Year: 2018

Comprehensible

Chill Regular-ass Post

Alas, this is not hyperbole. It’s not guaranteed that civilization will collapse but it’s certainly a risk. Even in a low-risk scenario, because the consequences are so grave, it’s worth doing much to prevent this. Why this is not comprehensible to most I have no idea.

Analagous

Chill Regular-ass Post

If you’re still using Facebook now, what the hell is wrong with you? I mean, come on.

BTW, I knew Mark Zuckerberg was a complete sociopath by 2006, and warned on my blog at the time not to trust a damn thing that wanker did or said. Was I right or what?

Best Diet

Chill Uncategorized

This is what I had gathered from other studies, but it’s nice to see it all in one place.

The findings suggest that there is no one “true” diet for humans, who “can be very healthy on a wide range of diets,” said the lead author of the study, Herman Pontzer, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. “We know that because we see a wide range of diets in these very healthy populations.”

One thing hunter-gatherer populations have in common is a very high level of physical activity. Many walk between five and 10 miles a day. Yet paradoxically they do not have higher energy expenditure levels than the average American office worker. That suggests that health authorities should consider recommending exercise primarily as a way to improve metabolic health, but not necessarily as a calorie-burning antidote to obesity, the authors said.

So the lesson is moderation is best. Exercise won’t help you lose (much) weight, but not consuming voluminous amounts of food in conjunction with exercise will keep you healthy. It doesn’t matter much what you eat, just don’t over-eat. Other than in special situations, diet is not so important as humans are genetically predisposed to be omnivores.

It’s not in this study, but intermittent fasting is also probably beneficial. Thus, the Fat Acceptance folks are demonstrably nearly completely wrong in basically everything they believe and espouse. Ya’ll can keep lifting Little Debbies. I’ll keep lifting weights.

Likely Not

Chill Uncategorized

Wrong.

While there was undoubtedly sexual abuse of enslaved children commonly, “very likely” does not mean “pretty” in this instance or in most (or perhaps any) ads for slaves from this period. In this sense “very likely” means more “pleasant” somewhat in the sense of appearance but also in the sense of presentation up to and including manner of speaking. It was not connotatively or denotatively referring to appearance in any sexual sense. Today, we’d say someone is “very presentable” or “comes off well” or something of that nature instead of “likely.”

You can see this easily by observing that many ads for older slaves, including men, also used “likely” and “very likely” in the same context.

People need to do more research before they spout off some ill-educated garbage. Bothers me to no end.

Not There

Chill Regular-ass Post

I simply don’t believe this is true for everyone. It’s certainly not for me.

Math is the only area where I’ve ever deliberately studied, and saw no improvement, even with huge number of hours using many different methods with full dedication on my part. I can memorize many things, and make sense of the concepts just fine, but when it comes time to actually doing the problems, unless they are completely identical I am lost.

Furthermore, when I do manage to memorize enough to determine what to do, the moment I learn something in the math arena but not related to what I was studying before the previous learning is utterly extinguished. What I mean is that, say, I learn how to handle factoring. I have it down from an operational standpoint (I always have understood the concept of factoring just fine). The moment I learn for instance how to do some geometry, factoring is wiped. It’s just gone, never to return.

Whatever it is in most people’s brains that allows them to remember more than one math idea at a time (from a working-out-the-problem standpoint) is just not present in mine. I suspect it’s because so much of my mind is devoted to languages and data analysis at a high level, there just isn’t space for anything else like this.

In high school, a teacher was astounded that some algebra techniques that I’d seemingly mastered just a few weeks before I could no longer remember even the first thing about. Sure, I remembered doing them. But I had no idea how to perform them any longer. This is the case with anything in the math realm, no matter how much time I devote to it.

With great effort, I can memorize enough for one test and do well on it, but a week later, all is forgotten.

Realize

Chill Regular-ass Post

All ya’ll realize I hope that what Trump and his cronies, conmen, cozeners and crooks have been doing is basically what all very rich people do, right?

Sure, it’s atrocious, but it has only been revealed because of a $25 million investigation. Look at just about any other person worth a few hundred million or above and you’ll find the same sort of nefarious frauds and grifts. It’s how you get that rich. That Trump’s staff criminals aren’t particularly good at it hasn’t mattered because no one looks.

Just a public service announcement.

Turnip There

Chill Regular-ass Post

A young woman in front of me in the line at the grocery store, who was buying turnips, confusingly enough could not identify them when the cashier asked what they were. No one around other than me knew that they were in fact turnips.

I considered asking the woman why she was buying something that she couldn’t identify, but then she ripped off her face and, surprise, it was Putin!

He was here to sow produce uncertainty throughout this great nation! By doubting the turnips, we will then doubt reality itself! Ah, Putin, never would I have considered such brilliant Brassica-based psyops.

Risk Tsk

Chill Regular-ass Post

Climate change is the big existential risk. Most effort should be spent abating and adapting to this. But it bothers me that the same people who say we should’ve done something about climate change 30 or 40 years ago say that it’s pointless worrying about AI now — that essentially no resources should be spent on this.

While the prospect of runaway evil AI is remote and fantastical, that is not the only failure scenario, and some of the more mundane ones are nearly as bad. How you prevent horrific outcomes is that you devote resources early to ensuring those outcomes are forestalled at the outset.

Is that so hard to understand?

By the way, AI’s risk is both overstated and understated — understated in the sense that AI is already causing harm, so those many who say we should do nothing are already wrong. And it’s overstated in the sense that the sun is not likely to be disassembled anytime soon to make paperclips.

Also, the “Skynet” scenario is most likely for AI causing massive harm. One day, there will be lots of autonomous robots making decisions related to combat and weapon use. I hope I don’t have to point out how even without full AGI this can and likely will go horribly wrong.

Planning Deal

Chill Regular-ass Post

Exactly. The New Deal wasn’t some grand scheme all planned out in advance, handed down from on high. It was iterative, provisional, experimental and uncertain.

Which, you know, was one of the reasons it was successful! Criticizing someone or some group for not having a plan for a society-uprooting undertaking that has literally never been done before anywhere by anyone is facile. It’s a way of shutting down debate and forward motion and it’s extremely ahistorical. We don’t know what will work, politically, environmentally, or technologically. We just don’t, nitpickers, dilly-dalliers, naysayers and dawdlers aside.

There’s an old saw in the IT world: don’t do premature optimization as it’s just wasting time. The same applies in the case, because we don’t know nearly enough to optimize. That doesn’t mean just wildly do whatever comes to mind, but it does mean be flexible, be pliant to the vagaries of circumstance, and responsive to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

No Know

Chill Uncategorized

Here’s how to make an event occur completely by chance and completely non-deterministically: take a uranium atom. Or many of them. Have it hooked up to a detector (Geiger counter). When there is a radioactive decay detected, rig the detector to trigger a switch which turns on a sign. The sign will say, “This was a non-deterministic event.”

There is absolutely no way to predict — even with perfect information — when this event will occur. None. Zero. It is a chance event. If you rewound the universe and started again, it would not happen the same way (despite what you might have been told).

This means that the event occurred by chance. Why do people have so many problems with this? Why are they so wedded to the obviously false determinism?

By the way, this doesn’t mean that there is free will. The two are not related. But it does mean two things: 1) Strict determinism is not true in this universe and 2) Causality is weak or violated in this universe because nothing caused the uranium atom(s) to decay; they just did.

Don’t Enjoy the Silence

Chill Uncategorized

The cosmic silence is sort of mysterious. We’ve seen no plausible signs at all of radio signals or other methods of communication that we can recognize emanating from an extraterrestrial origin.

I suspect it’s because we’re both early to the party (likely one of the first tech civilizations) and because technological civilizations will tend not to last very long. Also, I suspect those that do persist will recognize that there is substantial existential risk in advertising their presence.

Still, the silence is bothersome. It hints that we’re alone, or that we won’t last long. Global climate change seems to be confirming that latter hypothesis.

JW

Chill Uncategorized

I wouldn’t say it’s just that, but the ideas and goals of social justice have been at least 90% co-opted and contaminated by corporatism and corporate goals. This doesn’t make it invalid — but means it, like most other areas of life, needs to be cleansed and decontaminated.

Social justice has mostly now come to mean that we should have brown and women billionaire oligarchs instead of all just white men That’s not much of an improvement, really. Etc. The Overton Window has really has been very effectively shrunk here by corporate power, messaging, and censorship.

The reason I have a problem with most SJW types is because they are of the system rather than wanting to radically alter it or destroy it, just so that’s clear.