Avoid my Mistakes

Update 2019-02-16 0407 PM:

Facts only matter in one context: Power. If a fact doesn’t give you power, it arguably isn’t even a fact. Actuality’s defining trait is reality’s agreement. That’s alliance. That’s power. Knowing a fact about the sun makes the sun your ally to whatever extent the fact dictates.

Understanding the sun is what gave us farming, and it underwrote the Pharaohs power.

This is the whole reason we regard reason and rationality as superior, because ultimately understanding reality gives you technology and techniques which in turn give you real physical power. Take that away and all you have left is the same powers fantasy has. Emotional, psychological, subjective.

It’s a lie is pretending that facts and reason persuade people, which is manifestly untrue as proven by virtually every social debate still existing. Like nuclear power or climate change for example, or the persistence of multiple religions. (Since presumably either one or zero of them have facts on their side we should have whittled away the false competitors by now.)

Update 2018-02-10 0200 PM:

(Copy pasted comment, somewhat off topic)

I’m not gonna make any future attempt to comment wisdom or ethics at people. Because they are fact immune.

It seems my fact immunity manifestation is refusal to parse fact immunity in others. I bet I’m back at it again in a matter of days.

I keep trying and trying and trying to talk some wisdom and raw kindness into people and I fail over and over.

I realize now what I was doing with these comments was just an expression of frustration at atrocious odious hateful suffering-perpetuating memes, and that I’m completely better off just letting them fester in hateful little pockets and colonies while a small core of humanity carries the rest of it past this dark age.

Anyone who doesn’t tell them flattering crap they wanna hear is a “troll” in their mind. Well no. Not only do I really believe everything I type, I can exhaustively defend it, but it NEVER gets to that point because people are fact immune and astonishingly skilled at avoiding looking at anything that might challenge their belief system. (Honestly if anything is “wrong” with me in this context it’s that I for some reason lack this revulsion. I (pathologically?) adore challenging my own world view and would welcome REAL fact and logic pure debate. Indeed, having that debate with an AI is one of the things I most look forward to about the future. I am genuinely curious where I’m provably wrong or inconsistent. Humans that I’ve found just can’t bring that game to me. (Comment off topic:) All you ever do metaphorically is squirm and complain and crap in your hand and throw it and call that discussion.)

I’ve linked and linked and you refuse to read/watch. http://underlore.com/the-final-underclass/ READ IT. Especially watch the vimeo video from west wing. I mean it’s FAR from ideal, as it’s still propaganda mostly from your (the 1%s) camp, but it already refutes your entire position. Less well than the essay but you’ve got your fingers in your eyes screaming la la la to spare you from the horror of my text, so I’m done asking you to read that with a rational open mind. Honestly my even typing this is still my own fact immunity. I apparently still believe if I just type clearly enough and have enough fact and logic behind me you’ll somehow come around.

But you won’t. And I sort of know you won’t. Yet here I go again. /sigh

Update 2017-02-26 0443 AM:

Do it like this guy:

Convert your work, whatever it is, into straight up propaganda. Because otherwise, no one will listen.

“One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.” ~Frank Zappa

Update: 2017-01-15 1044 PM

Debate is a myth. If reason and logic equaled persuasion we’d have scientists and logicians as heads of state and we’d have far greater consensus generally across the entire human civilization. Debate is what it is dismissed as in 99% of social contexts, empty Internet argument or pointless televised drama intended to manipulate and deceive.

Update 2017-01-12 0633 AM:

Two short answers to how learning can exist if debate is pointless.

1. Children by default have no positions and can acquire them from reality or from adults.

2. People are perfectly happy to accept new data that doesn’t contradict previous data. It all depends on emotional loading.

This is the source of Max Planck’s famous quote:

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

I didn’t say learning is impossible, I said debates are an illusion.

See also: https://news.rpi.edu/luwakkey/2902n.

It is not debate which persuades.

Debate doesn’t trigger persuasions. That happens organically and indirectly, in ways that evade all the psychological deadlocks which make debate an illusion in the first place.

Facts and debate only change a person’s position when the emotions have a vested interest in switching sides. This is why money’s power to corrupt is so strong.

Also it’s important to be raised with a mindset that consensus and reality matter. Ironically, I was given a form of “faith” in facts that functions as the exact opposite of faith.

I was paradoxically frozen by adulthood into a state of childlike flexibility.

People rationalize what benefit them emotionally. Emotional manipulation is what actually persuades. It just gets complicated when you realize that literally everything else can have an impact on emotions, including debate, facts, and of course, reality.

All else being equal, to what extent debate appears to work on a given person is to what extent debate moves them emotionally.

Update:2015-12-10 0325 AM
http://www.ibtimes.com/donald-trump-explained-how-dominate-media-1987-i-play-peoples-fantasies-2218125
“Decades of studies back up his claim that people are drawn to shameless narcissism, be it in the realm of politics, business, war or show business.“

Update: Very relevant. And new to me as of 2015-08-12 0955 AM

Risk = Hazard + Outrage (24:07) from Peter Sandman on Vimeo.

To anyone seeking to change the world with writing the biggest advice I can offer, which is based on my own failure, is that charisma and emotional manipulation are the only way to persuade people.

Facts and logic and Intelligence only ONLY matter when you are up against a technological non-human problem.

They must feel it before they can think it regardless of how flawless and defended the thought is. Debate does not exist. Facts do not matter to the human mind directly. This is why religion is capable of persisting.

“A new ~~scientific~~ truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” ~Max Planck (strikethrough mine)

http://adamcurtisfilms.blogspot.com/

Watch those to learn how to influence mobs of people. That’s the only way to do it short of technological game changers.

http://underlore.com/what-can-i-do/ (20,000 words and needs heavy updating and much of the text is debate which I need to integrate.)

Find a copy of this and read it: http://www.thriftbooks.com/viewdetails.aspx?isbn=1841880094

That knife cuts both ways.

Wealth pawns hate the idea of free riders. So they whine about these mythical lazy people content to live at the poverty level forever. But let’s examine that very briefly.

Is poverty level wage enough or isn’t it?

If it is, then why do we need to allow wealth to be accumulated without limit on the grounds that wealth motivates people?

If it isn’t then why do we need to cut aid programs on the grounds that if we don’t they’ll stay on the dole?

If obscene wealth is a motivator then why do we need to also motivate by eliminating aid? If people can be happy at poverty level or below then why should we allow people to accumulate obscene wealth?

That’s how you can tell the right wing are liars. They can’t believe both yet they deploy policy as if they do.

That’s why they end up causing their own problems. Like bemoaning the swelling food program rolls yet insisting that said enrollees be prohibited from saving money. (The first question they ask when you apply is how much you have in the bank. If you have been saving up to start a small business they will deny your claim and tell you to eat your future. Why?)

Because they don’t actually want to solve the problem. They want to seize more power and more wealth under the guise of addressing the problem. All around the world, same song 🙂

Here’s the reason the right wing hates obamacare.

Why? Simply because it’s a portent of a workable and inevitable style of government that will force them to share. They are terrified of people getting a taste for compassionate government because the argument for compassion is incompatible with extreme wealth inequality.

Ironically (for multiple reasons) they have created a situation where not only would universal health care be palatable but one in which it is literally life and death precisely because of that inequality which they have been hired by the 1% to protect by any means necessary.

Their pathological need to horde all wealth and the political deceptions and madness required to perpetuate this hoarding, while at the same time putting on the appearance of a democracy, has literally sickened the vast majority of the population.

As the republicans/1% minions succeed in implementing the 1%’s demands the day to day situation for the 99% grows more inhospitable. Indeed lethal for many. We have already passed a point where the majority wants a roll back of their changes but the 1% cannot allow that because it would only by necessity continue. The worse it gets for us the better the alternative will look and feel. They’ve painted themselves into a corner. Now they have to kill us or at least a sufficient number of us that whoever’s left can be content with whatever scraps remain.

So far all the rollbacks have been temporary and thus fixable in the next cycle. Any problem, it has been possible to blame on the other party. Like setting a slow fire and then selling the house before anyone smells smoke and then blaming whoever moves in for burning the house down.

That’s not possible with obamacare because it’s both immediate and semi permanent. Frankly the 1% made a huge mistake allowing medical to stay private. At first it was a great decision from their profit perspective but now it threatens everything because they’ve tipped their hand. They’ve made it 100% clear that their obsession with more wealth means more to them than any suffering or death experienced by others as a result of it.

Once people realize that not only is it possible, but profitable, for government to truly serve them, they will settle for nothing less. They’ve conditioned us for decades to put our children above everything else but now they want us to let our children sicken and die so they can get more money. Money which everyone knows they do not need, money indeed they can use for nothing other than making more money. At some point that’s the only thing left to spend money on for yourself.

Once we have universal health coverage and the wealthy are still wealthy and everything is working fine until they sabotage it, society will begin to question everything the 1% has paid for them to believe.

The real terror for them is the idea that people might one day get a sufficient percentage of their needs met while being given sufficient free time to ask the larger questions and seek answers from a sufficiently uncensored source. What if people come to agree that original debt is unacceptable? What if they come to believe that being forced to choose between wage slavery and homelessness isn’t a real choice? What if they come to view economics as akin to a water cycle and that our current system lacks both evaporation and rain? If the economy is a river, what happens to a river when there is no rain, no evaporation? Obviously it dries up. It finishes flowing.

Healthcare reform in any direction which does not let poor people die is the beginning of the end for them. They have no where to go. If they try to leave America and fail to pay exit taxes we will seize their assets. They must share as directed or own the system.

The core facts of humanity and the proper strategic goals.

Your agreement cannot be acquired after the fact through discussion, nor can mine. You either already get it or you never will. I’m either wrong or right.

Humans…
1. They are not convinced or persuaded by logic, reason, or evidence.
2. They deploy Intelligence to justify positions adopted for emotional reasons.
3. Those emotions are involuntary responses to external stimuli.
4. Their volition is most easily manipulated without their knowledge.
5. All humans are biased and are being thus manipulated by some faction to some degree, even me.
6. This can be overcome with conscious effort to choose actions and support positions.

Given these facts, and given a choice between thought and action, do we act to manipulate humanity for the purpose of liberating it?

Social strategic priorities should be, in order of importance:

1. Opposition to the dismissal of suffering amongst ANY set of humans. This is what makes us worthy of power. Suffering and death themselves are the enemy. Not any group of humans, because whatever groups serve suffering and death are or were sourced by suffering and death in turn. Elimination of the root causes will do set selection opposition for us in time.

2. Development and defense of nuclear power technology generally, LWR<Thorium<Fusion. This is what enables us to acquire power. Technology is our only route to freedom, and to develop it and deploy it ethically there must be enough to go around without vulnerability to infantile division tactics built on quasi-human notions of who “deserves” what, which is at best nothing but short term infighting and brinksmanship.

3. Support for a UBI. This is what enables us to indiscriminately democratize power without conscious or unconscious bias. If our goal is to improve all humanity’s fate we should literally put our money where our mouth is and not begin with discrimination.

These are all one truth.

Do you agree or disagree?

Whatever answer you make, how ever long winded (or silent) and thick with obfuscation I will render it down to one or the other so you might as well start with that word or not answer at all.

The End of Code

All the coding languages are to me feel like extreme time gambles. Even in the mid term, and total dead ends in the long term barring a dystopia or extinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages

I mean damn, how many times are we going to reinvent the wheel? As many times as coders can get away with selling it I guess.

Computers are still ‘fancy,’ and I think a large part of that is intentional. Eventually the user friendliness and intuitive function users, to a degree, demand from the front end will be applied to the back end. The only question is how and when. (Or by what?) Most likely it will be young coders looking to obviate old coders for the purpose of economic/systemic disruption which will (unintentionally) enable the masses.

Operating systems could be construed as a compromising of this clash between the demand for flexibility and the ability to sell code. Still though, they are all currently limited to serve as yet another layer of software between hardware and user. A nested set of dolls.

Using software (coding language) to make software (operating systems) to run software (applications) to instruct hardware is obviously inefficient. Software can take any shape allowed between user desire and the physical/logical limitations of the universe as expressed by the hardware.

To organize it as we have done, using one kind of software to spit out locked and crippled other kinds of software, is asinine from an organizational standpoint. It it perpetuated out of ignorance or corruption. It can only be forgiven as a temporary relic of the research process. (Or hated as a quasi conspiracy.)

There shouldn’t be programs or operating systems or coding languages. It should be a single operating system refined as demanded by human need and interest. And or forked as demanded by tradeoffs and mutual exclusion of functional specialization.

The coding language, compilers, OS, applications, etc should all be the same thing. My interface with it should be as intuitive as oven use. Eventually it will be, or we’ll all be dead. I just hope the delay doesn’t cause that death.

Coders for whatever reasons have spent their collective effort improving the quality of the discrete outputs, but not on improving the interface from a default human perspective. Why develop operating systems and programs and not focus on making a tool making tool?

The cultural history of 3d printing will be instructive here. As of now coders make/sell the objects and I’m saying software should be like the printers. As of now precious few people, and for obvious special interests, are working on the software making software.

Game making applications show that there are some at least somewhat interested in correcting the problem.

Perhaps it is this inherent disregard coders have for those outside their niche, that in part creates so much disgust in me for coders as a block. They seem to not care whether the average person can have access to the fruits of coding. By that I mean the ability to custom sculpt the behavior of a computer. Computers should be like English speaking pets. And they are to coders, proportional to their skill.

As a writer I am in many ways the opposite of what coders are. As a writer my purpose is to transform the inaccessible into something more intuitive. And I do it using the standard interface language (accident of birth not withstanding) expressly because I want my output to be readily usable by everyone.

The tragedy is that the only people capable of correcting this problem are the very ones best positioned to solve it.

Why should the priests dismantle the church when the tithes are so profitable? For the good of parishioners? Ha. What have I been smoking right?

Pinko commie wacky tobacky I’m sure some would speculate.

The root of intelligence.

“F=T∇Sτ” ~Alexander Wissner-Gross

Pretty sure that’s the most important discovery of the 21st century. Notice I didn’t say “so far.”

Yeah. I’m calling it this early.

“In the equation, F is a force that acts so to maximize future freedom of action, to keep options open with some strength, T with S, an amount of diversity to possible accessible futures, up to some future time horizon, Tau.”

Give me one example of an intelligent behavior that isn’t an attempt to maximize the number of future options. Sacrificing one’s self at the behest of one’s genes isn’t intelligent or is at best an indirect investment in something which the intelligence has come to identify with.

An intelligent agent acting in this way is deploying their intelligence not for their own good directly but for the good of the genes which provide the substrate for their existence. (Kin selection and altruism.)

But assuming a desert island, last being in creation sort of context, I can think of no intelligent action that falsifies the assertion. If you’re right it should be easy to falsify. But it isn’t.

The entropy mechanism just explains how intelligence can arise from a purely mechanistic and unintelligent setting.

It is not at all far fetched to me that a simple physical law should form the foundation of intellect.

“Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.” ~Edward Robert Harrison