Logic – Page 15 – Underlore

Censored at Stumbleupon

Final update!

Innomen’s banned from stumbleupon 🙂

Here is a copy of the email between me and Barry Conway, some yuppy stumble minion.

Hello Brandon.

We write to advise you that your StumbleUpon account – Innomen – has been suspended for a further breach of our Terms of Service.

Your account has previously been involved in a number of incidents which breached of Terms of Service, and has been the subject of a high volume of complaints from other members of StumbleUpon. On the last such occasion, we advised you – in writing – as follows:

As we advised in our previous mail, Brandon: Since your account has
now been repeatedly involved in matters of dispute in which
we have been required to intervene, you are formally advised that any
further breach of our Terms will result in the permanent suspension of
your account.

Since you have continued to write objectionable content on your Innomen account, culminating in a recent review on the StumbleUpon blog pages, we have now permanently suspended your account – Innomen.

Please be reminded that our Terms of Service allow for only one account per member, and that you should not create further accounts on our service. Should you do so, they too will be suspended.

This suspension will not be lifted, and – because you have been formally warned on previous occasions – is not subject to appeal. No further correspondence will be entered into on this matter.

A record of your account suspension will be kept on file, along with those relating to the previous incidents.

Sincerely.

Barry Conway (StumbleUpon Community Support)
[email protected]
http://www.stumbleupon.com

To which I replied…

Oh please. Are you actually so far gone that you believe any of that? No one contacted you. No one complained. I was a valuable member of the su community getting around one fan or more per day. I had 720 followers at the time of my ban. I had regular fruitful correspondence with many members and not one negative private message in over a year.

The only thing I’ve done to get myself banned is fail to kiss developer ass that’s why I’m being banned at 4 in the freaking morning. You’re having a tantrum. You people spammed me your stupid tea party and I wrote my opinion. And it hit a little too close to home.

You don’t want people reading it and so you banned me, plain and simple. You realize how legitimate you’ve made my work right? One is define by the strength of their enemies and I was just unjustly censored by what, the second largest social media site on the Internet?

And for what? Complaints you don’t intend to produce? Heh, I couldn’t have scripted a better exit.

Your rubber stamp TOS gives you the rights to do whatever you want with your ball, yet you feel the need to pretend some kind of due process where no is required or exists.

You may of course take it home with all the maturity of a wounded grade schooler. I’m content with the obvious moral high ground and now the total freedom to publicize this event. Though of course I’m well aware no one will care and those that do, you will ban. Still, it is a thrilling vindication.

I wouldn’t write back if I were you. It will only make you look worse. And your responses absolutely will be published, consider your reply consent to my terms of service 🙂

And thus ends my time as a stumbler. I am a little angry I suppose but really I’m more flattered than anything else. Honestly this is completely unjustified. I’ve been shut out of places before but never so unilaterally. I wonder how long it will take my fans to realize I’m gone, I know from experience that when a person is banned you can go right on sending them stumbles and it won’t notify you that they aren’t going anywhere.

I wonder if the stumbler I had in the cue to be sent will still be sent. Eh, no big deal. The community will live without me. My stumble upon died before they bent over to eBay’s dollar.

Time to fire up my reddit account or something lol.

It’s been a helluva ride.

———
As if their piece of shit service weren’t bloating and fucked up and broken enough, now they insist on putting my sticky post even at the top of direct comment links. So I can’t share comments without forcing my reader to scroll down through something they obviously have already read, so I’m replacing it with a link to here that was they don’t have to scroll down so far.
———

Update: To whom it may concern, I can be found here.

myspace.com/brandonsergent [myspace.com]

friendfeed.com/innomen [friendfeed.com]

Where to begin?

Ruled by silly little brats with porn and poetry.

Unconstitutional EULA restrictions.

Inability to introduce a page unless you claim to like it, despite how much people enjoy complaining.

Inability to respond to reviews.

Removal of classic layout.

Inability to archive or backup your blog.

Absurdly small character limits, and dimension limits for images.

Tactical patenting lock down of a profoundly important type of information system.

Update: I was recently told that there are many like me here and that I need to continue writing reviews because they serve a purpose.

I want to explain something because they served a personal purpose as well.

I truly felt free to say whatever was on my mind here. I no longer feel that way.

I feel like a fool for having dedicated so many hours in creating content and introducing so many people.

Literally my entire circle of friends in real life I brought to stumble.

People I don’t even know anymore in real life still regularly use stumble because of me, people I’ve only met once I’ve hooked before they went their way.

And now I regret each and every one.

The ability to randomly serve up the Internet according to human filters is profoundly important, and I helped a company that would see that ability packaged and sold.

These people would charge per line read if they had had the chance to patent reading.

This event reminded me that free speech does not exist, there are merely levels of restriction.

In short my heart just isn’t in it anymore.

If I were to create content for these people again it would be a shallow imitation of what I would actually like to say, because what I really want to say I have been Specifically Forbidden to say.

I might ‘offend’ someone.

In addition, this event was a solid vindication, a complete ‘I told you so’, a total cynical non-shock that confirms every assertion I’ve ever made about the social circles here.

I have said who rules here, I have said how, I have pointed out the total lack of ethics, and the motivation for their abandonment.

I have called out bigots and liars, ageists and hypocrites. But when I dared to demand transparency and integrity, then we see the true nature of things here.

When I asked pointed specific questions, and when I attempted to defend myself I got silence and threats.

It became clear that all my freedom was merely the result of not yet encountering what the mafia charmingly refers to as a rat, and what is known as a tattletale on playgrounds all over the country.

When it became clear that these people feel that they OWN my thoughts and opinions, when it came down to a hostage situation, change what you say or we’ll silence you completely, I lost all respect.

In a country where protection of the law is a direct function of how much you can afford to pay a lawyer, I can no longer afford to be an idealist.

I cannot risk the deletion of what I have already said. We exist at the mercy of a hydraulic despot, with water in this case being the only realistic way for a non media company to talk to potentially thousands of people who weren’t actively seeking their words.

Too often we trivialize, not realizing that information is the most important commodity on the planet, and people like this control the flow of it.

It may be just a blog to you, and if you saturate it with lyrics and porn, that’s all it will ever be, but to me it was the ears of the future, and to protect what I have already said, I shall say no more.

What I’m doing now: http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=1460

Quantum mechanics for cheaters.

QM in a nutshell: “I don’t know the answer to this multiple choice, but I know it’s going to be A B C or D, and that’s the same as knowing the answer. Me not knowing the answer means there is no answer. I feel so much better.”

Just because a particle’s velocity and position can’t be known at the same time does Not mean a particle HAS NO velocity or position at a given time.

Yet that’s exactly what QM would have us believe. They are a whole culture of lab coats covering their eyes and believing the world has gone dark.

QM is the science of giving up.

Our inability to solve the problem has no bearing whatsoever on the possibility of the final state.

It’s like looking at a lighting rod and seeing lighting strike 1 inch to it’s left and asking yourself in shock, “Wow! What were the odds of that?” Well apparently 100%, since it happened.

QM is the gambler’s fallacy grown to the size of an institution. It’s a philosophy of acceptance for non answers based on existential confusion. A tolerance for fudged numbers, and claiming success when you got close enough to the mark when an actual answer presents itself. A stealing of credit. The science of hedged bets.

“Hey look, I told you the answer had a high possibility of being a positive number, I’m a genius!”

QM at best introduces randomness, or exposes us to a new unknown order. Chaos itself follows rules, else we wouldn’t be able to make statements about it, or calculate probabilities.

Free will as an actuality can not exist given our current understanding of reality. Quantum indeterminacy or not.

In our time line mutually exclusive events remain mutually exclusive. Our choices may branch into alternate time lines but that might as well be mythology for all the impact it has on our world. A cosmic game of woulda shoulda coulda.

In the here and now, events have only one outcome. If you want to pretend your brain world is somehow exempt from the laws of nature be my guest, but as for me, I’ll skip the magical thinking.

The illusion of free will is enough, and the existence of permanent unknowns is tolerable for me, but then, I’m a grown up like that. *shrugs*

I can’t imagine a more self important attitude. It’s like listening to arguments on how earth HAS to be the center of everything.

It’s puddle thinking.

It’s a religion infesting particle physicists. And until I see some of these quantum miracles (macroscopic teleportation, entanglement, and related quantum weirdness) applied at the macro scale, I’m not buying it.

The whole quantum world is viewed third hand. From instruments and abstraction to our sense organs and finally to us.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/writingscience/Ferris.htm

Read that.

Obviously there is more going on. And yet we invent fictional worlds or ignore the problem.

This is inexcusable behavior for scientists. And their laziness is infecting the future.

Things every kid should know.

“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.” – Diogenes

Facts and logic determine reality, but emotion determines perception.
Power often defines value.
Influence is power.
No one decides to be mean.
Being older doesn’t mean being smarter.
Respect does not mean obedience.
If someone can tell you what to do with something it’s theirs.
Responsibility is usually code for control.
Those who have more force others to have less.
Angry people are afraid of something.
If someone forces you instead of explains, you’re smarter than they are.
People want you to compete because they are afraid of what you can do when you cooperate.
Everyone gets something out of what they are doing.
No one chooses how smart they are.
No one chooses how they feel.
Almost everything is a matter of opinion.
Smart people can be wrong.
The message is independent of the messenger.
The majority can be wrong.
Reality is not a democracy.
Academic skill does not equal intelligence.
There is a tool or trick to offset every weakness.
Those that tell you loudest to work hard often aren’t working at all.
You don’t have to be part of something to understand something.
You could be the first.
Hurting people doesn’t make you strong or right.
Removing the need for something is the best way to fight it.
Everything you own charges you rent.
Only you know your gender.
Laziness is not a bad thing.
There are always more options.
How you feel and think depend partly on your health.
Your body is your brain’s pet.
You have a limited amount of time, spend it wisely sell it rarely.
People lie because the truth is a threat to them.
No one can tell you what love means.
Revenge is an attempt to control the past.
Context changes meaning, and you can always add context.
Outliving something is better than killing it.
They care enough to tell you they don’t care.
If they tell you they’re laughing, chances are, they aren’t.
The truth doesn’t always look true.
Knowing you could be wrong does not mean you are.
You don’t have to be an expert to be right.
No one owns a fact.
You don’t have to earn the right to live.
Wealth is about luck and ethics.
People who want power shouldn’t get it.
Genius is always outnumbered.
Strangers are more complicated than you think.
Everyone has a reason.
Some people are immune to the truth, sometimes it’s you.
There will always be things you don’t know about yourself.
Not all things are scalable.
Ignorance is not the same as stupidity.
Maturity does not equal conformity.
The really good ideas aren’t always popular.
Writing is nearly immortal and often ignored.
You are always entitled to an explanation that ignores authority.
You do not have to be what your parents intended.
Truly nice people are rarely popular, they tend to hide.
You’re a completely different person after a while.
Poor people exist mainly because rich people sequester wealth.
It’s not holding a grudge if they continuously offend you.
You will outlive all the adults, that means the future is your business.
If they can’t tell you what’s in it for them, it’s a trap.
Evolution doesn’t always improve things.
Common sense isn’t rare, you’re just misunderstanding the actual agenda of the parties involved.

New School

Do you agree? School makes a huge mistake in that it attempts to teach all that one needs to know when it needs to teach how to find what one needs to know and how to process what is found.

1. Ethics
2. Reading
3. Logic
4. Research
5. Civics

These subjects would give children the tools they need to develop and discover the tools they need, period.

This course would not take more then two years total. But would be spread out over k12 time frame to give children time to absorb, discover on their own, and most importantly, learn from their parents.

Ethics first for what should be obvious reasons. Being benevolent should be the highest priority.

Reading because it is what connects us to each other and the past and allows us to grow as a species.

Logic so we can process what we read critically and properly incorporate it into what we know.

Research so we can find the answers if we have questions or share the answers we ourselves created, or verify the answers we are given.

Civics so we know how to incorporate ourselves into our society in a way that is mutually beneficial and so that we can understand the purpose of the laws we are subject to and how those laws came about.

Each subject also provides defense against manipulation and exploitation, which will make our children strong, safe, wise, and perhaps most importantly, happy.

A secondary set should be as follows.
6. Psychology
7. Neurology
8. Sociology
9. Economics
10. Philosophy

Psychology so that we can know how we think, and avoid our cognitive blind spots, impact bias, and other inherent mental issues we all can have.

Neurology so we can understand that reality comes to us through the lens of our brain, awareness of the nature of that lens will give us a better actual understanding of the reality outside it.

Sociology so we can understand the societies we choose to live in and or were born in.

Economics so we can understand the nature of resources and how to best distribute them for the common and individual good.

And philosophy so that we can explore the context and meaning of our existence.

In addition I feel that all children should be taught one martial art (minus the philosophy, just the skill) and one artistic technical skill of their choice. So they can be safe, confident, and express themselves fully.

No Math?:
Nope, no 18th century French literature, or quantum mechanics either, math is not fundamental to learning how to learn.

( Update: This would be an acceptable form of math education: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/eng//id/1007 )

Forcing everyone to learn math is like forcing everyone to learn magic the gathering. Basic math like what is +-*/, would be covered by reading, but anything past long division is a specialty and thus not included.

Addendum:

The only thing we have the right to unilaterally insert or remove are cures and pathogens. And even then only with extremely careful consideration of the cost.

We literally steal childhoods. We conflate the indoctrination process with childhood itself to a repulsive disgusting degree.

Children should be treated EXACTLY like adults recovering from a brain injury and determining when they are to be given freedom and rights should be a clinical objectively driven process approached from that perspective.

When someone wakes up from a coma and has to learn to read and speak again do we presume to decide for them all the shit we decide for children? No, because we recognize an adult as a human.

Conversation about education in 99.99% of cases assumes children are not humans without even being aware of that prejudice.

Children are pets and property in our culture and our “education” is inextricably bound to that loathsome truth.

Quantum Indeterminacy and the Mind of God

If events are random then they will behave probabilistically like random.

If they are ordered, could we determine the mind of god by examining that ordered imposition on random material?

Would that then imply that each given particle is different depending on its divine meaning? Like say god wants to stop that bullet with a miracle, the manifestation of that will would be the macroscopic summation of the indeterminate behavior of that bullet’s subatomic partials in such a manner as its behavior is both a break from the typical laws of physics and an extreme violation of random distribution.

For the record I do not believe in this type of god because the evidence absolutely does not support it.

So, if that type of manipulation occurs, the study of a given particle in an effort to understand all particles is futile. So how do we determine if that is the case? We can’t study masses looking for random, random could be composed of order plus divine will. Indeed, no amount of data is sufficient to show one way or the other.

It’s like the brain in the jar problem. So, in my opinion even if there is a god we should act like there isn’t.

This is reminiscent of Kant’s idea that the past is ultimately not an indicator of the future.

Nothing Better to Do

All action can be classified as “nothing better to do”. When a person does anything it is the best action they can think of within the constraints of their present situation.

For example, even a person being mugged would rather being doing something better. Imagining a better course of action is not all there is to it.

This idea, the use of the phrase “don’t you have anything better to do?” in my mind betrays an absolutist Horatio Alger style of thinking where its all personal responsibility and no external influence. Carry that to its logical conclusion to see how absurd it is. Did the woman in Somalia watching her children starve to death choose that life? No. We are just as helpless as she, just a lot more lucky.