Dyson Sphere Program (Early Access): Interstellar Factorio ...

The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] -1 points 24 days ago
I have tried to be as factual in this essay as possible. If I am wrong on a fact, call me out so I can correct my thinking.
Help me out. Tell me where I am misinformed. What did I write that just isn't true.
EO Wilson put it like this.
We have paleolithic minds.
We have medieval institutions
We have godlike technology.
Things are moving furiously fast and at the same time things are static. I really don't know how to spell it out any better than I just did. No everything is not connected. And I seen that show called "Connections".
My point is that the AI is a double edged sword for humanity now. It can deliver undreamed of life or it can deliver the end. It really all depends on human attitudes at this point. Specifically the attitudes of the 1%.
The one thing i can confidently promise you is that the world of 2028 will be a far different world than anything that has existed to this point. I just hope it is a comfortable world for all of us. A world where we can all self-actualize. The pinnacle of our hierarchy of needs.
When i say the world of 2028 will be far different than anything we have experienced to this day, I have back up history for it. I love the study of history. Take a look at this and see what you think. Granted past performance does not guarantee future performance, but i think the trends are very solidly established.
https://www.reddit.com/Futurology/comments/4k8q2b/is_the_singularity_a_religious_doctrine_23_apr_16/d3d0g44/
If anything I wrote in that linked commentary seems patently untrue to you, let me know!
Your rendering is simply too linear and clean to consider in any serious way.
Consider the events that led to the American civil war. Consider the events that led to the Russian revolution. Consider the events that led to the Great Depression. Consider the events that led to the Second World War. Consider the events that led to the Cold War. Consider the events that led to 9/11.
In hindsight every single major event in history was considered to be inevitable. Every single event that occurred was the logical outcome. Every single event that occurred was linear and clean.
Even Franklin Pierce knew the American civil war was coming. His forecast is in one of his state of the union addresses, which i have read. That was like in 1856 I think.
The ideas of rebellion and Bolshevism were already well established by the year 1910 and it was clear that the Russian Imperial family was too weakened by the fecklessness of Czar Nicholas II. What happened after Russia surrendered to Germany in 1918 was just the last straw. The roots began though in the late 19th century. The very concepts of modern Communism and Marxism are logical outcomes of the industrial revolution.
The horrible system of obligatory alliances brought about the First World War. You can argue that Germany wanted "their place in the sun" or something was rotten in the state of Austria-Hungary. But it was the alliances that caused what nobody wanted. And everybody was so positive it would be over "by Christmas".
The great depression was a combination of over speculation and a relaxed economy of borrowing and credit. Especially borrowing and credit to all the banks and savings and loans. The credit in particular was a concept that had never existed before the 1920s. The belief was that the new growth was unstoppable. Wildly unstoppable. And there was no reason not to believe it. But just like the Tulip bubble in 1637 it was not unstoppable. The great depression has also been referred to as the great glut. There was tons and tons of food available, but the prices were too low. So the food rotted on the railroad sidings and the cows, pigs and chickens were slaughtered and dumped into mass graves.
Nobody imagined a comical Chaplinesque looking haranguer would hurtle the world into the worst war of all human history. But WWII started long before Hitler came to power. He (and Tojo) just sort of consolidated it all in a clear crystal idea for the average joe in the street. But by 1931 Italy was invading Libya and Japan was invading China in 1932. Anyone with eyes to see knew WWII was inevitable, but the horror of WWI, and the desire to never, ever have to experience such a thing again was still in the hearts of well, everyone. Chamberlain did the right thing for his best understanding of the time. Even if Churchill vehemently disagreed. Even though Churchill proved to be correct in sentiment, he was wrong in the context of that zeitgeist. Before Hitler came along, Churchill loathed Stalin and the "bolsheviks. But when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Churchill stated that "if Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least give the devil a favorable reference in the House of Commons." My God did Japan take the USA by surprise. Even Yamamoto declared, "we have six months to achieve our aims in the pacific and force the USA to negotiate to avoid further trouble before the USA rallies and utterly defeats us." He said that like the day after Pearl Harbor I think. Yes, yes, yes "sleeping giant" thing too.
He couldn't have imagined that Pearl Harbor would rocket the USA to the level of world super-power.
The USA and the Soviet Union had been sore at each other since the Red/White Russian civil war of 1923. Secretary Stimson himself said, we should send supplies to the Germans to crush the Russians and then when Russia is on the ropes we should send supplies to the Russians to crush the Germans and hopefully they will annihilate each other and solve all of our problems at a stroke. The USA fully understood that Russia was needed to destroy Germany. I would further state that the world owes the Soviet Union an unpayable debt for what they did. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But that was a marriage of convenience and from the moment Berlin fell, the gloves were off. Nuclear fission and fusion was the AI of it's day-could be savior, could be destroyer. The footage at the Elbe River was nice while it lasted.
Um, don't make the mistake of thinking AI is like nuclear power or bombs. AI is something that is alive and growing and could well manipulate us in a way that static nuclear jitters could never do.
Doesnt every one of these events seem so obviously inevitable in hindsight? Well I'm like Franklin Pierce. I think we need to be forewarned to be forearmed.
Ooh! I almost forgot 9/11! The cold war was again the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This included all the USA propped anti-Soviet governments in the middle east. We did not care if they were dictators. We cared that they forestalled any attempted Soviet idealogical incursion. That goes for Vietnam too. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1980, Osama bin Laden was for a time on our side. But things went sour for him when he returned to Saudi Arabia again. Plus he became far more radicalized by Wahibism and the Gulf war of 1991 was really the last straw for him. How they organized what they did is the stuff of infamous legend. Why were we unable to connect such obvious dots? And again they took the USA totally by surprise. "Bin Laden determined to attack within the USA", not withstanding. Seriously who would have believed such a thing was possible? I mean besides Tom Clancy. I read "Debt of Honor" like in 1995 and while the plot was cool, I would have never imagined in ten thousand years somebody could actually pull that off. We had to permanently change our thinking after 11 Sep 2001.
Don't these all seem pretty clean and linear in chronology to you? They only look messy when viewed as a contemporary. Day by day. Well I'm connecting the dots now.
permalinksavecontextfull comments (39)editdelete
Any good horror games for rift? by DoctorLunatic in oculus


[–]izumi3682 1 point 24 days ago
Dreadhalls
A comment I made to this article.
https://www.reddit.com/Futurology/comments/9diqgc/william_shatner_on_virtual_reality_weve_got_to_be/e5htqcf/
permalinksavecontextfull comments (40)editdelete
The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 1 point 24 days ago
Hiya mr long jumpers! Nope, been married twice. Have 3 grown children and 3 grandchildren--wow that went fast! I have been happily single since 1997 though. I did have a great skinny attractive girl-friend in 2005 and 2006 though. She was 30 I was 45;)
But I been on the shelf since 2006. I don't really miss that life.
Hey, what do you think of this write up?
https://www.reddit.com/Futurology/comments/9d9lpy/the_super_rich_of_silicon_valley_have_a_doomsday/e5ifghl/
permalinksavecontextfull comments (39)editdelete
The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] -1 points 25 days ago
Well, think about it. The industrial revolution took about 158 years (1760-1918) to unfold. It was generationally easy to adapt. The farmer didn't become a factory worker. His son or grandson did. And yet there was still tremendous discord and social change. Also the world population was about one tenth (1800) what it is today.
Today, as you have been reading so frequently of late, it is different. We are not replacing human (or horse or oxen) muscle. We are preparing to replace the human mind.
Think how long it took new economic and political systems to settle and stabilize following the industrial revolution. The entire 20th century, to include the "computer and information" revolutions, after the year 1918 is the fallout of the industrial revolution. People fail to notice how fast things disappeared in the blink of an eye. All of the European kingdoms of the Holy Roman empire. Fully there in 1914. Fully gone by 1918. Only Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, Italy, Greece and the Iberian peninsula were spared. The Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, The Prussian Empire, the Russian Empire--gone. Oh, and horses. WWII and the Cold War were also aftermath of the industrial revolution.
Ok I said all that to give you insight into the "new ARA revolution. I mark the beginning of this revolution at the year 2015. It was in the year 2015 that many critical factors came together to bring this about. Critical factors that simply did not yet exist in the year 2010 for example. And this new AI revolution is not going to take 158 years. It is going to take maybe, twenty? Too short a time for anyone to adapt. I don't think the "technological singularity" is a made up thing either. But I'm not even going to address that now.
The result is what I have come to call "ARA", that's AI, robotics and automation.
ARA is a very real thing as of the year 2015. Here is a USA government report from Dec 2016 about it.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/documents/Artificial-Intelligence-Automation-Economy.PDF
The TL;DR is--We know what is coming. We are not sure what to do about it. The USA government dismisses UBI out of hand. The USA government hopes that "retraining" will be the answer.
And to that I say, what are you going to retrain 4 million truck drivers to do? Be PSRs? (personal service representatives) In addition to those 4 million human truckers is about 3 million more humans dependent on human truckers for their industries.
That is just truckers. Any occupation where-in a human sits at a desk and uses a PC as their employ is going to be consumed by ARA in about 10 years. Yes, that includes coders. Especially coders.
The conventional wisdom has always been that if corporations replaced all of their employees with robots or automation that wouldn't they really be cutting their own throats because who is going to buy their product or service. And if you had argued that to me in the 1980s, I would have totally agreed with you.
But this time it is different. The corporations are becoming trillion dollar entities. Something that could not be envisioned as few as 3 years ago. Trillion dollar companies were believed to be something along the lines of asteroid mining companies. These trillion dollar companies are an unexpected phenomenon. Production is through the roof. But pay to the average worker has remained flat and even fallen since the 1980s. Now I can only speak for the USA, but I see evidence throughout the world, of this new normal emerging. In the USA we are seeing demons that are more than 100 years old emerging. We are seeing increased opioid addiction rates and increased suicide rates, and the so-called "deaths of despair" in the so-called "flyover states". pretty much across the board. Do you think it is any strange accident that Donald Trump was elected president? Donald Trump isn't the problem. The economic changes in the USA are the problem. The death of the American dream is the problem. The fact that most citizens of the USA will not have the standard of living that their parents had is the problem. Donald Trump is just a sign.
Citizens of the USA are beginning to come to the realization of this, even without ARA. And we are beginning to squabble. And this squabble is not Vietnam era protests. This is a far and away deeper problem. This concerns USA citizens becoming aware that for all their hard work, they don't get a piece of the pie. And then on top of that you have continuing demographic changes, particularly steadily more abrasive racial tensions between African Americans and European descended white Americans. To my way of thinking African Americans are finally getting the cultural and political power to live in a more just society. But not everyone thinks like me.
Anyway all of this together. The very real threat of genuine "technological unemployment" from which there will be no sanctuary. Really. What job do you plan to do? The demographic changes. The massive and egregious economic inequality. Do you think "1%" is a made up fantasy term?
All of this roils yet beneath the surface. And now we add to this the catalyst of ARA. The banner of ARA states, "Humans Need Not Apply." Remember that before the year 2015, there was no ARA. The technology did not exist yet. Yes, I know that robots made lots of things in factories. But humans had to run them. And use their hands for the fine work. And humans still had to use their minds for pretty much everything.
The ARA is just the final straw. But my question is this. Can we ease financial inequality? Can we have like a negative income tax for example? Truthfully the concept of UBI, just does not sound logical to me. Can we use our super ARA technology to give each human in the USA a comfortable life, where they are not required to work at all? Personally I am on board with Peter Diamandis and his call for post-scarcity. But that would require a sea-change in our way of thinking. It would require us to discard concepts and philosophies that are well over 6,000 years old.
It is not just accelerating technology that is utterly changing our world. It also has to societally utterly change as well. And something else that you must bear in mind. The ARA improves nearly daily. And it is improving exponentially. It is now to the point where it is fundamentally synergizing all other technologies-exponentially as well. There will come a point where ARA can do pretty much anything that a human can do. But flawlessly and perfectly. I can offer an awesome analogy for this if you press me.
This is not even taking into account the possible development of artificial general intelligence. That does not yet exist. This is just narrow AI for now.
The promise of ARA to make life quite literally "idyllic" is very real. I hope we can have post-scarcity, but I fear upheaval. And so do the 1%. It's not a joke. It's a real thing. I have tried to be as factual in this essay as possible. If I am wrong on a fact, call me out so I can correct my thinking.
permalinksavecontextfull comments (39)editdelete
The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 1 point 25 days ago
Oh dear honey, no. That's not how survival works at all.
I apologize. I don't follow your meaning there.
permalinksavecontextfull comments (39)editdelete
The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 0 points 25 days ago
Nope I am 58. I raid in WoW three nights a week. I have an Oculus Rift and the rig to run it, and I love cool special effects and alt-rock. I'm told I am a bit of an outlier for my age. But you know what? I'm damn happy with my life.
I hope you will be when you are 58 too!
permalinksavecontextfull comments (39)editdelete
The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 0 points 25 days ago
Bwu-hahahaha!
permalinksavecontextfull comments (39)editdelete
iRobot’s latest Roomba remembers your home’s layout and empties itself by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 2 points 25 days ago
LOL! ok, that was funny.
permalinksavecontextfull comments (4)editdelete
Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood Into an Elixir of Youth by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 1 point 25 days ago
"We are all books of blood. Where-ever we are opened, we are red."
Regards, Izumi Laryukov
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w88eURokvA&t=68s
permalinksavecontextfull comments (5)editdelete
Fast unthawing (of biological tissue) using lasers and gold nanopoarticles (Me: an advance for cryopreservation of the dead?) by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 1 point 25 days ago
I been here many years. And many years back I read of a new form of cryopreservation and wrote a big long essay about it. Unfortunately I learned the hard way that any type of post or comment that exceeds 1000 falls into an event horizon and you can never recover it again. However if you are directly linked to it, you can access it. So it is not actually deleted, just basically inaccessible. Which is why I've taken to collating everything I've thought were quality comments into giant linkbergs. Everything else was simply lost. And it was a lot. A good three years worth. Damn.
Anyway, the article from several years back was about a new method of cryopreservation called 'vitrification'. There is a lot of biology behind the technique, but it boils down to the reason a frog can freeze absolutely solid in the winter and then thaw out and be no worse for the wear is that they have a sort of built-in "antifreeze" substance in their cellular structure that inhibits disruptive ice crystal formation. The frog becomes more like glass than ice. I don't have a clue how a hibernating squirrel doesn't freeze solid. Mammals don't have that anti-freeze stuff.
I speculated that this would be a terrific way to preserve a body of someone declared clinically dead for future technology revival. There is two bad times for freezing the dead with our current technologies. The first time is when we freeze them in the first place with liquid nitrogen. Ice crystals form in all the cells and really by our current technology that is pretty much it. But the other time is uneven thawing when more ice crystals form and everything turns to basically unviable organic mush.
This is why we don't thaw cryopreserved bodies on purpose. I have read some horror stories about power failures that are well, ick. The ice crystal cell disruption is bad enough.
The idea is that in the future we can come up with some kind of unfathomable technology to fix not only the problem that killed the individual, to include Ted William's style old age. And in Ted's case, also to re-attach his head or brain to some kind of "thing". All they kept was his head I think. But first how on Earth do we fix the cellular damage?
Vitrification was imagined to be a way to preserve the cellular integrity. I don't know if we have the technology to vitrify someone yet. But that was the speculation.
So now I see this new technology article about a way to rapidly thaw them cells out that are apparently vitrified like zebra fish (and frogs) can do. You have to "prep" em with an infusion of some nano gold stuff. I mean before you freeze them. It must get into pretty much every single cell. And I don't know if it can get into certain things like deeper bone or cartilage like matrices in large "mammaly" creatures. That might take some additional technology to work for humans. And is such a thing toxic for humans? Well, I'd guess you'd do it just before they died anyways, because I'm not sure how long something like that could continue to keep and not metabolize right back out again. Or maybe it might work like embalming fluid, but I think you need to be alive to get that stuff actually into cells.
So I figured if we can figure out a way to vitrify the clinically dead person and then use this new business to unthaw them, that that using both methods to ensure critical cell integrity, would be quite the breakthrough for cryopreservation of deceased humans.
Then all you have to do is fix what killed them and/or re-attach their head, um and somehow restore life. Well at least you don't have to worry about the freeze/thaw part anymore.
So it looks like we are starting to make some of these "future technology breakthroughs' that people from the 1970s envisioned. But for everybody that's froze now, I'm not so sure. But then again there is still tons and tons of future ahead of us, so never say never!
permalinksavecontextfull comments (1)editdelete
Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood Into an Elixir of Youth by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 5 points 25 days ago
Can't we derive the pertinent factors and then synthesize them for everybody. That just sounds a lot less creepy "vampirey" that way. They could give the derivation a catchy name like umm "Tru-Derivative" or "Tru-Factors". Or, you know, something along those lines.
permalinksavecontextfull comments (5)editdelete
Researchers want to clone 40,000-year-old extinct horse -- a step towards woolly mammoth resurrection by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 31 points 25 days ago
Why can't we just attempt to clone a passenger pigeon or a Tasmanian tiger? Or a dodo even. Wouldn't they be a lot more viable? Surely we must have complete biological specimens or samples. I guess dodos would just be bones. So maybe not them.
permalinksavecontextfull comments (41)editdelete
William Shatner On Virtual Reality: 'We’ve Got To Be Really Careful' by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 1 point 25 days ago
He is exactly dead-on right about that.
I played a game on my Rift. Before I even got my hand controllers. It was a sort of a graphically simplistic demo game called "Dreadhalls". To me it was immensely cool and immersive. I was even in there so long I started to get a bit sim-sick, but "Dreadhalls" defined a new experience for me.
Bear in mind that you are in a totally 3D, life-sized environment. When I saw the first ghost that looked sort of like that Samara ghost from "The Ring", but was the same size as me, I was truly amazed. And it was scary/awesome cool at the same time. Well I kept seeing them from sort of far away and I wanted to see one of them closer to see the face of one.
And there is all these weird crying sounds like a baby crying going on too. And grindy sounds and just a lot of audio creepiness too. With headphones you can localize the sounds to the entities.
So I was bound and determined to find one of them ghosts up close. Oh also and they "disappear" into this creepy (life size) well executed, swirling black smoke.
I heard what I was sure was the sound of one of them. And I moved straight down the corridor towards it. My battery in my light was still pretty good. it might have been a bit dimmer. I saw an intersection coming up and I turned to the left way.
But instead of a ghost, there was this thing. It was as big as a cow and looked for the brief instant before I pretty much lost it, like a naked mole rat sort of thing. And I saw it's mouth move and it hissed. I screamed right out loud in real life. I mean I almost ran into it. It did not occur to me to rip off my hmd. Instead I turned around and ran as fast from it as I could, because that thing was like, real, to my perception.
I ran down some blind corridor using my xbox controller and suddenly I just took off my hmd instinctively. I was like wow! That was crazy! I haven't been back to "Dreadhalls" since that day.
But here is the weird thing. Yes it just happened in a game. But the memory of it has an odd "flavor". I can remember that instant so solidly, that it sort of feels like something that happened in real life, even though I know it was a game. And a pretty simplistic game at that. Kind of unsettling. So I can imagine what VR games that are actually fully developed will be like.
They will be like "Playtest" in Black Mirror. I bet a large number of people would not be able to handle that kind of immersion and presence in association with intentional horror type experiences.
But on the other hand, non-horror VR experiences, once the resolution and FOV improve in the upcoming next gen, will be so realistic that I see people not wanting to leave. Or rather, they will be wanting to get back "in" as soon as possible. I prophesy that a significant percentage of the population will become addicted to VR.
Even now I can see that VR is not television or videogames. It is a whole other kind of interaction with the human mind. I put it like this.
https://www.reddit.com/Futurology/comments/7r42h0/vr_is_going_to_be_like_nothing_the_world_has_eve
permalinksavecontextfull comments (1)editdelete
AI Researchers Left Disappointed As NIPS Sells Out In Under 12 Minutes by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 1 point 25 days ago
Oh! I-en-stein! I get it!
(just a a little gentle persiflage--ooh! I read your page--I like what you write! I added you ;)
permalinksavecontextfull comments (4)editdelete
Artificial Intelligence Is On The March. But Is Government Ready? by gone_his_own_way in Futurology


[–]izumi3682 1 point 25 days ago
You know, when these kind of articles appear in the "Mirror" or the "New York Post" that is one thing. Well, it's just click-bait. Having said that, I am totally not above linking to them just to stir the pot. Tabloids tend to scoop, while more cautious news sites are still in the vetting process.
But when these kind of articles appear in "Bloomberg" and "Forbes", the kind of publications where the hardnosed businessperson resides, then I have to take a different kind of note. I don't regard those two venerable and reputable publications as tabloids. And when these articles concerning impact and monetization opportunities for these incredibly recent ARA advancements appear here, that means there is something changing in our perception of what this really means.
I would also include "The Wall Street Journal", but that bad boy has disappeared behind a pay wall. At least for me it has. They often promote similar relevant articles in my list, but I can't seem to access them any longer
Consider what Bloomberg and Forbes were like merely 8 years ago. They were concerned with business, and today AI is business. This is where the ARA rubber hits the economics road. For better or worse.
ARA is AI, robotics and automation.
permalinksavecontextfull comments (1)editdelete
The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 0 points 25 days ago
Ok doke! I'll be here. Hopefully.
But wait until you see what we technologically manage within the next five years! Wow!
Also what is happening today is perfectly within the way that human civilization is advancing. There are no surprises here if you look at the big picture.
https://www.reddit.com/Futurology/comments/4k8q2b/is_the_singularity_a_religious_doctrine_23_apr_16/d3d0g44/
permalinksavecontextfull comments (39)editdelete
AI Researchers Left Disappointed As NIPS Sells Out In Under 12 Minutes by izumi3682 in Futurology


[–]izumi3682[S] 1 point 25 days ago
See? It's not just me in futurology. I am but a sign of what is occurring. I'll keep watching this space. What were clearly impossibilities three years ago are becoming hard reality today. This is why I can't give you a good prediction of where we shall be even as soon as the year 2030.
By the year 2030 we are either post-scarcity or post societal collapse. The ARA will determine that with little wiggle room. I am really, really hoping for post-scarcity, for my tail's sake.
However, barring utter societal collapse except for a couple tens of million lucky 1%'ers and their technical support staff, I do have a pretty good idea of what is coming in the big picture of things.
https://www.reddit.com/useizumi3682/comments/8cy6o5/izumi3682_and_the_world_of_tomorrow/

Working through my current pile o'tabs...

Wikipedia and its policies

I've been poking around Wikipedia a bit, and making occasional contributions. Started my first new page (for one I was surprised didn't exist). Numerous of Wikipedia's policies strike me as interesting and well worth considering, even (or especially) where they tend to disagree with mine. The topic of vandalism in particular leads to numerous interesting references.
There's assume good faith and numerous colloraries and associated concepts. Don't call a spade a spade in particular runs contrary to my view that someone who seems to be clearly pushing an agenda should be outed -- a role for which sites such as SourceWatch and DeSmogBlog are particularly useful in the case of climate denial. DCASAS focuses largely on the consequences of calling a spade a spade on the spade in question. My view is that the spade is a spade, and is unlikely to change, but that others benefit from the labeling.
Lies to children and Wittgenstein's Ladder (a sub-topic of the page) are "simplified explanation of technical or complex subjects as a teaching method for children and laypeople". Wittgenstein (a philosopher of whom I'm becoming increasingly curious) wrote:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Examples: Newtownian Mechanics as a less accurate but generally sufficient model of the physics of motion. The distinction between useful approximation and not even wrong is a key one to make.
Related to "lies to children" and something I've been mulling over are the twin ideas of fairy tales and myths, for example the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, typically told to children. I learned of Terry Pratchett's Hogfather this past Christmas and found it delightful. It's given food for thought on other myths we tell children (including adult children) for future development.
And worth mentioning that Wittgenstein knew from children: "Wittgenstein, Schoolteacher":

In 1920, after a year of training, Wittgenstein took up a post at an elementary school in Trattenbach. It was a tiny farming and factory village in the mountains south of Vienna; Wittgenstein accepted the job there after rejecting one in a town he decided was too cosmopolitan.

There are numerous other Wikipedia essays which make interesting (and occasionally excellent) reading.
Don't cry COI (conflict of interest) is among those I find interesting, particularly in the face of Agnotology. Wikipedia does address this under the heading "Astroturfing PR firms".
And of course, if you're going to talk about good faith, there's the matter of bad faith to deal with.

Bad faith (Latin: mala fides) is double mindedness or double heartedness in duplicity, fraud, or deception.[1] It may involve intentional deceit of others, or self-deception.
The expression “bad faith” is associated with “double heartedness”,[1] which is also translated as “double mindedness”.[2][3][4] A bad faith belief may be formed through self-deception, being double minded, or "of two minds", which is associated with faith, belief, attitude, and loyalty. In the 1913 Webster’s Dictionary, bad faith was equated with being double hearted, "of two hearts", or “a sustained form of deception which consists in entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings, and acting as if influenced by another”. There's the inherent bad faith model used by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in negotiating with the former Soviet Union.

And, wrapping the policy discussion, Our social policies are not a suicide pact, from Jimmy Wales himself:

Our social policies are not a suicide pact. They are in place to help us write the encyclopedia. [...] We need to take due process seriously, but we also need to remember: this is not a democracy, this is not an experiment in anarchy, it's a project to make the world a better place by giving away a free encyclopedia [...] we can cut some serious slack to administrators who are doing the good work of defending us from nonsense.

Also related to Wikipedia are tools for assiting in citation creation, toward which your pedantic editor feels affection. reFill and refToolbar in particular.

Wikimedia Sues the NSA

And one more late arrival, Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA to challenge upstream mass surveillance:

[T]he Wikimedia Foundation is filing suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) of the United States [1]. The lawsuit challenges the NSA’s mass surveillance program, and specifically its large-scale search and seizure of internet communications — frequently referred to as “upstream” surveillance. Our aim in filing this suit is to end this mass surveillance program in order to protect the rights of our users around the world. We are joined by eight other organizations [2] and represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Issuepedia and the Woozleplex, other Wikis of Note

Woozle is among my more interesting finds and closer friends at The Other Place. She operates a number of sites I'm finding increasingly useful (and to which I'm occasionally contributing) including Issuepedia, ICMS (the "International Consortium of Mad Scientists", a/k/a "ISeeAMess"), Instagov, and Instagov.
They're among a number of other wikis I frequent. Others include RationalWiki, LessWrong, and SourceWatch (excellent for uncovering, and reporting, bias and background in media sources).

On Nonsense and Distraction -- Teller of Penn and Teller

Teller Reveals his Secrets should probably be expanded into a post in its own right, but follows from my earlier discussions of nonsense. In particular the list of distractions magicians (particularly of the propaganda / PR variety) employ:

1. Exploit pattern recognition
2. Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth.
3. It's hard to think critically if you're laughing.
4. Keep the trickery outside the frame.
5. To fool the mind, combine at least two tricks.
6. Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.
7. If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely.

I want to draw particular attention to the 3rd and 7th elements. Laughter is strongly tied to creativity -- I've previously mentioned this discussing John Cleese, but it's an observation made by many others -- the childish delight of the creative mind. In particular, it seems that it comes from a state in which the mind is prepared to receive the unexpected and not challenge it. Which makes Teller's comment here interesting.
The "choice" manipulation, Teller calls it "one of the darkest of all psychological secrets", strikes me as profound, and deep at the heart of what frequently seems to be superfluous "consumer choice" in market societies. Almost always combined with some variant of "choice is good". That it's a key precept of Libertarian ideology strikes me as no coincidence (though whether it's deliberate or an arrived-at result I'm not certain).
Choice is not freedom. Particularly where the choice is constrained to a set of pre-determined options.

Know your Meme, Imgur

File under "guilty pleasures".
If you've not yet discovered it and want to keep up with the kids these days, I recommend it: Know your meme. Trace down the source of catchphrases and icons floating around the Net.
Imgur is not just a useful facility for hosting images used on reddit (though the per-account image limit has frustrated me), but is another Zeitgeist touchstone for me. One of the more delightful elements is discovering just how similar people's responses to postings are -- seeing an image and scrolling (or searching) for the comment I'd have made, and giving my upvote to whomever came up with it is one of those simple pleasures. Since the accident, that is....
(Warning: as with TVTrope, both sites are notorius tar-babies.)

Risks and such

Which should probably go to my RFC post on global catastrophic risks, but sometimes a running tab is easier.

• "Comparative Risk Analysis: an Informal Survey Of Experts", James K. Hammitt. "Comparative Risk Analysis (CRA) was developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to help set priorities in environmental policy and to evaluate the correspondence between current resource allocation and threats to environmental quality and human health...." (PDF)
  
• "The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)", Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Rupert Read , Raphael Douady , Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam. "The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety." (PDF)
  
• "Genetically Modified Organisms Risk Global Ruin, Says Black Swan Author Experts have severely underestimated the risks of genetically modified food, says a group of researchers lead by Nassim Nicholas Taleb" "Taleb and co begin by making a clear distinction between risks with consequences that are local and those with consequences that have the potential to cause global ruin. When global harm is possible, an action must be avoided unless there is scientific near-certainty that it is safe. This approach is known as the precautionary principle." (Review of paper above.)
  
• Global Catastrophic Risks", Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic.
  
• Cascading failure from Wikipedia.
  

And, this just in, the Systemic Failure blog: "This blog reports on a paradox in US public policy: although the nation has first-world status in science/technology, its leadership is mathematically-illiterate and/or corrupt. This paradox is most evident in the transportation sector — and especially mega-projects. Common themes in these postings include: non-invented-here syndrome, risk perception, and industry best-practices."

More on Agnetology -- Andrew O'Hehir's review of Merchants of Doubt

"Climate deniers and other pimped-out professional skeptics: The paranoid legacy of Nietzsche’s “problem of science”" (Salon).
h/t David Brin at the Other Place.
More on theme: "Leaked Email Reveals Who's Who List of Climate Denialists ". A long list of criminals against humanity.

Fermi and the Great Filter

A discussion that's arisen a few times of late. "The Fermi Paradox" describes the basic question and possiblities: as vast as the Universe is, as many stars and solar systems and planets as there are, "where is everybody?" Why have we not yet encountered intelligent life in the Universe?.
There are a few basic possibilities. We're the only intelligent species, due to some Great Filter which (variously) keeps life, complex life, intelligent life, technological life, and/or space-faring life, from coming into existence. Depending on where the filter lies (behind us, at the beginning, ahead of us), then there are three possibilities: we're rare, we're first, or we're fucked.
Or there are intelligent civilizations but they've chosen not to contact us (or haven't yet arrived -- after all, Space is Big...). Or there are good reasons not to advertise your presence, and civilizations choose not to (e.g., the Space Raiders hypothesis). Or we cannot receive or understand the signals, or are hiding the evidence, or we're being studied.

The Technical Interview Problem: Measuring quality

Thomas "tptacek" Ptacek is a frequent contributor to Hacker News, and I frequently disagree with him, particularly on virtually anything regarding NSA, surveillance, and Edward Snowden. However "The Hiring Post" is an excellent addition to a large field.
The problem isn't a new one -- assessing quality throughout the software, IT, and, frankly, technology world is difficult. I'd argue that the hiring process is only the tip of the iceberg, hiding, below the waterline, the internal employee review process, departmental reviews, product review, software QA, requirements, corporate governance, and more. All of these are inherently hard problems, and ultimately, questions of Darwinian selection: what is fitness to task? The harder in that task itself is poorly defined. We often think we know what it is, but are blinded by our own frames (a topic I really need to expand on more fully).
As Ptacek notes, the interviewing process is flawed, it's frequently adversarial, it relies on external indicators which may or may not be correlated with selection criteria. As Google's Yonatan Zunger noted a July, 2014 post at The Other Place:

I did a big analysis of resumes and of who we did and didn't give offers to, and came up with a classifier which could process a resume and predict hiring with better than 96% accuracy and zero false positives. I called the classifier "No."

(That is: rejecting all applicants was more accurate than any other heuristic).
The follow-up discussion on that post has numerous interesting points, suggestions, and observations:

• Hiring all candidates above a minimum bar to a probationary training program.
• The cost of ramp-up effort and time (particularly in engineering).
• The critical importance of clear communications skills (exceptions: janitorial and mathematics positions).
• The low predictive value of academic certifications (undergraduate and graduate degrees) in employment success.
• That Google effectively cannot find qualified candidates for its positions. This struck me as profoundly troubling on a number of counts. One, that a data, information, and search company cannot solve what's effectively a search relevance problem (identify promising candidates). The other possibility being that its internal systems are so complex that virtually nobody can understand them (complexity tax). A third might be that Google is no longer considered an attractive place for qualified candidates to apply.
• The role of academic certification as credentialing -- not as indications of aptitude but as absence indicating highly probable lack of aptitude. The importance of getting to "no" fast (a goal of many classifiers).
• There's Joe Buck's observation of the self-selection fallacy: "the definition of 'good candidate' the author is using is just 'people my company decided to hire'".
• "Factoring out" work -- looser coupling allows for more readily supported independent work teams. Yontan notes that Google's work "doesn't tend to factor out cleanly". The company also lacks discrete projects.
• John Williams makes the connection between hiring and promoting: "choosing which candidates to make offers to is ... a special case of choosing which employees to promote". Precisely.
• Ted Ts'o's comment highlights a cost of aggressive automation: "One of the reasons why Google doesn't have as many of the "entry-level" jobs ... is that those sort of tasks tend to automated away quite aggressively.

Back to Ptacek, among his solutions, a "first call" interview, following which:

Those candidates [who weren't familiar with our field] got a study guide, a couple of free books, and an open invitation to proceed with the process whenever they were ready. Those $80 in books candidates received had one of the best ROIs of any investment we made anywhere in the business. Some of our best hires couldn’t have happened without us bringing them up to speed.

Biases of Big Data: The curious behavior of the dog

In "The Hidden Biases in Big Data" by Kate Crawford we once again have the observation that disasters almost always mean communications breakdowns. Analyzing Twitter data from Hurricane Sandy:

The greatest number of tweets about Sandy came from Manhattan. This makes sense given the city’s high level of smartphone ownership and Twitter use, but it creates the illusion that Manhattan was the hub of the disaster. Very few messages originated from more severely affected locations, such as Breezy Point, Coney Island and Rockaway. As extended power blackouts drained batteries and limited cellular access, even fewer tweets came from the worst hit areas. In fact, there was much more going on outside the privileged, urban experience of Sandy that Twitter data failed to convey, especially in aggregate. We can think of this as a “signal problem”: Data are assumed to accurately reflect the social world, but there are significant gaps, with little or no signal coming from particular communities.

Just as with the Japanese experience following the bombing of Hiroshima. Absence of evidence is evidence. You've got to look not only at what you've got, but who's not reporting in. Dewey Defeats Truman redux.

The Dangers of Intermediate Targets, Goodhart's Law

"The Dangers of Intermediate Targets: IQ, Cholesterol, and 99%-ile Latency" illustrates several aspects of measurement fallacy. The two largest elements of which are that 1) all significant things are measurable and 2) all measurements are significant.
Confounding correlation and causality, failing to account for confounding factors, and failing to account for incentive effects -- "be careful what you incentivize for: you'll get it" -- are all common pitfalls.
I particularly like the conclusion:

This is the point in a blog post where you’re supposed to get the one weird trick that solves your problem. But the only trick is that there is no trick, that you have to constantly check that your map is somehow connected to the territory.

Bonus points for map-territory confusion.
HN discussion.
See also, Goodhart's Law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Fox News Propaganda Techniques

Fourteen Propaganda Techniques Fox "News" Uses to Brainwash Americans
File under "Psychology", "Bullshit", and "Scary Shit". Among the tactics:

1. Panic Mongering. "When people are afraid, they don't think rationally. And when they can't think rationally, they'll believe anything."
   
2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem. "No category of character assassination is off the table and no offense is beneath them" -- a characteristic I'll note as distinguishing this from the far more defensible impeaching of credibility.
   
3. Projection/Flipping. Accuse your opponent of using your own underhanded tactics.
   
4. Rewriting History. We have always been at war with Eastasia....
   
5. Scapegoating/Othering.
   
6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness. Anyone else remember all the Putin praise late 2014?
   
7. Bullying.
   
8. Confusion. "[D]eliberately confuse the argument, but insist that the logic is airtight and imply that anyone who disagrees is either too dumb or too fanatical to follow"
   
9. Populism. Proclaim you're the party of the people, etc.
   
10. Invoking the Christian God.
    
11. Saturation. Say it. Again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.... Attributed to Goebbels: a lie repeated often enough becomes truth.
    
12. Disparaging Education.
    
13. Guilt by Association.
    
14. Diversion.
    

The echos here of the (purported) Karl Rove playbook are striking.

Desktop Web Apps: Atom Shell

In my earlier tabbed browsing rant I suggested that splitting off Web apps into their own dedicated space might be a Good Thing. The Atom Shell offers just that capability:

The Atom Shell framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.

Hacker News discussion.

The Number of Publications is Too Damn High

"Attention decay in science" looks at how long newly-published scientific papers remain cited:

The exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work. Consequently, the attention that can be devoted to individual papers, measured by their citation counts, is bound to decay rapidly. In this work we make a thorough study of the life-cycle of papers in different disciplines. Typically, the citation rate of a paper increases up to a few years after its publication, reaches a peak and then decreases rapidly. This decay can be described by an exponential or a power law behavior, as in ultradiffusive processes, with exponential fitting better than power law for the majority of cases. The decay is also becoming faster over the years, signaling that nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly.

One thought that occurs is that with more papers published, at best a smaller percentage can enter into the canon. The volume of papers published has been exploding, as Randall Munroe of xkcd showed in a visualization of the growth of the index of all published papers for a special edition of Science on communications and publishing.
Via Joerg Fliege at The Other Place, my first choice for Minister of Education when I'm elected Emperor of the World.
John Cassidy's "The Attention-Deficit-Disorder Economy" traces the distraction issue to its broader implications, shadows of my earlier Dopamine Meme post.

Combatting Psudoskepticism, Fred Skinner contemplates suing to prevent Merchants of Doubt film release

"What Can Be Done about Pseudoskepticism?" by Michael Shermer looks at the problem of dealing with denialism, which often masquerades as skepticism. He calls it "pseudoskepticism".

It began with the tobacco industry when scientific evidence began to mount that cigarettes cause lung cancer. A 1969 memo included this statement from an executive at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”

Shermer goes on to mention denialist fronts Center for Consumer Freedom (A Rick "Dr. Evil" Berman front) and Citizens for Fire Safety, which is, of all things, a tobacco front. You know: cigarettes, burning furniture and nightclothes, house fires. Better to saturate all of the above in carcinogens rather than reduce smoking rates....
Also:

Climate change is the latest arena for pseudoskepticism, and the front group du jour is ClimateDepot.com, financed in part by Chevron and Exxon and headed by a colorful character named Marc Morano...

Marc Morano is a name I ran across recently on Imgur, of all places. Quite the epitome of denialist credentials. Via SourceWatch:

[Morano] "received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science at George Mason University."
Until spring of 2009, Morano served as communications director for the Republicans on the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Morano commenced work with the committee under anti-science Senator James Inhofe ... In December 2006 Morano launched a blog on the committee's website that largely promotes the views of climate change skeptics.
Morano was a journalist with Cybercast News Service (CNS), which is owned by the conservative Media Research Center. CNS and Morano were the first source in May 2004 of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth claims against John Kerry ... and ... of similar smears against Vietnam war veteran John Murtha.
Morano was "previously known as Rush Limbaugh's 'Man in Washington,'...

Even more at Morano's Wikipedia page.
Worth mentioning here that following a number of pointed exchanges with its moderator Will_Power, I've joined the illustrious ranks of those banned from the deceptively named denialist subreddit /climatechange.
The legitimate sub you're looking for is /climate.

Dante's Circles of Hell

This exercise being my own musings on the middle of the journey of our days... At Lapham's Quarterly, "Abandon All Hope". The ranking (and punishment) of sins in Dante's work has always struck me as fascinating. Of the nine circles, the Wrathful sink only to the fifth (and are engaged in combat with one another), the violent to the seventh (swimming in a boiling stream of blood). It's seducers, flatterers, diviners, corrupt politicians, hypocrites, thieves, false counselors, schismatics, and falsifiers who are in the eighth circle. To the ninth: betrayers of kin, country, guests, and benefactors. And Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.
Leaves me pause to think on those who defile our times....

Molly Crabapple: online creative success

"Molly Crabapple's 15 rules for creative success in the Internet age" is one of those syntheses of useful lessons and guidelines for being a successful onine creative (something I don't consider myself to be, but strive for). Among them:

• I've never had a big break. I've just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn't there any more
• Don't be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don't have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.
• Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.

Read it all.

Why stock trade strategies, and medical research, are generally wrong

"False hope: Most trading strategies are not tested rigorously enough" (Economist): why any system in which statistical results can be selected for publication leads to false positives:

[T]his is a well-known scam. The promoter sends out 100,000 e-mails, picking a stock at random. Half the recipients are told that the stock will rise; half that it will fall. After the first week, the 50,000 who received the successful recommendation will get a second e-mail; those that received the wrong information will be dropped from the list. And so on for ten weeks. At the end of the period, just by the law of averages, there should be 98 punters convinced of the manager’s genius and ready to entrust their savings.

Another Joerg Fliege contribution.

Media: HTML6 and APIs

I've been ... grousing a fair bit about the State of the Web, on multiple fronts: design, advertising and finance models, weaponized viral clickbait. One thought nudging its way into my head is that a simplified markup and JSON format might be better than the mess we've got. Something tells me that the reality will be worse than the promise, and I'm still wrapping my head around HTML5 (though I like the semantic bits), but still, "HTML6 & APIs as Natural Friends" raises some interesting possibilities:

[P]eople thinking ahead to HTML6 are including native support for APIs as a first-class citizen to the in-browser application experience. Reported by SDTimes today, this is very exciting news for web application developers who ubiquitously use JSON content from REST web services, but currently have to broker that interaction between web page and back-end service through Javascript calls.

Oh, and while I've mentioned Mark Pilgrim's Dive into HTML5 before (and yes that's what I've linked above), it's worth a second mention.
Also notable is "A Richer Canvas" which is another sign the world is turning to my madness:

It’s my belief that in order to embrace designing native layouts for the web – whatever the device – we need to shed the notion that we create layouts from a canvas in. We need to flip it on its head, and create layouts from the content out.

(Emphasis in original.)
Thought I didn't quite manage to say that in my principles of Web design, when I revisited the concept in a comment at The Other Place, I came up with "Design your content pages around the body copy".
I've been engaged in my own adventures in responsive design and such. One outcome is an on-page CSS media query report (CodePen) which creates a handy table with values filled in. I discovered that some devices lie, which lead to the Planck length / Skeptical Kid extension. I'm rather fond of the HREF anchor links as numbered sidenotes as well, largely aimed at print stylesheets.

In which I find evidence that I am either Not Mad or that the World is sharing in my insanity...

There are times when I find my own thoughts or observations reflected and refracted back at me in unexpected ways, from outside sources. Three of recent note.

1. Alex Jones, no, not that one, but the journalist and director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Saying that we may have to consider limitations on free speech to answer (if I'm recalling the context correctly) corporate spending and especially disinformation. A conclusion I'd reached some time back myself, with a considerable level of discomfort. No transcript, but he's got a book out: Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (2009).
   Oh, and he was also host of one of my favorite programs, On the Media.
   The quote appears at the 23m 10s mark of this video, two further questions starting at 50m 30s: The Health of Democracy—The Role of the Media.
   
2. Facebook looking at publishing news content (from publishers) directly on Facebook. "All the news that's fit to print...on Facebook":
   

   The New York Times is reporting that Facebook is in talks with a group of news organizations that might start publishing their content directly on the social network....
   

   First, let's just call Facebook AOL already (my thought independent of the reporter's).
   Second, and more important: what the effect of the Web on publishing, generally, is, is to increase the scope of existence of a publishing entity. I'm thinking increasingly of business models incorporating not merely some productive idea, but of ring-fencing of an opportunity -- defining a space in which the enterprise can not only produce or provide a good or service, but in which it can control access to create a market interface. In publishing the fences are moving back. Much as early magazines compiled what were otherwise independent pamphlets and small works. I think that the scope of publishing is going to be larger universes in which a number of channels operate, and where what we now see as a single operator (a traditional newspaper, book publisher, even movie studio or broadcast empire, is a part of a larger space. Whether that's a commercial or noncommercial model is another question (I'm going for noncommercial).
   
3. I happened to catch a portion of an interview with poet Rita Dove some days back. The phrase which jumped out to me was, paraphrasing somewhat as this is from memory: "As I get older, the hardest thing for me to do is to silence the world" -- creating a space in which she can work. That too is my observation. I guard against my intrusions exceptionally jealously.
   

Which all these tabs can get to be at times....
And with that let's call it a wrap.