Category: Logic

The price of civility and the Carlin Paradox.

The truth is I’ve respected my opponents so much that they lost interest.

I used to be much more inclined to tearing into minds individually. Google only made it easier because I quickly had access to surface personal details, and I would use them to attack credibility and character as I was attacking ideas or false logic. Which would of course enrage my opponents and make them easier prey.

Later I realized this was logically bankrupt and a bit of a cheat, as well as an admission of weakness on the part of my position, because by distracting them with rage I was saying that at their peak ability I might fail to defend my point. It was like getting someone drunk so you could win a debate.

Also it really didn’t matter who they were, because they were not their ideas and assertions individually. Thus I was attacking the messenger.

In learning these things and changing tactics accordingly I lost my audience, pro and con. Pro because many I suspect just liked watching me get my claws wet, and con because when they weren’t being goaded to froth mouthed rage they realized, before I did obviously, that the most useful tactic would be to ignore me since I have no social status that labels me as being worthy of attention. But there is no social status that conveys such worth. You’ll find that it’s not who you are the empowers what you say it’s a combination of what you say and who you are.

It’s what I’ve come to think of as the Carlin paradox. In order to gain an audience one must adopt a label or persona that annihilates the power to change things. The more credibility I attempt to garner for myself the more easily my position is assimilated and thus de-clawed. Real power can only be exercised from the shadows. Bernays understood this which is why despite his parties, no one among there rank and file could spot him on the street.

For a quick example of how sober professional efforts at amassing social respect are none the less impotent in the face of trying to actually get meaningful attention I need only point here: http://www.ae911truth.org/ Their collective credibility is quite good, but what they are saying regardless of veracity is no match for its opposition.

I call it the Carlin paradox because he wasn’t a comedian so much as a sociologist on a mission later in life and the only way he could get an audience was to don the jester cap and surrender all chance of actually influencing social policy. There really is no way to transition this audience either. Just look at Al Franken. Promptly declawed/assimilated/marginalized.

“I used to believe that any theory, once published with supporting evidence, then became open to discussion and debate. But I’ve learned how envious, vindictive, and vicious the academic community can be. They’re swine. Polite swine, but swine none the less. Convincing the world fairly to consider a new idea takes patience, perseverance, and a willingness to fight the good fight in any media forum one can find.” ~Dr. Timothy Flyte, Phantoms

What Dr Flyte didn’t realize was that “any media forum” which has an audience won’t have any credibility.

There are only two forces that change the course of human policy. Environment and volition engineering.

Technology is our only hope, because PR cannot be used for good by its nature.

Much like television. Its very structure lends itself most easily to misuse. In many real ways a gun is less dangerous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television

“What’s wrong with this country, Marty? Money. You taught me that. Evil defense contractors had it, noble causes did not. Politicians are bought and sold like so much chattel. Our problems multiply. Pollution, crime, drugs, poverty, disease, hunger, despair; we throw gobs of money at them! The problems always get worse. Why is that? Because money’s most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don’t have it.” ~Cosmo, Sneakers

And all that is why no one is reading this.

Open Response to Words of Encouragement

I appreciate your words of encouragement, and your heart is clearly in the right place but I’ve misspent my life learning to debate since I was 16.

When I got access to the Internet the very first thing I did with it was find a place to debate what I considered to be at the time the most important issue facing humanity, religion.

I never stopped. I simply changed topics and my views as information forced me to evolve.

See, I actually don’t feel that strongly about most topics by default. I realize now I have a nature and nurture trait allowing me to be critically open minded. All it takes to change my position is fact.

Establishing that fact and what that might require depends on the subject of course but I’m always willing to revise my position in favor of reality.

Ironically my desire to climb into my filter bubble is proof of this fact.

I am admitting that I’ve wasted my life for the most part laboring under a false assumption. That people from their opinions rationally and then invest emotionally, when in fact they invest emotionally first and then rationalize that emotional position, regardless of facts.

I’ve been called flavors of autistic my entire life. I realize now that this emotional difference in me is what allows for critical thinking.

In effect I’ve been writing for humanity thinking humanity operated like off duty scientists when in fact if I wanted to influence humanity I should have utterly abandoned logical rigor and instead learned music and public relations.

I realize that controversy is not the opposite of persuasion. But look at my blog, look at my book. I’m not being opposed, I’m being ignored. That’s the real opposite of persuasion.

I and my work are non factors.

Maybe in the distant future when this era’s Internet is downloaded and parsed by an AI, my memetic legacy if any will be noted and recorded, that is I’ll be recognized as having gone on record ahead of the curve, assuming the future plays out remotely like I expect, but little else.

These things I’ve written about will come to pass, or will be taken care of being of people far better at influencing the mob than I am, people who already agree with me and don’t need my logic to inform them.

People like you for example. Clearly you have more patience and more people skills. I can’t even drive or make a phone call. All I can do is write and I’ve been writing the wrong things, especially considering my social position, or lack there of.

I have ~1000 followers on G+and around 500 daily visitors to my blog but 99% of my comments come from a group of readers who I can count on my fingers. A group that tellingly doesn’t even include my family. Though in their defense we speak in person.

The people who agree with me don’t feel the need to read my work because they agree, the people who don’t have no desire to challenge their views, and if they do they’ll pick a more meaningful socially opponent than me.

The sad fact is when it comes to the expression of a fact or piece of logic, it really doesn’t matter what is said, but rather who is saying it. This fact is sad because if I had believed that when I was 16 maybe I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to explain the obvious to the oblivious.

There are over a billion English speaking people on earth. And exactly one person has downloaded my book on smashwords and no one has reviewed my book on amazon.

I’ve gotten one outsider comment on my blog in the last 6 months, and the ads on my blog made literally less than a penny’s worth of bitcoin in a similar amount of time.

The offhand remarks of even the most vapid super model or brain damaged athlete or drug addled rock star influence humanity more than my entire body of work.

My only consolation is that being open minded has allowed me to join sides with the winning team (technology.) The world will turn out as I expect or better or I’ll be too dead to care. Though I must admit it probably will have nothing to do with my efforts.

I am rebuilding my life and trying to recover from or work around my disabilities. I’m in my 30s but I feel about 15 in terms of life progress, only I’ve already had my chances to build social circles and accidentally start a family.

Any progress I make now is going to be fiscal or deeply personal.

Sell your soul for a glass of water?

“I sold out long before you ever even heard my name.“ ~Tool

I am beginning to understand why people of means are callous and ignorant, or at least act as though they are.

It’s primarily because I think that low cost (owing to information’s unique supply logistics) intellectual pleasures can’t compete with the gene subsidized sensual pleasures which, by and large, require resources to experience.

A good example is comparing the most boring hike in the woods with the best artistic depiction of a hike in the woods.

No writer, no painter, can truly compete with the pleasure channels accessible only via the senses.

Of course this line is blurring as various forms of simulation get more adept at fooling those senses and processes to give up their dopamine reward for simulated experience. Which is why games and movies are so popular. (And why advertisers own you like so much livestock.) They are dopaminergically speaking, close to the real thing. But sadly they cost resources as well, at least initially in terms of equipment purchase and constantly by way of feeding that equipment. Environment and content costs being the minimum.

Manipulating the brain’s built-in environment renderer is the ideal solution. As per lucid dreaming. But sadly, that’s a single-player exercise for the time being and such an option doesn’t exist for a wide range of minds, until such time as technology opens the door.

I say all this because I find myself in a situation where I am simply waiting for my body to motivate me. Sitting here writing about what I think in the meantime. Because I can’t afford to go do what I would do, resources permitting, and I’ve just about exhausted the acceptable (to this brain state) and available intellectual stimuli afforded me by my status and economic picture.

So here I sit, waiting until outside stimuli or bodily needs present a sensual opportunity with a profit margin in excess of writing about the wait.

That this is a viable solution speaks to my comments above because simple passing hunger or thirst, if nothing else, will in practically no time at all accomplish this goal. And when I am done feeding my pet body, my enteric nervous system will no doubt be affected, feeding back into my mood, which will become congruent with this new state, allowing for a different set of options. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until such time that this bodily need becomes sleep and I experience that disconcerting yet all-too-common time jump we all experience, and its fleeting glimpse into a world of infinite variability and vividness, which really utterly dwarfs reality in every positive subjective sense. At least for me. Maybe your dreams are hollow and dim.

Until such time as we can truly harness the gene to reflect the will of our memes, the gene will utterly dominate the lives of humanity. And those who have learned to (or lucked into the resources allowing them to) placate and manipulate those genes toward the end of influencing the memes will continue to rule humanity.

Oh, look! Bitterness and frustration. New(ish) mental states. I wonder how long till the desire for a simple glass of water will shut out my rage?

Sidethought: Is this why so many faiths include fasting and other forms of body denial? To drown out with their own hunger, thirst, lust and the cries of all those people they are praying for instead of actually helping? Could this be a factor in the many instances of religion seeming to inspire psychopathic behaviors?

“Power over a man’s subsistence amounts to power over his will.” ~Hamilton, Alexander

“You can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.” ~Norman Borlaug

Thought ramble.

(Perspective disclaimer.)

Anyway… The human body is a space suit for the brain. A way for the brain to link to the world yes, but primarily a way to survive in said world.

There are three ways to expand your sphere of influence in this context. To adapt the environment to yourself, find an environment already suitable and travel there, or adapt yourself the environment. Everything that has meaning about a person is in the brain. I am firm on that point. I am not my arms or legs or liver, but I most definitely am my memories, my feelings, and my experience. The only reason my body is remotely me is because what is really me extends into those things. My nerves.

Ok so we can look at a person and we are so used to looking at people that we come to think that this is what people, which are brains as I just explained, look like. But what if another kind of brain evolved? What if other brains took different options? What would a brain in a suitable setting look like? What would a brain adapted for life on land look like? The answers are terrifying because these models of life aren’t fantastical or alien they are ubiquitous and completely disregarded at best or shamelessly exterminated or consumed by us.

Indeed I’m having the worry that intelligent feeling life on this planet might be more common than unfeeling life if you simply expand  your scale a bit. I am not the first to have this idea. It’s in fiction everywhere. But this is the first time I thought about it from a purely anatomical perspective. If you hardened my neurons against the elements and made them more physically flexible, or maybe even blended them with muscle tissue so they could individually contract, what would that look like? A blob? A large moving mold? A jellyfish? And aspen grove? I’m looking around at my world from the brain’s perspective and I’m realize that half of what I see could be brains that have found various ways to dispense with their body.

What if the skull has cut us off? I don’t like where this is going.

As I’ve realized before the only thing special about us in this context materially is the ability to exit our biosphere completely. But what if that’s only because our condition leaves us totally blind to a far superior method of escape? What if the answer to the Fermi paradox is that radio is completely crappy as a communications tool, and that space ships or physical travel is an equally crappy travel mechanism? What if they are watching us for resurgence? Would you bother talking to an anthill? What if the thickness of the skull prevents reception? What if that’s why ancient cultures cut holes in their skulls and did other gruesome things to their heads? What if that is the real purpose of a crown? What if that is the source of power and divine right? What if that is how warriors came to be rulers again and again not because of the fighting but because of the head injury?

I’m tempted to not share these things since each would be a story idea maybe and I’m not supposed to share and I’m so powerfully broke. But whatever, I love writing and I love talking and fate has kept me alive so far. Failure to gain is not the same as loss. Maybe someone will help me.

Show me the money.

Today I looked at my stream. I do that less and less, and a thicker and thicker filter bubble is required for me to tolerate the frustration caused by the feeling of impotence being unheeded creates.

I feel too deeply and I apologize for the disservice this does to my readers if any and the hypocrisy and paradox of this sentiment, since I’m basically whining about not being read while I explain why I’m reading less and less.

If enough of the world cared to collectively pay my electric bill so I didn’t have to beg the government for an insanity label and a check or sentence my family to wage slavery as an alternative to eating a bullet, perhaps I wouldn’t feel this way.

But to date not counting what amounts to a clerical error and the soaring price of bitcoin, my lifetime income from my writing and my desperate and near constant effort to engage with humanity and participate in solving its problems and addressing it’s suffering is about 40$. (Not counting the hosting for this site graciously donated to me by one of my few readers, and now friend. So I guess in that sense the writing is self sustaining at least if not author sustaining.)

The phrase dollar vote comes to mine, and if that’s where I stand in the mind of the mass of humanity I genuinely want to help, then I must be doing an atrocious job indeed.

Is my writing and the desire to help that spawned it really so worthless to you all? It must be. Conversely, is the good done by the CEO of Goldman Sachs for example really so staggering? It must be. Has 50 Cent done more for humanity than Norman Borlaug? He must have.

To all children. My apologies for my failure. I swore when I was a kid that when I grew up I’d save other kids. And I meant all of them. All of you. But I can’t convince these people, these adults, of even the most obvious truths. I feel like I could hit them with a brick and they would still deny the existence of bricks. I guess like all my adult peers I’ll have to take part in passing the buck.

Why I’m a crappy writer.

Bits lifted from here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/103840576618549598514/posts/R374FkRcZ4y?cfem=1

First off, these debates help me stress test and sharpen my code so to speak. Thank you. I’m aware of the effort it takes on your part and I appreciate it. This is Always true of every debate I have. I just get tired of saying it even if I’ve never said it to you before.

Sidenote: I’m not repeating myself, I’m shining light on multiple touches or points of overlap from a single truth. Think venn diagrams. It’s like fixing a watch, one missing gear can ruin 30 adjacent systems. When I link to the same thing over and over, that’s because I’m trying to insert the missing part that addresses those 30 adjacent systems, not repeating myself 30 times. Savvy?

“Way to take the whole argument out of context.”

No, when you argue at this scale of social policy there is more context than what is apparently intuitive. You are missing that in the same way you are missing the meaning of scale. What is possible for a handful of people can be perfectly impossible for the species/culture as a whole or put another way, at the scale level above. That is where this debate must be had and that’s where I’m having it.

The policy that works in your back yard is not by definition viable for all back yards.

“it’s about the net force of the state, in respect to its citizens .”

You don’t get to just arbitrarily exclude non-citizens from the discussion when you’re talking about national, let alone global, policy.

I’m talking about the state plus those it interacts with et al. Not some hyper specific game theory scenario with highly constrained sets of participants.

“+Brandon Sergent’s writing is way too unfocused…”

By design. The point isn’t pithy bumper stickers, the point is to borrow a phrase “The accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment.“

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me ‘Bob’ 🙂

If you want to datamine my work for pithy one liners be my guest.

Anything can be argued no matter how absurd. That’s why critical thinking and debate are skills that must be learned. Your ability to argue (as opposed to debate) with me doesn’t demonstrate anything.

“When I said he’s not a good writer, I mean he skips around a lot.”

That’s an illusion caused by unspoken context. I assure you there is logical connection and flow to my thoughts, it’s just that the hyper linear nature of language sometimes betrays that when applied to the fuzzy, massively parallel, and non-linear nature of reality.

Plus I’m a bastard who is a little insane with a fairly short temper. 🙂 But I balance that with not holding grudges and being ultra-willing to reconsider my views in the face of evidence. It’s easy to make peace with me so long as you have intellectual spine. (Not even ability, just courage. I’m not an ivory tower dweller.)

“…when it’s conveyed linearly, and avoids repeating or rehashing points.”

Agreed, but again that’s a PR/stylistic concern. If you would like to paraphrase/datamine my work, I would be more than pleased. I’ve heard that kind of admonition my whole life. My goal is not to persuade (though I admit that was the initial hope) but to inform.

Think of me as the raw data, and what you’re talking about is a tidy chart. One which I lack the skill to create because if I had a brain conducive to said skill I would lose the ability to produce the data in the first place. They are I suspect mutually exclusive.

“My comparison to Nietzsche was for this reason– while Nietzsche’s writing is world famous and the subject of a great deal of analysis and debate, it’s also notorious for being difficult to read, understand, and interpret.”

I accept that backhanded compliment in the spirit in which it was given. 🙂 I completely agree (about the difficulty.) My work is a chainsaw, not a scalpel. But then again I’m aiming it at redwoods, not blades of grass. 🙂

“…indeed, longer than I ever thought possible.” (http://underlore.com/an-argument-in-favor-of-the-state/)

Over 37,000 words when you include the quoted bits. Believe me, I’m aware of that problem.

“…express it in such a way that is dramatically more concise and elegant. I don’t want to read +/- 50 pages worth of writing just to appreciate (and respond to) what could have been 5+ pages of material.”

Data vs charts man, data vs charts. You’re right, but it’s also not my problem, more or less. Give me staff, and then see what I can do. I’m ineffectual because of divide and conquer. I’ve been isolated and then the consequences of my isolation are paraded as reasons for it.

It’s a catch 22. you’re asking for the product of a PR man, but if I was a PR man I’d have long ago been tricked into being someone with money’s tool. If you want Truth (or Underlore) this is the form it comes in.

http://vimeo.com/20861423

“It would also be immensely useful to combine only the most essential parts of both your writing into some text to link to.”

So again, go for it. I can’t change the world alone, that’s exactly why my enemies have seen fit to de-fund and isolate me. I’m a specialist with no support in this context.

I’m disabled even irl by my mind. Not to come off as arrogant, just honestly trying to convey my situation, I’m like hawking without the chair.

Yeah it would be great if I could get to meetings and speak clearly, but if I could do that shit I wouldn’t have had the time to sit and figure out hawking radiation now would I?

The world demands the impossible from me. If you want that shit, you’re going to have to wheel my ass to the table and fit me with a voice box, or in this case help me refine the ore of my work into some useful exotic metal.