I knew elephants could swim. I didn’t know they could swim in the ocean. I didn’t know they commonly swam ten miles from shore. I didn’t know that they could cover long distances in the ocean.
(learn something new every day)
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-13 17:08:00 UTC
You know, Stephen J. Gould was wrong about everything other than punctuated equilibrium. But we are stuck with a lot of popular sentiment because of his success at ‘wrongness’.
The one question I have yet to wrestle with, is whether intelligence is a deterministic outcome of life over long periods.
His position was that intelligence was so costly that it’s doubtful. That intelligence is a temporary and unsustainable strategy compared to it’s opposite: bacteria.
Mine is that it is hard to think of conditions that WOULDN”T generate it, just by watching crows, elephants, octopods and wolves.
Or it could be for example, that man evolved most by competing with other great apes, and will end up a dead end like the bear.
The most significant concern that I know of is not the determinism of the evolution of intelligence.
It’s that the universe is not a gentle place to ‘bake’ a life form in relative safety in the galactic suburbs for five billion years.
And worse, these periodic extinctions appear to accelerate the development of life toward greater complexity. What if we hadn’t had them? Would each era have ‘peaked’?
So it just seems to take a very long time to cook intelligence while still not ‘freezing’ it at an equilibrium.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-13 16:32:00 UTC
—“Living in harmony with nature is letting a drunk drive you home. Overthrowing nature is like grabbing the wheel from the drunk and flipping the car for the fun of it. Mastering nature is like being the designated driver and getting the drunk home first before going on a joy ride on his gas.”—Anne Tripp
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-13 11:17:00 UTC
—“The human brain’s processing power is estimated at about 38 petaflops. But all it needs to operate is about 20 watts of energy.”—
That’s less than half of the current supercomputer (that runs on algorithms). But an algorithmic computer that could produce anywhere near the plasticity of the human brain would need thousands of times that processing power.
Back in, i dunno, mid 2000’s I told people that the reason I got out of AI was when I understood that the power needed to create a general AI with current technology would turn the surface of the earth to cinders. And of course I was speaking (as usual) illustratively and therefore hyperbolically.
But you know, the whole point is, that it’s actually a hardware problem. Most of what we need to do is not calculate, but to search. Algorithms calculate. (expensive). Search is cheap. And while many models require calculation, most of what humans need is to do is search.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-09 11:18:00 UTC
Belyaev Experiment. The fox breeding experiment is probably the most important addition to evolutionary knowledge of the past century. Not to diminish genetics. But the fact that we can turn a fox into a dog that quickly by selecting for one simple, easily demonstrable trait, and that the cascade effects are identical to those in human domestication, as well as the domestication of all other farm animals, puts an end to the all sorts of pretense about rates of evolution, and dependence upon mutation and adaptation. Instead, we preserve, in our genetic records, multiple potentials that we can express in response to local need. We can select for rates of maturity or the reverse. And by doing so produce the variation in the races. It turns out that civilization requires we select for the very same trait we select for in foxes and wolves. We produce neoteny and its various consequences. Because all our endocrine and cerebro-chemical functions are interdependent.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-06 09:27:00 UTC
Mathematics and logic make use of platonism (idealism) to a degree that is painful, but it is translatable into scientific prose if you understand the foundations (causal relations) that constitute both math and logic.
Now, it is one thing to move from the descriptive (scientific) to the ideal (supernormal), and quite another to move from the ideal (supernormal) to the experiential(phenomenological), and from the phenomenological to the supernatural and occult (abrahamic or religious surrender of reason).
I mean, at some point you’re creating deception value rather than truth value. And while I we need analogy, and we can use ideal to substitute for knowledge when the ideal is demonstrable as a general rule – after that, everything starts moving from truth value, to meaning-value, into deception value.
And I just dont’ understand why we should accept anything communicated in the realm of deception value.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-04 21:31:00 UTC
MATH IS DEAD SIMPLE. (Even if applying it gets increasingly difficult)
Math is stated as a form of idealism (mathematical platonism, specifically), and that’s the problem.
Mathematics consists (scientifically) of the use of measurement, by using positional naming, serving as scale independent constant relations, to describe constant relations in the universe, and to deduce constant relations from those constant relations, or fragments of constant relations.
I mean. Math could not be more simple. It’s trivial. That’s why its so powerful. We can use one of anything to describe any constant relation.
Where math has a problem is inconstant relations (economics and law).
Even there, we can identify some constant relations through the commensurability provided by property and money.
Property and money themselves being empirical measures of the time saved through acts of voluntary cooperation.
Math is really simple. Constant relations of position names provide scale independence.
Unlike reality, we can construct numbers (positional names) in an infinite number of ‘dimensions’. So that not only can we represent countings, but one dimensional (lengths) two dimensional (geometric) three dimensional (spatial), four dimensional (change) – but we can also represent all sorts of pure relations ( ‘types, or classes’). For example, spreadsheets that reference each other’s pages form additional dimensions. But there is no limit to pure relations we can represent with positional names (topologies).
Math is trivial. Just like binary number systems are trivial.
Thats why they’re so powerful.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-04 20:50:00 UTC
METAPHYSICS, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY ?
I my view the purpose of science is to construct measurements where we provide a means of sensing the otherwise unsensable such that we render it commensurable and judgeable. So Propertarianism is a method of measurement, where man is used as the unit of measure. In other words, perfect commensurably provided by the limits of human action within each dimension of actionable reality.
Now given that we are marginally indifferent in our senses, we can then testify to one another in each of those dimensions (testimonially) and test one another’s statements for (as Joel says ) both correspondence and coherence. So it’s just very hard to construct a falsehood ‘testimonially’ that we cannot sense. Since everything is reduced to that which we can commensurably (marginally indifferently) sense.
So I view science as the art of constructing measurements in logical and physical forms. I view philosophy as the means of decidability within a domain. I view truth as the means of decidability across domains, or independent of domain.
So whether you want to take those three things and represent them as a triangle, or a hierarchy, I guess I have taken the position that there is a hierarchy, and it is Time > Life > Necessity of Action > Truth > Philosophy > Science. But I might be wrong about that relationship. I am almost certain I am wrong. But I can think about it a bit.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-04 18:58:00 UTC
by Steve Pender
What other good can exist than that which expands the only known form of life that has power to delay/counteract entropic forces? Only intelligent life seems to be aware that life even exists.
Some policies can be tough (require more steps) to demonstrate their higher survival value, but most don’t require being a rocket surgeon or a brain scientist. Island morality (whatever extends life on a deserted island for the most people for the long-term) looks to be a useful micropropertarian guide to develop macropropertarian policy.
Example: 80 IQ mother of 5 can’t afford to feed her babies but wants another baby
Dysgenic left argument typically assumes that further expansion of intelligent life in the universe isn’t necessary, that we can feed endlessly using extant food. It takes for granted a level of food/resource stability/surplus that it doesn’t contribute to.
Eugenic right wants symbiosis, mutually beneficial trade. What do we get for feeding someone who does not contribute to our global “island’s” resource surplus? A big nothing burger for ourselves.
We can also point to traditions that increased the survival of the people who followed them, and at least have data points that show that an anticipated good has indeed been a past outcome for a disputed policy.
We can’t point to any cultures that normalized children being sexualized at a very early age, or encouraged to be gay, or transgender, for instance, and showing positive results. We can’t point to *any* cultures that ever existed doing so, so on that policy, we have a whole world of cultures who were, in practice, uniformly against such policies, that continue to expand in the absence of that desired policy.
We can’t point to any culture that disarmed the bulk of their population, and successfully expanded their *own* culture afterwards.
Some policies have been “scientifically tested” and failed. Dysgenic leftists are therefore more like alchemists and conspiracy theorists who offer no evidence for their arguments.
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-03 10:19:00 UTC
MATHEMATICAL PLATONISM IN THE BROADER INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT, AND THE CURRENT STATE OF DEVELOPMENT IN MATHEMATICS (the study of measurement using constant relations via positional naming)
(continuing discussion)
Converting statements of mathematical platonism:
If we say: “Can we say a subset…?” rather than “All is/are…” we eliminate a great deal of mathematical platonism, that requires us to use terminological special pleading.
This eliminates the cultism (fictionalism) of mathematical platonism and ensures that the speaker knows of what he speaks, rather than simply performing operations he does not understand, but is still capable of constructing proofs of possibility.
In other words, there is a difference between an idiot savant who masters pattern recognition and the individual who explains why the patterns can exist in the first place.
As the intuitionists discovered, (and authors of proof software have taken advantage of), a proof must be falsified, and the two dimensions of doing so are via negativa (application tests), and via positiva (construction from operations)
Unfortunately it seems that Wolfram is trying to cast operationalism as a separate science, rather than restoring mathematics to operations AND deductions, and it seems theoreticians are still describing symmetries (lie groups), it appears we are stuck with fictionalisms in each sub discipline rather than the rather obvious: that by free association we can either identify or search for patterns, and by a competition between construction and deduction we can test them, in any number of dimensions. And that our topography is largely little more than puzzles, while the problem of N-dimensional permutations producing consistent intermediary symmetries whose change in state is measurable, and lends prediction to heretofore unimaginable outcomes of n-dimensional high causal density is the holy grail of mathematics at which point we will be able to produce semantic intelligences rather than mere computations and algorithms.
This is a perhaps more articulate explanation of the pseudoscience and pseudo-rationalism of the 20th (and now 21st century) that Hayek chastened us would be remembered in history as a second age of ‘mysticism’.
Unfortunately, the great wars interfered wth the second enlightenment and the second industrial revolution, and gave the common man economic and political influence by which to distribute that new mysticism (Boaz/marx/freud/cantor/frankfurt school/postmodernism) when poincare, hayek, popper, brouwer, bridgman, and mises all failed to complete the operational revolution.
(I’m doing my best to pick up the pieces.)
Cheers.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2017-07-03 10:03:00 UTC