Simple and yet profound. After all, it only took me years and dozens of design iterations to get it. An OOUI is one where representations belong to objects. So in OOP, code belongs to objects. And in OOUIs, representations belong to objects.

Now, this doesn't mean that each object has one and only one representation. That would be as ridiculous as an object having one and only one method. What it does mean is that the farce of "pluggable views" in the MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm is chucked away as so much lying garbage.

The whole notion of pluggable views is a sick joke and a lie. Not just because it's impossible in practice. But because it's not even desirable. Looking through your class hierarchy browser at some class and having not the slightest fucking clue how it represents itself ... this is Not Good.

Distractions

So anyways, I finally cottoned on to this ridiculously simple insight two days ago. It didn't help at all that the Naked Objects framework written for Java actually fails, totally and utterly, to heed this simple insight.

It also didn't help that so-called OOUIs are nothing of the kind. For one thing, people claim that Smalltalk has an OOUI but anyone who takes a look at Genera knows what a sick lying joke that is. There is no Smalltalk UI with Genera's abilities, and that's a really sad pathetic thing.

I would chalk up my view of OOUIs as an original invention except if Genera's UI is implemented the way I think it is, then it probably has it down. Or at least, that's how I invented it. By trying to imagine how I would implement the functionality I saw in that video of a Lisp Machine.

Now just think about this last paragraph and reflect upon it. An original invention ... replicating 30 year old functionality. There is something seriously wrong with the world when this can be said with a straight face.

Eliezer Yudkowsky Is A Plagiarist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power Glows - Only Nuclear Power Glows

There was a rambling useless discussion on Rod Adams' Atomic Insights blog about moving away from self-destructive marketing by the nuclear industry. Because all that emphasis on safety is just as self-destructive as an American politician declaring out of the blue "no, I am not a homosexual".

Then there was the stupid suggestion by someone that the nuclear industry emphasize how "green" it is. Except that too is self destructive since “green” is a propaganda word owned by the enemy. And what's so laughable about green is it's the colour of money in the USA. Hence the colour of the rich. Which is of course who bankrolls the anti-industry anti-human movements.

I of course have an obvious proposal to all this aimless useless confused scratching of heads among pro-nuclear advocates. I propose we call nuclear a BLUE power source. Mmmm blue. In fact, it’s a GLOWING BLUE power source. And since we all know from cartoons and anime that Power Glows it behooves pro-nuclear advocates to use this obvious selling point.

(And it's true too. Stars glow. Supernovas glow. Quasars glow. Lightning bolts glow. Lasers glow. Even fire and lava glow! And if you count sonoluminescence then even sound waves glow ... if they are powerful enough. Glow => Power in the human mind.)

Take a look at this picture which could easily have come off of a pro-nuclear advertisement (but didn't) and tell me that doesn't give you a warm glow inside. Fuck all that submarines and electricity shit. That's all fucking worthless. You want a message that will resonate with people? Keep it simple.

Only nuclear energy glows with power. Because REAL power glows!

The corollary is that so-called “green” energy sources don't glow because they are WEAK! And equally obvious, to me anyways, is the reason why Gaians hate nuclear energy. Because it is powerful. And this conflicts with their submissive worship of Gaia.

Inherited Surnames - so-called Family Names

There is little more retarded than the concept of inherited surnames. Certainly in the modern era where many people are aware they've been abused as children (because even childrearing has evolved rapidly in the 20th century) and where a vastly greater number of people choose professions and lives disapproved of by their parents.

The whole concept of inherited surnames is absurd and despicable. It stopped making sense during the Industrial Revolution when society gradually stopped looking towards the past (classical education) and started attending to the present (modern education). With our emerging future-orientation, it makes even less sense.

Inherited surnames also run afoul of gender equality. And I will say that nothing showcases the crushing lack of creativity and utter fucking stupidity of humanity than the fact that feminists, who have an abiding hatred of patrilineal surnames, were able to come up with NO solution to the problem (hyphenated names don't count as a solution). It's not like the solutions aren't blindingly obvious either.

The first obvious solution is that when a couple gets married, they exchange surnames. The better solution is that when a couple gets married, they take up their significant other's given name as a surname. How's that for gender equality? And yet, I've never heard it proposed. Probably because feminists are all fucking idiots, as the general run of this pathetic species called humanity tends to be.

The second and obviously correct solution is that when a couple gets married, when they become a family, then they PICK A FAMILY NAME. How fucking obvious is that? The children then inherit this new family name, by virtue of being part of that family until they form their own family. How pathetically obvious is that?

And yet I've never heard of this rather obvious suggestion. A withering indictment of humanity if I've ever heard one. After all, something like 100 million people get married every year on this planet, and how many of them have the minimal intelligence to do something different than all the herd animals around them have done for centuries? How many of them can actually come up with something smart to do? Apparently, too few to be detected.

This whole species you are all proud to be part of is mind-numbingly stupid. Even the supposedly smart people, the engineers, the programmers, the academics, the scientists. They are ALL idiotic in the extreme. They've memorized worthless facts and esoterica so they can show off by regurgitating them to their peers. Like trained parrots and seals. Meanwhile, they're too stupid to wonder for a single minute what to call their own children.

Future of Nuclear

There are many incredibly ridiculous people who talk about transitioning away from nuclear power and towards weak ambient power sources (the propagandistically misnamed "renewables"). In these people's views, the world is entirely static and unchanging but there is this magical fairy called The Future that will transform their chosen power source (through magic) to do anything they wish, irregardless of the laws of physics.

Ridiculous is a grossly inaccurate term for this batshit insane magical thinking. I happen to know all of the developments promised for wind, solar and nuclear and while some of the future developments of wind (but not solar) are impressive, they don't actually nullify that source of energy's inherent weaknesses. And future developments in nuclear power aren't "impressive", they are revolutionary.

Some of these ridiculous people are putting a 25 year timeline to "transition away" from nuclear power. Which is entirely ridiculous and unrealistic. At least if they'd said 100 years then I could allow for solar power satellites or other such technology but whatever. Within 25 years, wind power will almost certainly gain high altitude from kites, wings or other techniques and so bump up to a solid 40% reliability onshore, improve economics and siting issues, and reduce the infrasound pollution problems.

Nuclear Revolution

Within 25 years, revolutionary technologies like small nuclear, high temperature nuclear and nuclear gas turbines will all come online. With some luck even thorium, molten salt and chemist's designs will be developed, though the time horizon there is more realistically 40 years to deployment. Why do I say these are revolutionary? Well,

• small nuclear plants will do away with the enormous expense (and unsightliness) of long-distance transmission lines, something that wind power will never be able to do since it actually multiplies transmission lines (another dirty side of wind power that's rarely spoken of)
• high temperature nuclear will be vastly more efficient (thus cheaper) and assuming the temperature is high enough allow entirely new applications like providing heat for industrial process, something ambient power sources will NEVER be able to do (sun-powered forges have been tried & failed already while electric arc furnace mills will move out of the country rather than pay for expensive electricity)
• nuclear gas turbines will allow NPPs to be dispatched (ramp up and down) very rapidly, opening up the potential to displacing single-cycle gas turbines and even hydroelectric dams. The competitor here is natural gas, ambient power sources need not apply!

So in 25 years, nuclear power will be entrenched as never before. It will definitely be powering mining sites, oil rigs, remote towns, and small islands. It will probably be competing against hydroelectric dams. And it will possibly be used in the chemical industry at refineries.

Thorium, molten salt, and chemists' designs are all equally as revolutionary, though their advantages are far more esoteric. Things the typical end user hardly cares about but the mining industry, nuclear industry and politicians definitely will.

In other words, for all the delusional crap about transitioning "away from" nuclear power, the reality is the future will involve transitioning TOWARDS nuclear power. Something we have honestly just barely begun. Something even France has barely begun when you keep in mind the massive potential of nuclear power.

Not Just Energy

And I haven't even mentioned laser enrichment which will collapse the price of fuel for nuclear power plants down to raw uranium, utterly changing the game there. It will also drastically shorten the acquisition period for nuclear bomb material, as well as make this activity undetectable. Both of which are excellent news for everyone who hasn't lived under the umbrella of peace provided by nuclear missiles. Something which anyone who's read about the confrontation Khrushchev had with the suicidal madman JFK will agree with.

Yes so when I said we had a glorious nuclear future, I wasn't restricting this to nuclear energy. The only fly in this ointment is truck bombs. Nuclear truck bombs to be exact. Bombs whose provenance you can't trace. Missiles are great for peace. Truck bombs, not so much. Or are they? Maybe a few rich cities getting blown up by terrorists will make the world's rich people take seriously the demands of disenfranchised poor people. When a poor person can light a nuclear fire in your gated community, the balance of power between rich and poor is going to change drastically. We'll be living in very interesting times.

I won't mourn when Tel Aviv is incinerated. I'll be too busy laughing at all the politicians scrambling to remake this world into a socialist paradise where poor people are happy, happy, happy.

Germany's New Old Anti-Nuclear Stance

I was asked to comment about the seeming about-face in nuclear policy in Germany. Well, there is no about-face in Germany. They were always nutso anti-human romantic fascists on the subject of energy and always will be.

The narrative seems to be "we trusted the nuclear industry and they lied" but this is a blatant fucking lie. They NEVER trusted nuclear power. They are delusional fuckers if they think they ever did. The nuclear industry is by far the safest industry. Safest does not mean "risk-free" since NOTHING like that is even remotely theoretically possible. Even if you had an entirely white-collar industry, you could still say that X engineers died of heart attacks during the tenure of their jobs. Or that X artificial intelligences died from their supporting hardware undergoing proton decay.

But "risk-free" is the exact standard the Germans want it since they hate, positively HATE, nuclear power as a deep down gut reaction. It isn't even paranoia, it's hatred. Any misstep, any stumble, even one that is recovered from fully, is an excuse to hate nuclear power as far as the Germans are concerned. The reason I say this is the extreme similarity between the poor white racists in the USA and Germans, each claiming victim status to justify their hatred.  It isn't fear they're displaying since fear is something to be fought and conquered. They're displaying resentment, bitterness and smug vindication. All emotions tightly associated with hatred.

You probably have no idea but the media over there in Germany is claiming that 1) Fukushima is as bad as Chernobyl, a claim which is unbelievably bald-faced lying since the radiation at the front gate of Fukushima at its worst was never as bad as 20 kilometers away from Chernobyl. 2) the exclusion zone the Japanese drew will be a permanent radioactive graveyard for the next 100,000 years. Another claim which is unbelievable in the sheer audacity of its lying since radiation levels should die down to insignificance around Fukushima within a year. And this year-long period is a severe blow to me personally since I expected it to be done within 3 months or so before I looked up the facts.

The exclusion zone in Japan could last for longer than a year for purely political reasons. Just as surely the anti-nuclear revival in Japan could continue. But I have severe doubts that will happen given that Japan is up against the wall economically. And they were up against the wall BEFORE the tsunami hit and did one trillion yen in damage and killed ten thousand people. Can Japan afford expensive anti-human policies? No. Will the political pressures for rational industrial policies overwhelm the anti-human hatred? That is a very good question and I am eager to see.

Needless to say, Germany is a lost cause. But then again, I considered it a lost cause ever since Merkel started talking about raiding the German nuclear industry in order to pay for the morbidly obese subsidies they've given the parasitic German solar and wind industries. Because of course they couldn't kill off those deadbeat industries even when the German government is running ridiculous deficits. No, I had my "what the fuck is this shit?!?" moment about the German nuclear industry a long time ago. Germany's attitude after Fukushima barely made me pause. Though the German media's blatant lying about what did and will happen at Fukushima did piss me off.

Engineers Are An Inferior Form of Life

Engineers lack the capacity to synthesize original ideas, which is one of the two pillars of Judgement. Which means engineers are amoral and incapable of discerning good from evil without a market survey. Which will of course return bogus answers.

That's the abstract explanation. Let us examine a concrete example. Let us look at how software engineers decided to handle data.

The History of Unix and Windows

Long ago, software engineers looked at data on hard disks and they asked themselves: what dimensionality is yon data, what is its nature? And they determined it was one dimensional (bytestreams) and they patted themselves on the back and saw that it was good.

Then software engineers looked at data on CRT monitors and they asked themselves: what dimensionality is yon presentation, what is its nature? And they determined it was TWO dimensional (bit-BLOCKS) and they scratched themselves on the head and they said "we have a problem".

But lo, a brave engineer came forth and said: we shall Reduce the dimensionality of the CRT so that it maps the one-dimensional data in two-dimensions. Look, it is simple, Cantor did this! And the engineers toiled for a day and a half and they named their creation the Command Line Interface and they patted themselves on the back and saw that it was good.

Then some evil-doers (called Lusers) made a Feature Request, and they asked: we want to embed this directory data inside of other directory data, can we have this? And the engineers saw that this Feature Request was Easy. So they toiled half a day and they named their creation (now with fractional dimensionality) the Filesystem and they patted themselves on the back and saw that it was good.

Then some evil-doers (incomprehensible unfathomable aliens called Artists) said: look, this is all well and good but I have these things called PHOTOS, what the fuck do Command Lines and Bytestreams have to do with my Photos? And the engineers now had a Real Problem.

But the Engineers' procedures had "worked" so well they had produced something 5% as usable as Symbolics' Lisp Machine or Smalltalk OS, so they said they might as well get on with it and produced Windows. And they patted themselves on the back and saw that other people were calling them delusional fuckers. And they were very surprised.

The History of Lisp Machines and Smalltalk

Needless to say, the approach of genuine systems researchers and designers to data was ... a bit different. For one thing, these weren't engineers. They were experimentalists. And they were either capable of original thought themselves, or if they weren't personally capable of creativity, they were at least capable of recognizing that genuine creativity was something to be cherished, not something to be scorned, crushed and dismissed by claiming it didn't fit a Market Need.

The Researchers' and Designers' approach to data was thus: okay so we've got an encoding of data, but we forgot about it because it's not even remotely relevant. We've got a presentation of data, that's almost relevant but mostly it's misleading so we'll actively put it out of our minds. What we need to do is figure out the NATURE of the DATA ITSELF.

For starters, what dimensionality does this data naturally exist in? Oh, it's K-dimensional fractal data where K varies arbitrarily, hmm that's interesting. Okay, so it looks like we'll need a couple of transformations to encode the data and a completely different family of transformations to present it.

And lo the Researchers approached some engineers and the engineers said: say what? I don't fucking get what you're talking about! What are these "objects" you're talking about? Why would anybody need this? What is this "idea space" you keep talking about?! This is absurd and inefficient! Only hardware exists. ONLY HARDWARE!

Then the researchers scratched their heads and said unto themselves: what we need is to buy some engineers and if they don't DO AS WE SAY then we will FIRE THEIR ASS. And lo this was done and through natural selection the Researchers and Designers finally got some engineers that had faith in their Word, and Lisp Machines and Smalltalk were both invented. And this was magnificent.

And to this day, still the Engineers maintain that Unix and Windows are "good" because they refuse to shut the fuck up and do as they're told!

Star Trek Is Predicated on Human Idiocy

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

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

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

Examples

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future

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

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

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

How Science Really Works

Behold the so-called Scientific Method. Scientific Academia anyways.

As opposed to the idealized anything goes of Paul Feyerabend which merely describes how science should work.

Of course, Against Method also describes how science does work at the margins of academia where all the best work is done. Where the sacred cows are gutted before the shocked eyes of bystanders.

Naturally, Popperism is a ridiculous and unworkable pile of crap not worth the effort of reading about it in an online encyclopedia of philosophy.

On Hatred

It is exceedingly annoying how many people buy into the moronic notion that hatred is evil. Like fuck it is!

Hatred is not evil. Love is not good! Dark is not evil. Good is not nice. Light is not good!

Empathy, altruism, ethics, morality, politeness, and kindness, are all entirely independent concepts. Not a single one of them entails any other!

I have personally used all of the first four as justifications and tools to destroy people. Granted, it was always evil people doing evil things but the point remains.

Evil Love

Love of the world is provably evil since loving something means caring for it as it is. Well, this world is overwhelmingly monstrous and evil. So loving the world translates to trying to preserve evil and monstrosity. Since loving the world means preserving evil, loving the world is evil.

Hatred has its just place in the world. In fact, it is not possible for anyone in this world to be happy in it if they are genuinely and solely concerned with morality and justice.

Evil Construction

Hatred is a destructive emotion just as love is a constructive one. But construction is not good, and destruction is not evil. As proof, look no further to people's constant constructions of evil. 

What, did you think genocides aren't constructed? Did you think child abuse and justifications thereof aren't constructed? Did you think patent systems aren't constructed?

Did you think financial debt, plutarchy, positive interest currency aren't constructed? Did you think gerontocracy, tradition and bride price aren't constructed?

Inseparable

Furthermore, construction and destruction are two sides of the same coin. One needs empty space in order to construct anything at all. It's not going to stay empty so you'd better fill it immediately. In fact, you'd better start filling it just before you make it empty. But destruction of orthodoxy is constructive of revolution.

And every genuinely creative person knows that construction of anything at all is destruction of possibilities. That knowing even a bad solution to a problem is to inhibit the creation of an original solution.

Construction and destruction are inseparable just as love and hatred are.

Values

There are no good or bad emotions. Only good or bad values. Justice, morality, empathy and passion are good. Narcissism and apathy (the signature values of Americans and English respectively) are evil.

You can't turn morality and ethics to evil because they define good. It's also exceedingly difficult to turn empathy to evil. However, construction and love, never mind politeness and kindness, these have nothing to do with good or evil.

It bears repeating.

Hatred is not evil. Love is not good! Dark is not evil. Good is not nice. Light is not good!

Genera, Termkit, Unix: what a fucking joke Unix is!

I've been going through info on Genera and Stanislav's site when some commenter on there mentioned Losethose, possibly as a joke.

It's worth watching the first few minutes of the first video. Especially if you're familiar with LISP or Smalltalk. Because then you immediately understand what a sick joke is the conceit, the pretense, of Unix that it "supports C".

Unix doesn't support C. In fact, Unix supports nothing. Unix is a sick fucking joke of an OS.

Take this project for instance. Termkit is just trying to reproduce one small feature of Dynamic Windows on Symbolics' Lisp Machines. See Using A Lisp Machine 1 as proof.

Except that Termkit provides a distinctly inferior version of the objectedness found in Dynamic Windows. And it sure as fucking hell didn't take the Symbolics team a year to program it! Actually, I predict that like many other similar projects to improve Unix, Termkit will die quietly.

What is Unix? It is a sick fucking joke. An undead monstrosity shambling along from the dinosaur age when interactivity didn't exist. Unix was created for batch processing and was never meant to work with anything better. And it has failed to adapt to newer hardware.

Brian Wang, a Hypocritical Lying Racist Fuck

Every so often I read Next Big Future. I've got two good reasons. First is to lift up my spirits and motivation by reading about Progress. And second is to know what tools I will be able to play with to redesign the world. There is a downside to reading that blog and the reason I can never recommend it. It is its myopic dishonest hypocritical lying racist fuck of an author Brian Wang.

Well, three stories caught my attention in that vein.

Intelligence

There's this story about the role of motivation in intelligence testing which turns out to be very large. Now, as you know, most Asian children are put under incredible pressure to test well. And if you're a reader of that racist fucker Brian Wang then you know most Asian countries score an average of 15 points above Western countries. Well here we have a study that says 10 points of that is down to motivation!

Hmm, at last an obvious explanation for the phenomenon and it's ... a confounding factor. Of course. And this all goes to show we can't say anything at all on the subject with any authority. Is Brian Wang going to admit this? Fuck no. There is no indication in that article that Brian has even caught the obvious implications.

Incidentally, the more laid back Asian countries like Thailand score at the 85-90 IQ points. Which is again exactly as predicted. So much for Wang's Chinese racial supremacy theories.

Longevity

The second story that catches my cynical eye is this crap about "herbs" lengthening life of fruit flies, and based on that tenuous evidence going straight to clinical trials in humans. Which is bullshit since lots of stuff, caloric restriction comes to mind, that lengthens life in fruit flies and worms has no effect whatsoever on higher animals except to make them constantly aggressive, miserable and angry.

We are not talking here about a little dieting that just makes people fatter, we're talking about serious shit that warps their personalities.

Anyways, so this story goes on and on about how he "doesn't recommend it" for people but of course he fucking does. It reminds me of Brian's stories about domes around cities that never account for cleaning city streets and buildings. Or his story about the wondrous wool-mud bricks that are so much better than unfired bricks ... that conspicuously fail to compare against fired bricks!

Trains

Finally, there's an interesting article about high speed trains that perfectly illustrates what a hypocritical lying racist fuck Brian Wang is.

Back when the Chinese high speed trains were supposed to run at 350 kph, he made a huge deal about it. Even though their most important systems would use entirely Western technology (not made in China as he implied) and just accept the tearing up of tracks for political reasons (not exactly attractive or sane).

But now that the Chinese government has nixed those stupid plans, he talks about how that isn't a big deal and saying "[other people] are making a big deal of it [which I never did]" which of course is a blatant fucking lie. No it isn't a big deal, BUT HE CLAIMED IT WAS!

It was a big deal to him because he claimed that going at 350 kph was proof the Chinese had assimilated the technology and improved it. Which was a blatant giant fucking honker of a lie. So he lies now about what a big deal it supposedly isn't in order to cover up his previous odious lies. What a disgusting filthy lying son of a bitch!

Other Lies

I've previously written about how fusion will never be viable which was in reaction to a pro-fusion bunch of crap by Brian Wang. He is a big fanboi of fusion. He is also a big fanboi of space travel, which is why I wrote there's no reason whatsoever to go to space. My post about how some engineers confuse SF with reality was written as a reaction to him saying that's his mode of operation!

Other People's Lies

I even wrote about how internal FTL may be possible in reaction to him. Because you see, this fucker thinks the laws of physics are no obstacle to engineering. He also thinks expanding the Fermi Paradox to the entire universe is no obstacle to engineering! Incredible what a moron he is.

In any case, FTL is NOT possible and Fermi Paradox is an absolute obstacle to its viability. However, unlike Brian Wang, I am intellectually honest so I do admit that internal FTL may be possible. FTL used NOT for exploration or expansion of a civilization but purely internally to keep the civilization cohesive.

Though there's an awful lot of stupidity and intellectual dishonesty by people talking about wormholes. There is no fucking way wormholes "just happen" to have zero distance internally. And there is no fucking way that masses like black holes all curve space conveniently "inwards" where the distortions can meet into wormholes. Ugh, that's just self-serving delusional crap.

SETI types are Creationists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Privilege - Modern Homocentrism

Humans believe their experiences as human beings are privileged. This is a delusion which even professional intellectuals cling to. There are many such illusions which have turned into delusions. Most of them have ended up as great "mysteries" for philosophers who conspicuously scratch their heads over them.

One such illusion is of time "running". Another is the so-called "arrow" of time which is a straightforward artifact of the nature of computation. But then again it would require understanding computation, entropy and time, and that's something beyond most physicists.

Just about everyone clings to bits being dimensionless - they're not. Bits are similar to functions and not at all like numbers. The bit 1 is close to the function f:1->1 and not the number 1 at all. Most people, even many physicists, cling to elementary particles being dimensionless points instead of extended objects.

Mathematicians cling to the delusion of there being One True Mathematics with a death-grip even though every single mathematician will freely tell you it's a delusion. They know it's false yet cling to it. They also cling to the notion of T having meaning (one true truth, hah!).

Physicists cling to the absurd notion of One True Timeline (copenhagenites, nondeterminism, clinging to a classicist vision of micro- and macro-reality instead of quantum, rejecting time travel out of hand). They also cling to One True Physical Reality (big bang creationists). Physicists have also clung up to the late 20th century to the notion of Aphysical Free Action (vitalism).

Most normal people cling to One True Present (time travelers "overwriting" the past). Magical thinkers cling to One True Self (copies of me aren't me, they are "copies").

Are you catching the pattern? It's not just the loathsome T word, which is a lie and a deception, it's the whole emotion behind it.

The emotion that says I AM PRIVILEGED ABOVE ALL OTHER THINGS. Ultimately "true" has no meaning other than "privileged". And people for some stupid moronic reason, think they are privileged.

People think their minds are privileged. They think 'now' is privileged. They think their subjective experiences (of singular linear classical time as opposed to branching multiple merging quantum time) are privileged.

People think their actions are privileged (not subject to determinism). They think their senses (of real probabilities instead of complex probabilities) are privileged. They think their subjective universe (the mathematics they subjectively experience) is privileged.

As a good modernist I know to scorn such privilege. It is a loathsome abomination to all intellectuals.

For fuck's sake, even the supposedly anti-privilege "aliens are real" is an expression of that imaginary privileged status. These morons think they are privileged to live in a friendly universe where aliens wouldn't bulldoze them like we would a pond of slime. They think they matter.

They think humanoid bodies are privileged. They think *corporeal* bodies are privileged. They think their feudal anti-rational societies are privileged. They think their concerns for ethnicity, their stupid ideologies (esp, gaia-worship, aka "environmentalism") and obsolete resources are privileged!

I would bulldoze them into food paste if I could, just to show them how very, very wrong they are.

On Meta-Leveling - Design Strategy #1

Importance of Formal Definitions

Like other commonly understood terms such as life, intelligence, empathy & morality, meta-leveling is easily understood and admits to many crappy semi-useful definitions.

Definitions which don't provide any useful insight into what the fuck the phenomenon actually is since they are fuzzy, slippery and squishy. This "wealth" of crappy inaccurate, incorrect definitions leaves people scratching their heads when boundary cases come up. As they inevitably do.

Are viruses alive? Most biologists don't know because they don't have enough insight into what life is. And they lack insight because they don't have a single fucking formal definition. Is having just one too much to ask? Mathematicians often work with half a dozen, and gain insight from each and every one of them.

Unyielding, rigid and formal definitions of common terms are exceedingly useful when you're pushing the boundaries. When you're not content not-thinking the same crap every other group-thinking moron is not-thinking about. And I'm not talking about average people here, I'm talking about academics who supposedly are intellectuals.

What Is Meta-Leveling?

Well, you've just had a fine example of it above. I intended to write an article about a formal definition of meta-leveling I developed a few weeks ago. It's in my mind now because just yesterday I developed a definition of transcending.

But before getting into a formal definition of meta-leveling, I thought it would be important to get straight what it is in the first place. And then I realized it was even more important to explain why a formal definition of meta-leveling is important.

What is meta-leveling formally? It is making a complete model of a system and then annotating the model by determining its most important elements. Which are almost always the elements with the greatest freedom of output.

How To Meta-Level

Okay, when I say model, you can forget UML or any other such crap. You'll see why in a minute.  You can also forget functional modeling since that only works for mathematicians. 90% of human beings are better suited to OO since human brains prefer SVO word order to VOO. So pick up Object Oriented Systems Analysis by Embley, Kurts  & Woodfield. It's available from Powells and of course Amazon.

Meta-leveling is nothing more than creating a complete OOSA model of the system whose parts you're thinking about then annotating the model. It's based on those annotations that you decide what parts of the system to think about. Because some elements (objects, relationships or interactions) are more free in their output than others (they're generally the ones that control the system).

Other elements contradict each other in the system. There may also be contradictions between elements and the system as a whole. There may be overly complicated elements that can be simplified. Or made weaker, or made stronger, or made more general, or more flexible, or more restricted depending on your concerns. There may be objects that can be unified together.

Meta-leveling is the process of creating this OOSA model and annotating it with all of these descriptions. Ideally, you do all this in your head without relying on paper. Or even conscious thought. So if you're talking about some objects in the system with someone but one of the other objects in the completed model is more worthy of attention and consideration then shifting the conversation to those other objects is said to be meta-leveling. The beginning of this essay is a good example. I had no outline nor any plan, the shift just popped up from my subconscious.

What Meta-Leveling Is For

Meta-leveling is known as Judgement in Bloom's original taxonomy of cognition. It is the highest form of cognition, one which not all people are capable of. It is also known as Evaluation. Judgement is the capacity to distinguish not just right and wrong (fitness to a predetermined goal) but good and evil (determining the goals themselves). Strictly speaking, judgement is broader than determining good and evil. It's just that 

Eliezer Yudkowsky makes a big deal of recursion. In planning, recursion is not just considering your goals and plans, but the other players' goals and plans. And in double recursion, you assume that the other players have considered your goals and plans, so you account for that as well. Well, meta-leveling is so much more powerful than recursion that it makes recursion look like a weak pathetic thing.

After all, meta-leveling was the crucial step required to go from playing a game using rules to playing against the other players. Recursion is nothing compared to meta-leveling since it stays on the same level always. Eliezer Yudkowsy harps on recursion because he is incapable of meta-leveling, because he is incapable of synthesis.

By meta-leveling the first time you go from playing the pieces of the game, to playing the players in the game. By meta-leveling a second time, you change the game's rules, outcomes and players entirely. It's like going from playing against your opponent in chess, to playing 3 dimensional fantasy chess where the winners are the best 3 cooperators out of 5 players.

Meta-Meta-Leveling

Meta-leveling twice in a row is called transcending. The first meta-leveling step gave you a model of the system and identified its most important elements. The second meta-leveling step gives you all the ways this system can evolve in future, all the forces that direct its evolution, and the entire space of possibilities for you to redesign the system. Transcending a system means to redesign its entire architecture so that it is no longer recognizable as the original system. It is not an improved system, it is radically different and better.

On reflection, my definition of meta-leveling isn't nearly as formal as I'd like. Meta-leveling is not just creating a model, it's annotating it. Doing it a second time is creating a super-model and annotating that. I didn't make this correspondence explicit enough. I also didn't point out that every time you model (or meta-level) you make things more generic, more abstract. Now there are multiple types of super-models but this is exactly as it should be since there are multiple aspects to any system. Every real system admits to multiple models, and every model admits to multiple super-models. Mathematicians ought to be very familiar with this.

In particular, if you create a model in the OOSA style then the OOSA book is one possible super-model. It's not a very interesting super-model (or form of transcending) so don't waste your time on it. If you didn't use the OOSA style but just did it in your head, then a model of your mind is the super-model that replaces the OOSA book (and a theory of the human mind replaces the endnotes of the OOSA book). That's at least more interesting than the book. What I described at the beginning of this section is a reliably interesting type of super-model for a systems designer.

It now seems dubious to me that there can be more than two types of meta-leveling. The first goes upwards to the conceptual space. The second goes upwards to the realization that contains the concept. What else can there be?

Meta-Meta-Meta-Leveling

By meta-leveling three times in a row, you leave the system entirely behind you to enter into the realm of generic systems design. If the level is chess, the meta-level is a rulebook on chess and transcending is fantasy cooperative chess, then meta**3 is talking about the nature of meta-leveling and how important it is for systems design. In other words, this blog post.

Which reminds me, meta-leveling and transcending are the #1 and #2 tools of any systems designer. If you can't do them then don't even bother. Another crucial tool is empathy. Now, the really funny thing is that empathy's formal definition is: the capacity for formation of other-identities (to complement self-identity). Psychopaths are incapable of this, probably because they lack a crucial form of synthesis.

Multi-Leveling

Now what makes this funny is that formation of identities for others is ... meta-leveling. What Dabrowski calls "multi-leveling" (formation of a complex and utterly accurate self-identity) is ... meta-leveling your own mind. Empathy is just ... meta-leveling other people's minds. So you see, the top three tools of any systems designer are meta-leveling any system, meta-leveling twice in a row, and meta-leveling human minds. Hmm, I sense a pattern here. It's almost like meta-leveling is important.

Incidentally, Dabrowski was incapable of multi-leveling or meta-leveling, which is why he didn't have any insights into the process. He never realized that multi-leveling was meta-circular (the whole of the meta-level exists as a subpart inside of the level it describes) or that it was related to consciousness (which is also meta-circular). In fact, he never understood multi-leveling as the formation of a complex and accurate self-identity. Beyond identifying that the process existed and that it had something to do with ethics and integrity, he was in the dark about it.

Dabrowski also made up the crappiest theories about the nature of Development Potential (people who can multi-level). But his estimation of less than 10% of the general population capable of multi-leveling sounds about right. Of those 10% less than one tenth are naturally prone to multi-leveling because they use their synthesis more heavily than their analysis. Synthesis is what drives the process after all, while analysis just keeps it in check. These one or two percent of the population will try to meta-level everything they come across.

Who Can Meta-Level?

It's not every person that can meta-level. The process can be described so that any person capable of logic will be able to follow it, but it takes synthesis (creativity) to actually do it. Engineers and mere programmers for instance, will never be able to meta-level. So why bother describing it? So that I can say in your face you pretentious assholes! Because they claim to be able to do synthesis and the truth is, they can't.

Meta-leveling is the province of people capable of both synthesis and analysis. It takes synthesis to create the original concepts and it takes analysis for those concepts to be both correct and also to keep the meta-level strictly separate from the level. People lacking in logic are prone to thinking the map is the same as the system it describes, that by changing the map, they change how the system works. This is literal magical thinking.

But let's set aside the pretentious fuckers who can't meta-level but desperately want to be thought of as just as good as those who can. For those who possess both analysis and synthesis, and thus CAN meta-level, the whole process of meta-leveling is something that can be learned and practiced.

Skill and Talent

Of course, a person will show skill at meta-leveling only when they can do it subconsciously. When they have no need to draw out the diagrams on paper at all. This is why I said UML software is worthless. If you need computer software to help you meta-level, you're hopelessly incompetent. And then of course there is the question of talent. Let's say that a person shows talent only if they're able to meta-level subconsciously before ever learning to do it consciously.

If you're able to skim the first couple chapters of Object Oriented Systems Analysis by Embley then flip to the endnotes (where they have a formal OOSA model of the OOSA modeling formalism) and make sense of them then congrats, you've got talent. If you're able to read that book and this article, then think back to how you were meta-leveling years ago as an adolescent, then congrats you've definitely got talent.

And if you haven't got talent at it, then go back and reread the previous section where I go on about how the overwhelming majority of people will never do it in their lives and couldn't do it even if there were a loaded gun stuck to their heads and their lives depended on it. Be glad that you can do it at all. Be glad you can learn. Be glad and appreciate your cognitive gifts.

And if you can't meta-level at all? Fuck off.

Why Software Is Stupidly Slow

People often bitch about software being slow and they have every reason to. Modern hardware has plenty of CPU and GPU cycles to spare, so why the fuck is it so slow? The software I have to use that's slow as molasses is Office, Opera and Firefox.

The first thing I observe is that these pieces of crapware do things I never asked them to do, I don't want them to do, things I don't need them to do, things I don't want them to do, things that nobody anywhere either wants nor needs them to do. Let's look at some examples.

Opera keeps all 30 pages I have in tabs immediately renderable. Did I ever ask it to do that? Like fuck I did. Most of those tabs are things I haven't looked at in days. One of them I hadn't looked at in 3 weeks.

Inevitably those 30 tabs will grow to 120 tabs, which will have Opera thrashing for no good fucking reason and then I'll save them all as a new session (rendering them unusable) and start from scratch.

If there were a better way to organize tabs than multiple windows (which are difficult to use and unhelpful) then I would use them. Not that moving the tabs to another window would help since Opera insists like some kind of fucking moronic retard to keep those tabs immediately renderable too!

Who the fuck decided it was a good idea to keep every bit of cruft a web user left opened immediately renderable? What kind of fucking retard at Opera decided on this dys"functionality"? I never wanted this feature, I never asked for it, I don't need it, NOBODY needs it. Nobody on the fucking planet needs it!

Nevermind that it is dysfunctional and fucking harmful, nobody needs this.

The same goes for Firefox and Office. I only open Office to read RTF files. Do I fucking need all this "functionality" that takes 30 seconds to load? For fuck's sake, does any Office user need it?! I would dearly love to know whether more than 10% of core Office users need to regularly change between 50 different fonts. I use one font, ONE, Sylfaen, that's it! 

It seems to me if software did ONLY what every one of the core users needs (instead of what's expected by the programmer's peers and tradition, or what the programmer thinks might be nice, or what users say they want or ask for, or what some user wants, or what non-core users need) then so much crap falls away in the code, so many "features" go away, that there's plenty of computing power for what's actually needed.

Kinect Is Useless

Aha! It took a long time but I finally figured out that Kinect is useless. I blame having just woken up.

Gesture languages are just castrated forms of sign languages, which are full-fledged langugaes. And sign languages are useless for people who aren't deaf. So gesture languages are useless. QED. I've known that for years now.

Oh and they also make you look retarded, take a look at the photo of the three retards behind the conference table in Google's Gmail Motion for proof. Google seriously thinks this photo will help sell this piece of crapware. "more efficient and intuitive" my ass!

Conceptual Analysis

The problem is that it seemed Kinect had more. And it turns out the "more" bit, the part about moving stuff from device to device "with a flick of your fingers" can be done entirely without flicking your fingers.

All it requires is a good UI, one that provides an extensible spatio-visual field. So that your computer exists in a space represented on its monitor and other devices exist as extensions of that space. That's the basic conceptual mechanism underlying "moving stuff from device to device".

Note that this conceptual mechanism does not in any way rely on fingers or hand motions or body motions or "multi-touch" (ugh!) or anything of the kind. It can be achieved with the mouse, which is a perfectly usable pointing device.

A device far, far more sensitive than that crappy fucking piece of shit Kinect that requires you to move your hand 15 centimeters for a gesture. Seriously, what the fuck? Those ergonomics are atrocious!

You see, when you break things down at their conceptual level, you've got a conceptual mechanism + hardware, and those are independent. Kinect provides the hardware only. And this hardware sucks for ergonomic reasons.

If an input device like Kinect ever acquired sub-centimeter resolution then it would compete directly against the mouse and could be superior to it. But I predict that such an input device won't use (because it won't need) shitty gimmicks like gesture languages.

It's a similar analysis that reveals that touch screens absolutely suck for general computers and laptops.

It's another similar analysis that reveals multi-touch is useless. I mean for fuck's sake, in my design work I've come up with two pointers and am struggling to have any kind of justification to have more. I don't have any use for multi-touch.

It's another similar analysis that reveals that mouse buttons are useless so mice should really have zero buttons. Because the mouse can never support as many buttons as the keyboard (ergonomics) and the keyboard is where buttons belong (conceptually)!

The Fundamentals

The basic problem with input devices is this:

• you've got your discrete events device - the keyboard provides zero dimensional input
• you've got your continuous 2D device - the mouse provides 2 dimensional input

what's left?

Adding buttons to mice doesn't improve them because they shouldn't have any buttons at all. Mice shouldn't generate discrete events at all! It is a defect in UI programmers' imaginations that has made users associate so-called "mouse events" with mice.

Laser mice are a great change to mice hardware but they don't change what the mice does conceptually so it's evolutionary, not revolutionary, to users. To hardware designers, laser mice are of course revolutionary.

Multi-touch is having 2 or 3 times the already existing continuous 2D device. And you can achieve 90% of the benefits of that by having an easy way to switch off between multiple pointers. Chasing that remaining 10% is just not worth the effort - you end up "needing" it only for gimmicks.

Touch screens are just 2D continuous input devices with horrible ergonomics. Interesting in theory, useless in practice. You need something as bizarre as the iPad where the proportion of input to output activity is miniscule (eg, restricted to flipping pages) to make touchscreens viable.

1D continuous input is ... provided by the scroll wheel. Hence that is revolutionary from the user's point of view! So now we have in the present situation

• a 0D input device - the keyboard
• a 1D input device - the wheel
• a 2D input device - the mouse

What the fuck more do we need?

The False Need For 3D

In certain rarefied applications, we might desire a genuinely 3D input device. These (eg, ringmouse) haven't panned out because of technological problems with resolution. Hmm, poor resolution, does that sound familiar?

The bigger problem with them is that their applicability is extremely limited. Because the visual cortex of homo sapiens sapiens isn't 3D! It's strictly 2+1D, like a topographical map or bitmap. Which is exactly what the wheelmouse provides!

Except for a few freaks, human brains just don't process 3D data. We don't see in 3D (you can't see the inside of a box and its outside simultaneously), you don't think in 3D, you don't visualize in 3D (go ahead, try to visualize all sides of a solid box at the same time), you do nothing in 3D except move your body. You do everything in 2+1D.

Is it any wonder then that anyone wanting to push 3D input devices resorts to proprioception? To moving around and dancing with your body? Even though moving around your body has fuck all to do with any computer game or software application out there? Yeah yeah, it looks great. And you know what? Fucking useless!

Look at the video of Kinect users in the first article I linked to. Do you see any game or application in the video? No. Because the peddlers of this tech couldn't imagine anyone actually using it for anything exciting so they didn't bother to make a rigged demo. It's exactly like I said - it looks great but it's fucking useless.

The challenge for input hardware designers is that input hardware is already perfect. Excepting only that slanted QWERTY keyboards are fucking horrible and Kinesis contoured keyboards are vastly superior. Well, that's a legacy problem and a patent problem. The patent may have expired but it's been there holding up progress for a long time.

And while I'm at it, 3D output hardware (holograms and phased array optics) are also useless for individual users. They only come into their own in holodecks where multiple users can interact. Otherwise, virtual retinal display is plenty good enough. Or I suppose if you want to drive what the user sees with natural head motion without inducing nausea.

Summary

Like touchscreens, 3D output hardware is of limited applicability. Great when you absolutely need it, terrible most of the time. Like automatic kitty lasers, 3D input hardware is completely fucking useless. We don't really need 3D because the human brain just doesn't process it. We need inspired use of 2+1D. And this isn't going to take better technology but better systems designers. Unfortunately, we're pretty good at the former and terrible at the latter.

A Response To George Monbiot's Turnaround on Nuclear

I just read the most fascinating article by George Monbiot and I had to respond.

Still the Same

George, you still profess hatred for "the liars in the nuclear industry" (whoever they might be, I'm at quite a loss) but embrace the anti-human scumbag liars in your own "green" movement. What a paragon of truth and moral rectitude you are!

It's by no coincidence that green is the colour of money. It's because you and your ilk are just foot-soldiers of the aristocracy waging endless war against humanity. Yes, you still are an anti-human eco-zealot in my book even if you've repented of your most grievous sins.

It Almost Sounds Like ...

Your article was surprising since it almost sounds like you've read my blog posts, something I doubt. Starting with your switching from the false & misleading term "renewable" to the technically correct ambient (low-powered hence weak and useless).

But mostly, it almost sounds like you've read my scorning hatred of you self-righteous egotistical assholes that sanctimoniously decree everyone not your rich white elite selves ought to freeze in the cold and the dark, in misery, starvation, disease and poverty. "Sustainably", that is to say, forever.

Man vs Nature

I keep hearing recently all this moronic talk of "loving the land", from people who ignore the corollary "hate humanity". The converse is true of course, to love humanity you have to hate the land. Because humanity is at war with a capricious fickle nature and always will be until one of them is destroyed. And since nature is stupid, I guarantee you it won't be nature that wins.

It amazes me how anyone can be so twisted up inside, so anti-social, and let's face it downright psychopathic as to love filthy dirt above human beings! But whatever, yeah, you're still one of those moronic saps that "loves the land" George. The proof is in the fact you still haven't rejected the twisted up "deep ecology" scum that hate humanity with a passion and want us all to die. In the eternal war of man versus nature, you side AGAINST humanity.

Still a Tool

I know you haven't read my blog posts and are on the whole incapable of learning. You're just reacting to personal experience, even if that personal experience is on TV. The proof of this is you still haven't learned about the Wet Sahara effect or about Freeman Dyson's comprehensive denunciation of the whole field of "climate research".

(I note here that I didn't need that denunciation. I recognized the smell of crap coming off of the field years before Dyson weighed in to tell us exactly where the crap was and exactly how large it still is.)

George, you still harp about "climate change" as if it were a bad thing. Though I suppose it actually is a bad thing for your entrenched aristo masters. But then, it's not news that you're still a tool, is it? You're a journalist (or columnist, whatever) which obviates even the possibility of you mattering on your own terms.

What It's All About

And since you are a tool, this article had nothing to do with you and everything to do with the industrial needs of England. Coal has been written off because of those nasty coal-miners' unions. Gas has been written off because any pipelines pass through France. Which leaves nuclear and ... nothing else. It's that simple.

This article isn't about the change of heart of a person of principle, since you haven't changed your heart and you have no principles. This article is about England's industrial policy, pure and simple.