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Science of the Gaps

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 10:36:55 +0200

Mainstream science is overrated. Most of the reason it feels so effective and all-explaining is a cognitive illusion. Most people overestimate how solvent scientific consensus actually is.

I saw Joe Rogan’s recent interview of Mel Gibson.

Gibson said that he was a creationist and didn’t believe in evolution. Joe pushed back a bit, saying that mainstream science had found remnants of putatively proto-humans.

Here is a snippet of Mel’s response and the back and forth:

Mel: Yeah maybe they were monkeys I don’t know, you know.

Joe: There was, they’re similar to us just not where we are, they’re on the road to becoming what it means to be a human being.

Mel: Yeah I don’t know, I don’t know.

Joe: What do you think those are?

Mel: I don’t know they could be animals or they could be like look at today I mean you can get some mosquito can bite you and your kid can be born with a malformed skull or something it’s like uh you know they have those you know…

Joe: Yeah… but this is like a like a genetic thing like they’ve done they’ve mapped the genome of these creatures they’re different yeah.

Mel: Well I don’t know how to explain those, Joe, I don’t know.

Don’t worry Mel, I know how to explain that fact: The fact is false!

We don’t have any early hominid DNA and we nearly certainly never will. We have DNA samples of recent human “sub-sub-species” like Neanderthals and Denisovans, but those are so recent that they only went “extinct” after Aboriginal Australians physically and genetically departed from the rest of mankind.

We certainly do not have the various hypothesized species of Homo with their genomes all neatly fitted into some kind of system that clearly shows their relation and descent one from another and that they are distinct from both us and great apes.

Even if we did have their genomes, genomes are often so messy as to not be able to even show what Joe is supposing. We have the genomes of many people of many different races, and although we can look at haplogroups to determine descent (which are more or less directly inherented without change from a parent), most anything else has too much statistical noise.

Evidence that can’t be there.

Now Joe Rogan isn’t quite lying—he is saying what he assumes is true. He’s heard of supposedly early supposedly hominin fossils, how they are related, how they must have geneticly diverged, and how evolution should affect the geno- and phenotypes, so he assumes that the finding of bones of something like “Lucy” and the publishing of a theory of such a creature’s life and date must come as well with its genome and the theoretical cornucopia of corroborating data.

After all, it’s hard to visit a friend’s house without leaving DNA behind. Certainly having “Lucy’s” bones means we have her genome sequenced. Can’t they just dig into her marrow? If scientists can find out who you’re related to by your DNA, or find a criminal based on DNA, certainly they should be able to show the relative descent of creatures on earth!

The reality is that not only that genomics is much more complicated than that, but also that DNA just doesn’t last that long. Supposed early hominids (or any creature) have no DNA remaining whatsoever, let alone a full genome (which I suppose I should say is not the same thing).

So why do we think Lucy is what we think it is? Well, we have a theory of species and their origins and its apparent traits fit in a well-wanted place.

Just Imagine the Science

My point here is not narrowly about evolution or creationism.

The point is that when we are brought up in a wider mindset of science, when we hear about a theory of how the world works, and see that there are trained authorities that say what kind of evidence we should expect, we naturally fill in the gaps and assume that work has been done to complete satisfaction.

Joe Rogan here is doing what we all do. He knows that the ideas of common ancestry, genetics, evolution and others will predict very specific things about the world. He also knows that theoretically we should have tools to find this information.

Obviously scientists are laboring to fill out precisely this predicted evidence—that’s what their careers are—but the human brain automatically fills in what could amount to thousands of years of scientific gruntwork without question.

Misimagining the Fossil Record

To the point above, the paleontologist David Raup (here) has gone into some criticism of a narrowly Darwinian interpretation of the fossil record. This quote has been parroted by creationists quite a bit, because although Raup certainly was no creationist, it dispells a lot of the learned assumptions about what kind of evidence we actually find…

Evolution, but especially that motivated by Darwinian natural selection expects to find a fossil record that shows a slow transition from certain creatures into more fit creatures. This just isn’t what we see in the fossil record:

“Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. And it is not always clear, in fact it’s rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find.”

Raup, of course, is not endorsing creationism, and he certainly believes in the common ancestry of humans and animals, but he’s saying that a person looking at the entirety of the fossil record really sees species pop into and out of that record, whose relationship of descent with prior or posterior species is dubious.

When I was young and learning about evolution, I naturally assumed that scientists could dig into the fossil record and find incremental evolution, in which generation by generation, we could see early mammals become more and more humanlike with every passing century. This would be overwhelming evidence of Darwinian evolution… but it has nothing to do with what we actually find.

Raup goes further:

“We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.”

There is a reason for the emergence of ideas such as punctuated equilibrium, wherein all species speciated from one origin, but their actual speciation is not something of Darwinian gradualism, but of relatively rapid reoganization of the entire being to new, rapid environmental changes. There is an even more radical theory, saltationism or the “hopeful monster” theory, wherein this evolution happens in massive mutations sometimes in a single generation….

There are a lot of different ways to interpret the fossil record as we see it, but had we known the fossil record as we know now, Darwinian natural selection would not be the best, or even a passable explanation of the data we see.

Nonetheless, natural selection is the public representative and stereotype of mainstream science. The ideology became so pervasive and ingrained in the culture that we speak and think with metaphors of natural selection as if it truly is some operant principle well evidenced through eons of time.

Point

Now I am not making a creationist point with this information, but one of public perception.

We are not actually shown scientific evidence—actual scientific evidence for anything (we can’t be)—because the reality is quite messy. “Evidence” doesn’t exist as if there are single ontological proofs or disproofs of theoretical frameworks. Anyone who for a moment pretends that “science” is so simple as to pretend that some Popperian “falsification” means anything only displays how far their experience or awareness is from how institutionalized science actually works. To truly delve into a field and to understand with sweat and rigor the painful complexities of it is something that cannot be adequately summed up in one or two archetypical examples to be fed to the masses, although those examples can indeed define how the masses understand the world.

Instead, in our “scientific education” we are told the underlying ideology or geist of the mainstream scientific current, for example, Darwinism, and we are shown piecemeal evidence which is by no means representative of reality, to shore up faith in that ideology. Once we know the logic of that ideology, we fill in the blanks of what the hypothetical evidence should say. This creates an illusion in our own mind of scientific uniformity and that illusion is the perfect weapon to dispell any of the many disproofs one will encounter if he acquires a more gritty and real relationship to the data as it actually exists.

There are a lot of times where R*dditors, “skeptics” or “science communicators” will have highly inflated views of how well mainstream scientific theory, or at least the public court history of it, correspond to actual facts on the ground. This is the case even when the theoretical framework of a fiend could be losely described as “true.” Even more so in the many, many cases where the consensus, for one reason or another or a million has in any way diverged from reality.

Miracles and Black Swans

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 18:50:52 -0400

The Blindspot

The standard modern scientific worldview cannot admit miracles and cannot admit the paranormal.

That’s not the same as saying the scientific worldview disbelieves in miracles or the paranormal (although most modern science fans do).

Nor is it the same as saying that the scientific worldview refutes or disproves miracles or the paranormal.

People get all of these confused, but to state it clearly:

If there are paranormal or supernaturally miraculous events which actually do occur in the universe, modern science, by its very set of assumptions cannot allow or admit their existence.

This is because a narrowly “scientific” worldview bases all beliefs about the world in controlled experimentation and replicability. If there are events that are non-replicable or not subject to predictable physical cause and effect, they therefore cannot be accounted for by the way modern people look at science.

I’m using words like “miracles” and “paranormal,” which assume something other-worldly, but these are functionally the same as any “black swan” phenomenon.

For example, if the whole known universe were contained in water droplet on a leaf in another larger universe, and at some time a creature in that higher universe walks by the leaf and brushes against it, disturbing the droplet, our universe would undergo a stimulus so unique, unprecedented and unrepeatable as that it would not be possible for those living in the the droplet to even concoct a testable theory as for its happening.

But nonetheless it would have happened.

Our mechanisms for science would be utterly unable to understand what happened and why, even if some of the effects might be obvious and measurable. This inability, of course, is not a disproof of the event of the distruption of the water droplet.

This ultimately means that to be a fervent scientific rigorist—a positivist in a way, you have preemtively committed to a particular view of what is possible in the observed universe. If you truly and erroneously believe that the modern system of “science” is capable of understanding the universe in its fullest and truest sense, you must assume that all such black swan phenomena are impossible (which they are not).

Stable or Chaotic Universes?

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos documentary is probably the purest distilled narrative of mainstream science ever put together. It is the standard of inoffensive academic consensus in the post-war American world.

I remember very distinctly a statement Sagan made about how glad he was for science’s sake that we live in a universe with some change and variation, but not too much. (This was in the episode of “flatland.”)

Sagan said that some imaginable universes could be highly stable, so stable that nothing changes and there is nothing to learn or experiment with. There would be no “science” to speak of, and probably no life which could emerge from the absolute stasis.

Other imaginable universes might be so chaotic and changing and inconsistent as to be impossible to experiment with. No science could be done because basic interactions might be too difficult to study. Everything might be capricious, and life too would be too delicate to emerge.

We live in both universes.

Now the truth is that change is not really something set at a cosmic level. In truth, we live in a cosmos where certain sectors are highly variable and others are highly stable.

Sure, there are a lot of domains where we can do Sagan’s style of “science,” but there are many, many more that are too chaotic or unpredictable as to even bother doing science. There are other portions that are so stable as to be trivial for scientific analysis.

So-called Soft Science

There is also a lot of “parascience” or “soft” sciences where although people constantly praise the scientific method, they cannot even begin to approach it with rigor. In economics and psychology, there is no way of doing real experiments. Economics requires an entire separate society as a laboratory, which can never be distinguished scientifically by one and only one controlled variable.

You might say, “Ah, but they do experiments in psychology,” but they are very different animals despite going by the same name. If you do the experiment of dropping a bowling ball on earth, there is absolutely no notable variation under the given stimulus. In psychology, behavior is nowhere even approaching that level of consistency, so people trying to do “science” in psychology do a kind of “hack:”

Instead of one controlled experiment, they take huge amounts of varying data, and then run statistical analyses to boil down complexities creating by even more complex unseen cognitive data into single numbers to create the illusion that there is single operant force which, although not consistent, seems to be statistically active.

In the experiment of dropping a bowling ball, we are ultimately evaluating the force of gravity, which we allege to be a singular force and it is really the only force active on the ball. I.e., the gravitational force of the planet Mars on the ball is negligible. In psychology, however, supposing we are testing how quickly a person remembers a word, there might be hundreds of very effectual things that affect a person’s recall of a word, from emotional associations to memories of the word’s meaning to its spelling to the appearance of dust particles on the computer screen to the random stream-of-thought present partially due to happenstance, but also due to the exposure to previous words in the experiment. None of these are easily severable and all of them are embedded in some way in the reaction time—and they might even vary so significantly from one reaction to the next.

There are so many variables, and many more ways to interpret them that, even if we keep the study of “psychology” at the very superficial things it attempts to control in experiments, we will really never be able to understand much. Incidentally—this is why there has been room for some patently non-sensical approaches to psychology being able to survive and flourish (e.g. Freudianism or Jungianism, which are mostly just idle imaginations of single men). These are just new kinds of folk psychology (although folk psychology is certainly more vouched and valuable).

Where does “science” end?

I am not saying that psychology or economics are illegitimate disciplines (although their fields do have particular issues), but I just mean to emphasize that the methodologies of these fields is not strictly “scientific” and “experimental,” not because there is no reality behind them, but because they are inhernently chaotic domains.

Already in psychology, we are mostly in the realm of the utterly unclassifiable—and even if we assume that psychological phenomena are entirely based in the material world, they are far too interactive and complex to pretend that we are doing something similar to sliding a ball down a frictionless plane.

Many peoples, obviously view the entire visible cosmos (by which they mean the bottom half that was earth, and the top half that was heaven) as such. The lower half of the cosmos was the realm of change, the upper half that of constant, predictable and relatively unchanging celestial bodies.

Hume’s oft misunderstood argument

Occasionally you will see self-proclaimed skeptics extol the virtues of David Hume’s argument On Miracles in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

I cannot say with what awareness Hume was making his argument, but I can say that it is not an argument against miracles, it is an argument against believing in miracles, even if they actually occur. Here is Hume:

“When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened…. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.”

Hume’s argument can be abridged to say, “It is always more likely that an observer is mistaken than it is the law of the universe is broken.” Hume’s intuition can be expanded to be applied even to events directly observed by a person.

Suppose you directly observe a person deceased, even maimed raised from the dead and made whole. It might seem like something supernatural, but for Hume, the more economical explanation is always that you or anyone else have misperceived what has happened.

Now to the modern atheist, this argument smells like a good deal. He assumes that nothing magical happens in the universe, so a heuristic like this that cuts out the supernatural seems like a good way of cutting out everything “metaphysical” [sic].

That’s because modern people seem to assume that there is a very clear line between the “natural” and “supernatural.” But in reality, Hume’s argument amounts to a belief that black swans or improbable or unexpected events are impossible: there is nothing that can occur that should not already be within our implicit scientific understanding. Once we propose a scientific law which seems to be vindicated by reality, we never really accumulate reason to dispose of it. Hume here is not realizing that he is already resting on a significantly aged scientific culture that has only achieved its current level of solvency because it has accepted “miraculously” aberrant data and attempted to integrate it.

Even mainstream 20^th century epistemology is mostly about how “Science” (since the Logical Positivists took over) is pretty unfit to make any systematic changes or responses to new data. This is what Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend speak of in one way or another. The real goal should be looking to “promote” the misunderstood “paranormal” phenomena into the realm of the merely “normal.”

So now you have disciplines like cosmology that started putting anomalous and unsolved data problems in their pocket, until the unexplained data in their pocket is now greater than everything outside the pocket. We are told we are just supposed to remain hypnotically focused on the data we can explain and have faith that “Science” (which invariably means the most recent theory in vogue) will eventually incrementally explain this data, even with it is radically opposed.

The Turkey Problem

Nassim Taleb popularized what he called “The Turkey Problem” that shows the issue with scientific consensus-making, clumsy induction, Hume’s argument, but any mindset that categorically excludes some theoretical types of data by fiat.

Suppose a bookish turkey lives on a turkey farm. Certain conspiracy-inclined turkeys on the farm believe without evidence (as the Jew York Times would put it) that their beloved farmer intends to kill them. However our bookish turkey hero says wisely that, “Each day, the farmer feeds us multiple square meals. There’s no evidence that he intends to kill anyone. He protects us from predators. When a turkey is ill, the farmer nurses it to health. All of this is further proof that the farmer loves turkeys.” As the days, weeks and months roll on, each day the turkey can input this new data into his Bayesian algorithm that shows the increasing degree of certainty that farmers love and care for turkeys.

Eventually, however, Thanksgiving comes and the farmer kills all the turkeys. This is a “black swan” event. By the standard of turkey science, this is a paranormal event—indeed a supernatural one, transcending the normal principles of how nature has been established to function.

But if the late bookish turkey were David Hume, his ghost, hovering over the Thanksgiving meal would still confidently be able to say:

“Look, this might look bad, but I have more reason to trust objective science and the statistics we’ve built over years. Sure, I have anecdotal and subjective ’evidence’ that perhaps farmers do kill turkeys, but it is always more likely that I’ve misperceived this and I am actually still alive and being fed well on the farm.”

John Searle and Daniel Dennett on Consciousness

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 17:30:08 -0400

Below I am here giving voice to a conversation in articles on the subject of consciousness originally published by the New York Review of Books and in John Searle’s book The Mystery of Consciousness.

I find these hilarious.

Here, Searle’s adversary, well-known and now late “philosopher” Daniel Dennett follows the logical train of verificationist modern science to its logical conclusion: the denial of the subjective—the consciousness itself—the thing, the only thing that allows perception in the truest sense.

Searle’s writing here is very concise and worthy of praise. I admire that he here grapples with an idea so absurd, yet at the same time dissect it expertly and patiently.

Dennett plays an excellent foil and a strawman—if he weren’t the real thing. (This is what happens when western philosophy lost its nous.)

– Luke Smith

Consciousness Denied: Daniel Dennett’s Account

by John Searle

Daniel Dennett is a philosopher who has written a number of books on the philosophy of mind, but it seems clear that he regards Consciousness Explained¹ as the culmination of his work in this field. That work is in the tradition of behaviorism—the idea that behavior and dispositions to behavior are somehow constitutive of mental states—and verificationism —the idea that the only things which exist are those whose presence can be verified by scientific means. Though at first sight he appears to be advocating a scientific approach to consciousness comparable to those of Crick, Penrose, and Edelman, there are some very important differences, as we will see.

Before discussing his Consciousness Explained, I want to ask the reader to perform a small experiment to remind himself or herself of what exactly is at issue in theories of consciousness. Take your right hand and pinch the skin on your left forearm. What exactly happened when you did so? Several different sorts of things happened. First, the neurobiologists tell us, the pressure of your thumb and forefinger set up a sequence of neuron firings that began at the sensory receptors in your skin, went into the spine and up the spine through a region called the tract of Lissauer, and then into the thalamus and other basal regions of the brain. The signal then went to the somato-sensory cortex and perhaps other cortical regions as well. A few hundred milliseconds after you pinched your skin, a second sort of thing happened, one that you know about without professional assistance. You felt a pain. Nothing serious, just a mildly unpleasant pinching sensation in the skin of your forearm. This unpleasant sensation had a certain particular sort of subjective feel to it, a feel which is accessible to you in a way it is not accessible to others around you. This accessibility has epistemic consequences—you can know about your pain in a way that others cannot—but the subjectivity is ontological rather than epistemic. That is, the mode of existence of the sensation is a first-person or subjective mode of existence, whereas the mode of existence of the neural pathways is a third-person or objective mode of existence; the pathways exist independently of being experienced in a way that the pain does not. The feeling of the pain is one of the “qualia” I mentioned earlier.

Furthermore, when you pinched your skin, a third sort of thing happened. You acquired a behavioral disposition you did not previously have. If someone asks you, “Did you feel anything?” you would say something like, “Yes, I felt a mild pinch right here.” No doubt other things happened as well—you altered the gravitational relations between your right hand and the moon, for example—but let us concentrate on these first three.

If you were asked what is the essential thing about the sensation of pain, I think you would say that the second feature, the feeling, is the pain itself. The input signals cause the pain, and the pain in turn causes you to have a behavioral disposition. But the essential thing about the pain is that it is a specific internal qualitative feeling. The problem of consciousness in both philosophy and the natural sciences is to explain these subjective feelings. Not all of them are bodily sensations like pain. The stream of conscious thought is not a bodily sensation comparable to feeling pinched and neither are visual experiences, yet both have the quality of ontological subjectivity that I have been talking about. The subjective feelings are the data that a theory of consciousness has to explain, and the account of the neural pathways that I sketched is a partial theory to account for the data. The behavioral dispositions are not part of the conscious experience, but they are caused by it.

The peculiarity of Daniel Dennett’s book can now be stated: he denies the existence of the data. He thinks there are no such things as the second sort of entity, the feeling of pain. He thinks there are no such things as qualia, subjective experiences, first-person phenomena, or any of the rest of it. Dennett agrees that it seems to us that there are such things as qualia, but this is a matter of a mistaken judgment we are making about what really happens. Well, what does really happen according to him?

What really happens, according to Dennett, is that we have stimulus inputs, such as the pressure on your skin in my experiment, and we have dispositions to behavior, “reactive dispositions” as he calls them. And in between there are “discriminative states” that cause us to respond differently to different pressures on the skin and to discriminate red from green, etc., but the sort of state that we have for discriminating pressure is exactly like the state of a machine for detecting pressure. It does not experience any special feeling; indeed it does not have any inner feelings at all, because there are no such things as “inner feelings.” It is all a matter of third-person phenomena: stimulus inputs, discriminative states (p. 372 fF.), and reactive dispositions. The feature that makes these all hang together is that our brains are a type of computer and consciousness is a certain sort of software, a “virtual machine’’ in our brain.

The main point of Dennett’s book is to deny the existence of inner mental states and offer an alternative account of consciousness, or rather what he calls “consciousness.” The net effect is a performance of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Dennett, however, does not begin on page one to tell us that he thinks conscious states, as I have described them, do not exist, and that there is nothing there but a brain implementing a computer program. Rather, he spends the first two hundred pages discussing questions which seem to presuppose the existence of subjective conscious states and proposing a methodology for investigating consciousness. For example, he discusses various perceptual illusions such as the so-called phi phenomenon. In this illusion, when two small spots in front of you are briefly lit in rapid succession it seems to you that a single spot is moving back and forth. The way we ordinarily understand such examples is in terms of our having an inner subjective experience of seeming to see a single spot moving back and forth. But that is not what Dennett has in mind. He wants to deny the existence of any inner qualia, but this does not emerge until much later in the book. He does not, in short, write with the candor of a man who is completely confident of his thesis and anxious to get it out into the open as quickly as he can. On the contrary, there is a certain evasiveness about the early chapters, since he conceals what he really thinks. It is not until after page 200 that you get his account of “consciousness,” and not until well after page 350 that you find out what is really going on.

The main issue in the first part of the book is to defend what he calls the “Multiple Drafts” model of consciousness as opposed to the “Cartesian Theater” model. The idea, says Dennett, is that we are tacitly inclined to think that there must be a single place in the brain where it all comes together, a kind of Cartesian Theater where we witness the play of our consciousness. And in opposition he wants to advance the view that a whole series of information states are going on in the brain, rather like multiple drafts of an article. On the surface, this might appear to be an interesting issue for neurobiology: where in the brain are our subjective experiences localized? Is there a single locus or many? A single locus, by the way, would seem neurobiologically implausible, because any organ in the brain that might seem essential to consciousness, as for example the thalamus is essential according to Cricks hypothesis, has a twin on the other side of the brain. Each lobe has its own thalamus. But that is not what Dennett is driving at. He is attacking the Cartesian Theater not because he thinks subjective states occur all over the brain, but rather because he does not think there are any such things as subjective states at all and he wants to soften up the opposition to his counterintuitive (to put it mildly) views by first getting rid of the idea that there is a unified locus of our conscious experiences.

If Dennett denies the existence of conscious states as we usually think of them, what is his alternative account? Not surprisingly, it is a version of Strong AI. In order to explain it, I must first briefly explain four notions that he uses: von Neumann machines, connectionism, virtual machines, and memes. A digital computer, the kind you are likely to buy in a store today, proceeds by a series of steps performed very rapidly, millions per second. This is called a serial computer, and because the initial designs were by John von Neumann, a Hungarian-American scientist and mathematician, it is sometimes called a von Neumann machine. Recently there have been efforts to build machines that operate in parallel, that is, with several computational channels working at once and interacting with each other. In physical structure these are more like human brains. They are not really much like brains, but certainly they are more like brains than the traditional von Neumann machines. Computations of this type are called variously Parallel Distributed Processing, Neuronal Net Modeling, or simply Connectionism. Strictly speaking, any computation that can be performed on a connectionist structure—or “architecture,” as it is usually called—can also be performed on a serial architecture, but connectionist nets have some other interesting properties: for example, they are faster and they can “learn”—that is, they can change their behavior—by having the strengths of the connections altered.

(Figure 5 omitted.)

Here is how a typical connectionist net works (fig. 5). There are a series of nodes at the input level that receive inputs. These can be represented as certain numerical values, 1, -1, 1/2, etc. These values are transmitted over all of the connections to the next nodes in line at the next level. Each connection has a certain strength, and these connection strengths can also be represented as numerical values, 1, — 1, 1/2, etc. The input signal is multiplied by the connection strength to get the value that is received by the next node from that connection. Thus, for example, an input of 1 multiplied by a connection strength of 1/2 gives a value of 1/2 from that connection to the next node in line. The nodes that receive these signals do a summation of all the numerical values they have received and send out those values to the next set of nodes in line. So there is an input level, an output level, and a series of one or more interior levels called “hidden levels.” The series of processes continues until the output level is reached. In cognitive science, the numbers are used to represent features of some cognitive process that is being modeled, for example features of faces in face recognition, or sounds of words in a model of the pronunciation of English. The sense in which the network “learns” is that you can get the right match between the input values and the output values by fiddling with the connection strengths until you get the match you want. This is usually done by another computer, called a “teacher.”

These systems are sometimes said to be “neuronally inspired.” The idea is that we are to think of the connections as something like axons and dendrites, and the nodes as something like the cell bodies that do a summation of the input values and then decide how much of a signal to send to the next “neurons,” i.e., the next connections and nodes in line.

Another notion Dennett uses is that of a “virtual machine.” The actual machine I am now working on is made of actual wires, transistors, etc.; in addition, we can get machines like mine to simulate the structure of another type of machine. The other machine is not actually part of the wiring of this machine but exists entirely in the patterns of regularities that can be imposed on the wiring of my machine. This is called the virtual machine.

The last notion Dennett uses is that of a “meme.” This notion is not very clear. It was invented by Richard Dawkins to have a cultural analog to the biological notion of a gene. The idea is that just as biological evolution occurs by way of genes, so cultural evolution occurs through the spread of memes. On Dawkins’s definition, quoted by Dennett, a meme is a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation, [p. 202] I believe the analogy between “gene” and “meme” is mistaken. Biological evolution proceeds by brute, blind, natural forces. The spread of ideas and theories by “imitation” is typically a conscious process directed toward a goal. It misses the point of Darwin’s account of the origin of species to lump the two sorts of processes together. Darwin s greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology, and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal species was entirely an illusion. The appearance could be explained by evolutionary processes that contained no such purposes at all. But the spread of ideas through imitation requires the whole apparatus of human consciousness and intentionality. Ideas have to be understood and interpreted. And they have to be understood and judged as desirable or undesirable, in order to be treated as candidates for imitation or rejection. Imitation typically requires a conscious effort on the part of the imitator. The whole process normally involves language with all its variability and subtlety. In short, the transmission of ideas through imitation is totally unlike the transmission of genes through reproduction, so the analogy between genes and memes is misleading from the start.

On the basis of these four notions, Dennett offers the following explanation of consciousness:

Human consciousness is itself a huge collection of memes (or more exactly, meme-effects in brains) that can best be understood as the operation of a “von Neumannesque” virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities, [italics in the original, p. 210]

In other words, being conscious is entirely a matter of implementing a certain sort of computer program or programs in a parallel machine that evolved in nature.

It is essential to see that once Dennett has denied the existence of conscious states he does not see any need for additional arguments to get to Strong AI. All of the moves in the conjuring trick have already been made. Strong AI seems to him the only reasonable way to account for a machine that lacks any qualitative, subjective, inner mental contents but behaves in complex ways. The extreme anti-mentalism of his views has been missed by several of Dennett’s critics, who have pointed out that, according to his theory, he cannot distinguish between human beings and unconscious zombies who behaved exactly as if they were human beings. Dennett’s riposte is to say that there could not be any such zombies, that any machine regardless of what it is made of that behaved like us would have to have consciousness just as we do. This looks as if he is claiming that sufficiendy complex zombies would not be zombies but would have inner conscious states the same as ours; but that is emphatically not the claim he is making. His claim is that in fact we are zombies, that there is no difference between us and machines that lack conscious states in the sense I have explained. The claim is not that the sufficiently complex zombie would suddenly come to conscious life, just as Galatea was brought to life by Pygmalion. Rather, Dennett argues that there is no such thing as conscious life, for us, for animals, for zombies, or for anything else; there is only complex zombiehood. In one of his several discussions of zombies, he considers whether there is any difference between human pain and suffering and a zombies pain and suffering. This is in a section about pain where the idea is that pain is not the name of a sensation but rather a matter of having ones plans thwarted and ones hopes crushed, and the idea is that the zombie’s “suffering” is no different from our conscious suffering:

Why should a “zombie’s” crushed hopes matter less than a conscious persons crushed hopes? There is a trick with mirrors here that should be exposed and discarded. Consciousness, you say, is what matters, but then you cling to doctrines about consciousness that systematically prevent us from getting any purchase on why it matters. Postulating special inner qualities that are not only private and intrinsically valuable, but also unconfirmable and uninvestigatable is just obscurantism, [p. 450]

The rhetorical flourishes here are typical of the book, but to bring the discussion down to earth, ask yourself, when you performed the experiment of pinching yourself were you “postulating special inner qualities” that are “unconfirmable and uninvestigatable”? Were you being “obscurantist”? And most important, is there no difference at all between you who have pains and an unconscious zombie that behaves like you but has no pains or any other conscious states?

Actually, though the question with which Dennett’s passage begins is intended to be as rhetorical as the ones I just asked, it in fact has a rather easy correct answer, which Dennett did not intend. The reason a zombies “crushed hopes” matter less than a conscious persons crushed hopes is that zombies, by definition, have no feelings whatever. Consequently nothing literally matters about their inner feelings, because they do not have any. They just have external behavior which is like the behavior of people who do have feelings and for whom things literally do matter.

Since Dennett defends a version of Strong AI it is not surprising that he takes up the Chinese Room Argument, summarized earlier, which presents the hypothesis of a man in a room who does not know Chinese but nevertheless is carrying out the steps in a program to give a simulation of a Chinese speaker. This time the objection to it is that the man in the room really could not in fact convincingly carry out the steps. The answer to this is to say that of course we could not do this in real life. The reason we have thought experiments is because for many ideas we wish to test, it is impossible to carry out the experiment in reality. In Einstein’s famous discussion of the clock paradox he asks us to imagine that we go to the nearest star in a rocket ship that travels at 90 percent of the speed of light. It really does miss the point totally—though it is quite true—to say that we could not in practice build such a rocket ship.

Similarly it misses the point of the Chinese Room thought experiment to say that we could not in practice design a program complex enough to fool native Chinese speakers but simple enough that an English speaker could carry it out in real time. In fact we cannot even design programs for commercial computers that can fool an able speaker of any natural language, but that is beside the point. The point of the Chinese Room Argument, as I hope I made clear, is to remind us that the syntax of the program is not sufficient for the semantic content (or mental content or meaning) in the mind of the Chinese speaker. Now why does Dennett not face the actual argument as I have stated it? Why does he not address that point? Why does he not tell us which of the three premises in the Chinese Room Argument he rejects? They are not very complicated and take the following form: (1) programs are syntactical, (2) minds have semantic contents, (3) syntax by itself is not the same as nor sufficient for semantic content. I think the answer is clear. He does not address the actual formal argument because to do so he would have to admit that what he really objects to is premise (2), the claim that minds have mental contents.² Given his assumptions, he is forced to deny that minds really do have intrinsic mental contents. Most people who defend Strong AI think that the computer might have mental contents just as we do, and they mistakenly take Dennett as an ally. But he does not think that computers have mental contents, because he does not think there are any such things. For Dennett, we and the computer are both in the same situation as far as the mind is concerned, not because the computer can acquire the sorts of intrinsic mental contents that any normal human has, but because there never were any such things as intrinsic mental contents to start with.

At this point we can make clear some of the differences between Dennett’s approach to consciousness and the approach I advocate, an approach which, if I understand them correctly, is also advocated by some of the other authors under discussion, including Crick, Penrose, Edelman, and Rosenfield. I believe that the brain causes conscious experiences. These are inner, qualitative, subjective states. In principle at least it might be possible to build an artifact, an artificial brain, that also would cause these inner states. For all we know we might build such a system using a chemistry totally different from that of the brain. We just do not know enough now about how the brain does it to know how to build an artificial system that would have causal powers equivalent to the brains using some different mechanisms. But we do know that any other system capable of causing consciousness would have to have causal powers equivalent to the brain’s to do it. This point follows trivially from the fact that brains do it causally. But there is not and cannot be any question whether a machine can be conscious and can think, because the brain is a machine. Furthermore, as I pointed out earlier, there is no known obstacle in principle to building an artificial machine that can be conscious and can think. Now, as a purely verbal point, since we can describe any system under some computational description or other, we might even describe our artificial conscious machine as a “computer” and this might make it look as if the position I am advocating is consistent with Dennett’s. But in fact the two approaches are radically different. Dennett does not believe that the brain causes inner qualitative conscious states, because he does not believe that there are any such things. On my view the computational aspects of an artificial conscious machine would be something in addition to consciousness. On Dennett’s view there is no consciousness in addition to the computational features, because that is all that consciousness amounts to for him: meme effects of a von Neumann(esque) virtual machine implemented in a parallel architecture.

Dennett’s book is unique among the several books under discussion here in that it makes no contribution to the problem of consciousness but rather denies that there is any such problem in the first place. Dennett, as Kierkegaard said in another connection, keeps the forms, while stripping them of their significance. He keeps the vocabulary of consciousness, while denying its existence.

But someone might object: Is it not possible that science might discover that Dennett was right, that there really are no such things as inner qualitative mental states, that the whole thing is an illusion like sunsets? After all, if science can discover that sunsets are a systematic illusion, why could it not also discover that conscious states such as pains are illusions too? There is this difference: in the case of sunsets science does not deny the existence of the datum, that the sun appears to move through the sky. Rather it gives an alternative explanation of this and other data. Science preserves the appearance while giving us a deeper insight into the reality behind the appearance. But Dennett denies the existence of the data to start with.

But couldn’t we disprove the existence of these data by proving that they are only illusions? No, you can’t disprove the existence of conscious experiences by proving that they are only an appearance disguising the underlying reality, because where consciousness is concerned the existence of the appearance is the reality. If it seems to me exactly as if I am having conscious experiences, then I am having conscious experiences. This is not an epistemic point. I might make various sorts of mistakes about my experiences, for example, if I suffered from phantom limb pains. But whether reliably reported or not, the experience of feeling the pain is identical with the pain in a way that the experience of seeing a sunset is not identical with a sunset.

I regard Dennett’s denial of the existence of consciousness not as a new discovery or even as a serious possibility but rather as a form of intellectual pathology. The interest of his account lies in figuring out what assumptions could lead an intelligent person to paint himself into such a corner. In Dennett’s case the answers are not hard to find. He tells us: “The idea at its simplest was that since you can never ‘see directly’ into people’s minds, but have to take their word for it, any such facts as there are about mental events are not among the data of science” (pp. 70-71). And later,

Even if mental events are not among the data of science, this does not mean we cannot study them scientifically. … The challenge is to construct a theory of mental events, using the data that scientific method permits. Such a theory will have to be constructed from the third-person point of view, since all science is constructed from that perspective, [p. 71]

Scientific objectivity according to Dennett’s conception requires the “third-person point of view.” At the end of his book he combines this view with verificationism—the idea that only things that can be scientifically verified really exist. These two theories lead him to deny that there can exist any phenomena that have a first-person ontology. That is, his denial of the existence of consciousness derives from two premises: scientific verification always takes the third-person point of view, and nothing exists which cannot be verified by scientific verification so construed. This is the deepest mistake in the book and it is the source of most of the others, so I want to end this discussion by exposing it.

We need to distinguish the epistemic sense of the distinction between the first- and the third-person points of view, (i.e., between the subjective and the objective) from the ontological sense. Some statements can be known to be true or false independently of any prejudices or attitudes on the part of observers. They are objective in the epistemic sense. For example, if I say, “Van Gogh died in Auvers-sur-Oise, France,” that statement is epistemically objective. Its truth has nothing to do with anyone’s personal prejudices or preferences. But if I say, for example, “Van Gogh was a better painter than Renoir,” that statement is epistemically subjective. Its truth or falsity is a matter at least in part of the attitudes and preferences of observers. In addition to this sense of the objective-subjective distinction, there is an ontological sense. Some entities, mountains for example, have an existence which is objective in the sense that it does not depend on any subject. Others, pain for example, are subjective in that their existence depends on being felt by a subject. They have a first-person or subjective ontology.

Now here is the point. Science does indeed aim at epistemic objectivity. The aim is to get a set of truths that are free of our special preferences and prejudices. But epistemic objectivity of method dots not require ontological objectivity ofsubject matter. It is just an objective fact—in the epistemic sense —that I and people like me have pains. But the mode of existence of these pains is subjective—in the ontological sense. Dennett has a definition of science which excludes the possibility that science might investigate subjectivity, and he thinks the third-person objectivity of science forces him to this definition. But that is a bad pun on “objectivity.” The aim of science is to get a systematic account of how the world works. One part of the world consists of ontologically subjective phenomena. If we have a definition of science that forbids us from investigating that part of the world, it is the definition that has to be changed and not the world.

I do not wish to give the impression that all 511 pages of Dennett’s book consist in repeating the same mistake over and over. On the contrary, he makes many valuable points and is especially good at summarizing much of the current work in neurobiology and cognitive science. For example, he provides an interesting discussion of the complex relations between the temporal order of events in the world that the brain represents and the temporal order of the representing that goes on in the brain. Dennett’s prose, as some reviewers have pointed out, is breezy and sometimes funny, but at crucial points it is imprecise and evasive, as I have tried to explain here. At his worst he tries to bully the reader with abusive language and rhetorical questions, as the passage about zombies above illustrates. A typical move is to describe the opposing view as relying on “ineffable” entities. But there is nothing ineffable about the pain you feel when you pinch yourself.

APPENDIX: An Exchange with Daniel Dennett

Following publication of the original article on which this chapter is based, Daniel Dennett and I had the following exchange in The New York Review of Books.

DANIEL DENNETT writes:

John Searle and I have a deep disagreement about how to study the mind. For Searle, it is all really quite simple. There are these bedrock, time-tested intuitions we all have about consciousness, and any theory that challenges them is just preposterous. I, on the contrary, think that the persistent problem of consciousness is going to remain a mystery until we find some such dead obvious intuition and show that, in spite of first appearances, it is false! One of us is dead wrong, and the stakes are high. Searle sees my position as “a form of intellectual pathology”; no one should be surprised to learn that the feeling is mutual. Searle has tradition on his side. My view is remarkably counterintuitive at first, as he says. But his view has some problems, too, which emerge only after some rather subtle analysis. Now how do we proceed? We each try to mount arguments to demonstrate our case and show the other side is wrong.

For my part, knowing that I had to move a huge weight of traditional opinion, I tried something indirect: I deliberately postponed addressing the big fat philosophical questions until I could build up quite an elaborate theory on which to found an alternative perspective—only then did I try to show the readers how they could live with its counterintuitive implications after all. Searle doesn’t like this strategy of mine; he accuses me of lack of candor and detects “a certain evasiveness” about the early chapters, since “he conceals what he really thinks.” Nonsense. I went out of my way at the beginning to address this very issue (my little parable of the madman who says there are no animals, pp. 43-45), warning the reader of what was to come. No cards up my sleeve, but watch out—I’m coming after some of your most deeply cherished intuitions.

For his part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, for in all those years he has never to my knowledge responded in detail to the dozens of devastating criticisms they contain; he has just presented the basic thought experiment over and over again. I just went back and counted: I am dismayed to discover that no less than seven of those published criticisms are by me (in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993). Searle debated me furiously in the pages of The New York Review of Books back in 1982, when Douglas Hofstadter and I first exposed the cute tricks that make the Chinese Room “work.” That was the last time Searle addressed any of my specific criticisms until now. Now he trots out the Chinese Room yet one more time and has the audacity to ask “Now why does Dennett not face the actual argument as I have stated it? Why does he not tell us which of the three premises he rejects in the Chinese Room Argument?” Well, because I have already done so, in great detail, in several of the articles he has never deigned to answer. For instance, in “Fast Thinking” (way back in The Intentional Stance, 1987) I explicitly quoted his entire three-premise argument and showed exactly why all three of them are false, when given the interpretation they need for the argument to go through! Why didn’t I repeat that 1987 article in my 1991 book? Because, unlike Searle, I had gone on to other things. I did, however, cite my 1987 article prominently in a footnote (p. 436), and noted that Searle s only response to it had been simply to declare, without argument, that the points offered there were irrelevant. The pattern continues; now he both ignores that challenge and goes on to misrepresent the further criticisms of the Chinese Room that I offered in the book under review, but perhaps he has forgotten what I actually wrote in the four years it has taken him to write his review.

But enough about the Chinese Room. What do I have to offer on my side? I have my candidate for the fatally false intuition, and it is indeed the very intuition Searle invites the reader to share with him, the conviction that we know what we’re talking about when we talk about that feeling—you know, the feeling of pain that is the effect of the stimulus and the cause of the dispositions to react—the quale, the “intrinsic” content of the subjective state. How could anyone deny that!? Just watch—but you have to pay close attention. I develop my destructive arguments against this intuition by showing how an objective science of consciousness is possible after all, and how Searle’s proposed “first-person” alternative leads to self-contradiction and paradox at every turning. This is the “deepest mistake” in my book, according to Searle, and he sets out to “expose” it. The trouble is that the objective scientific method I describe (under the alarming name of heterophenomenology) is nothing I invented; it is in fact exactly the method tacitly endorsed and relied upon by every scientist working on consciousness, including Crick, Edelman, and Rosenfield. They have no truck with Searle’s “intrinsic” content and “ontological subjectivity”; they know better.

Searle brings this out amusingly in his own essay. He heaps praise on Gerald Edelman’s neuroscientific theory of consciousness, but points out at the end that it has a minor problem—it isn’t about consciousness! “So the mystery remains.” Edelman’s theory is not about Searle’s brand of consciousness, that’s for sure. No scientific theory could be. But Edelman’s theory is about consciousness, and has some good points to make. (The points of Edelman’s that Searle admiringly recounts are not really the original part of Edelman’s theory—they are more or less taken for granted by everyone working on the topic, though Edelman is right to emphasize them. If Searle had read me in the field he would realize that.) Edelman supports his theory with computer simulations such as Darwin III, which Searle carefully describes as “Weak AI.” But in fact Edelman has insisted to me, correctly, that his robot exhibits intentionality as real as any on the planet—it’s just artificial intentionality, and none the worse for that. Edelman got off on the wrong foot by buying Searle’s Chinese Room for a while, but by now I think he’s seen the light. GOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned AI—the agent-as-walking-encyclopedia) is dead, but Strong AI is not dead; computational neuroscience is a brand of it. Cricks doing it; Edelman’s doing it; the Churchlands are doing it, I’m doing it, and so are hundreds of others.

Not Searle. Searle doesn’t have a program of research. He has a set of home truths to defend. They land him in paradox after paradox, but so long as he doesn’t address the critics who point this out, who’ll ever know? For a detailed analysis of the embarrassments in Searle’s position, see my review of The Rediscovery of the Mind, in Journal of Philosophy* Vol. 60, No. 4, April 1993, pp. 193-205. It recounts case after case of Searle ignoring or misrepresenting his critics, and invites him to dispel the strong impression that this has been deliberate on his part. Searle’s essay in these pages is his only response to that invitation, confirming once again the pattern, as readers familiar with the literature will realize. There is not room in these pages for Searle to repair fifteen years of disregard, so no one should expect him to make good here, but if he would be so kind as to tell us where and when he intends to respond to his critics with the attention and accuracy they deserve, we will know when to resume paying attention to his claims.

JOHN SEARLE replies:

In spite of its strident tone, I am grateful for Daniel Dennett’s response to my review because it enables me to make the differences between us crystal clear. I think we all really have conscious states. To remind everyone of this fact I asked my readers to perform the small experiment of pinching the left forearm with the right hand to produce a small pain. The pain has a certain sort of qualitative feeling to it, and such qualitative feelings are typical of the various sorts of conscious events that form the content of our waking and dreaming lives. To make explicit the differences between conscious events and, for example, mountains and molecules, I said consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology. By that I mean that conscious states only exist when experienced by a subject and they exist only from the first-person point of view of that subject.

Such events are the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain. In my account of consciousness I start with the data; Dennett denies the existence of the data. To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies.

I think most readers, when first told this, would assume that I must be misunderstanding him. Surely no sane person could deny the existence of feelings. But in his reply he makes it clear that I have understood him exactly. He says, “How could anyone deny that!? Just watch…”

I regard his view as self-refuting because it denies the existence of the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain. How does he think he can, so to speak, get away with this? At this point in the argument his letter misrepresents the nature of the issues. He writes that the disagreement between us is about rival “intuitions,” that it is between my “time-tested intuitions” defending “traditional opinion” against his more up-to-date intuitions, and that he and I “have a deep disagreement about how to study the mind.” But the disagreement is not about intuitions and it is not about how to study the mind. It is not about methodology. It is about the existence of the object of study in the first place. An intuition in his sense is just something one feels inclined to believe, and such intuitions often turn out to be false. For example, people have intuitions about space and time that have been refuted by relativity theory in physics. In my review, I gave an example of an intuition about consciousness that has been refuted by neurobiology: the common-sense intuition that our pain in the arm is actually located in the physical space of the arm.³ But the very existence of my conscious states is not similarly a matter for my intuitions. The refutable intuitions I mentioned require a distinction between how things seem to me and how they really are, a distinction between appearance and reality. But where the existence of conscious states is concerned, you can’t make the distinction between appearance and reality, because the existence of the appearance is the reality in question. If it consciously seems to me that I am conscious, then I am conscious. It is not a matter of “intuitions,” of something I feel inclined to say. Nor is it a matter of methodology. Rather it is just a plain fact about me—and every other normal human being—that we have sensations and other sorts of conscious states.

Now what am I to do, as a reviewer, in the face of what appears to be an obvious and self-refuting falsehood? Should I pinch the author to remind him that he is conscious? Or should I pinch myself and report the results in more detail? The method I adopted in my review was to try to diagnose what philosophical assumptions lead Dennett to deny the existence of conscious states, and as far as I can tell from his letter he has no objection to my diagnosis. He thinks the conclusion that there are no conscious states follows from two axioms that he holds explicitly, the objectivity of science and verificationism. These are, first, that science uses objective or third-person methods, and second, that nothing exists which cannot be verified by scientific methods so construed. I argued at some length in my review that the objectivity of science does not have the consequence he thinks it does. The epistemic objectivity of method does not preclude ontoiogical subjectivity of subject matter. To state this in less fancy jargon: the fact that many people have back pains, for example, is an objective fact of medical science. The existence of these pains is not a matter of anyone’s opinions or attitudes. But the mode of existence of the pains themselves is subjective. They exist only as felt by human subjects. In short the only formal argument I can find in his book for the denial of consciousness rests on a fallacy. He says nothing in his letter to respond to my argument.

But how then does he hope to defend his view? The central claim in his reply is this sentence:

I develop my destructive arguments against this intuition by showing how an objective science of consciousness is possible after all, and how Searle’s proposed “first-person” alternative leads to self-contradiction and paradox at every turning.

He makes two points: one about “objective science” and the other about “self-contradiction and paradox,” so lets consider these in turn. Dennett reflects in his letter exactly the confusion about objectivity I exposed in his book. He thinks the objective methods of science make it impossible to study peoples subjective feelings and experiences. This is a mistake, as should be clear from any textbook of neurology. The authors use the objective methods of science to try to explain, and help their students to cure, the inner subjective pains, anxieties, and other sufferings of their patients. There is no reason why an objective science cannot study subjective experiences. Dennett’s “objective science of consciousness” changes the subject. It is not about consciousness, but rather is a third-person account of external behavior.

What about his claim that my view that we are conscious “leads to self-contradiction and paradox at every turning.” The claim that he can show self-contradictions in my views, or even one self-contradiction, is, I fear, just bluff. If he can actually show or derive a formal contradiction, where is it? In the absence of any examples, the charge of self-contradiction is empty.

What about the paradoxes of consciousness? In his book he describes various puzzling and paradoxical cases from the psychological and neurobiological literature. I think these are the best parts of his book. Indeed one of the features that makes neurobiology fascinating is the existence of so many experiments with surprising and sometimes paradoxical results. The logical form of Dennett’s argument is this: the paradoxical cases would not seem paradoxical if only we would give up our “intuition” that we are really conscious. But this conclusion is unwarranted. The cases are interesting to us because we all know in advance that we are conscious. Nothing in any of those experiments, paradoxical as they may be, shows that we do not have qualitative conscious states of the sort I describe. These sorts of arguments could not disprove the existence of the data, for reasons I tried to explain in my review, which I have repeated here and which Dennett does not attempt to answer. To summarize, I have claimed:

Dennett denies the existence of consciousness.
He is mistaken in thinking that the issue about the existence of consciousness is a matter of rival intuitions.
The philosophical argument that underlies his view is fallacious. It is a fallacy to infer from the fact that science is objective, the conclusion that it cannot recognize the existence of subjective states of consciousness.
The actual arguments presented in his book, which show that conscious states are often paradoxical, do not show that they do not exist.
The distinction between appearance and reality, which arguments like his appeal to, does not apply to the very existence of conscious states, because in such cases the appearance is the reality.

Those are the chief points I want to make. The reader in a hurry can stop here. But Dennett claims, correctly, that I don’t always answer every time every accusation he makes against me. So let me take up every substantive point in his letter.

1: He claims that Crick, Edelman, and Rosenfield agree with him that conscious states as I have described them do not exist. “They have no truck” with them, he tells us. He also claims that Crick and Edelman are adherents of Strong AI. From my knowledge of these authors and their work, I have to say I found nothing in their writing to suggest they wish to deny the existence of consciousness, nothing to support the view that they adhere to Strong AI, and plenty to suggest that they disagree with Dennett on these points. Personal communication with Edelman and Crick since the publication of my review confirms my understanding of their views. Dennett cites no textual evidence to support his claims.

Indeed, Dennett is the only one of the authors I reviewed who denies the existence of the conscious experiences we are trying to explain and is the only one who thinks that all the experiences we take to be conscious are merely operations of a computing machine. In the history of the subject, however, he is by no means unique; nor is his approach new. His views are a mixture of Strong AI and an extension of the traditional behaviorism of Gilbert Ryle, Dennett’s teacher in Oxford decades ago. Dennett concedes that GOFAI, Good Old-Fashioned AI, is dead. (He used to believe it. Too bad he didn’t tell us why it is dead or who killed it off.) But he thinks that contemporary computational neuroscience is a form of Strong AI, and here, in my view, he is also mistaken. There are indeed experts on computational neuroscience who believe in Strong AI, but it is by no means essential to constructing computational models of neurobiologies phenomena that you believe that all there is to having a mind is having the right computer program.

2: One of Dennett’s claims in his letter is so transparently false as to be astonishing. He says I have ignored and not responded to criticisms of my Chinese Room Argument and to other related arguments. “Fifteen years of disregard,” he tells us. This is a distinctly odd claim for someone to make in responding to a review in which I had just answered the objections he makes in his book. And it is contradicted by the record of literally dozens of occasions where I have responded to criticism. I list some of these below.⁴ Much else could be cited. I have not responded to every single objection to my views because not every objection has seemed worth responding to, but it should be clear from the record that Dennett’s claim that I have not replied to criticism is simply baffling.

In recent years the issues have escalated in interesting ways. I took up the general issue of computational theories of cognition in my Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association in 1990, and this appeared in an expanded version in my book The Rediscovery of Mind (1992). There I developed the argument that I restated in my review of Dennett to the effect that the Chinese Room Argument if anything conceded too much to computationalism. The original argument showed that the semantics of human cognition is not intrinsic to the formal syntactical program of a computer. My new argument shows that the syntax of the program is not intrinsic to the physics of the hardware, but rather requires an outside interpreter who assigns a computational interpretation to the system. (If I am right about this, it is devastating to Dennett’s claim that we can just discover that consciousness, even in his sense, is a von Neumann machine, virtual or otherwise. In his letter, Dennett says nothing in response.)

3: Dennett’s letter has a peculiar rhetorical quality in that he is constantly referring to some devastating argument against me that he never actually states. The crushing argument is always just offstage, in some review he or somebody else wrote or some book he published years ago, but he can’t quite be bothered to state the argument now. When I go back and look at the arguments he refers to, I don’t find them very impressive. Since he thinks they are decisive, let me mention at least one, his 1987 attack on the Chinese Room Argument.

He says correctly that when I wrote my review I took his book to be his definitive statement of his position on the Chinese Room and did not consult his earlier works. (In fact I did not know that he had produced a total of seven published attacks on this one short argument of mine until I saw his letter.) He now claims to have refuted all three premises of the argument in 1987. But I have just reread the relevant chapter of his book and find he did nothing of the sort, nor did he even make a serious effort to attack the premises. Rather he misstates my position as being about consciousness rather than about semantics. He thinks that I am only concerned to show that the man in the Chinese Room does not consciously understand Chinese, but I am in fact showing that he does not understand Chinese at all, because the syntax of the program is not sufficient for the understanding of the semantics of a language, whether conscious or unconscious. Furthermore he presupposes a kind of behaviorism. He assumes that a system that behaves as if it had mental states, must have mental states. But that kind of behaviorism is precisely what is challenged by the argument. So I have to confess that I don’t find that the weakness of his arguments in his recent book is helped by his 1987 arguments.

4: Dennett resents the fact that I characterize his rhetorical style as “having a certain evasiveness” because he does not state his denial of the existence of conscious states clearly and unambiguously at the beginning of his book and then argue for it. He must have forgotten what he admitted in response to another critic who made a similar complaint, the psychologist Bruce Mangan. Here is what he said:

He [Mangan] accuses me of deliberately concealing my philosophical conclusions until late in the book, of creating a “presumptive mood,” of relying on “rhetorical devices” rather than stating my “anti-realist” positions at the outset and arguing for them. Exactly! That was my strategy…. Had I opened with a frank declaration of my final conclusions I would simply have provoked a chorus of ill-concealed outrage and that brouhaha would have postponed indefinitely any remotely even-handed exploration of the position I want to defend.

What he boasts of in response to Mangan is precisely the “evasiveness” I was talking about. When Mangan makes the charge, he says, “Exactly!” When I make the same charge, he says, “Nonsense.” But when a philosopher holds a view that he is pretty sure is right but which may not be popular, he should, I suggest, try to state it as clearly as he can and argue for it as strongly as he can. A “brouhaha” is not an excessive price to pay for candor.

5: Dennett says I propose no research program. That is not true. The main point of my review was to urge that we need a neurobiological account of exactly how microlevel brain processes cause qualitative states of consciousness, and how exactly those states are features of neurobiological systems. Dennett’s approach would make it impossible to attack and solve these questions, which as I said, I regard as the most important questions in the biological sciences.

6: Dennett says that I advance only one argument, the Chinese Room. This is not true. There are in fact two independent sets of arguments, one about Strong AI, one about the existence of consciousness. The Chinese Room is one argument in the first set, but the deeper argument against computationalism is that the computational features of a system are not intrinsic to its physics alone, but require a user or interpreter. Some people have made interesting criticisms of this second argument, but not Dennett in his book or in this exchange. He simply ignores it. About consciousness, I must say that if someone persistently denies the existence of consciousness itself, traditional arguments, with premises and conclusions, may never convince him. All I can do is remind the readers of the facts of their own experiences. Here is the paradox of this exchange: I am a conscious reviewer consciously answering the objections of an author who gives every indication of being consciously and puzzlingly angry. I do this for a readership that I assume is conscious. How then can I take seriously his claim that consciousness does not really exist?

POSTSCRIPT

After the publication of this exchange, Dennett continued the discussion in other writings. Unfortunately he has a persistent problem in quoting my views accurately. Several years ago, he and his co-editor, Douglas Hofstadter, produced a volume in which they misquoted me five times.⁵ I pointed this out in The New York Review of Books.⁶ More recently, after the publication of this exchange, Dennett produced the following:

Searle is not even in the same discussion. He claims that organic brains are required to “produce” consciousness—at one point he actually said brains “secrete” consciousness, as if it were some sort of magical goo—…⁷

In the same book, he writes:

One thing we’re sure about, though, is that John Searle’s idea that what you call “biological material” is a necessity for agency (or consciousness) is a nonstarter. [p. 187]

The problem with both of these attributions is that they are misrepresentations and misquotations of my views. I have never maintained that “organic brains are required” to produce consciousness. We do know that certain brain functions are sufficient for consciousness, but we have no way of knowing at present whether they are also necessary. And I have never maintained the absurd view that “brains ‘secrete’ consciousness.” It is no surprise that Dennett gives no sources for these quotations because there are none.

Little, Brown, 1991. ↩︎
In his response to the publication of the original article on which this chapter is based, Dennett pointed out that in other writings he had rejected all three premises. This response together with my rejoinder is printed as an appendix to this chapter. I believe the issues are adequately clarified in my rejoinder to Dennett. ↩︎
In a section published in this book as chapter 7. ↩︎
In 1980,1 responded to twenty-eight critics of the Chinese Room Argument in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, including Dennett, by the way. Responses to another half-dozen critics appeared in BBS in 1982. Still further replies to Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter appeared in these pages [of the NYRB] in 1982. I took up the issue again in my Reith Lectures on the BBC in 1984, published in my book, Minds, Brains and Science. I also debated several well-known advocates of Strong AI at the New York Academy of Science in 1984, and this was published in the academy proceedings. Another exchange in The New York Review of Books in 1989 with Elhanan Motzkin was followed by a debate with Paul and Patricia Churchland in Scientific American in 1990. There is a further published debate with Jerry Fodor in 1991 (see my response to Fodor, “Yin and Yang Strike Out” in The Nature of Mind, edited by David M. Rosenthal, Oxford University Press, 1991). All of this is only the material published up to the Nineties. On the tenth anniversary of the original publication, at the BBS editors invitation, I published another article expanding the discussion to cognitive science explanations generally. In the ensuing debate in that journal I responded to over forty critics. More recently, in 1994 and 1995,1 have responded to a series of discussions of The Rediscovery of the Mind in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. There is besides a rather hefty volume, called John Searle and His Critics (edited by Ernest Lepore and Robert van Gulick, Blackwell, 1991), in which I respond to many critics and commentators on all sorts of related questions. ↩︎
The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (BasicBooks, 1981). ↩︎
“The Myth of the Computer,” The New York Review of Books, April 29, 1982. ↩︎
Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences, edited by Michael Gazzaniga (MIT Press, 1997), p. 193. ↩︎

Consciousness and Materialism

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 08:05:18 -0500

Hume’s Parallel

David Hume has often been quoted for his “Is” vs. “Ought” distinction. The argument is that fact and morality are two different domains, and from no accumulation of statements of fact alone can we ever jump to a statement of morality.

We can say statements of fact such as:

To be murdered is potentially painful.
To be murdered is irreversible.
Murder causes social dysfunction.
Etc. …

By merely my collecting these, we haven’t proven that Murder is evil. That is an entirely different statement that cannot be inducted from statements about the description of murder.

Certainly we can derive moral statements from other moral statements accompanied by factual statements. For example, if we assume that the moral statement To kill a living being is immoral. we can derive new moral “facts” from it:

To kill a living being is immoral.
Unborn children in the womb are living beings.
Abortion is immoral.

Or…

To kill a living being is immoral.
Animals are living beings.
Killing animals is immoral.

Whether you find Hume’s argument ironclad, it proposes that mere fact and morality are ultimately two domains and substances, and while they can interact, importantly, morality itself—whatever it is—is made of different stuff than just empirical statements. There requires some extra jump.

Consciousness

I bring this up because it is a logical analog to the reality of consciousness.

Some would incorrectly say that the issue of consciousness is the “Hardest Problem in Science.” That’s premature because it presupposes that science has even begun to properly ask the question, or has any idea of a vector to approach the issue, or any tools to attack the problem.

One funny thing, even—perhaps especially true about the institutionalized academic venues for the study of consciousness, is that they are rife with “pseudoscience.”

Go to a “scientific” conference or institute and however many serious scientists you see, you will find no fewer Hindu gurus. This is because there are simply no scientific methods for even approaching the issue of the origin and nature of consciousness and many scientists are at least honest enough to recognize they have little to no performative advantage in the field over pagan lore or even esotericist scammers.

Consciousness from a Humean Perspective

In the same way that Hume argued that morality must be a different substance from fact, I will state flatly that consciousness, in its essence, must be a totally different substance from matter.

Materialist science is self-limited to what is ultimately the syntactic interactions of atoms more or less bumping into each other, at whatever level of abstraction. In the same way that Hume could say that no as-of-yet unknown facts could generate a foundational moral statement, I say that no as-of-yet unknown material configuration generates this ontologically new category of self-perception.

Now when Hume, as a skeptic, suggested that fact and morality were different domains, a part of that skepticism is the suggestion that morality, since it is not grounded in fact, might actually just be a worthless enterprise. That “solves” the philosophical problems of morality by saying it ultimately has no independent ontology, i.e. it doesn’t really exist, so we don’t really have to talk about it.

Consciousness cannot be discarded in the same fashion. Consciousness is not just something we observe, but it is the only thing we observe. It is the basis of all of our other observations and it is the most inexplicable thing.

Mere computation?

You might interpret my statement here as a denial of the so-called Computational Theory of Mind which, among other things, alleges that consciousness itself is a side-effect of the configuration of the brain to compute and process reality.

After all, computation is merely the processing rules of a formal game. Saying computational operations can generate consciousness by themselves is no sillier than saying that a game of Monopoly can generate consciousness. (There are some who have argued themselves into corners where they will affirm that such Monopoly games can be conscious).

It might be that some syntactic configurations might resonate in such a way to “summon” consciousness from another dimension. That is not my point, my point is the more obvious one: consciousness itself, qualia, sense in itself are obviously something different than matter.

There’s an unfortunate temptation to describe things that consciousness seems to interact with or do or correlate with, mistaking that to be an explanation of the sensation of consciousness itself. To do that is to forget the question altogether, replacing it with something trivial.

Matter over Mind?

To be clear, it is very obvious that material conditions affect consciousness. This is no different from how Hume admitted that factual statements can affect derivations of moral statements.

Chemicals can induce other states of consciousness. Injuries can affect the state of self-perception.

For a while I assumed the error of thinking that because these statements were true, that must mean that consciousness itself must be merely material as well.

This is fallacious reasoning because we can just as easily say that the physical components of the brain are “receivers” of a “signal” of consciousness.

In the same way that smashing a T.V. doesn’t destroy the signal it receives, damaging the brain or distorting its physical reactions in such a way to affect consciousness doesn’t mean the consciousness itself has an origin in the physical brain.

That might sound other-worldly, as if it entails consciousness must be something from another dimension, but it’s even similar to the way people approach their non-solutions in the Computational Theory of Mind.

Other-worldly

I will say that I have come to grips with the idea that consciousness must be something literally other-worldly.

Before pan-physicalists and atheists throw their computers aside in disgust, remember that this is almost a tautology or truism, and it is really the essence of my argument here. It also doesn’t even require any more metaphysics than are required to remain consistent.

Physicalism and materialism assume that the core of the universe is familiar atomic matter and other physical forces and energies. Consciousness is simply something ontologically apart from these things.

In making philosophically physicalist models for consciousness, we are trying to build paper-flat two-dimensional scaffolding to hold an immensely oblong three-dimensional object. That might teach us something about consciousness in a pedagogical sense, but the operations of atoms and forces are just different stuff than consciousness and even with clever emergent arguments, never suffice to explain it.

It is one thing to say that complex computational systems can emerge from simple interactions of matter. This is a mere issue of complexity. It is a totally different thing to say that the very realm of the cognitive theater, including qualia and sense itself are mere complex atom-bumpings. This is an addition of that same third dimension.

While nearly everything in the universe can be attacked with a materialist model, and even though we can correlate matter with conscious states, the appearance of the qualia of things in the mind is not just something we can reduce to material corollaries, because the material corollaries are not the interesting or crucial aspect.

You’re already a dualist anyway.

There is an obvious sense in which even a rigid materialist should realize the wide scope of the universe is pretty wide, nearly certainly wider than we now anticipate.

Familiar matter and energy has formed the physical sciences, but that in no way means that part of, in fact, most of reality is actually other types of forces and substances.

Remember that modern materialism before used to be “mechanicalism.” Before Newton, many thought that atoms alone were sufficient to describe reality, specifically, atoms exerting direct force on one another.

Newton proposed an elegant theory that was involved an occult force: Gravity that acted counter-mechanically over long distances via an unknown—and still totally unknown—means. The theory solved significant problems and unified much, but its central assumption was other-worldly and totally unjustified and unexplained.

How can a force act over long distances seemingly instantly? The fact that we don’t dismiss gravity immediately as spiritualism is only a testament to the multi-generational coping mechanism has made this new force mundane.

Now Newton’s concept of gravity is thought of as being “real” and “physical” and within the realm of “science” despite the fact that it upended the physicalist assumptions of the day of how matter and atoms can interact.

All of this is to say that old-school atomists (Democritus, Lucretius, etc.) promoted a highly obsolete science that not even modern “materialists” endorse. At that, new occult and spiritual forces, like gravity, after repeated observations and theories come under purview of “science” and thus become “physical” even though they are clearly of a totally different substance than traditional atoms and matter.

That said, the universe has many different substances and forces that are not necessarily commensurable. They may interact, but that in no ways makes them the same substance. When we realize that, we have already dismissed philosophical monism. Some forces are familiar enough to make models of, thus they become unsurprising, regular and subject to science. Other forces of the universe might be wider than experimental tests can harness, so irregular as to avoid sensible-sounding theories and different enough to still seem miraculous forever.

So in saying that consciousness is a totally different substance, of a non-material reality and cannot be accounted for from narrowly material computation is not an unreasonable statement. I would say that it is a self-evidently true statement regardless of philosophical assumptions, and I think it would behoove people who purport to study consciousness to acknowledge it as such, rather than attempting to muddy the waters and reduce conscious theater to something it is not, so they can pretend to study it.

Why I Won't Go to Restaurants in 2023

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 18:18:40 -0500

I’ve decided after some consideration to not go to restaurants at all in 2023. You can call this a New Year’s Resolution. It’ll require at least some sacrifice, pain, annoyance to myself and perhaps others, but I’m going to stick by it and I think it will have a good effect.

Restaurants are a drastically over-used creature comfort of the consumerist economy… even worse, nowadays they’re not even comfortable…

Especially now that portions are smaller more expensive than ever, it’s hard to go to a restaurant without feeling cheated.

All of this is fortunate, though, since relying on the ease of restaurants is a vice. It is now easier than ever to quit it without missing anything but disappointment.

Here Are the Rules.

When I travel alone, I will flatly never eat at a restaurant, no matter what. I will pack food, or prepare food bought at a grocery store.
At time when I might usually offer to go to restaurants out with people, I will serve them at home.
I’ll get in the habit of preparing and carrying food—not snacks—but food when I will need it. This will include trips.
If I have not prepared food while out, I will go hungry. Oh well!

I have even already forewarned people in my life about my adherence to this.

I’m not saying I’m going to throw a Richard Stallman-style sperg-out when asked to go to a restaurant, but I will find a novel alternative. If I do go physically to a restaurant with people, obviously I will order nothing and eat nothing, not even free tortilla chips (because it’s not just about the money, either).

Things even worse that restaurants

Obviously take-out counts as a restaurant, in fact, is even worse.

There are some things even worse than restaurants that I don’t use now and won’t start. (I say this because some might be tempted to comply with the letter, but not the spirit of the law.)

I will get no take-out.
I will buy no food from gas stations, convenience stores or delis.
I will have no junk food.
I will also count coffee shops and other such things as restaurants and thus subject to exclusion.

What not Going to Restaurants Will Get Me.

The first and obvious advantage is that I will be saving money.

The wider goal is to make sure that I am more comfortable with preparing food for people on short notice, having spontaneous picnics, planning in advance for things and thereby acting less impulsive in food consumption.

It might be weird to unironically suggest in the 21st century that “picnics” can be an alternative to restaurants, but however corny they may sound to our ears, they are infinitely more social, customizable and economical. Doing all of this make a new habit to permanently displace compulsive restauranting.

My goal is not to minimize alimentary social outings—but to improve them by minimizing cost and maximizing the possibilities of what I can end up doing.

How Rigorous Will I be?

People in real life have questioned how rigorous I will be in this resolution. I’ve said I will reserve the right to go to a restaurant on a highly exceptional occassion which is certainly not a part of everyday habit.

For example, earlier this year, I went out to a nice restaurant with some friends and subscribers during Linuxfest—this is the kind of outing/event I might exempt. Even in those circumstances, I want to consider social alternatives to restaurant-going though.

I’ve talked to other people and restaurants have become a continuing disappointment to many in the days of shrinkflation. Since I can barely go to one and be filled for less than $35, I don’t think I’m going to look back from this.

Blockchain Blasphemy and the Technological Antichrist

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a meme YouTube video by Leonardo of Biz (here) where the villainous Bogs refer to their desire to attain something called “The Akashic Records” using blockchain technology.

This random aside not just shows the attention to detail Leonardo gives what would otherwise be silly videos, but articulates something deeply troubling about a war unfolding over Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain technology, but also technology generally.

Most normal people see this comment and ask…

“What are the Akashic Records?”

In the late 1800’s, there emerged a group of spiritualists and scammers called Theosophists, principally followers of the eccentric Helena Blavatsky.

This New Age religion was a mishmash of perennialism and invented secret eastern teachings (which Blavatsky claimed to have learned in a fabricated part of her life in Tibet), with significant parallels with other universalist sects like Freemasonry. It was one of the many spiritual vultures preying on the spiritually empty as the power of Christendom waned.

The Akashic Records were their idea of a cosmic repository of all reality, past, present and future. They contain every event of the universe from all past and all future. Theosophist psychics tried to “tap into” these records to attain universal and specific knowledge.

Blockchain as Akashic Record

To explain aloud Leonardo’s subtle joke: blockchains, as they come to maturity, are functioning as Akashic Records of our own invention.

Bitcoin’s blockchain is a necessarily public ledger of all past transactions, the origin of their funds, the wallets they interact with and more. People often erroneously think that the “crypto” in cryptocurrency means that information about it is somehow “cryptic” or hidden, but this is just ignorance.

Bitcoin is substantially worse for privacy than even the most corporate credit cards, since even then credit cards don’t broadcast your transactions publicly on the internet as bitcoin must do for all submitted transactions.

As time has gone on and projects such has Ethereum have developed, blockchain technology is employing these public ledgers for an ever wide range of tasks: decentralized computing, contracting and much more…

If blockchains continue developing as they are, they will gradually record and make publicly available every transaction, action and for that matter—idle word of every human. There are projects and coins for every segment of digital life, including storing and accessing files, watching videos, interacting with the internet of things and more. A combination of greed, stupidity and neophilia are leading us to disaster world that might not be able to be undone.

The technologization of society is accelerating for most. Less and less of human life occurs without the filter, approval and overwatch of internet-connected technology. As more of this becomes part of “the Blockchain,” more of it becomes an issue of common knowledge.

A normal human reacts in fear at the idea that God the Dread Judge has a Book of Life with all actions and thoughts of all men and will judge them accordingly. A delusional theosophist might pine for the power that such knowledge would give them over others, but they needn’t pine long, since this is exactly the weaponry we are creating and leaving in the open with blockchain technology…

Technology and Will-to-Power

The greatest threat to good programming, human freedom and humanity itself is the love of technology just for technology’s sake.

There is no shortage of visionary programmers who can imagine niche uses for novel technology. But unfortunately for these people “Can I?” is a common question, but “Should I?” is fairly rare.

Pride and lust for power are the true motivations of many visionary programmers. It doesn’t feel like “lust for power” when you experience it, but there is a very Nietzschean muscle a programmer exercises when he sees a large and exploitable dataset. When you see masses of metadata, and you know you have the means at your fingertips to create something “new” with it, the temptation is almost always too difficult to resist.

Only the most mercenary and depraved programmer sets out to write software to enslave. Still, when even a semi-competent programmer sees an interesting dataset of GPS coordinates, cell-phone metadata, Bitcoin transaction data or something else, there often arises an insatiable desire to deploy this dataset in a “clever” and “useful” way.

This is the pinnacle of the “useful idiot” phenomenon. In design alone, the technology is morally and socially inert, but no technology is morally or socially inert in implementation. This is even more the case when many evil actors, governments, the media, organized power weaponize “clever” and “useful” projects to actualize private and hidden goals.

There is a deep undercurrent in modernity to have “smart” technology. Refrigerators and appliances often now connect to the internet and download software patches from their vendors. Simple finger-operated light switches have apparently been ruled passé, while voice-operated light switches that communicate with Amazon servers are the new thing.

The reason that people like Richard Stallman continue ending up sounding prophetic about the dangerous of proprietary software is because they are serious enough to realize that programming is the closest mankind has ever come to wizardry and dark arts. With such supreme power and with such a lack of oversight (either by writing closed-source code or otherwise), even the most noble programmer can be easily seduced into flexing their Will-to-Power to do the absurd.

The Antichrist and Digital Hyperreality

As we further encroach creating the Akashic Records by hand, this all might remind you of that one Voltaire quote…

You know, that one that millennial gamers will know from the ending of Deus Ex if you decide to merge yourself with the omniscient and omnipotent AI panopticon:

If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.

The zeitgeist of modernity is certainly atheistic, but at the same time, every movement in it seems to bend like pliable reeds to the desire to create a “God” of its own design.

Positivism rejects or scientifically dismisses the very metaphysical reality of “truth” and “falsity” themselves. It then encourages the assumptive jump from personal or informational subjectivity to the denial of transcendent objectivity altogether. Since this is an absurd crime even against logic, we have a natural deep-seated desire to instead create a new layer of reality on which objective and undeniable truth can be restored. This is the newly created digital realm. This is man’s electronic equivalent of God’s “Book of Life” which logs all truth in digital databases and blockchains.

Actual reality is messy, organic and is perceived subjectively—And mankind is only a part of that creation. But in the digital world, we can arrange our new lives with inviolable programs and smart contracts that have a new enforced objectivity.

Mankind is creator and omnipotent in this lesser reality, but our desire for power is so great that we want to elevate this lesser reality to something greater than reality itself. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the kinds of superpowers we can achieve with computer programming in our waking lives? If so, why not insert our waking consciousnesses into this reduced reality to wield this fantasy power?

Worst of all, you now have a class of Jordan Petersonian “intellects” denigrating and obfuscating reality to such a degree as to make the new digital Antichrist sounds like it was what we were talking about the whole time! God has been reduced to and confused with “the idea of God” or “the most powerful thing in creation.” The mentalistic world of archetypes has become the world of digital imagination, which is now held up as a replacement for the very idea of reality beyond atoms bumping into each other. We’re all theosophists! We’re all Free Masons now!

It is now held as an ideal to create our “Creator” and imbue digital technology with as much power and omniscience as possible. People will soon unironically call themselves religious because they worship a created techno-god because they have been duped into believing this is what “God” always meant.

Deus Ex was a dystopian video game, not an instructional manual. (Looking at you, Elon Musk.)

It’s naturally common for Christians to interpret the singular final antichrist to be an individual person, but at this point, a much more obvious “beast system” to marvel at is a technological system in itself consummated in something that looks like God.

Transhumanism and Singularity as Pattern Extrapolation

This entire budding techno-futurist religion has a simple origin. The human mind sees patterns.

In every moment of history, every society manages to “see patterns” by extrapolating the past presented to them, just adding on a couple extra steps (also presented to them). Do not mistake your extrapolation of recent events to be a foundational direction of the universe.

For example, John von Neumann, the most notable polymath of the 20th century took the geometric proliferation of nuclear arms and their Game Theoretics seriously—and unironically recommended immediate nuclear war. His obituary in Life (Feb 25, 1957; p. 96) says of his thinking the following:

[He] observed at that time: “With the Russians it is not a question of whether but when.” A hard-boiled strategist, he was one of the few scientists to advocate for preemptive war, and in 1950 he was remarking, “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not 1 o’clock?”

Thankfully most people lacked the iron-clad logic of von Neumann and we avoided nuclear holocaust.

In our modern world, this lazy tendency of extrapolation often manifests in a kind of Transhumanism or belief in technological “Singularity”.

This is a utopian or millenarian belief that we can eternally extrapolate geometric increases in increased technological or computational power to a point where technological improvement becomes instant, effortless, yet infinite. Technology seems to have significantly accelerated in human life, so it seems to these people that we should assume it continues to do so, apparently with the idea that there is no factor in human psychology, physiological, neuroscience or even economy that could ever be a principled boundary for this tumorous growth.

Transhumanists, as their name suggests, ultimately believe in what they might glowingly describe as humans “transcending their biology and psychology” or other cloudy terms. In reality, these people are pining for the death of humanity, or as some absurdly put it, “human civilization surviving [sic] in human-created AI.”

This is actually the best case scenario of 'transhumanism.' If you think this comic is weird, wait until there are Matrix-style warehouses of pod-people hooked up to auto-masturbators. Actually, you should realize in some senses, they're already here.

They imagine husks of biological humanity, perfectly climate-controlled by vaccines, “augmentations,” and directly-injected stimulation and entertainment, embedded in a casket of metal for their entire lives. They imagine human-created robots, then totally de-tethered from their creators, exploring the universe and installing robot colonies on distant planets. In some perverted way, they call this genocidal conquest of humanity humanity itself, or humanity “improved.”

This is the Gnostic Heresy reborn, but worse than original Gnostics, who at least believed in the structure beyond matter, and who consistently denigrated matter compared to it. These new Gnostics believe in creating this realm of ideas, but destroying and mutilating the human mind and body that they believe to be the very metric of value of this new realm. In a literal sense, they want to destroy nature, mankind and the universe as they know it.

Cucked by “Inevitability”

Transhumanists take a page from Marx’s book in passing of their true desire as being a scientific “inevitability.” They argue that singularity will happen, therefore, by some leap of logic, it should, or even its many consequences or birth-pangs are therefore good. This is absurd.

If, after all, an asteroid were hurdling towards this planet capable of wiping out human life, only a moron refuse to act saying that “It’s inevitable,” or “It’s the clear direction of history.” At that, the trajectory of an asteroid is an issue of math, while any alleged trajectory of history is an issue of pure fantasy.

I mention this to say that transhumanists often try to pass of their fantasies of the future as being “inevitable,” when in fact, they are merely titillating ideas that appeal to their imaginations formed for years under the influence of interesting fantasy futurism in film, fiction and modern culture.

So, our state of affairs…

The influence of technology is at a local high point now. It has become over-encompassing enough to be reminiscent of omnipotence and omniscience.
In our godless age, this power naturally breeds a kind of worship from godless people. It provides not only a pseudo-divinity, but a new arena for a new objectivity that out-classes the skepticism of post-modernity.
There are psychological (and material) incentives for people to continue expanding the power of this technological system, and build it new powers to monitor and control people.
There are utopian and millennialist sects going by various names that concoct rationalizations to expand the power of this technological system, expand its range and shield it from questioning.

I will leave for the future why I so quickly dismiss the supposed inevitability of “singularity.” Perhaps in the next episode…

Basically Everyone Should Be Avoiding Docker

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 10:19:58 -0400

I am a well known Docker-non-respecter.

I want to explain why I don’t use Docker (so much as possible)

The Real vs. Fake Reasons

I admire the candidness of the developer of BTCPay here. He says that he chose to use Docker to deploy his project because he was a Windows person doing .NET and didn’t want to read up on how to use Linux/Unix.

There are basically only two “real” reasons to use Docker or containerization more generally:

People who do not know how to use Unix-based operating systems or specifically GNU/Linux.
People who are deploying a program for a corporation at a massive enterprise scale, don’t care about customizability and need some kind of guarantor of homogeneity.

Granted, class 1 should be a temporary state in an ideal world, but we don’t live in an ideal world at all.

I would estimate that of those two categories, substantially more than 95% of people are in the first. If you look at sites and users that endorse Docker or list reasons for using it, they are nearly always for this.

So for my purposes, when I’m instructing people on how to set up email servers, personal websites, little services, federated social media, etc., the only reason to use Docker is if you want to make things harder for yourself by having this extra and totally unnecessary layer of abstraction.

People watching my videos already know how to do at least basic Unix things. Doing things the Docker way is a departure from that, while without doing, you can do things the more familiar way.

I don’t give recommendations for people who are professionals deploying enterprise-level homogenous software and I’ve never pretended to do that. Please do not email me telling me you need Docker for some large-scale implementation. I know you do. That’s not what I do personally, and it’s not what people following me do, so I don’t do it.

How does containerization make your life miserable?

On BTCPay, there was a period when I was running a BTCPay server and begrudgingly used Docker as recommended. This did make setting up all the working parts to BTCPay extremely easy as it can be mostly automated.

But then I ran into some complications:

I wanted to change the Monero wallet I had set up with the program.
I had set up the system with Ethereum support as well just to have it, but decided later I didn’t want it.
After three months, certbot certificates failed to renew and redeploy.

If I had not been using Docker, all three of these typical issues could’ve been solved in several seconds. Even if I were someone who didn’t immediately know how to renew a Certbot certificate, it would be easy to look that up.

But since I was using Docker, which is like running a computer video-game inside your computer, they became extremely difficult. To solve the Monero issue, since there was no GUI option to delete the old wallet, I figured out all I needed to do is delete the wallet file on the Docker container. That sounds easy, right?

Well, if you’re expecting Docker to have a file-system easily accessible, you’re wrong—in fact, that’s “the point.” I can’t use typical commands like updatedb/locate/find to find what I need. I have to run a command with a massive prefix specific to that container. I don’t have tab completion when running Docker container commands, so when I inevitably mistype while searching for the file or attempting to delete it, I have to re-edit a multi-line command. After a while, I did, however, delete the file, which allowed me to change the wallet I was using.

You might say that doing such a little operation becomes easier after being more familiar with containerization—I’m sure that’s true, absolutely. But ultimately all I needed to do is delete a single file!—That shouldn’t be something you need to train to do!

I will admit that the other two problems proved insoluble. The only way to turn off Ethereum support from what I could tell is reinstall the whole thing. Don’t expect to have a config file for a Docker container. Actually, if you did, you should expect it to be impossibly difficult to edit.

While other people on the internet had had issues similar to the Certbot problem, mine was clearly different and no solutions worked.

All I needed was to run the equivalent certbot renew --nginx; systemctl reload nginx, but that proved too difficult when acting through the impenetrable wall of Docker.

In my old video on why I don’t use Macs, I described them as “smart-people proof.” Docker is the same way. It’s Common Core for technology: it reduces the good of knowing how to use your operating system to zero. This might actually increase the convenience to tech-ignorant users accidentally, because developers now have to answer “dumb” questions about Docker, including saying “No, sorry, you can’t change that.” for most things you can indeed change if you weren’t using Docker.

Containerization makes software an opaque box where you are ultimately at the mercy of what graphical settings menus have been programed into the software. It is the nature of containers that bugs can never been fixed by users, only the official development team.

Fake Reasons

“Containers are more secure.”

The reality:

Scripts that compromise containerized software/data are no more difficult to write than those that compromise non-containerized software/data. They are merely different.
Containerization places more reliance on developers to keep software, including libraries used up to date.
People mistake “It’s unintuitive for me to interact or interface with this containerized program.” with it being secure.

People might know flatkill.org, which sums this up briefly, but it’s very true.

“Containers are easier to set up.”

The reality:

It’s no easier to setup a Docker file than a installation shell script, even one that runs on multiple platforms.
When containerization seems easier, you are getting freetime up-front by paying with hours of headache later on managing the software.

Especially when we’re talking about “Installing on Linux” this is silly. If a program can be easily installed on Debian and (nowadays) installed on Arch Linux, that covers basically all Linux users.

“Containers are easier to manage.”

Containers can only be “easier to manage” when they strip away all of the user’s ability to manage in the normal unix-way, and that is relatively unmissed.

A Third Reason

Let me add a sympathetic third reason:

You want to export security to a party that might know better than you.

Again, let’s use BTCPay as an example, since it’s a payment processor. Granted, normally a BTCPay server only has access to your public keys, but none the less, there are substantial liabilities with anything related to money.

So if you set something like BTCPay up without Docker, assembling the required interacting programs yourself, there’s a chance you might do something wrong or create a security flaw inadvertently.

Using Docker is a panacea, but it lets you rely on the security acumen of whoever is putting together the Docker image, who in many cases might know more than you. (In some cases, maybe many, he might know less though, or be less willing to update security protocols, and you’ll put yourself in a precarious position!)

Conclusion

Ergo, I don’t use Docker and containerization, I’m annoyed by them and I don’t do tutorials on them. They are not for me or for people who want to do basic personal sysadmining. I think enterprise sysadmins would definitely do better doing more for their personal life outside of things like Docker, but again, there are reasons people use these things for many professional use-cases.

'Based' Paganism vs. Christianity

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 07:53:20 -0400

I’ve been meaning to write about Paganism recently. I will frame it as a response to an email I received within the past day or so:

Hey Luke,

First off, I would like to thank you for all your efforts in making everything you know accessible to everyone. You have exposed me to some of the most thought-provoking people on the internet and Varg is one of them. I was wondering if you can write an article or make a video on what you think about Varg’s Paganism in relation to you choosing Orthodox Christianity. I know that you briefly talked about it in one of your livestreams, however, I would like to better understand why you don’t practice Paganism yourself. My background is Serbian and most Serbians follow the Serbian Orthodox Church, but after watching Varg’s videos, I’m conflicted. I agree with a lot of what Varg says about Christianity, but my father long ago told me to follow the Serbian Orthodox Church if I were to become religious. I’m sure that many people feel the same way after watching Varg’s videos, and your thoughts on it would greatly help people like me make up their minds.

Best,

redacted

I will sum up my answer to this email in bullet points, then explain what I mean.

Modern “paganism” is not a real thing and has nothing to do with paganism in history.
The most direct cultural link between modern man and antiquity is the Orthodox Christian Church.
Truth matters—“Picking” a religion on personal preferences is brain-dead and self-refuting.

Your Average Pagan

Many people probably don’t know who Varg Vikernes is, but since the email brings him up, I will talk about him as an example of where paganism leads. Modern “paganism” is not an authentic tradition handed down over the ages. It is an attempt of modern disconnected people to recreate or re-engineer a culture, time and place they have absolutely no contact with. This ultimately makes “paganism” a modernist Rorschach test where individuals can more-or-less create the religion they want.

Paganism with modern goggles

Varg’s particular “paganism” is a kind of scientific euhemerism: he doesn’t actually believe in gods in the way an ancient pagan would have, but that the concepts of the gods represent scientific or other knowledge. (This is where the placenta meme around him comes from after all, when he and his wife related assorted pagan myths and items to the tree-like appearance of a human placenta.) He has also reduced classical abstract spiritual concepts into hormones and other related things. In essence, he has created a pseudo-paganism that is compatible with modern materialism.

Varg had cited and recommended works such as Frazer’s Golden Bough as influential on his thought which is of a similar vein. This book was part of a wider movement in the English-speaking rationalist world to rationalize and explain myth. It goes without saying that I think this all comes from the assumption of modern man that all ancient people underlyingly thought like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

How long until legend becomes myth?

More plausible is the viewpoint I’ve spoken of in works such as Hamlet’s Mill. It alleges that one specific prehistoric civilization used myth to transmit scientific knowledge, but being thousands of years out from that civilization, the descendant stories are distorted, partial and can only be related after extensive study. They allege that “Hamlet stories” are similar in origin and actually carry astrological information, including the idea of the procession of the equinoxes.

But Varg’s quasi-euhemerism makes a much stronger claim, that all our “forebears” (as he tends to call them) left an entire encyclopedia of scientific knowledge in stories that have remained unblemished and mostly unchanged over thousands or millions of years since the Neanderthals, who he views as the Trve Europeans.

This stronger claim should be absurd on its face, as it assumes that over the millennia, there is little to no addition, subtraction or change of folklore. The Hamlet’s Mill model admits that this does happen, but Varg is dealing with a much longer scale and often makes very specific claims about some myths. What I think Varg is truly doing when he looks at a pagan myth and sees a placenta, he is seeing statistical noise and fitting that noise to the many possibilities in his head. (I will also say that this is somewhat the modus operandi of many capital-T “Traditionalists” in the vein of Evola or Guénon.)

Is Christianity a departure from European tradition?

One thing I’ve tried to emphasize in some places is the general wrongness of the idea of the cultural “quantum leap” or “discontinuity” between Prechristian and Christian Europe. This is a highly important issue for many putative pagans, because they view the “change” of Europe over to Christianity as perhaps the start of the now constant and perpetual leftist cultural revolution.

This is the idea, which most people and “based” pagans have even by osmosis, that the Christianization of Europe was a radical break from history and tradition.

This is true only on the Christian metric: obviously the salvation of Europe is a quantum leap. However, melodramatic pagans will lament that this is when Europe have up its “European” soul and adopted a “Jewish” or “desert” religion which put the continent on a totally different and out-of-touch cultural direction.

Pagan Philosophy and Christianity

Christian theology, including Trinitarian theology has direct and undeniable “pagan” analogues and imitators: Neoplatonism expresses a kind of theological trinity as well (the One, the Intellect and the Soul), albeit one more similar to Origen’s trinity where a hierarchy of the three persons exist.

In the cosmogony of the Poemandres, a Hermetic work, shows a pagan creation myth wherein God creates the world via his Logos, as in the first chapter of St. John’s gospel, which also has a trinitarian and monotheistic unity with God (differing from Christianity in its panentheism).

As I mentioned in the linked podcast episode above, Stoic philosophy is a component needed to understand the opening of the gospel of John and is part of the philosophical backdrop of early Christian theology.

Medieval esoteric doctrines and alchemy viewed all of nature as trinitarian, possessing body, mind, and spirit (salt, sulfur and mercury), which was related directly to the Triune nature of God. Even specific mystical sects like Mithraism or the many forms of Gnosticism are tied closely to the development of Christianity.

All of these intellectual strands were intertwined with Christianity since the beginning of the written expression of Christian theology.

A pagan now has to ask himself: if Hermeticism or Mithraism had taken over as a universal religion of Europe, would they loathe it like they loathe Christianity and view it as a radical departure from “paganism?” Note that Hermeticism had an alleged Egyptian origin, and Mithraism had a orientalist/Iranic origin.

Note that none of my point here is specifically that Christianity influenced or created these other philosophies or that they influenced (providentially) Christianity. What is important is that looking at it dispassionately, we cannot deem Christianity as some cultural departure from “real” European culture without also throwing out this entire philosophical tradition as a whole.

Medieval Christians would often look at Greek Philosophy as another covenant of God established to prepare mankind intellectually for the revelation of the Trinity. (Note also that Dante and others represent Christians who viewed the Roman Empire also as part of a divine plan.)

Ultimately, the Christian religion is non-cultural and thus universal/catholic. There are cultural aspects associated with it, but there’s a difference between essence and accidents. Of those cultural aspects, they are nearly all European, not, as some allege, Hebrew or Jewish. Most of the New Testament is quite literally an explication of why this religion which accepts the Hebrew Scriptures is markedly non-Jewish and why Jewish practices like circumcision and sacrifice are sacrilegious.

So the view we should get from this is that Christianization was no cultural leap into an alien worldview, but something whose intellectual side happened slowly over centuries and would only be viewed as spiritual, not culturally distinct from its environment.

Which change is good?

Note that even Varg admits that religious interpretation and practice changes with the centuries. In his interpretation and even in his RPG, MYFAROG (which is really just an expression of his paganism and worldview), characters can have one of two “Life Stances” or religious inclinations: Seiðr or Âsatrû. Seiðr “tradition,” represents a kind of animism, witchcraft or spell-casting, while Âsatrû represents the worship of pagan gods. Characters can choose either life stance, but one can only change from Seiðr to Âsatrû, which is a representation of the alleged historical shift in early history from animistic to polytheistic practices.

If we accept this cultural transition as “legitimate” in terms of cultural continuity, on what grounds could we also mark as verboten a shift from polytheism to monotheism? After all, the pagan philosophy of Plato and Aristotle even from the earliest was monotheistic at its core, and even today, the world’s one remaining “polytheistic” religion, Hinduism only appears so on the surface, but has at its core its own monad and final cause: Brahman.

Tradition vs. Inventing your own religion

To learn of Christian theology, thus, is to set oneself down a road of millennia of learning with often with no delineation between Christian and Prechristian thought. By the same token, learning of secular philosophy, even as an atheist might lead you to Christianity, as was the case with me. There is no obvious discontinuity, either in thought or practice.

But modern day “paganism” does indeed have such a gap. To be a “pagan” does not involve communing with a centuries-old tradition passed down generation-to-generation from antiquity.

It is modern people imagining based on T.V. shows, books and their own creativity what Prechristian Europe was like and then putting on their own imitation of it. They might see something they dislike in the world, blame it on Christians and then imagine a world without it. This invariably comes with retrojecting their own modern values and assumptions on the past.

After all, we Christians can sit down with an Orthodox Priest or grow up in a Orthodox household and have a direct, personal contact with a tradition and understand how people who are part of it think and act. We have no tangible contact with Prechristian European paganism, even out of intellectual interest. Understanding how Europeans truly thought and acted is an issue of cultural reconstruction and theory. Traditional folklore and practices are still very much alive, but they are now decked in a Christian garb. We do celebrate Christmas for Our Lord’s birth, but everyone knows that nearly all of the practices of that season of the many nations of Europe predate Christianization.

The Worst Possible Decision.

All this said, the absolute worst self-own possible would be someone who has direct and easy access to the Orthodox Church and abandons it or leaves it for a false “religion” that doesn’t even exist off of the internet and has no organic connection to reality, like Neo-Paganism.

So my recommendation to the emailer above should be obvious.

Being physically close to the Orthodox Church is a huge asset, but even being able to travel to one occasionally is a massive grace. Everyone should be taking advantage of that as often as possible.

Pagan Gurus

Because it is ungrounded and ahistorical, modern “paganism” thus naturally exists as a kind of extreme Protestant guru-centered feel-goodery where since there is absolutely no tether to a genuine preserved tradition, a man can make up an unfalsifiable claim about what true “Paganism” is and sell it as legit.

I mentioned Varg earlier, who has concocted a “paganism” that consists in claiming that their lore and practice embed scientific information. He doesn’t believe in pagan gods, unless we’re talking about belief in a very evasive and meaningless Jordan Peterson kind of way. If we could actually transport a prehistoric pagan to our day and speak to him, he would probably either be confused or bemused by this very modern worldview, but we can’t even do this.

Most pagans are not “based” like Varg anyway (he lives a minimalist and traditional lifestyle in rural France with an ever-growing family). Most “pagans” are leftists who like “paganism” because they hate God and nature and morality and imagine that pagans were demented sexual perverts like they are.

Truth

Notice that I had specifically avoided the most important issue: Truth.

I’ve done this because when people are asking to convert to something just because it’s “based,” Truth is unfortunately not necessarily their concern, so I’ve first addressed issues that do concern them.

The reality is, thankfully, that truth is the most “based” thing of all—And it is entirely cringe to believe in something because it sounds cool to you. If you think you can decide your own truth, you are no different from someone who thinks they can decide their own pronouns, literally.

Even in the email above, he refers to me “choosing” Orthodox Christianity as if it were an issue of personal taste. If I liked pop music and people rolling on the ground, perhaps I would be just as justified converting to some Pentecostal sect. This is silly.

The greatest deception is that religion is this separate category about “feelings” or “preference” and not truth. Atheist and spiritual R*dditor Stephen Jay Gould put this in words in the modern era, calling science and religion “non-overlapping magesteria,” declaring in a laughable attempt at big-braned centrism that nothing in material reality is relevant to religion and nothing in religion is relevant to material reality.

This is strange because people can research the philosophies I mentioned earlier, Platonism, Gnosticism, Stoicism, Hermeticism and can analyze and critique them and look at them as models of reality perfectly comparable to modern philosophical assumptions and approaches. But we have been taught to view Christianity as this separate category, that can’t possibly be a model of reality, but is a something merely “moral” or “personal” or “spiritual” which are all terms that have been debased to mean nothing at all.

A Christian believes that Jesus’s resurrection was a true historical event, and a prelude of a general resurrection to come and that he established a Church and sacraments which are his vehicles for having man recover from sin within this life to prepare for his roles in the next. The Orthodox Christian Church is an unbroken chain since that period, and oft built on yet older philosophical and liturgical practices.

If you find this alien, or God unbelieveable, you can do yourself the favor of prayer and visit a priest and see what happens.

They don’t even believe it.

To contrast, pagans do not believe in pagan gods. Their brains are 100% modern and materialistic in mindset, and if they ironically say they believe in gods, it is out of some kind of Petersonian fake metaphorical “belief” in a concept or that “Zeus” isn’t a person, but is some kind of abstraction symbolizing the weather or something silly. The only thing sillier is for them to claim that people in the ancient world didn’t really believe in them either, but practiced entire religions meta-ironically for some social reasons. If they believe in a “spiritual” nature, it is not one beyond or above matter, but instead derived from it: it is psychological, hormonal, etc.

Modern paganism is neither a tradition, nor a religion, nor even a belief. It is just a new identity which supposedly flexes some kind of disposition to the world which is not even consistent across pagans because there is no basis for any of it.

Real Baste European Pagans

Christians, however, do believe in pagan gods. Christians have always admitted the reality of spiritual beings, including the demonic. You can take the Michael Heiser/Divine Council pill on this if you’re interested: While there is only one Creator and Supreme God, he created many among his heavenly host, and originally appointed them to the different races on earth. Many rebelled and set themselves up as specific gods of their appointed races.

One of the purposes of Christ’s coming was to vanquish these usurpers, and thus paganism/polytheism, which obviously has been successful. (Note that the Book of Enoch in Chapter 10 prophecies that these fallen angels would be judged 70 generations after the Enochian period, which cross-referencing with the Gospel of Luke, it is exactly 70 generations until Christ.) Now the issues of faith are not so much polytheism, but heresy and then atheism, which is a significant enough change in the cosmic dynamic.

Minimizing Liabilities Is Making It.

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 12:10:08 -0400

The default way to look at financial “independence” nowadays is to think that means “making a lot of money.” That’s understandable.

But then you see stuff like this:

Or this:

It takes until 30 for a person to be as rich as they were when they were born. (And this is average net worth, median would be significantly worse.)

The longer you mentally analyze the second picture, the more depressing it will get. Obviously the negative net worth early in life is kids losing around $10,000 a year in value by going to college, but the truly depressing thing is that after that period, their net worth increases only by an average of about $5,000 a year.

That means they might have $5,000 more in the bank or $5,000 paid off of their student loans or $5,000 going to equity in a house, but no combination greater than that.

How does this happen?

How is it that people alive in the period of the highest and most productive technology are working more than Medieval serfs?

Let’s put it in simple terms by defining “making it:”

Making it:: Earning or having significantly more money than you spend or owe.

Or in pseudomath:

$income - liabilities = comfortability$

To increase comfortablity, you can increase your income or decrease your liabilities. This is a simple equation.

By “liabilities” I mean:

the cost of food you have to eat to live
the cost of the place you need to live
the payments for goods and services you actually need (power, or perhaps a car, etc.)
debts

The problem I would estimate is that people focus all of their time, money and interest on increasing their income and focus quite literally none on decreasing their liabilities, which is actually substantially easier anyway.

In fact, the modern economy, including all the bad advice it gives to people can generally be thought of a system that is desperatly trying to increase everyone’s liabilities within it. Financial libabilities, debt and others, breed even more financial liabilities.

The Lifestory of Basically Everyone Nowadays

Let’s illustrate this with the story of most people you know:

“I’m going to the best college I can because everyone told me to.”
“I need to pay off my $40,000+ in student loans, so I need to move to the city and get a good job.”
“I get paid well, so I need a better car and other stuff to match.”
“I still have loan debt, car debt and now credit card debt, but now I have a good credit score, so I’ll use all my savings to pay 20% of an expensive house I’ll be paying off for 25 years.”
“Oh my boss wants me to humiliate myself for sodomy month or get the Coofid vaccine or the Mark of the Beast to keep my job. I have at least a quarter of a mil invested in my life here, so I can’t just leave. Be realistic.”
“Yeah the economy is really bad and I lost a lot of investments. Either way, this is my career and what I’m trained for. It’d be hard to retrain. I made the right choices, I just got unlucky.”
“Well, I’m 60 and it’s time for retirement! Now that my body is broken I can start enjoying life!”
*Dies of seed-oil-induced heart attack.*

It’d be wrong to singularly blame student loans for all of this, but there is a tangible sense in which opening up any new massive monthly liability to the system encourages people to open up more to cover for it.

No one is ever told that this is the inevitable end of increasing liabilities: you need more and more liabilities.

“Which way Millennial?”

Millennials come in two financial categories: around 90% of them are extreme consoomers who cannot not spend every penny of their salaries on subscriptions, plastic toys and coffee and seem to view the fact they get calls from collections agencies as some unpreventable outcome of “capitalism.”

The other 10% are the exact opposite: they are contemplating living in the trunk of their 1990’s Corolla parked in the parking lot of their job site so they can save 97% of their income. When they plan on buying a house or getting married, they are quixotically salivating on how much money they can save on monthly bills.

The Endgame

I will go ahead and say, I consider the ideal not even to be rich, but to not need money to live a comfortable life because you have put yourself in a geographic and behavioral position where you can survive on as little as possible.

Either way, my mindset (as the second type of millennial) has always been “How can I absolutely minimize the amount of money I need to live?”

“What is the cheapest place to rent?”
“What is the cheapest-per-calorie real food for me to eat?”
“What “needs” are not really needs and can I go without?”

The implicit goal was to live on as little as possible: that’s what actually maximizes your life’s freedom. If you can live on less than, say, $500 a month, even working as a part-time wagie, you will be plenty to pay bills, save a significant amount and have lots of free time.

For young single guys in computer science, this is especially ideal, since your hobbey/craft doesn’t cost anything to tinker with.

In my late twenties, right before I bought my house, I was living in a college town with a monthly budget including my rent of around $400 ($300 was rent $100 was basically groceries). Probably went over that $100 most months, but never by much. This is also when I started churning credit cards to make a significant portion of my little expenditure back.

Behavioral Patterns over Life

As you’re saving money to buy/pay off a permanent dwelling place, most important is cultivating permanent behaviors that will reduce your need for money and “the system.”

If you take the “high”-income, high-liability route, you’re going to be establishing wasteful antipatterns your early life and when you need to buckle down and root those out, it will be more difficult because it will be the egotistically trying task of going from showly and “easy” pleasure spending to a Spartan budget.

It’s much easier to have a solid foundation of low spending. I said in that video years ago on getting Trumpbux that all money you earn and spend should be directly weaponized to decrease your reliance on money. Property, tools, plants, skills. These are investments much more substantial than investing in boomer stocks because they lessen your need for money.

Worst Case Scenario

As a passing remark, I’ll add that the other benefit of focusing on minimizing liabilities is that it makes you significantly less reliant on “the system” and more robust in the case of disaster.

“Training” to get a highly specific corporate job is not going to help you in all possible scenarios in the way that simple the simple craftsmanship of someone who fixes their own cars and things.

The hardest technical solutions are right in front of your face.

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 16:16:31 -0400

Nassim Taleb had this old anecdote of the sheer absurdity that while the suitcase and other bags had existed for lifetimes, it was only in the 1990’s that people had the idea to put wheels on the things so they didn’t have to haul them around airports all day with their strength.

It reminds you of the fact that while children in the Incan Empire did indeed have some toys with wheels, apparently no one thought to use the wheel to make a simple cart or wagon to use in town or on the Inca’s extensive imperial roadways.

The proper response to hearing this should be the deserved angst that right now, there are make “obvious” technological improvements we could make to improve our lives significantly. Even worse, in lieu of these simple and obvious solutions which have lain hidden in plain site for centuries, we have no doubt developed a lot of inefficient technology to fill in the gap.

Since I was recently doing tutorials on Hugo, a static site generator, it’s funny to think that through the 90’s, no one really thought to invent a computationally simple static-site generator as they exist now. People moved pretty much directly from manually edditing HTML files manually into massive proprietary WYSIWYG editors and web “frameworks” that regenerate web pages on every single visit.

This lack of vision and inability to see the simpler solution has largely produced the slow-loading, content-minimal web of today and the bizarre culture of modern “webdevs” whose diets consist in anti-patterns.

The shame of Bitcoin

Recently there was an interview released of me at Monerotopia with the Crypto Vigilate team. Unfortunately, the video cut off and doesn’t have perhaps the best part which I now remember: our discussion on the possibility of “obvious solutions” that could conceivably replace proof-of-work in cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin, ultimately is a self-reinforcing behavioral Nash Equilibrium that uses the logic of proof-of-work mining to establish consensus while still remaining decentralized. The thing is, anyone who is not a delusional fanboy has to look at proof-of-work as some kind of incredible weird and inefficient abomination.

To establish decentralized consensus, we have to have an increasing farm of the world’s computers performing computations that do essentially nothing outside of “secure the network.”

There is no magic force in the universe that has ordained that the only possible way to establish decentralized consensus is Proof-of-Work. Proof-of-stake is obviously an alternative to it, but one whose long-term game theoretic nature is still an issue of significant controversy.

Regardless, an alien civilization observing us might view the issue of decentralized consensus similar to how we view the Inca who never thought to use wheels to make carts. It will be pretty absurd if most of the world’s computing power will soon be dedicated to proof-of-work mining only for some bratty kid or jaded cryptographer to come up with an “obvious” other way to establish a self-reinforcing system that can verify decentralized consensus that doesn’t require the waste.

Take-aways

Technological opportunities are not just everywhere, they are right in front of your face.
The fact that a solution is obvious and simple is not reason for ruling it out because “Someone must have thought of that and tried it before.”
Never be happy with technology that is inelegant just because there is no obvious alternative now.

Never Trust Custodial Crypto

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 19:35:09 -0400

It should actually be a point of optimism that centralized technology tends to destruction while decentralized tech can survive pressure…

Some highly attentive people might have noticed that LandChad.net lost one of its articles: that on how to set up a website with the Basic Attention Token (BAT) which is a crypto-currency tied into the Brave Browser. I can’t even tacitly endorse this project due to some recent personal developments that we’ll see below…

I’ve used the Brave Browser (in fact, I’ve even defended it as a browser), but the BAT project itself is almost a perfect example of a poorly-designed crypto project. Like most 💩coins, it is constructed to enrich a business behind it, not to truly be an open standard.

To be clear, I’m going to talk about BAT, but this isn’t really just about it. It’s about any kind of compliance cuck crypto project (i.e. effectively all of them).

The main issue.

BAT is a browser-mediated system that allows users to view ads in the Brave browser and collect their BAT cryptocurrency, which they can give to “creators” (i.e. people with websites or social media profiles registered with them).

Forced KYC

The issue is, however, is that the entire system is a centralized one, not just around Brave, but “creators” like me with websites cannot actually receive their BAT earning in their own wallets. Instead, earnings must go to a centralized Know-Your-Customer exchange that has a relationship with Brave: Uphold or Gemini. Even the addition of the choice of Gemini is new—Uphold used to be the only option.

Either way, I made an Uphold account when I registered my sites with Brave. I would receive a small amount of monthly BAT and after several months, since I am not braindead, I would transfer those funds to non-custodial wallets every once in a while. I would have liked to transfer them immediately, but Uphold charged obscene withdrawal fees ($15 + some percentage).

Aside from that, I never used Uphold for anything. I’ve never heard of anyone using Uphold for anything other than BAT Rewards anyway.

Uphold emails me.

After several years of being forced to use Uphold for literally no reason, this past month I began getting a flurry of vaguely worded emails asking me for “more information about myself.” Here is the most recent (they have all been the same in content):

We’re following up on our request for additional due diligence information sent on May 27. As a regulated financial services business, we’re required to perform ongoing risk and compliance reviews. Please note that if we do not receive the requested information, we reserve the right to restrict your account. Please provide the following information at your earliest convenience:

Purpose of your Uphold account.

Estimated monthly activity.

You previously mentioned that you are unemployed, please elaborate more about your source of wealth. [sic, lol]

Please explain the purpose of your withdrawals to different crypto wallets and your relationship with them. You have withdrawn funds to X different external wallets.

Relationship with the users you receive funds from, as well as the purpose of such transactions (Include supporting documentation, if any)

Incoming $X — USD (X transactions from X users)

Is your account used for activities related to a business?

Please use the following link to upload your files:

…

As the old adage goes, “Bitcoin fixes this.” Or at least it’s supposed to if people actually used it.

As I said before, Uphold is a KYC exchange: they already know who I am and have a picture of a photo ID of mine. They can also clearly see the origin of 100% of my incoming transactions from “Brave Software International.”

I respond to this email here.

Purpose of your Uphold account.

The reason my account with Uphold exists is because you have some kind of financial relationship with Brave Software International wherein you have nearly exclusive rights to receive BAT payouts. The reason my account exists is because I can’t just receive funds to—you know… an actual cryptocurrency wallet, so I have to use your worthless non-service and pay $15+ dollar fees every time I want to turn your fake custodial crypto into my own.

Estimated monthly activity.

You are a centralized custodial exchange so you can easily see my mountly activity and in my case, you will see that it is actually perfectly uniform across months.

Not that this should matter, nor do I appreciate the tacit assumption that irregular and variable income (which is extremely common nowadays) is somehow bad.

I should add that the only other thing I’ve ever tried to do is there was one point where I figured I’d bite the bullet and buy some KYC Bitcoin to slurp some heckin’ dipperinos at short notice. Unfortunately, your site is so broken that no transaction ended up going through.

You previously mentioned that you are unemployed, please elaborate more about your source of wealth.

Could you elaborate on which country you live in where four figures over the course of three or four years in considered “wealth”?

(Not quite sure when I ever said I was unemployed. I may’ve answered that on a questionaire to avoid questions on the level of stupidity I am dealing with now.)

As in the question above, you, Uphold, are a custodial exchange that can clearly see 100% of the transactions into my account come from “Brave Software International” and considering Brave is Uphold’s only reason for existence, I should not have to explain how they work to you.

Please explain the purpose of your withdrawals to different crypto wallets and your relationship with them. You have withdrawn funds to X different external wallets.

I am interested in having cryptocurrency. I am not interested in having pretend custodial crypto funds indexed to the price of crypto which ultimately I have no control over. I can understand that you are upset that I would like to own my own assets rather than letting you “just hold onto them” in exchange for an IOU, but the fact that I am receiving this email illustrates why it is important to keep 100% of my assets off of platforms like this.

In the previous case, you could hold my money against me. In this case, I am laughing at you. I have $0 on Uphold and I will continue to have $0.

If the issue here is the fact that I withdraw to different crypto addresses, I suggest you instead contact users who withdraw to the same wallet addresses and chide them for reusing addresses and thus using cryptocurrency in a more privacy-violating fashion.

Relationship with the users you receive funds from, as well as the purpose of such transactions (Include supporting documentation, if any)

As previously established, like everyone else who is forced to use Uphold, I use it for BAT. As such, I know the identities of literally zero of the people who may have donated to me through BAT. This should not be an issue for you since you do know these user’s accounts and at least can exhaustively track the movement of BAT payouts on your system.

So this is a question I should be asking you out of curiousity, if I cared about it.

In the BAT system, anyone who stumbles onto my website can end up giving me BAT. If you want me track everyone somehow and tell you, you are delusional.

Notice the Questions…

Notice the issue at work here: they don’t just want to have my information, but they seem very interested in:

If the addresses I withdrew to are my addresses or someone else’s…
What my relationship with other people on the network are…
What real-world business interactions might correspond to transactions…

To even answer these questions could put other people’s privacy at risk.

This is why people who say “I don’t care about privacy, I got nothing to hide” need to remember that in fighting for free and open, yet private tech is not a war we wage for our own selfishness, but to keep everyone else, including our children safer and more private than we have been able to be.

“Bitcoin fixes this.”

What is so pathetic about this email, which represents the wider comply-cuck movement in crypto—is that it is precisely what Bitcoin was developed to avoid.

The goal of a peer-to-peer currency is to make the “due diligence” of financial “custodians” irrelevant since users have every technology sufficient to control, hold and secure their own funds.

The two greatest unfortunate problems in crypto are that:

Scammers and “developers” realize that they can mimic the custodianship in the traditional financial system to control users’ funds in centralized exchanges.
Most people in cryptocurrency are simply not discerning. They talk about self-custody, privacy and security, but they don’t actually do what they need to get any of that.

I will just say, it’s quite a shame as well how little the overlap between the free software movement widely and cryptocurrency is. These ideological strands absolutely require each other, but for bizarre historical reasons, they are separate, don’t understand each other and it is to everyone’s detriment.

On BAT and Uphold

I let my Upload account be closed. Who cares? I have to stand for something and it’s easy to do so when it’s humiliating to comply.

On the "Hate Speech" Psy-op

Tue, 03 May 2022 16:58:15 -0400

How to shamelessly win arguments.

If you’re out there to “win arguments” without shame or honesty, the easiest way to do it is variously distort, shame and socially discredit everyone else to such an extent that impressionable people are left with a choice of either extreme social shame or taking your side no matter how patently dishonest and illogical you are.

This is really how the modern propaganda engine works. It is never so good at justifying what it wants, but it is expert at herding very well-socialized people away from everything else. This has given us the bizarre state of affairs where everyone openly consents to elite values, but privately knows they’re lies.

“Hate Speech”

The idea of “Hate Speech” is one of the most concise and pure-distilled examples of this technique that it has really become the tool of choice of the opinion-molding class. It’s so easy, even a journalist could use it!

A lot of “conservative” people in pop-politics have definitely come to understand that the accusation of “hate speech” is tool used only on those it could not actually apply to. But why this term of all other possible ones? First, let’s inspect its traits:

If you accuse your opponent of “Hate Speech,” in fact, even use the word, you are creating the presuppositions that:

My opponent is emotional.
My opponent doesn’t have any real rational reasons to believe what he argues for due to that emotional motivation.
All people who believe his stance too are merely emotionally distorted.
My stance is so naturally obvious to people who are not emotional.

If you accuse someone in passing of “Hate speech,” you are making a tacit claim not just that they are governed by emotions, but that irrational emotions are the only possible justification for their stance. It’s a great tool as an accusation because it’s throwing a quick emotional tar and feathers on a target to frame an argument—and the only way to extricate for a target to free himself is to painstakingly explain himself (which no one has time for) or for the audience to actually invest time into understanding the wider context.

As an aside, it is definitely true that most “debates” are not logical, but tactical: people make associations to make their enemies look bad, and throw out arguments not even that are necessarily good, but that require time and mental effort—and sometime some inspired conciseness—to dismiss. Most debates are really emotional and mental gauntelets—and by “mental,” I don’t meant of intelligence or wit, but of sheer endurance of annoyance.

Either way, the normie, who lives in constant fear of being associated with scary buzzwords, scatters from the target of accusations of “hate speech” like a cockroach. To even deconstruct the psy-op I just outlined that’s way more verbal effort and risk than most people are willing to do, even if they are aware of the well-poisoning that comes with the term “hate speech.”

Hermetically-sealed “Hate” Domains

Why there’s no platform for “Hate.”

I’m reminded of the old 1989 “debate” between Philippe Rushton and one David Suzuki which can thankfully still be found even on YouTube.

It is worth observing that spectacle.

The debate was supposed to about genetic differences across races, particularly Rushton’s forte of IQ, etc. I stumbled across the debate as a teenage socialist and had never heard the research on race and genetics in Rushton’s 20 minute opening statement, so I eagerly awaited Suzuki’s rebuttal.

The rebuttal never came. Instead, Suzuki took the stage and chided the university for even allowing his opponent to speak. His speaking time was a constant flurry of “Hate Speech”-style accusations that were honestly awkward and shameless, not to mention devoid of even inept attempts to negate Rushton’s case. Suzuki at most only managed to repeat angrily a couple mantras of faith that everyone in the modern west is fed.

On a factual level and for “rational people,” Suzuki was loudly and embarrassingly admitting defeat. But rhetorically, he won: he provided an emotional out for those who wanted to stay in denial, he promoted fear among the undecided, and he poisoned the very argument itself with the “Hate Speech” technique.

Surely the crowd of Canadian university leftists was in his pocket beforehand, but it just took a little social prodding to have them cheering for him. If he had simply tried to rationally (and ineptly) tackle the science in front of him like an honest person, he would’ve “lost” the debate and many more of those leftists would have wavered in or lost their faith.

Racial genetic differences were such a losing issue for leftist intelligentsia that they have been so perfectly suppressed—and are really the Patient Zero issue for “Hate Speech” accusations. Even seeing a packed stadium in the Rushton debate is cause for nostalgia: congregating 10 people on a university campus to talk about racial genetics nowadays is sure to fall victim of a bomb threat, terroristic reprisals and official condemnation and expulsion from the university itself.

This is the power of the “Hate Speech” psyop. You don’t have to have a case. In fact, it might be better if you don’t. Calling something “Hate Speech” is what they call talking past the sale.

The leftist professor merely publicly presupposed that his opponent was wrong, and took the discussion to, “Since we suppose that he is wrong and evilly motivated, how can we suppress him?” This of course, is the same thing that a modern journalist does.

This is substantially more effective than honestly taking the L.

“Hate Speech” to create “hate.”

The use of the term “Hate Speech” is agit-prop and tactical frustration in itself. It’s such a mendacious and condescending rhetorical technique because it is targeted at people who aren’t at all emotional about their stances with the specific goal to make them emotional.

Compare the pose of Rushton and his supporters with his debate opponent and his supporters in the video above. Who is hateful? Who is motivated by emotion and ignorance?

Nonetheless, the goal is to make politically persecuted people upset by categorically dismissing their needs and to provoke them to anger, thus simultaneously creating and proving the concept of “hate” as a motivation.

It’s the political equivalent of “Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?” It’s a game where a powerful party humiliates their underlings with hopes of attempted retribution.

Accusations of “hate speech” are not leveled to decrease some amorphous ball of “hate” out in society, but to rapidly increase it. I’ve talked about this technique used by the media in videos, but the very obvious goal is to provoke public fury and use that fury as a justification to tightening the screws even more severely.

Requisite Propaganda

Obviously, only a fool would think anyone could accuse someone of “hate speech” and it be effective just by those magical words itself. “Hate” is a gun that only fires rightward. That’s why it’s a useful weapon for the powers that be. It’s a weapon that one cannot fight back with.

This is because the media has brought us up with an unrelenting stream of imaginary archetypes of “hate.” Only if the accusation matches one of these archetypes is it truly the “hate” of “hate speech.” When someone is called a hater, that accusation only resonates in the mind of brainwashed westerners if it matches the thousands of force-fed incidents of micro-drama we’ve gotten from television, film and social media.

How many times has a TV show shown you a vignette of, say, a perfectly innocent black man who out of the blue is mercilessly terrified by a evil white person? Everyone in the scene looks on in shame, but no one stands up for the harmless colored gentleman, so the show or film can pull each emotional string until the sickened and confused audience privately fumes with hatred against those odious white haters. Every person with at least a toe in reality viscerally notices how out-of-sync such scenes are with real life, but the psychological effect of the constant stream of exactly this type of brainwashing causes people to accept there must be some reality to this “hate.”

We are supposed to think whites “hate” non-whites. We will get a constant stream of imaginary examples of these in TV shows which have no correspondence to reality. Men “hate” women. Attractive people “hate” unattractive people. Christians “hate” other religions. Jocks/chads “hate” losers. The strong “hate” the weak. And everyone “hates” the poor, innocent Jews.

In each case, this “hate” is only depicted in one direction. Therefore using the acclamation of “hate speech” only works when it is buttressed by the many media vignette one holds in his memory of subconscious. Therefore, accusing a man, Christian or an attractive jock of “hate” works, but accusing a vindictive woman, Jew or nerd of the same for some reason doesn’t, when more accurate.

The inundation of propaganda is so intense that it continues on its own momentum. If you want to peek down a confusing rabbit hole, there is an entire cottage industry of social media accounts make professionally-produced imaginary scenarios that mimic mainstream “hate” propaganda. Stranger than that, you might notice that in the comments to such videos, perhaps a strong majority of people don’t seem to notice that these are fictional videos—obviously staged for either clicks or for more pernicious brainwashing content.

We can laugh at those commenters, but it’s probable that you haven’t noticed the same fictionality in the TV and media you grew up with. Even if you rejected the fakery of specific hoaxes, the wider gestalt of what we are supposed to believe remains. You might realize that each and every imaginary “Nazi” event in mass-media fiction is, in fact, fiction—but all people, even the most “red-pilled” walk away from the TV with some idea that there must be some kind of truth to, say, the idea of secret Nazis lurking everywhere in the shadows ready to “hate” unsuspecting victims. At the very least you might feel the need to differentiate yourself from these phantasmagorical Nazis.

Because of this, Hollywood can publish very absurd agit-prop to get you to actually hate men/whites/chads/Christians or whichever target group they have prepped as being most important to undermine for their program or personal vindiction. Nowadays they are becoming more artless, blatant and ham-fisted, so you get films like this or things like Tarantino’s films about Nazis or southerners that are passed off as “fun jokes” and “exaggeration,” but have already been transmuted from ludicrous myth to assumed history in the mainstream mind.

Ultimately, there is no blood libel too ridiculous for them to accuse their enemies of. Logic is a line they want to cross, because when they do, you—their target—might leap into anger and reactivity.

Overcome Evil with Good

It is most important, however, that you not read this as agit-prop. Indeed, we should have natural reactions of disgust to lies and propaganda, but the entire point of the “hate speech” psy-op is to frustrate the target into embodying the very accusation. Enough haranguing and the most sensible people become more the imaginary Nazis the media is looking for—well, at least something somewhat like them.

But as Saint Paul says simply, “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” I’m describing an illness in this article, not so you can get upset at the people who inflict it, but so that when you know what it is and how it works, you don’t have too react or otherwise be psy-opped by the rhetoric.

Not Even Libertarians Believe in Libertarianism

Tue, 03 May 2022 16:08:12 -0400

Nietzsche, in I forget which book (probably Genealogy of Morals), noted that moral philosophy is kind of the opposite of other sciences. In moral philosophy, we know beforehand what is “right” and “wrong,” and its goal is not so much to discover new truth as to concoct a framework that helps us understand the system of why things are “right” and “wrong.” We do not “discover” new moral truths.

Nietzsche was living before there were any libertarians.

Libertarianism, like other “Enlightenment” philosophies turns the entire system on its head. It creates its own “rational system” that reaches new and absurd ethical conclusions. Like Marxism, liberalism and everything-else-ism, libertarianism is a form of rational pornography that continues to lead us to absurd conclusions because of the intellectual appeal of its reasoning system. The system produces plenty of absurdities, but to lift one’s self out and abandon the pretense is a Herculean task.

Years ago—when I was a libertarian too libertarian to call himself a libertarian—, I remember watching a talk by Jonathan Haidt on his social research on the ethical values that he gave to an audience of libertarians. He flattered the libertarians for their intelligence and logical consistency, and gave them hypothetical ethical scenarios starting from abortion and escalating to rich people buying fetuses in the womb to make brain-dead to later grow into unconscious sex slaves. Many of the libertarians gleefully and proudly consented to the permissibility of even the most absurd of such hypotheticals with smiles and laughter.

The smiles and laughter come not because these people genuinely think they are endorsing some obvious moral good, but because with pride and felt-superiority they know they are endorsing absurdities that nonetheless show their slavish dedication the principle the identify with. This is a badge of dedication no different from leftists who will insist with full pretended certainty that a hairy pervert in a skirt is actually a woman.

Political Nihilism

There’s always a large gap between what a libertarian professes to believe and what he actually does. Here’s an experiment. Go to the closest libertarian and say that you want to ban something. It doesn’t matter what: pornography, heroin, abortion, cigarette ads, prostitution, alcohol, take your pick.

This is, without a doubt the response you will get:

“Woah, dude, you can’t ban pornography! I mean if you ban it, you can’t enforce it and people are just going to do it anyway! Plus who are you to decide for all of us what’s good and bad?”

This straw response holds a distilled Platonic quintessence of every libertarian statement ever, which can be summed up in two assumptions:

Assumption A: Banning something, even something indubitably bad is useless because “people are just going to do it anyway.”
Assumption B: Making any kind of moral or legal judgment is impossible because of a nihilist argument to absurdity.

“They’re just going to do it anyway!”

This is an “interesting” “argument” because if we foolishly take it seriously, it does indeed utterly annihilate any anti-libertarian arguments you can come up with… but it also equally annuls libertarianism itself.

No libertarian actually believes this. If they did, they would be entirely politically apathetic: They wouldn’t argue that marijuana or other drugs should be legalized, because in this twisted logic, it makes no difference and it is not enforcible.

In real life, every libertarian knows that this is a cynical and mendacious argument because all of their political advocacy is predicated on it not being true.

I haven’t heard libertarians yet saying we should legalize murder or rape since “If you want to do it, you’re going to end up doing it anyway.” This argument is equally applicable here. (Actually I’m revising this article draft to say, I have gotten at least one email saying precisely that murder should be legal since “people are just going to do it anyway.”)

Libertarians are supposed to know about economics. One of the first things economists should acknowledge is that people respond to incentives. There are certain actions that have only negative externalities. A rational state would take means to disincentivize these and they would be successful.

Defending the Indefensible…

Libertarians are in the awkward position of constantly having to argue that things that are entirely destructive and damaging have to be legal for some reason.

Pornography causes nothing but harm. Crystal meth causes nothing but harm. Bath salts cause nothing but harm. Every libertarian knows all of this, but so they can feel politically consistent, they have to defend to death the legality of bath salts or we lose everything.

I can at least give some honorable mention to Murray Rothbard, who after tortured logic eventually determined that the mere creation and ownership of nuclear weapons is inherently bad. So at least we won’t have private nukes in the an-cap paradise… (Although he did famously argue that parents have the right to sell their children.)

This is the issue with the mere Enlightenment idea that reason has to precede patent morality: we can’t just say “This is wrong.” We have to construct this massive and leaky intellectual edifice that provides some consistent rational justification for all moral claims simultaneously, and we better hope that human reason, supposedly created by Darwinian accidents, is up for the job.

Anarcho-tyranny

One of the reasons that this argument can pass under the radar as non-retarded is because Americans are so emotionally abused by their non-government. In America, it is common for many things to be nominally illegal, while at the same time being publicly endorsed and supported by the government.

“Illegal” immigration is nominally “illegal,” but it is effectively never enforced. Tens of millions of people in America have built their lives entirely dependent on the fact that illegal immigration is not really illegal. Oftentimes its non-enforcement is enforced by law and public criticism of it is more likely to lose you a job!

Marijuana is also “illegal” (it remains a federally controlled substance), but government allows it and it is advertised profusely in American pop culture. Democracy is by its nature a dishonest government where there will always be a massive gap between de facto and de jure.

Libertarians will say, “You can’t ban pornography,” or silly things like that forgetting that the government already has done a great job in banning child pornography. The state and its satellites have done an exceptionally clean job of censoring “‘racism’ on the internet” because it is in their twisted motives to do so at all cost. If they were 10% as enthusiastic for regulating pornography, you would never have run into internet pornography in your life.

Other nations that actually desire to regulate drugs or pornography or prostitution or vices do so very, very well. If you don’t think so, go smuggle drugs into China or Singapore. Go ahead. It should be a great market since competition is scarce.

In reality, libertarians, in all their social activism are not advocating to bring hard drugs into China because ultimately they don’t believe that drugs are good or that anyone is improved by them. They are okay with drugs because their ideology leads them to and because they imagine themselves too smart to be dumb enough to use the “freedom” to get addicted to drugs.

China and drugs is an important side note. Remember the Opium wars? Remember when western powers managed to domesticate and drug a significant portion of the Chinese population to make money and increase their influence over them? How is a pro-drug libertarian supposed to land on this conflict? Were the British and French empires fighting for freedom? If “people were just going to use opium anyway,” why did the British and French bother sending men to die to prevent China from enforcing their “unenforceable” laws?

“Who are you do make that decision?”

What about argument 2: “Who are you to decide what we should ban?”

Libertarians talk about these things as if it is some esoteric concept.

In a livestream a bit ago, libertarian coomers went apoplectic when I said matter-of-factly that pornography should be banned. Duh.

Letting the “Free Market” Decide

Now the libertarian has a highly nominalistic concept of “right” and “wrong.” There is a kind of Darwinian intuition behind what these words could be used for.

For example, how do we determine what is a proper way to raise children? What are the proper social norms conducive for the continuity of society? Is it appropriate to take a certain drug or substance?

The libertarian has no answers to these questions from their philosophy alone, but instead thinks they should be left to a kind of “free market” or Darwinian system of experimentation. This “free market” allows society to “freely” experiment with all possibilities, and those that are truly beneficial will persist, while negative things will be discarded.

For example, for a libertarian, drugs should be legal, even drugs that are unambiguously deleterious. The libertarian’s “solution” for these drugs (which some libertarians have no doubt been yelling at the screen since I mentioned it above) is ultimately that there are people who will experiment illogically with dangerous drugs and those who have superior moral senses who can resist them. The Darwinian “free market” allows the impulsive to be maximally harmed as a lesson to us all, while the wise are unscathed and reproduce in having more children and having a greater effect on society’s standards.

(Some libertarians will stray from “Darwinian” terms, but this is an honest appraisal and I totally lack the leftist hatred of anything not dysgenic.)

The important thing is that certain types of errors or short-sightedness are disproportionately punishing. For example, we don’t need a Darwinian free-market solution to nuclear arms, as once a global error is made with them, it’s hard for us to undo the problem.

A society is hard to build and easy to destroy. If you acknowledge this, you realize that this is why promiscuity, drug and the like that cause life-altering deviations from social functionality. When a generation is free to make massive, irreversible errors, they cannot be undone, and even the information of that error is rarely heeded automatically.

A Truly Stateless Society Is a “Reactionary” One.

I’ve heard many libertarians argue just this for the determination of social norms. As a libertarian I did believe it as well… But suppose we have this libertarian paradise: What really does it look like after several generations?

As time goes on, “society” learns more and more about which behaviors are, if we use the term in a utilitarian sense, wrong or bad or evil. Our libertarian society, to continue and improve must take on highly “judgmental” and conservative social norms. At the same time, the enforcement of these social norms is, let’s say, post-rational. A generation might see the harm that something causes, and then teach that to their children and grandchildren who may pass on the information and norm without knowing some deep praxeological justification for why this behavior is bad on a rational level.

We will quickly learn that certain substances and foods are “evil.” But just as well, we can learn just as easily that it is socially harmful for women to dress in a way that reveals their legs and shoulders.

That said, it’s important to remember that the “state” truly is a novel invention. There have been empires throughout history, but they were never comparable to the highly intrusive states of today or mass-monitoring, mass-taxation, mass-management and social engineering. In essence, every society of history was either a total “anarchy” in the sense of a stateless society, or one where a far-off ruler and bureaucracy had largely nothing to do with the daily life of people.

The restrictions on one’s individual life (even if they now are incarnate in laws of the state) have been emergent social norms, in the same way that this line of thinking above (which is very Hayekian). What I mean by this is the that “irrationally” socially conservative old cultures of the world are, in fact, libertarian societies that have just aged a little bit and acquired that social wisdom that any “libertarian” society needs to function.

Most self-described “libertarians” usually do not want to returned to the merely “privately-enforced” hyper-conservatism of the past. The “libertarians” who smoke marijuana, sell other drugs, have family-less and promiscuous lives are really more properly just libertines who have some cursory awareness of libertarian argumentation to rationalize their personal degeneracy.

The Two Types of “Libertarians”

So in truth, “libertarians” are really two very distinct groups who are, in their essence ultimately incompatible.

On one side, the degenerate libertine, but on the other, the “paleo-libertarian/paleo-conservative” who is a little more in the vein of Hoppe. They view the modern [American/Western] state as a force both degenerate and suffocating.

I don’t ultimately think these people should be burdened by association with the first category, but I also think they do too often associate themselves with the libertines just because their argumentative arms are always aimed at “control” and talk about “freedom.” In the mind of modern man, and sometimes in their own, they truly do come off with a goal similar to the revolutionary leftist; this is in fact how Murray Rothbard construed it when saying that right libertarians are the “true leftists.”

But a truly “free” and “stateless” society is actually one where there are very often very many more social expectations (which can be interpreted as constraints) upon individuals.

I think especially Americans living in Anarcho-tyranny have a very sarcastic view of government. One of the reasons that many “libertarians” ceased being libertarians when Trump came around is because Trump finally presented the possibility of an “out” within the political system, even if a long-shot.

Look too at the many libertarians who have fallen in love with Nayib Bukele of El Salvador—he drops a lot of libertarian buzzwords and is a big bitcoiner, but he is most notably seriously and overwhelmingly enforcing crimainal law, but also will often cut corners of “civil rights” to do so.

I don’t mean that in a bad sense—in fact, he is likely doing the best libertarian government possible for his people and is genuinely restoring the freedom of his people to be and act without rampant crime or drugs. Bukele might be one of the most admirable heads of state right now. You can debate about how “libertarian” or not he might be in some autistic sense, but it is better to live in the New El Salvador than the old, for libertarians or “statists.”

Obscenities are symptoms of weak minds.

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few years, I made the decision to totally cut obscenities out from my speech. You might actually be able to find recordings of me cursing four or five years ago, but as of now, I really stand by my decision.

Obscenities are the linguistic equivalent of an trashy emaciated person entirely decked in tattoos, smoking cigarettes and wearing a shirt with nudity on it. They'll defend what they do on the idea that it's someone "their right," or "expression," as if they do what they do for some lofty philosophical reason. What everyone else sees is a person who is not in control of themselves or their vices, in fact, someone who views their vices as a good thing.

There's the atomistic and nihilistic tendency to give an "intellectual" argument for obscenities: "What's so special," the argument goes, "about obscenities in English? They're just a combination of arbitrary sounds! They don't have some objective magical harm in them."

But the "arbitrary sounds" in an obscenity do indeed have a special place in human psychology. Obscenities are produced and processed in the brain quite differently from non-obscene language, involving the more animalistic/reptilian parts of the brain. When assembling a well-thought out case, there is really never a temptation to litter it with curses.

When a person curses, it's a direct indication that they are thinking on a lower, more reactive, more emotional level.

I get a lot of email every day and most I don't answer for time constraints. I've gotten good at filtering out emails, and I have realized that obscenities are one of the best indications of a low quality content. I haven't gone so far as to totally block curse words with Spam Assassin, but it is genuinely rare that I receive an email of any quality with obscenities.

All of this is to say that obscenities are a great indication of reactive thinking. When someone is cursing, he is thinking at least in part like an animal. In deciding not to curse, I have decided to be quiet first, then only evaluate things calmly afterwards.

For me, there is extra reason not to curse because I am in a position of an exemplar for many people on the internet. The internet is full of "snarky" people cursing profusely and creating the idea that all "famous" people should be highly arrogant and emotional.

There might be times when it's proper for someone to react in righteous anger, but those are in reality so rare as to only happen in life-and-death situations. Instead, a lot of modern nihilism is becoming just as emotionally transfixed on minor slights and imaginary problems, thus one spews out curses as if one is fighting some kind of crusade. This makes profuse cursers not only the type of people who are reactive and hard to relate to, but indicates how disordered their priorities are.

Every Web Browser Absolutely Sucks.

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The title explains it all, you don't even have to read.

There are no good, even passable web browsers. None. Not a single one even comes close.

The weird thing is this: making a good browser should be easy! Among the existing web browsers, you could assemble all the parts necessary for a passable (if not perfect) browser. No one has ever bothered to do this, instead, people assembled 90% good stuff and 10% junk.

Here I will list:

Features a passable browser must have.
Features a good browser must have.

Again, no browser out there has all the traits of even a passable browser, but we might as well list them all here for the record.

Features a Passable Browser must have.

It must actually work on the modern web.

Sorry terminal browsers. lynx, w3m, you're out. There is some role for you in scripting and dumping HTML email as standard output, but no can get along using a terminal browser unless they are purposefully limiting themselves to a very small segment of the modern web. I wish this weren't the case, but it is.

Sorry also to niche independent browsers like Dillo. Nice concept, but not usable. I don't think Dillo can even handle my simple modern CSS on my website.

Free and open source software.

No reason to explain this. Absolutely insane to use a program to browse the internet whose source code isn't publicly auditable.

No unsolicited connections.

This will be literally the easiest point to comply with, but also the rarest thing in browsers:

Don't automatically connect to Google.com or Brave.org or some stupid start page or analytics page or Cloudflare or any other site on when I open the browser or at anytime while browsing unless I type the address in my URL bar.

Don't automatically connect to an "autoupdate" site, and especially don't pull updates from it.

Don't send analytics. Don't make analytics. Actually, don't even ask me if I want to opt in to "bug reports," I don't. If something breaks, I'll tell you.

If you want analytics, I want you to beg for it on an obscure Settings page. Tell me your sob story about how it helps you get funding. And I will still not give you analytics because I don't let my file manager, email client, music player, video player, text editor or any other random program monitor me for no reason, least of all will I allow a browser, which often handles the most sensitive information.

It's a statement of just how bad the browser market is that this is even something we're talking about.

Ad-blocking must come with the browser.

No one opens up a browser to view ads. This is just not why browsers exist. No human in all of humanity has benefited from involuntary ads. 100% of people would be better off with browsers without ads, therefore, a sensible browser should block ads.

This is no more controversial than saying that if you rent a server from a company, it should come with sensible defaults, like an operating system, a solid root password that a Chinese script-kiddy isn't going to guess and maybe a firewall.

Ad-blocking must be universal, so should other sensible "add-ons"/features. HTTPS everywhere is a sensible universal browser feature as well. There are no places where using HTTP is preferrable to using HTTPS if available. If there are reasons to ever use HTTP only or to view ads, they are so rare as to hide them away in the Settings Menu.

Brave (Le Shill Lion) has at least done us the favor of blocking ads by default (it also has HTTPS everywhere). Qutebrowser has a notional hosts ad-blocker that allegedly blocks I guess some things, but you will still get an add-full browsing experience. GNU Icecat has a lot of sensible default add-ons (I forget if it blocks ads by default), but in truth, only developers have any reasons to use bare browsers without ad-blockers and other basic add-ons.

Basic options!

How long has Google Chrome and its clones been around? A decade? Why has literally no one in that period had a problem with the fact that none of these browsers have an option to not store history!

No, not Incognito mode, I want to keep cookies, but I don't want stupid browsing history showing up whenever I start typing.

No, I don't just want you to not suggest previous sites, but still store them all for some reason.

Thankfully, Firefox browsers at least have this basic option. Brave does too. Ungoogled Chromium doesn't. Useless. I like that it doesn't send my browsing history to Google and all, but I also don't want it broadcasting it to the people over my shoulder when I type a url. I honestly imagine that the mandatory "we must keep history" aspect of Chrome is subtle social engineering. "Oh you shouldn't have that choice, you want everything you do to be stored for reference!"

Internet browser history is really obsolete.

For normies on the modern web, there is really less and less purpose of browsing history with every passing year. In the better days of the internet, back when people actually browsed the internet and you would see dozens or hundreds of different websites a day, there is kind of a use to a constant log of history, in case you vaguely remember seeing a site, but couldn't remember how you got there and you couldn't search because there were no search engines.

Web history is basically obsolete for 99% of people because:

They use only Facebook or two other sites and quite simply never see any of the rest of the internet.
Bookmarks exist and are widely used for the few sites people do use.
People can use a search engine to find a site.
They are daily watching porn or simping for instathots or doing other abominable things for which they will be erasing their internet history anyway.

No clutter in the browser experience and Neutrality

Brave. Lol.

I complimented Brave for adding ad-blockers to their browser by default. The issue is that they also continually add more and more and more stuff to their browser of extremely niche orientation in every single update.

Update Brave and there'll be some new Crypto gadget on the main screen which is probably making some kind of unsolicited connections to something or another. Brave has been dutiful enough to allow everything to be disabled, but none of this is browsing related. I want a browser. Stop giving me stuff that's not a browser. That's why I liked the idea of the ad-block, but it looks like Brave will need a feature-block as well.

Aside from Brave, about every browser from Pale Meme to unJewgled Chromium has a distracting stupid start page that advertises your history or suggests inane sites. When I open a fresh browser window, unless I have specifically created an HTML page which I have set as my homepage, I want to see a clean virgin page. I don't want to see giant soy blocks that show a links to my bank account or the Bitchute documentaries I was just watching. If I want to get there quick, I'll bookmark it, thank you.

I want a browser to be neutral, not personalized. Or at least neutral by default. I don't want it to advertise new features and software. I don't want it to change when I visit a site.

Do not clutter home!

Browsers routinely make messes in home directories. XDG Compliance. Know these directories:

~/.config/ – for configuration files
~/.cache/ – for your cache
~/.local/share – for share files

This is where stuff goes so 100 useless folders don't clog up your home when you ls -a. No one seems to have told this to browser developers.

Chromium browsers give you this useless ~/.pki/ directory. If you're using a Furryfox clone, they are going to force at least ~/.mozilla/ on you, but you'll also get something else. Installed Librewolf? You'll get ~/.librewolf/ too.

I don't know how hardcoded Google and Mozilla made this annoyance, but if you can deGoogle Chrome, you can use the proper XDG directories.

Dishonorable mention definitely goes to Pale Moon. Being an independent browser, you would think they would jump at being less annoying. Nope: ~/.Moonchild Productions right in your home directory. Capital letters and whitespace: a big eff-yew to Unix-based operating systems. (I think they made this lower-case now?)

Must be written in a sensible language.

Aw, Dang!

Sorry, Qutebrowser, you thought you could make it all the way right?

Hey, that's okay, there are a lot of great aspects to being written in Python: it's easier for people to play around with your config file and script things into it, but let's be real: you're slow and buggy and take way more system resources than a browser written in C or C++. That's just not going to cut it for a mainstream browser that old boomers are going to be watching YouTube and Netflix in with 250 other open tabs.

Maybe if you were written in Go? Or maybe you could get compiled in Cython or something? Idk, but as it is, it ain't cutting it.

Of course I realize that Qutebrowser does basically everything else well. If I had a computer with more CPU power and RAM, I might use Qutebrowser. It has gotten a lot better over the years.

Features a Good Browser must have.

Now that we've ascended past the summits of the bare minimum, we might as well discuss what additional features every browser should have.

A config file.

I don't care if only 2% of people know what a configuration file is, you need one. You can keep your Settings menu for normies, but it's nuts that browsers think it's okay to get by without a configuration file.

Once someone has their browser configured, all they have to do if they change computers or want to replicate their settings is to move one file. Or for someone like me, who has people wanting to install my system configuration a lot, it would be convenient to be able to have a single text message that assembles a browser with sensible settings. You just can do that though. You can sorta-kinda do that with some Furryfox settings, but for a Chromium browser, forget about it.

Either way, there needs to be a simple text file that can handle setting settings, like:

Add-on lists including links to the source (similar to a vim plugin manager)
Key bindings and custom shortcuts
Bookmarks
Search engine prefixes (combination of the two above).
Graphical settings, color appearance, organization of tabs and buttons
Font, language

Config files, even if 2% of people are going to use them now open up a new world of sharable and editable settings. This will solve a lot of tech support issues as well, frankly.

Actually...

After the configuration file, every other feature a browser should have comes for free. For example, it would be nice to get vim-like key-bindings for mouseless browsing, but that is really dealt with custom key-binds (and I suppose a link hint feature).

In general, I feel that once you have the sensible defaults above and configuration file, you really have everything. Browsers suddenly become programs with the same level of usability and customizability and non-egregiousness of every other program on the computer.

Summary

A browser...

Must actually work.
Must be free and open source software.
Must make no unsollicited connections.
Must block unsollicited ads and other sensible defaults.
Must have sensible options for history and cookies.
Must not be cluttered by features irrelevant to browsing.
Must not clutter the filesystem.
Must be written in a fast language light on system resources.
Must have a configuration file.

Tell me when a browser finally meets these requirements.

Matrix vs. XMPP

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

What are XMPP and Matrix and what makes them special?

XMPP and Matrix are two decentralized and federated free sofware projects for chat, including true end-to-end encrypted chat.

Users can either install the software on their own server if they want, but they can also easily register on any public server—both allow any XMPP or Matrix user to talk to users on their server or on any other one. In essence, it works like email: you might have an email account on a different site than your friend, but all accounts on all sites can communicate.

In a world where most communication is done on centralized proprietary platforms without end-to-end encryption like Facebook, Telegram and Google, Matrix and XMPP both are permanent solutions to communication privacy. Even based boomerware like IRC has to play second fiddle to them.

The only question is, "Which is better? XMPP or Matrix?"

Matrix vs. XMPP: Which is better?

After timely research and experience, I will say that XMPP is superior to Matrix. I'll talk about why here, but I'll firstly discuss Matrix's apparent advantages over XMPP.

There are some use-cases where Matrix is preferrable to use and Matrix is somewhat easier for normal people to start using. However, Matrix, although it is still end-to-end encrypted has larger metadata liabilities. Although Matrix is decentralized, there are many issues that make it too reliant on the "main" Matrix.org server. It also has more significant problems in that metadata is spread from server to server.

Matrix's advantages over XMPP

Matrix is more normie friendly.

Although there are many Matrix clients out there, there is one "primary" one, Element (formerly called Riot). Element is a lot more streamlined and easier to use than most all other clients, and it is available on all platforms. This is because it is an odious Electron-based application, but that it is a big advantage to be able to tell your friends just about one program they can use on all platforms.

Matrix now comes End-to-end encrypted by default.

The standard Matrix-Synapse server now encrypts all chats and private rooms with end-to-end encryption by default. This is not the case for most XMPP servers. For example, OMEMO encryption can be used with XMPP servers, but it usually requires extra setting up and many XMPP clients do not have proper or easy compatibility with default End-to-end encryption (you may have to manually select to encrypt communications for each chat).

Matrix's default functionality is more "intuitive."

If someone sends you a message, you expect it to show up on all your devices, not just the one that checks first. When you install a new application on your phone, you sort of expect it to be able to view previous conversations in the chat. XMPP does not necessarily work like this by default (I should say that some XMPP servers do allow this), but in general Matrix chats are really more like entire chat histories that multiple people can edit and sync.

This makes Matrix a lot more familiar in functionality to old AOL/Google chats, or things like Discord or Telegram, which people are used to and find convenient. XMPP can indeed do all this, but it requires more setting up, and you are more likely to run into unexpected things when setting it up yourself.

XMPP's advantages over Matrix

But all that said, as I said above, XMPP is better than Matrix.

XMPP servers are easier to manage than Matrix.

The default Matrix server software is atrocious. Trying to do something "simple" like deleting a user account from the command line is frustration. You might have to open up databases yourself and do it manually. There is a distinct lack of configuration options in Matrix compared to XMPP servers and XMPP server usually have a good command-line interface to do basic things.

XMPP is lightweight. Matrix is big bloatware.

I just logged into a VPS where I host both a Matrix and an XMPP server. It has about 1G of RAM. Right now, 27.7% of my memory is hogged by the Matrix server, while the XMPP server is only using 1.4%. That makes Matrix a major resource hog, while XMPP is the kind of thing you can spin up on your already-existing VPS and not really have to worry about it.

This is no big surprise because the default Matrix server is soyware written in Python. While the Matrix team is allegedly working on a better non-Python server-side, XMPP already has many different kinds of server software to choose from, some of the more popular ones being ejabberd and Prosody IM.

Matrix is less decentralized.

This might be somewhat related to the above issue, but very few people actually run their own Matrix servers and instead, just use Matrix.org, which is the Matrix server of the official company. This means that policies and blocks issued by Matrix the organization can functionally disconnect who they want from most Matrix users.

Additionally, the default settings in the Matrix server configuration use matrix.org and vector.im. These sites thus get a lot of independent metadata from other unsuspecting instances.

Matrix is a metadata disaster.

It gets worse. Because Matrix doesn't really just exchange individual messages, but because it syncs entire chats to all involved servers, this means that while all messages might be end-to-end encrypted, the conversation metadata is known to all servers, including what accounts are involved, when messages are sent and other account information made public (for example, users can add their emails and phone numbers to their accounts). See more here.

That means that all Matrix servers, especially Matrix.org, has a huge repository of metadata. Although chats are thankfully encrypted, encrypted chat logs are synced between all relevant servers, spreading metadata far and wide, and nearly always back to Matrix.org.

Privacy with Matrix used to be even worse. Passwords used to be verified on a centralized identity server, and much more.

You're probably wondering how any of this could get any worse...

...

Take a guess...

...

🇮🇱 Matrix is linked to Israeli intelligence! 🇮🇱

Matrix was developed and funded by a company Amdocs. Amdocs is an Israeli company that has since moved to America and has near total knowledge of American telephone communications.

You can read about the fun history of Amdocs here. More about Matrix and Amdocs here.

Since American telephone records have "mysteriously" fallen into the hands of Israel, there are many questions as how this has happened. Perhaps this Israeli company which has had many Israeli military and intelligence officers involved with it and which also has all American telephone records might be involved?

Actually, this is just like Matrix. Amdocs does not have access to telephone audio (so far as I know), they only traffic in metadata (when calls are made and between whom). Matrix functions the same way. Chats are at least end-to-end encrypted (which still puts this Israeli honeypot lightyears ahead of proprietary spyware like Telegram), but Matrix metadata is easily available to server administrators.

Now to be clear, formally, since 2017, Amdocs no longer is the open sponsor of Matrix. It is instead funded by a break-off organization called Vector. But Matrix/Vector has somehow remained very, very well-funded for a "community-driven" project: they raised $8.5 million, that's a lot for free stuff! Crowd-funding for relatively unknown open source software projects is apparently much more lucrative than I thought!

(Of course, we all know that this is a baseless and widely deboonkted anti-semitic conspiracy theory as Our Greatest Ally^® Israel would never do anything bad to us at all.)

In conclusion

Matrix is federated and free software which is end-to-end encrypted, but it's bloated and the company behind it might be a privacy danger. Using Matrix is indisputably better than using Telegram or Google or Facebook on nearly every count, but XMPP outclasses Matrix on pretty much everything.

XMPP is minimal software that is easy to run on a small server. It requires more setup time and has the Linux-like "problem" of there being a lot of "fragmentation" (i.e. choices), but XMPP is a much better long-term tool despite the fact that it might require you to set a couple more settings to get it how you want. XMPP is also more scalable and customizeable.

I do run a Matrix server because I had to move some Telegram-using friends to something better and I was worried that the world of XMPP might be a little much. Retrospectively, I think I could've just switched them to XMPP, and I might still in the future, but Matrix is simpler for people to grasp and install if they don't know too much about computers.

How the XMPP environment can be improved

It would be very nice to have a cross-platform XMPP chat platform. Obviously I don't want Electron trash like Matrix's Element (although Element is intuitive enough), but when I say cross-platform, that might just be several different XMPP clients (one Linux, one Android, one iOS, etc.) that decide to go for similar design principles and branding. This might sound stupid, but it makes the environment accessible to people unfamiliar with it because they know that one program (or "branding") they can look up and recomend friends.

Other note

I suspect some people will be a little upset I "only" talked about Matrix and XMPP as chat protocols. In reality, both are highly extensible and can to many more things. I'll talk about that when I feel it's relevant, but most people looking into them are looking for an actually secure chat system.

Modern "Freedom" Means Being a Slave to Impulses

Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

What does freedom mean?

See this article in video form here.

Which of the following two people is more free:

A drug addict.
A average man who is only not a drug addict because he lives in a country where drugs are regulated or shamed in a way to make them hard to obtain.

Most modern people will have a kind of cognitive dissonance, a kind of glitch in their matrix here. In the modern view of freedom, freedom means the ability to do what you want without the government or society telling you what to do, so (1), the drug addict, should be more "free."

But at the same time, this feels wrong. (2) probably lives a better life. He is more suited to make more and better decisions. Someone addicted to drugs is highly constrained in the kind of life they have to live to fulfill their addiction.

Even extreme libertarians will probably say (2) is in a better place, but might chalk things up to (1) needing to have more discipline and they'll make up some just-so story as for why unambiguously bad drugs, or pornography, or dangerous things should be allowed anyway.

Classical freedom

In reality, since the Enlightenment, we have had a hobbled understanding of what "freedom" is. Enlightenment "freedom" is only the freedom to perfectly follow the whims of impulses and vices indiscriminately.

The Christian tradition

Christians stated the classical view of freedom very clearly. Paul writes that all men are either "slaves to Christ" or "slaves to sin." The modern man wants to retort that he doesn't want to be a slave to anything, but wants to be his own master, but there is really no such thing.

One can be guided by Christ, or more generally, by consistent moral principles, restraint and forethought. Or one can abandon the pretense of morality and by definition follow his impulses to fornication, substance-abuse, and general reckless living.

These masters aren't equivalent either. Being a slave to one is nothing like being a slave to another. Slaves to sin are wrapped up into incoherent and uncontrollable behavior. Following one's sexual whims might be inconsistent and thoughtless behavior that one likes one second and is disgusted by the next. It might mean someone exploding in rage and emotion.

This "free" man, a slave to sin, is only bound by the practical consideration that he might get caught or shamed by "prudes" and that might dampen his ability to follow his inpulses more.

Impulses are not the man

If we look at the modern world as if it has desires and goals for us, it certainly seems like it is trying to induce as many people as possible into being slave to sin. People no long have identity in who they actually are, but in accidental preferences formed over years of impulse-seeking: their sexual fetishes, drugs of choice, their favorite TV show to consoom or their favorite music they constantly pump in their head to dampen the possibility that an original reflective thought might occur to them.

More than that, these people often can't even fathom of life without their master sins, and retort in rage when someone dares to direct them otherwise or "judge" them. They don't just have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome with sin, but they can't comprehend the fact the people are something deeper than their pleasure habits.

Control of Impulses Leads to Freedom

However if one can constrain his impulses, he will be free to truly sit down and deliberate and make free decisions on what is best to do.

This is where true freedom begins. The concept is totally alien to the coomer, the slave to sin, because he can't even afford the mental space to think further than his constant service to sin.

To him, it is merely "me having fun," versus "some haters who are against fun."

Slaves to Vices are Slaves in General

If you indentify with your impulses, it's very easy to get you motivated to defend them with the same impulsivity if you are told that they are "under attack." While impulsive people might be hard to be around as individuals, they are easy to control as groups and can be herded around like unthinking sheep.

People who are reactive in politics are always the losers, and what is an impulsive life but one that is entirely reactive and therefore controllable?

The Kingly State

With the classical understanding of freedom, the goal of social conventions, traditional morality and the good government is to increase true liberty by minimizing one's temptation to vice. People are born with some tendency to vice (original sin to Chrisitians) that can be easily made worse. The goal of normal society is to lead people away from lasciviousness and impulsive behavior. (That is clearly not the goal of the modern West, however.)

A drug addict is not free. A teenager who gets home from school everyday, closes his door and watches internet pornography is not free. A person who compulsively checks their social media feed when they wake up or are minorly bored is not free. A woman who sleeps around throughout her twenties and is left with nothing is not free. A boy who stays up late because he has to "grind" on a video game is not free.

No one can say that these people truly want what they do: no one fully consents to any impulsive behavior. This is actually why in the Catholic tradition, sins of incontinence are not as grave as deliberate sins. It's not a fair game.

Either way, the goal of the church, or a moral society and moral government generally, is to increase freedom by being a countervailing power to inborn vices.

The point of moral instruction is not to restrain man, but to make him more free by eliminating the true causes of his enslavement: his vices, his bad habits, his sexual paraphilias, his gluttony and greed.

Conspiratorial Thinking and "Multiple Outs"

Wed, 05 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

How to do magic tricks...

Magicians have this concept called "Multiple Outs." It's actually how you can do simple magic tricks. Suppose you have a person pick a card and say you will guess the suit of their card.

They pick a diamond card and announce it, and you tell them to check underneath their chair to reveal a slip of paper that says, "You will pick a diamond card."

That might sound like a nice trick, but if they had picked a spade, you have another piece of paper under the fruitbowl that says, "You will pick a spade." If they pick a club, you unbutton your shirt to reveal a giant club written on your undershirt, etc.

In essence, for any possible outcomes, you have a response planned that seems natural and predictive. This is one of the ways that magicians do what they do, often with more complicated mechanisms.

Applications

Multiple outs are actually real magic.

You've heard the expression "hope for the best and plan for the worst," but the concept of multiple outs is that one should be planning for all possible outcomes, including those that you yourself might not even anticipate now.

Every business plan should have multiple outs. Your major life decisions should be planned with multiple outs. You should even tacitly plan dates with multiple outs, so that unexpected events can be met with a confident, perhaps even better replacements.

Multiple outs in political power

Any longstanding group in political power is by the mere fact of their survival sure to have mastered the sleight of hand of "multiple outs."

This serves not only to continue in political power, but to cement their power further by the appearance of inevitability. A ruler or ruling class puts themselves in a position to benefit from any possible occurrence: be ready even to use disaster to your benefit, as Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel put it succinctly: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste."

Conspiracy?

People skeptical of the state sometimes devolve into thinking that every major political event is in one way or another is planned in advance. This is because they don't understand and apply the concept of multiple outs. They see that their rulers are good at benefiting from any chaos or unforeseen events, so assume these events must've been engineered.

Look at the corona virus: it's a great example of an event that has hugely benefited a small elite: it has bankrupted small businesses in favor of Amazon, destroyed churches and mom and pop stores in favor of passively consooming digital infotainment from curated social media sites and more. It is a rationalization of state location and contact monitoring and things far beyond what anyone dreamed of. It was a rationalization for sending out unsolicited ballots to unverified voter rolls which had very obvious beneficiaries. It has produced a cult of doomsday believers crying for the state to lock them in their houses and make them wear fetishistic masks.

Seeing all this and asking who benefits, "Cui bono?" might lead you to think that the whole thing was planned: perhaps the disease itself is fake, or maybe it was real, but spread on purpose, or perhaps it was engineered. You've probably seen stuff like this, and while I won't dismiss this kind of thinking out of hand, it's unnecessary.

In reality, the ruling classes of the West have openly prepared to benefit from a pandemic scenario. COVID19 was deemed "closed enough" to a pandemic, and the momentum of the system took over. It's not even that they wanted it to happen, but they were prepped to benefit from it as a contingency plan if it might occur.

The Conspiracy Rabbit Hole and the Omnipotent Cathedral

There are some people who see how the ruling class is in a position to benefit from every school-shooting, police encounter, foreign entanglement, dissident politician and everything else and thus assume that everything they see must be arranged in advance. There is a logic behind believing this: it does seem way to convenient for all of this to happen at what retroactively seems to the best time, but this leads people to the much more uneconomical idea that the System is so omnipotent that it controls every event and every reaction to every event.

In reality, our rulers just know how to use multiple outs. When you know how to do that, it seems like you are always in control, and by nature, people attribute a kind of magical power to you. All you have to do is stay cool and play it off like you predicted it all.

This is why "the System" always seem to win.

The system knows how to play with multiple outs.

There is a canned response, or at least a reasonably ad-libbed response, for every event and every possible event. They are in a position of antifragility and can gain from nearly any possible event. When they can't, the media can at least throw enough mud on public perception to inspire apathy or confusion.

There are certainly portions of the System which are "conspiratorial." Major news organizations usually coordinate on what editorial line to publish, but in general, their entrenched power comes from a detached ability to be flexible in new events.

The omnipotence and permanence of the Soystem is illusory. It comes from that flexibility.

Multiple outs in your life

Even aside from politics, it's important to behave yourself in a way that allow yourself to have multiple outs. Business, social life, major decisions and in everything else. Never tether yourself to one option; that's when you lose. Have a smart response to co-opt anything that can happen, no matter how good or bad.

Monero and Other Privacy Coins

Tue, 04 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As I said in other writings and videos, no serious cryptocurrency can function in real life which is not also a truly private cryptocurrency.

By far, the most popular of all these is Monero, which has already become the de facto currency of the dark web, but also of all cryptocurrency users who actually use cryptocurrency for purposes other than a mere investment.

Monero, however, is not actually the only private or pseudo-private crypto-currency, and while I talked about its competitors in a recent stream, I think it's worth putting in words for a reference.

Monero's Competitors

Zcash is Trash

Optional privacy is no privacy at all.

Zcash (ZEC) is often shilled as a Monero replacement. On the surface it actually sounds great and unambiguously better: it has a clever a zero-knowledge proof technology called zk-SNARKs which can store and prove transactions in the blockchain in a private way. zk-SNARKs are generally superior to Monero's somewhat ragtag triad of ring signatures + stealth addresses + ring CT to anonymize transactions and they are more scalable.

zk-SNARK is short for "Zero Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge."

Zero Knowledge – It is private.
Succinct – Referring to computation time.
Non-interactive – In some earlier implementations of the technology, the interacting parties must exchange information and negotiate in turns, while zk-SNARKs can occur instantaneously.

Zcash, however, has two major problems, one substantial and one accidental (in the Aristotelean sense).

The substantial problem is that zk-SNARKs are not fully trustless: they require a trusted setup where public parameters are generated and if not properly disposed of, the initial developers could use that knowledge to produce infinite money without anyone knowing. This sort of defeats the purpose of having a decentralized cryptocurrency and while the rest of the currency is decentralized, that gaping hole certainly isn't.

The accidental problem (or maybe incidental problem in modern English) is that Zcash is only optionally private. The vast majority of ZEC transactions are not "shielded" with the zk-SNARK technology, but are as public as a Bitcoin transaction. This allows a third-party to uncover the "private" transactions by a process of automatic process of elimination.

Zcash, while is created valuable technology, is simply not a private currency and is not a valid competitor to Monero.

Pirate Chain

Pirate Chain (ARRR) is a minor privacy coin that has mooned significantly recently popping up from 30 cents to 14 dollars or so (it's halved since I started writing this article though). Pirate Chain uses the zk-SNARK technology, but unlike Zcash, uses it mandatorily (with optional transparent transactions like Monero via the private view key).

Pirate Chain has two big issues though. The first is what I mentioned before: zk-SNARKs as they have been implemented in ZEC and ARRR are not trustless. They require a setup in which theoretically, if the public parameters of the system were known to some inside party, they could print an infinite amount of the currency with absolutely no way that any other people could know.

Even if you trust the Pirate Chain developers, Pirate has another pretty undeniable problem: 90% of ARRR has already been mined and is in circulation! Yep, you heard that right: A minor niche alt-coin which has existed for only three years was put together in such away that now as big of a proportion of it has been mined as has been mined of Bitcoin in over ten years!

That means that that 90% is highly aggregated in the wallets of the two and a half people who knew of ARRR in this period, and anyone adding to the market cap is mostly just contributing to these people's bags. Even if Pirate Chain had great trustless technology (which is doesn't) it has not been set up equitably, but in a way that enriches early adopters to an extreme degree. Expect to get dumped on if you buy this stuff.

Honestly, if you want a better, more honest cryptocurrency, you could just take the Pirate setup and give it a slower and more sane emission. That would be a better choice than ARRR itself.

Monero + Dogecoin + Bitcoin = Wownero

website – meme site

Wownero is a joke currency. It's literally a fork of Monero with Dogecoin aesthetics and some minor additions. Like Pirate Chain, it also has surged significantly recently (from 2 or 3 cents to more than a dollar—beating out Dogecoin as a pump-and-dump for sure).

Weirdly enough, Wownero is probably the best of the alternative privacy coins that I've mentioned so far. It's trustless, unlike the zk-SNARK coins, but also has some nice features.

It was created somewhat as a satirical response for another privacy 💩coin, MoneroV, which was just Monero with an initial coin offering and forked from the same blockchain (which ruins the privacy of users on both chains because it becomes easier to triangulate on when outputs are actually spent).

Since Wownero is a "joke," it actually has integrated new technology and helpful additions before Monero has, since the Wownero developers are doing it all fast and loose. Ironically, that can be good.

One principle division between Monero and Wownero is that Wownero is more like Bitcoin in that it has a totally fixed supply, while Monero has tail emission. Some people have criticized Monero for tail emission, arguing that it is unnecessary and inflationary. I am not sold on either side: the game theoretics of this has never truly played out, but Wownero might actually be something to look into if you like Monero, but think it's "inflationary." Regardless, Wownero's whitepaper and roadmap on their website are something that everyone should read and take seriously.

Again, the currency is sort of a meme, but it is what it is. I decided to start taking Wownero donations on my site a while ago, just for fun.

zk-SNARKs vs. zk-STARKs

In addition to the zk-SNARK system used in Zcash and Pirate, there also exists zk-STARKs, which like zk-conSNARKs allow for a trustless setup. Whitepaper.

To repeat, zk-SNARK stands for "Zero Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge." zk-STARK stands for "Zero Knowledge Scalable Transparent ARguments of Knowledge." [Scalable]{.dfn} because it scales better than zk-SNARKs and [transparent]{.dfn} because it has a trustless setup.

I do not know of a currency project that uses this technology now. Like zk-conSNARKs, it's only a couple years old.

The ideal privacy coin

Would be one that:

Is actually private.
Is trustless.
Is highly scalable.
Is truly decentralized and unmanaged by a singular entity.
Has reasonably fair emission/mining schedule.

Monero gets only half credit on 3, but full points on the rest. Wownero is the same, although perhaps it should be taken less seriously as a Doge-tier joke. Zcash fails on 1 and 2. Pirate Chain fails on 2 and 5. Suterusu has great tech, but flounders on 4.

So the recipe for an ideal currency is here. It is one that implements the zk-conSNARK technology of Suterusu or zk-STARKs (provided that such technology is appropriately vetted), but does so in a way without centralization, dev taxes and other self-refuting silliness.

This ideal currency might just be Monero itself, to my understanding Monero has contemplated integrating zk-STARKs as they become more well-travelled. Such an addition, if it works, would drastically improve the scalability of Monero even if it might require somewhat of an overhaul.

Monero Maximalism: Or, How Bitcoin Is a 💩coin

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Biggest Problem with Cryptocurrency

Most normal people hear the word "cryptocurrency" and assume that means that they are "cryptic" or "private," but that's actually a huge, perhaps the hugest misunderstanding of our time and it has some big consequences. The "crypto" in cryptocurrency merely comes from its cryptographic nature.

When it comes to actual privacy, cryptocurrencies are an unmitigated disaster: All transactions and wallet balances are easily viewable on the necessarily public blockchain.

This might not seem like a problem to some, and there are also some who will retort with "Well, I'm not doing anything illegal so it doesn't matter to me."

But here's the thing: Every currency in human history has been totally private, so we have no other similar disaster scenario to even compare this to.

American dollars are centrally financially controled, but we can transact without that being public information. Even when using a Visa or Mastercard with your bank, Visa or your bank might know of the transaction, but it isn't broadcast publicly to the entire world like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin is therefore a unique privacy disaster that we can't even anticipate. No cryptocurrency is widely used enough as an actual currency for people to really feel the burn of this, but this opens up huge liabilities for every human on the planet. You might think the American dollar is a NWO/Satanic/Mark-of-the-Beast currency that will take away your freedoms, but let me tell you that Bitcoin as it is is far worse!

The Disaster of the Bitcoin Future

Here's some of the things we can expect in a world running on Bitcoin:

Your personal budget, income and bank account is necessarily public information.
Every business's expenditures and payroll are now necessarily public information. Everyone in the world knows how much everyone makes and know what suppliers each business transacts with. Trade secrets are a thing of the past. Employee privacy is a thing of the past.
Consumer privacy is a thing of the past. Everyone knows how much money everyone spends everywhere else.
Even giving money to friends for favors or help is visible to the IRS. This makes easy micromanagement and taxation of even minor things that might not be plausibly taxable now.
Nearly every privacy law is rendered unenforceable and useless by Bitcoin.

No sane person would volunteer to reveal all their bank accounts, transaction histories, spending habits and thereby physical movements for no reason to every government and business in the world. But if you use most cryptocurrencies, that is exactly what you're doing.

It will be even worse.

Losing personal privacy is one thing. Maybe you don't even mind a world where eveyone is continuously "doxxed" and bombared with perfectly targetted ads a là Minority Report.

More important than that is systemic privacy. In a system with glass walls like Bitcoin, criminals, governments, corporations and regulatory agencies realize that it is very easy for them to abuse and exploit people. Expect the maximum amount of extortion, the maximum amount of taxes on increasingly mundane things and the maximum amount micromanagement.

While you might not be able to imagine in your mind's eye all the terrible things that might happen with a fully monitorable currency, needless to say, it will contain what are, in effect, indescribable Lovecraftian monsters from the blackest Stygian depths. Bitcoin is the opposite of freedom. It is giving a carte blanche to all the world's worst people to prey on innocents.

The Solution: Monero

Monero (also known by its ticker "XMR") is an exception to this.

Monero is a digital currency that has the blockchain technology of Bitcoin, but has in its core very smartly designed tech to keep the transactions on this public blockchain totally opaque. It takes what we've learned from Bitcoin and makes a complete project that can function, in fact is functioning in real life.

Firstly, the technologies which make the Monero blockchain private:

Ring signatures to protect sender privacy. All transactions are jointly signed by not just the actual sender, but ten other addresses. Security by obscurity and plausible deniability.
Stealth addresses to protect receiver privacy. Instead of one address on the blockchain, you technically have a different address for every single transaction and only by your private view key can you see that they are yours.
Ring confidential transactions to obscure the amount sent.

The creator of Bitcoin really intended to create what Monero would later become. Bitcoin itself is incomplete.

None of this means any complication for the user. Monero works just like any other cryptocurrency and if you use the default graphical Monero wallet, it's just as easy to use Electrum or something else for Bitcoin.

Monero is for normal people

Monero is often portrayed as being subversive because it is coming to totally replace Bitcoin on the dark net for illegal transactions. It often has a reputation associated with those potentially criminal purposes it could be used for (same thing with Bitcoin before blockchain monitoring became a science). Monero is not doing anything illegal that cash couldn't do beforehand, but there's a more important point:

Much more evil can be done with public transactions than private transactions: they can cause blackmail, rumors, gossip-mongering, witchhunts, stalking and targeted robberies and attacks. Seasoned criminals know how to juggle Bitcoin and other non-cryptic cryptocurrencies to avoid compromising privacy; normal people do not and can fall prey to some of the worst things just by using Bitcoin for normal things in normal ways.

At the end of the day, it's not Monero that's weird or subversive or niche, it's Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies. Privacy is a bare minimum for any functioning currency. Currency users deserve that and no currency could function without it. The dollar, the euro, the renminbi and every other currency by definition has the same privacy features as Monero. Bitcoin just doesn't have that.

Monero solves all of Bitcoin's other problems.

Bitcoin also has other drawbacks:

Bitcoin block size is limited to such a small size that spenders have to compete with massive fees to get their transactions processed. It often takes $10 of Bitcoin to send $5 of Bitcoin.
It is unclear if the Bitcoin have incentives to continue once all Bitcoins are mined.
Bitcoin mining is increasingly centralized and requires extreme specialty ASIC hardware to compete.

All of these pale in comparison to the privacy issue, and a lot of smoke is generated by random coins trying to solve these issues, but Monero has a solution for them all.

1. Monero has low transaction fees.

Monero has variable block size that avoids this issue as well, as long with a disincentive for large blocksizes to prevent spurious transactions (that could otherwise be theoretically used in an attack to compromise network privacy).

2. Monero will be mined forever.

The second issue is the big question mark behind the whole Bitcoin system. Once all Bitcoins are mined, will miners continue to process transactions if they are paid by fees only?

This isn't an issue for Monero because there is never a point where the block reward for mining is zero. It will eventually stagnate at 0.6 XMR for eternity, which is a supply inflation which approaches zero over time and avoids the issue of no block rewards. This is called tail emission.

Note also that any solution to Bitcoin's first problem above, will necessarily exacerbate the second problem. If you solve the fee problem, you make the mining incentive problem worse. If there is the Lightning Network or something else that reduces Bitcoin's fees dramatically, the chance of those lower fees maintaining miners will decrease dramatically.

I will say, if you think that the capped supply of Bitcoin will work out fine and might be better, you can still have the benefits of Monero with Wownero, which is a Monero fork with a capped supply and doge-tier memes (it also has a higher ring signature size of 22 which might theoretically be better for privacy (or overkill)). (See on Coinmarketcap) They also have a meme site.

3. Monero stays decentralized by avoiding mass-mining.

Monero is specifically designed to avoid allowing specialty hardware (ASICs) participate in mining. This makes individual mining on consumer computers more possible for longer and makes it hard to farm Monero. They use a technology called RandomX to do this.

Other Monero Perks

In short, Monero is cryptocurrency done right. Bitcoin was a great proof of concept, but Monero fixes all the issues that the Bitcoin project brought to attention.

There are yet more good features of Monero that are worth mentioning:

Optional Transparency with Private View Keys

In some cases, you might not want privacy, but transparency with Monero. Suppose you're running a kind of non-profit that want's to proudly show all their financials to potential donnors. Monero allows this too with Private View Keys. You can publish your private view keys on your website for your transactions to visible to whoever has them.

Monero is actively developed and improved.

Monero users and developers are constantly trying to improve, break and stress-test the technology. A lot of the features I've mentioned here have been added to Monero since its founding. If you want to have an in depth look at the history of Monero's development and technology, you can see this video series "Breaking Monero" where some guys overview how Monero has overcome previous issues to become the prime privacy coin of today.

Using and Holding Monero

If you're reading this, I'll assume you're at least superficially familiar with cryptocurrencies and probably have some Bitcoin. Even if that's not so, just follow the links and you're smart enough to get started.

Wallets

Get a Monero wallet here from their main site. Write down and store your wallet seed where you will never lose it.

Getting Monero

The first thing I recommend everyone should do is put your public address on your website for donations and produce high-quality writing and other website content. Monero users will usually be more likely to send small Monero donations since transaction fees are low. This also increases the profile of Monero in the eyes of anyone who sees it, which is a good costless investment for you now. Cryptocurrencies are driven by networking effects. Note that you can make a QR code with qrencode or an online generator if you're a true-blue normie.

The unofficial site Monero.how lists many exchanges where you can exchange Bitcoin or Ethereum for Monero and store it on your private wallet, including many that don't require KYC (sending in an ID).

The site Local Monero is even an anonymous service where you can mail in cash to exchange with a trusted Monero vendor or vice versa.

I also recommend using Bisq for the highest level of privacy. It is a peer-to-peer and totally anonymous exchange which even creates its own Tor service automatically. You can exchange XMR for BTC there too.

There are also Bitcoin/Monero atomic swaps in the works. This is something very new, but when it happens and goes fully public, you might expect a lot of value in Bitcoin moving over into Monero.

Use now or to HODL?

They also keep a small list of the growing number of services that accept Monero. Everything from online services, to houses, to computer parts and more. I also keep a Monero donation address public and recommend others to do so as well. Since Monero transaction fees are so low, microtransactions and small donations are easy.

Although if you're persuaded by my case here, you might just want to HODL Monero for the most part and expect that it will rise. As I'm writing this (April 21, 2021) Monero has increased a lot recently in the ongoing bullrun, but it is still proportionately far lower than it was in comparison with Bitcoin in the 2017 run. I have no clue whether it will moon or crash hard at the end of the bullrun or anything, all I can say is that I think the technological fundamentals are far better than Bitcoin and all other currencies and its only getting scarcer.

What separates Monero from everything else is that it is a gimmickless currency that has all the bare minimums of privacy. It is Bitcoin perfected. It's what Bitcoin should've been. That's it.

We Want Our 4 Causes Back!

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Artistotle, a medieval depiction.

Aristotle, in his Physics argued that there are four causes behind everything that exists. These causes answer the question of "How" or "Why" something is the way it is.

The Material Cause: The material from which something is made. E.g. the stone of a statue.
The Efficient Cause: The external force that causes something to be made. E.g. the artisan and his tools who make a statue.
The Formal Cause: The form or plan of the thing made that define it. E.g. the artisan's written or thought blueprints or sketch of plans for how to make the statue.
The Final Cause: The goal and reason of the thing. E.g. the purpose for which the artisan is making the statue.

If the statue lacks any one of the four causes, it will not be made.

The Demise of the Formal and Final Causes

If you want to point your finger at a single philosophical change that defines the shift from the Aristotelean worldview of antiquity and the Middle Ages to the materialism of modernity, it is the rejection of the Formal and Final Causes in the early Enlightenment.

Just ask your modern brain: "Does everything really have a purpose?" You will probably reflexively think back "No," therefore, you do not believe in a Final Cause to everything. The same is true of the Formal Cause, both of them seeming to assume that there is a kind of conscious agency behind the action. That isn't strictly speaking how Aristotle intended them, but that's how they are interpreted through modern goggles.

You can see their rejection as early as the 1600's: Francis Bacon in Novum Organum pushed aside the Final Cause as only being only suitable for inter-human behavior. The Formal Cause, he dismissed merely as desperata "hopeless." He actually dismissed the vocabulary of the other two causes as being superficial and an irrelevant distinction too, but philosophically, they are still retained in his philosophy by other terms.

In any case, modern people do not believe in Final and Formal Causes, or if they do, not for everything in the cosmos. For Aquinas and others in the Aristotelean world, the question of whether the universe has a purpose or a formal plan is a kind of tautology. Of course it does! Everything non-random does in Aristotelianism.

The Final Cause in Nature?

Now our post-materialist view of the Final Cause is sort of different from Aristotle's original view. We have to remember that Aristotle viewed grammar and cognition as something that in some way was directly reflective of reality itself. Compare this view shared with the so-called "Speculative Grammarians" of the Middle Ages, "speculative" coming from the Latin word speculum "mirror", since grammar reflects reality. This common strand stretches from Aristotle to those influenced by his work like Priscian and Bacon (Roger (who was based), not Francis (who was p. cringe)).

Nowadays we atomize questions like "Why" to the point that even causality itself doesn't mean anything and is a mere human cognitive convention, but for Aristotle, the linguistic existence of "Why" questions means that there is a legitimate logical equivalent to "Why" in reality.

Aristotle originally had argued that it is appropriate to refer to the Final Cause of something whenever it is not due to randomness or spontaneity. The example he uses is the growth of human teeth: there is no variance in where the molar and incisors grow within the human mouth. Everything appears where it's "supposed to" and we can assume that there is some kind of Final Cause behind this.

If different shapes and sizes teeth grew in different locations of the mouth, then it would be appropriate to talk of them as lacking a Final Cause. Things that appear randomly and inconsistently do not necessarily have Final Causes, but if something happens invariably, we can trust that it has a Final Cause.

Darwin "Got It Wrong" too?

So how far are moderns willing to take the rejection of the Formal and Final Causes?

One of my old Ph.D. advisors, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini wrote a book with Jerry Fodor called What Darwin Got Wrong. You can withhold your kneejerk reactions; it's not a creationist book or anything, but it almost ended up being as controversial—it's a critique of Darwinian natural selection on "philosophic" grounds.

I will stultify one of the main arguments for brevity's sake: "How can we reasonably talk about evolution as a goal oriented process when we have admitted already that speaking of Final Causes is illegitimate?" Massimo and Fodor do not use the Aristotelian terms, (instead they talk of Gould's spandrels) but that's what they mean.

Evolution would only have been "scientific" in Medieval Europe.

Darwinian natural selection is actually a kind of cheat idea for materialism. In order to understand how humans have arisen from common descent with other animals, we want to have a narrative of why we speak, why we are bipedal, why our bodies are mostly hairless, etc. etc. Natural selection offers an answer without reference to a conscious incremental designer (God), but it smuggles back in the Final Cause: "This evolved to do that."

But if we actually limit ourselves from talking in purpose-driven/Final-Cause statements, the most communicative "scientific" thing we can say is "Humans share a common ancestor with other animals, but we became different." The issue of "Why" is dreaded "metaphysics." In truth, we actually need a Final Cause to understand anything. The Final Cause, as Aristotle notes, is really the most important cause, because understanding it is key to understanding something in its greater context. Understanding something intuitively largely amounts to knowing its Final Cause. Darwinism came to be accepted as a theory because it cleverly smuggled in illegal metaphysics that we were having withdrawal symptoms for. When you really think about it, this totally withdraws Darwinian selection from the ledger of supposedly scientific topics if you took such standards seriously (I don't).

The funny thing is that people can easily be made to become hyper-material anti-metaphysicians or lax on everything depending on circumstances. Fodor and Massimo partially wrote their book as a critic of "adaptationism" and evolutionary psychology, which were and still are bugaboos to the political left because they seek to explain minutiae of human social life, including hot-button issues like gender differences and race, in the light of Darwinian natural selection. Leftists like Gould and Lewontin would dismiss such explanations as "just-so stories," as would science-popularizers and the press, but Fodor and Massimo argue that this is an argument you cannot avoid generalizing once you make it. It applies to all of evolution: if it is philosophically illegitimate to talk about human sexual dimorphism because that reads a Final Causes into evolution, then it is equally illegitimate to talk about any other kind of change as being purpose driven by "selection."

This book was received with mostly hostile confusion by the mainstream press and I suspect most biologists which mostly missed the argument and were languishing in the culture wars of the Bush Years. Mind you, I don't agree with the book, but it's mostly because I don't care to endorse this kind of materialism, but most people do indeed at least claim to abide by it, so these arguments would be important to address for them.

Just a "linguistic" argument?

At the end of it, any evolutionary biologist will be tempted to throw up their hands and say "So what‽" to that philosophical objection. After all, it sure feels like some kind of technicality or argument from the way we linguistically talk about evolution. And they're right! In truth, Darwinian evolution is a useful theory specifically because it is a method of giving us a Final Cause for gradual evolutionary changes. That's the whole point afterall. If it didn't give us a Final Cause, it wouldn't be an explanation. Striking the Formal Cause from scientific vocabulary is only a recipe for the typical postivistic science status quo of denying any "metaphysics" to your science while just tacitly assuming it all.

Return of the Formal Cause?

What about the Formal Cause? That is, what about the idea that everything must have a form/plan behind its creation? If we are willing to concede that a Final Cause can arise from natural selection, what about a Formal Cause?

While I'm on Fodor and Massimo's book (who again, are not talking in Aristotelian terms themselves), they actually do end up resuscitating the Formal Cause as well, albeit in a more purposeful way. While the book beats around the bush, I can say that in my conversations with Massimo at Arizona, he really does think of evolution as not being an issue of natural selection. Instead he (and Noam Chomsky as well) has the view that complex features in biology evolve from in-built genetic parameters whose complex interactions can also produce fully-formed design. This is the kernel of Minimalism in linguistics.

Now in presentations, Massimo always loves to talk about those species of jellyfish which with a single simple genetic change, develop highly complicated proto-eyes even without a direct need. One minor genetic development can produce structure as complicated as a primitive eye. This is not uncommon in biology because many complex structures are simple derivatives of simple principles. The general name for this is emergent properties and are said to be based on so-called Laws of Form.

Laws of Form are actually a big topic of conversation in linguistics nowadays, Chomsky's idea approaching the idea that one single and very simple cognitive change could be enough to produce the human language faculty. (This is totally contrary to the pop-idea of language abilities slowly arising from behavioristic cave-man grunting complexifying over centuries).

It should be obvious that Laws of Form, Fibonacci spirals, golden ratios, apparent ordering and other emergent properties arise naturally from the universe without the obvious need of conscious planning. This is not a rejection of the Formal Cause, but states the truth that it is universal. "Form" needn't just be a conscious plan like the sculptor's plan for a hunk of marble, but a form that emerges from natural principles.

Even a Materialistic Universe Generates Formal and Final Causes

In trying to escape the Formal and Final Causes, modern science has really made them more irreplaceable. Laws of Form emerge from very simple computational operations and define the formal structure of things that arise in nature. At the same time, any kind of selective pressure or survival mechanism like Darwinian selection will naturally produce structure arranged to a goal. Understanding anything is quite impossible without referring to its Formal and Final Causes.

For the Aristotelian up until Newton (the last of the magicians in J.M. Keynes' terms), this is us uncovering the Mind of God. While words like "God" make moderns queasy, it's legitimate to ask why the Formal and Final Causes as concepts should. Final Causes are by definition universal where unchecked spontaneity occurs. A conscious human mind is not a prerequisite for them, neither for Formal Causes.

You actually can keep even a very clumsy materialism while accepting these traditional notions. Indeed, to understand something's Final and Formal Causes is to truly understand it such that the Material and Efficient Causes seem like mere details.

Wanna Learn LaTeX?

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have a full video tutorial series on learning LaTeX, broken into small sensible parts, here.

What is LaTeX?

Basically, it's how big boys write and format documents. Every public brief, scientific article, book, cryptocurrency whitepaper or even outline written by people who know what they're doing is written in LaTeX.

If you want to see examples of documents made with LaTeX, you can see my Master's thesis here or another paper here that shows some diagrams and other features you can have in LaTeX. Of course, LaTeX documents can be infinitely customized.

"Is it hard?"

No. It's sort of like learning vim. People complain about how hard it is until they take the bare minimum of time to learn it and realize how much more effective they are with it. The return on investment is massive. I wrote the thesis above in LaTeX in around a week of learning from the bare minimum.

"How is LaTeX different?"

LaTeX is a markup language, meaning that you write documents in whatever text editor of your choosing and instead of manually moving margins and placing things yourself, everything is optimally placed when you compile the document into a .pdf.

Markup languages are great because they separate the task of writing from the task of formatting. It's somewhat similar to the difference between HTML (a markup language) and CSS (which does styling) and Javascript (which does scripting). LaTeX does the equivalent of all three, but it allows you to do them all separately so you can easily extend documents.

"Why is LaTeX better than Microsoft Word and friends?"

Bibliographies are done totally automatically. For all the research papers I've written in the past 5 years, I have never written a bibliography page. You just tell LaTeX, "Oh, APA style, please" and it's done.
Section/page numbering and cross referencing is done automatically. That means if you refer people to a chart on page 52 multiple times or figure 5 or chapter 4, then you move pages or figures or chapters around, the references continues to refer to the page, figure or chapter you originally meant. That also means you can literally copy and paste text out of your document into a larger document and LaTeX will automatically reconfigure all cross-referenced numbers to be correctly referring to what you actually want them pointing to.
Text can easily be copied to a new format. I've written many term papers that latter became monographs or books and with LaTeX, you can just copy the raw text and it takes on the formatting of the document it is inside of.
It is scriptable. You can use coreutilities and other programs to search, modify and move text. This seems useless if you've never done it, but it makes a world of difference when you realize you can. You could use this, for example, to automatically take customer information on your computer and automatically-generate professional itemized invoices in LaTeX or the like. Also, being able to use sed -i and grep with .tex files is fantastic.
For more advanced users, LaTeX is more than a markup language too: and also has basic logic and tests (if statements and the like) that allow you to react dynamically to unknown content.
You can write LaTeX in literally anything. I write it in vim for its extensibility, but you can easily design your own workflow, instead of having to rely on the ever-changing idiosyncracies of Microsoft Word.

"But Word has some of those things!"

Niche features that basically no Word-user uses. Also they change with every new update. This is the primary operating structure of LaTeX.

Installing LaTeX

The core LaTeX package (texlive) is fairly small, but I highly recommend you download all the LaTeX packages out there at the beginning (a big download). This is nice because as you learn more things, you won't have to manually download new packages. You'll be able to experiment with new LaTeX abilities through new packages seamlessly. Here's how you get them:

GNU/Linux
- Arch-based (Artix, Manjaro, Parabola): pacman -S texlive-most texlive-lang
- Debian-based (Ubuntu/Linux Mint): apt-get install texlive-full
- Some distros (like Void) use tlmgr to install TeX packages instead of the main package manager.
Windows: Here. (Choose the net install to be able to install all packages.)
MacOS: Here.

Once you've downloaded and installed that, you have a fully-featured LaTeX engine on your machine! You can make lots of amazing things that you don't even fully realize yet.

LaTeX Video Tutorials

Basics

First thing to learn is how to compile documents with pdflatex and the basic principles of the TeX lanugage. In this first video, I talk about how basic text, paragraphs, titles, headings and more work. This in itself is enough to make a professional write-up.

Click to reveal video.

Numbering and cross-referencing

As you make more complex documents, you'll want to automatically number and interrelate section, figure and other numbers together. LaTeX makes this super simple, and make it even easier to copy your file into a new file where it will automatically update all cross-referenced numbers.

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Bibliographies with Biber and BibLaTeX

Bibliography management is a huge plus in LaTeX through biber. I haven't written a bibliography in more than half a decade due to the fact that LaTeX only needs a bibliography file of metadata and autogenerates citations for any needed source.

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Images and Figures

TeX isn't all text either. You can insert and nicely format images in a way that they are optimally placed without too much human interference.

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Macros to make things easy

As you do more specific things, you might want to make your own macros and functions. This really makes things easier, and you can do very complex things very elegantly.

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Slide Presentations with Beamer

LaTeX isn't just for printable documents either. You can change your document into a Beamer presentation, allowing you to present it as a slide show similar to Microsoft PowerPoint's.

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Making a Professional Résumé

Here, I also give some extra pointers while I make a résumé.

Part 1

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Part 2

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Veganism Is the Pinnacle of Bugmanism

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

People have quoted me as saying that. I forget where it comes from, probably a livestream, but I definitely stand by it. Since a lot of people labor under the assumption that my channel is about "Linux," I've accumulated a lot of subscribers that are variously nerds, furries, degenerates, coomers, libertarians, communists, trannies and among them are vegans. Some of them (I assume) are good people.

There's a stereotype about vegans that they are annoying and can't talk about anything but Veganism. This hurtful stereotype comes from the fact that it's true.

Bugmanism

Firstly, what is Bugmanism? How do Vegans fit the bill?

Long story short, a bugman is someone who rejects the purpose and role of humans in their natural environment. They reject tradition, religion, their family, gender roles, the expectation that a person should contribute to their community, etc. They might do this for their personal convenience (usually they just wanna coom outside of marriage) or for apparently rational reasons, but the effect is the same.

If you want to sum up the esoterically evil goals of "modernism" or whatever you want to call it, it is destroying the countervailing power of tradition and in its place, new social engineers attempt to dictate human values top down. If you separate people from their families, their races, their traditions and who they actually are, you can engineer TV shows, sports teams, activist movements and a million other things for them to identify with and worship. Modernism pretends to liberate people from arbitrary traditions and authorities, when in reality is substitutes natural, emergent morals with controlled authorities.

Veganism has always been one of the most radical examples of this logic. Esoterically, Veganism forces one to abandon not just their own traditions, but every human dietary tradition and leaves them at the whims of processed grains and pharmaceutical supplements for a meager survival.

That is, Veganism is highly disruptive: You can't have a normal life. You can't have a normal meal. You can't wine and dine with people and must make it an affair. You can't use traditional hand-made leather products. You can't hunt or trap for food or raise animals, even for eggs.

You become a nag at war with your family, the world around you. You are trapped within urbanite bugman society: you can't even eat in most non-urban places or foreign countries because the insane concept of not cooking with animal fats and eating and using animal products just doesn't exist. You have to survive holding your breath from one hipster downtown area to the next.

On every point, you become more reliant on macro-society. Vegans try very hard to give off "organic" vibes, but it's just a lie. Even people on the internet who "advertise" their Vegan lifestyle spend hours processing a basic meal and of course predigesting indigestible plant matter with a blender. Try and find a non-urbanite Vegan in real life. They exist, but they are an aberration.

The LARP of "Vegan for Health"

Vegans sometimes pretend to advertise Veganism because it's allegedly healthy. This is just public relations; any true Vegan, when you really pin them down thinks that Veganism at its core is a moralistic belief. Vegans are Vegans because they believe that not being Vegan is morally deficient: killing/eating animals and using their bodies is bad. That's it.

So you have your moral principle and run with it. What magical force then is making that moral principle necessarily good for your health? If Veganism were actually a good diet for humans, that would actually be a massive coincidence. "Vegans for health" have to grapple with the bizarre claim that meat, exactly the food that has been viewed in all human cultures as superior and more desirable is somehow nutritionally deficient.

The Standard American Diet (SAD) is Plant-based.

The weirdest thing is when Veganism is held in opposition to the Standard American Diet, as if the American diet somehow represents traditional or non-Vegan diets. The SAD is just Vegan-lite. SAD is a post-Vegan invention of the diet industry take over the past decades has been leading people into the most harmful parts of vegan diets: unstable plant-oils, processed grains as meat substitutes, etc.

The pop-cultural idea of "health" is simply "being skinny." Veganism is great at making people skinny because it is slow moving starvation (I have met some carbo-loading exceptions who fatten up).

Veganism is just to starvation what waterboarding is to drowning. If you stick with it, you will eventually die, but it's so painful in the meantime, you'll probably give up.

Veganism is rational.

Vegans are exceptionally "rational" in that they adopt the moral framework of modern society and follow it to its logical conclusion.

When you're given for your acceptance some inane religious platitudes like "equality" and "rights" along with vaguely Marxist notions of "exploitation" and "slavery" and "oppressed classes," it seems perfectly reasonable to expand that language to the relationship between predators (humans) and their prey (many animals) (or maybe pets too).

If you're raised in a time of extreme moral nihilism except for not liking the several historical events you're told that matter (usually slavery and the Holocaust), obviously you're going to glom on to what looks most like them: chickens in chains and sheep being led to slaughter like sheep to slaughter.

Honestly, Veganism by their own logic might not be far enough. There is some circumstantial research to the effect that plants have nervous systems that might feel pain as well: you could go one step further and simply eat nothing living. The Ctistae of ancient Thrace refused to eat anything alive, eating only by-products/foodstuffs like milk and honey. The Ctistae also refused to have sex, which might be something to consider since Vegans eventually lose sexual function anyway.

Veganism is rebellious.

Veganism has the same kind of "rebellion" that all other forms of leftism share. It "rebels" against the system by perfectly internalizing the system's values, extrapolating them to their logical conclusions and thus fighting the system when it fails to meet those obviously unworkable conclusions.

Corporations started shilling vegetable oils (which originally were and frankly still are just industrial by-products) as workable replacements for butter and lard. Seventh-Day Adventists lobbied for them because of their own religion beliefs. Jews lobbied for them because they hate unkosher lard. Years later, now we know that vegetable oils are highly unstable and have contributed to the massive rise in heart disease.

Veganism is a leftist phenomenon. The psychological type of a leftist is such that they will always subordinate their direct experience to ideology. It doesn't matter if not eating meat or wearing leather or using animal products sounds hard, their suffering is more proof of a greater moral superiority.

Non-leftists can simply not become Vegans for longer than extremely brief periods. Even if a Vegan wins an argument with them, a normal person is just going to say, "I'm sorry, I like animals and all, but I can't not eat them, that's just crazy."

Veganism only makes sense in a bugman environment.

Ask a vegan why he doesn't eat eggs. He will probably tell you a spooky story about how terrible it must be for a chicken to live in a coop laying eggs all day. That might even bring a tear to a sentimental person's eye.

Out where I live, people have their chickens wandering in their yards and garden pecking scraps. They return to their coops at night to be safe from coyotes. Is there really something "unethical" in the mind of a Vegan about picking up an unfertilized egg lain by one of these chickens and eating it?

A lot of the moral logic behind Veganism falls flat outside of bugman capitalism. Fundamentally, it's another manifestation of general angst from lack of connection to the real natural world.

I say this because most Vegans are Vegans because they are softies who have literally no connection to animals whatsoever until as a teenager they watched a PETA documentary with chickens getting their heads buzzed off or pigs walking around in their own poop.

Literally think about the animals. When wild animals die in nature, they don't slowly slip away in the night surrounded by their family. They die of starvation, or by being ripped apart alive by packs of coyotes. Would you rather die by getting your brains blown out instantaneously or die a "natural" death like this?

But to the original question, it really makes no sense even for a Vegan to not eat or distribute the eggs a chicken lays... You're going to have to get deep into Marxist analysis to think that's somehow unethical. And once a chicken has living a long life of egg laying, why not quickly and painlessly dislocate its neck and eat it for dinner? If you don't, your cat will eventually gore it and it'll be a mess.

Animals live to be eaten.

This isn't even a metaphysical claim. Domesticated cows and pigs and chickens do not and cannot live as they exist in the wild. They have evolved symbiotically with us as sources of food. They can go feral and breed with wild boar and the like, but their composition is based on their domesticated state.

Wild game like deer have lived alongside human hunters for centuries. Their breeding habits and evolutionary development is based in the fact that a sizeable portion of their population will be hunted by humans every season.

If you actually care about "the environment" (1) you would care for humans, whose natural diet is meat and (2) you would be terribly worried about the unintended consequences of severing one of the most important links in the food chain.

Dumb Vegan sayings

"You wouldn't kill it yourself!"

They say this whenever someone turns their eyes away from an animal being killed in one of their Vegan propaganda videos.

Guess what, I also might turn away if I see a video of a sanitation worker wading through human feces it in a sewer. That doesn't mean that I'm a hypocrite for taking dumps in a toilet connected to city sewage.

I turn away when I see depictions of amputations of gangrenous limbs in movies too. That doesn't mean I don't think it's not medically necessary.

Killing animals is actually a bad example of this because while all cultures are disgusted by feces and amputations, in most times and places (including this country before Bambi), killing animals was nothing any self-respecting grown man would react to. It goes without saying that there are many countries where people recreationally torture dogs and cats.

I don't say that to say that I'd be okay with killing dogs and cats, merely that the trained moral responses we have for them are very localized and subjective in our own modernist viewpoint. But Millenials have now been raised in a Disney fantasy-land where animals think and talk like us and therefore must share the same feelings. Vegans absurdly "imagine what it'd be like" to live in industrial farming as if a chicken's birdbrain is having an existential crisis while living in a cage.

"Veganism is minimal or more self-sufficient."

Vegans have been fruitlessly trying to meme this one on me for forever. Starvation and death is minimal, I suppose, so it is at least true in that sense. Veganism is ultimately the diet of only eating inedible garnish that looks "good" on Instagram.

Raising most animals is easier and more efficient than raising vegetables. If it's too hot, potatoes don't naturally know to go move to the shade. Yams don't eat your overgrown grass. Onions don't poop out fertilizer. Tomatoes can't pull a simple tractor. You can't skin dead okra and make leather out of it. You can't grind up old mustard to make bonemeal (that's not just something in Minecraft, by the way).

Animals are an absolutely necessary portion of any homestead in life and death. Listen, I like growing stuff. I like growing vegetables. But vegetables are just not real food... They are garnish. They are sides. They are only enjoyable insofar as they elevate your enjoyment of real food: meat.

"Veganism is more efficient or environmental."

People say that eating plants is more "efficient" because they saw an energy pyramid diagram as a kid, which shows how many prey animals are needed to maintain carnivorous animals. If we actually lived in a place where there was a calorie shortage, like a desert planet where greens couldn't grow, that might be an issue. It frankly just isn't here. We're not exactly running out of grass to feed cows. Most people are mowing their grass and throwing it away.

There are people who make really absurd environmentalist arguments against meat as well, for example, methane from cows warms the globe. Okay. Fine. So what does Veganism do about that? Are Vegans going to kill the cows for us? Should we just let them starve in the woods since we can't harvest them for meat or even milk? What about all the game we won't be hunting? Those 50% of deer annually that we won't be killing—won't they me causing pollution with the huge amount of calories they need to frolic in the woods all days? Same will all other game. Most of those arguments are cute just-so stories and they fall apart after examination. Anyone can play that game.

Let's just laugh at this for a minute...

Alright class, look at this commonly posted vegan meme and tell me why it's retarded:

"Per 100 calories" shows a deception so insane you should laugh. Whoever made this image wants you to believe that the piece of steak on the fork is equivalent to the tiny broccoli head on the right.

You can compare the nutrition of both broccoli and beef at those links yourself.

In order to get the protein in a single large bite of steak, you'll have to eat more than half a pound of broccoli. Good luck. Now you know why those poor impressionable girls who go vegan bloat up. And that's only 100 calories. 2000 calorie diet? Have fun. If you're famished, it's pretty easy to eat a big steak with 2000 calories (around a pound and a half of matter) and it will fill you up without any bloating or stomach pains. You'd have to eat twelve pounds more or less of broccoli or equivalent greens for that. And with all that fiber, you're going to just be pooping it all out.

Honestly, the human disgust response will stop you way before that. It's easy to eat a juicy steak without or without sauce, salt and pepper, but you'd nearly have to put a gun to someone's head to make them eat their daily 13 pounds of indigestible garnish.

Noootruits don't actually matter anyway

"Plants don't have over fifteen micro-nooootrients..." —sv3rige, at the end of every video

A lot of Vegan autism gets focused on replicating the consumption of known nutrients and minerals using only plants. The image above, in addition to being deceptive is based on a flawed idea that human nutruition is about consuming particular amounts of particular substances as if we are a perfectly predictable machine or a videogame. This isn't just a Vegan problem, basically everyone implicitly has this idea.

The reality is that those nutrients on the Nutrition Facts are a narrow realm of what might actually be relevant for the complex organ of our bodies. Additionally, there are many types of proteins and vitamins and minerals that the back-of-the-box doesn't account for. The Vegan game of saying, "we can get that too" is utterly pointless when you realize we have nowhere close to a full idea of how the human body works, only some plausible theories about the relationships between certain nutrients and what they seem to do. As in the case of some nutrients, like the falsely-maligned cholesterol is a good example of something two generations of people were told to fear and reduce only for us to later realize that our ideas about how it interacted in the body were arguably literally backwards.

Why It's Bad to Have High GDP

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To put it in other words...

The common way of looking at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is that it's a metric of economic success: more GDP is more wealth. Wealth is good. "Poverty" (meaning low per capita GDP) is bad. Nowadays, pretty much everyone talks about "economics" like this as if this truism was scribbled on the back walls of the cosmos.

This is just looking at one side of the ledger in a kind of global double-entry accounting book. A logically equivalent way of looking at it is that GDP is a metric of economic exchange required for survival in society as it exists. You can say that some area "produced" $1 billion of output (sounds good), but you can just as easily say that $1 billion was required for that area to sustain itself (sounds bad). These two are simply logically equivalent.

Living on $1 a day

Antediluvian Hyperborea. GDP: $0 per year.

Let's dive into the Gestalt: when you hear that a family of eight lives on less than a dollar per day (PPP adjusted), you might wonder how they manage! To actually do such a thing would require buying large bags of rice for the whole family, eat only that and live in free cardboard boxes.

The reality is that that often uttered phrase means that they use less than $1 a day in the general economy, while the rest of their livelihood is "off-the-grid" or self-sufficient. They may grow food in a family farm, hunt for food, and most of their daily needs from cooking oils, to plates, to pottery, to soap are often made at home as well.

There is still "an economy" but often one that is barter based or socialist in the real pre-socialist sense of the word: mediated by direct face-to-face social tit-for-tat between neighbors and friends, none of this mediated by currency being exchanged, thus it is not part of the GDP.

If you read about some Bangladeshi village where the only product is "textiles", that doesn't mean that everyone there makes textiles all day and, without a textile company, everyone would've starved to death. It means that the only on-paper, measurable global industry practiced there is textile manufacturing.

Other villagers might farm, hunt, even do some kind of gathering in some places. They will produce the arts and crafts and live the way people live when you leave them alone. If your view of the world is mediated by GDP, you're only seeing the extremely small sliver that pops into existence when people exchange something involving legal tender.

This is extremely difficult for us modern bugpeople to understand because to be a bugman in a large city is to produce absolutely nothing on one's own and buy literally everything you need from the store. To us non-productive people, GDP means income, which means survival. But the further out of Bugmanville you go, the clearer the vacuousness of GDP becomes. When you realize that most of human wealth is unmeasured by GDP, you realize that Whig History and Steven Pinkerism is based on shaky foundations.

A Personal Example

A minor example. We had a large Thanksgiving feast near my uncle's house in very rural Florida. As it got cold in the night, we had a fire in a repurposed old sugar cane cooking vat artfully standing on used symmetrical cinderblock pieces. A bugman hipster might pay two hundred dollars or more for a similar looking "authentic" piece of equipment. Those $200 would be counted in the GDP. A bugman hipster might have also bought or rented chairs for the event, "contributing" more to the GDP, but my uncle, as part of the local wholesome church community, simply borrowed some from the church. Thus our event produced basically no GDP output in goods or services, despite being functionally equivalent to some similar but expensive and ergo "productive" "Friendsgiving" practiced by urbanites. In reality we are richer than the bugmen hipsters who blew hundreds of dollars on a faux-folksy party. In this case, we owned the firepit and had easy access and permission to the chairs, thus we are more economically flexible than they are. That GDP that they produced/expended is evidence of deeper reliance on the economic system. That GDP output is a marker of fragility, reliance on the conditions of the outside economy in the same way that a village of Bangladeshis who abandon their traditional way of lives to work on textiles are more fragile, despite being able to save up for iPhones.

What GDP really measures

Most of the increase in GDP across the world is simply the movement from local partially-social partially-under-the-table economies to economies mediated by taxable currency. An economically self-sufficient village with close social relationships and a barter economy has 0 GDP. A township of entrepreneurs and artisans you partially barter and partially use currency which they don't report has 0 GDP. All of these people are "in poverty" and "earn less than a dollar a day". And if you want to be truly self-sufficient, that means having a personal GDP of zero.

More than that, pretty much everywhere, GDP is a strong indicator of social upheaval. If you think that GDP is some eternal goodness, remember that everything "good" about industrialization shows up in the GDP, while at the same time, everything bad about it will not show up. Or, sometimes bad things are registered as positive economic growth: urbanization has caused mass-disease, and if that means a market for new medical services and pharmaceuticals, great! The GDP just went up! The Ganges is polluted due to the textile plant? That just means more opportunities for local entrepreneurs to sell bottled water! The GDP just went up! Are people being pushed out of fishing or other subsistence occupations because of it? Even better! Now they have no choice but to contribute to the GDP! With every passing year, in fact, more and more of the GDP is produced by dealing with the problems that our higher level of GDP have caused.

At the end of the day, GDP is only a measurement of how reliant a place or country is on the global economy. Self-sufficiency has a GDP of 0. Wasteful consooomerism has an extremely large GDP.

Planned obsolescence

I have one of my great grandfather's early electric circular saws. It has a bunch of gunk in it, but it still works (although I recently took it apart to replace some old screws and springs and other little parts to be careful). They literally do not make circular saws like it; it's all metal, while even the fancy modern stuff is mostly plastic.

The "unfortunate" thing about it and other durable tools is that it's "bad for the economy," especially the GDP. Since that thing has been around since maybe the 50's or 60's, that's as long as 70 years the economy has gone without the "stimulation" of us having to buy another saw.

Viewers of my technology videos: Which would be better for the world, if everyone used the material equivalent of a classic American-made IBM ThinkPad, or some Apple Laptops that are unfixable computers made of mostly batteries designed to conk out right before the new version comes out? Regardless, the Apple Macs that cost thousands a piece are much better for the "economy."

That's what I mean. If you have quality tools and do not need to constantly throw money at the system to buy things, fix things and otherwise waste money, you are going to be having a lower GDP. That's just how it is.

The propagandistic role of GDP

When you don't think things through like this, GDP is supposed to appear as an objective measure of economic goodness. You're supposed to be looking at those GDP charts and saying, "Wow, my life might be terrible, I am not free, I am subject to forces out of my control, and I am told I have to participate in mass-consumerism to survive, but these charts are the facts[!], and the facts say that things are better now, so I believe them!"

It's legitimately surprising to me how big of a boon the idea of increasing GDP is for Whig history and NPCs of many different ideologies. People of the Left and Right will matter-of-factly tell me that a plastic-based economy taking over the world is still good because the line is going up. I've heard it as a justification for everything:

Don't like globalization?
- You're wrong, the GDP is going up.
Don't trust state-funded institutionalized science?
- You're wrong, the GDP is going up.
Don't want child drag queens?
- You're wrong, the GDP is going up.
Don't want everything to be made of plastics and other petrochemicals?
- You're wrong, the GDP is going up.
Don't want mass pornography?
- You're wrong, the GDP is going up.
Don't want free sugary drinks since infancy?
- You're wrong, the GDP is going up.

When you abandon the illusion of GDP, you are suddenly able to ask whether massive technological "progress" has actually been good for real human life and human pychology.

Advice on Some Other Languages

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This page is just for minor pointers on lesser studied languages that I don't have enough to have on their own pages.

Gothic

Gothic is a dead language and the only thing existing in it is a partially translated New Testament by Wulfila. It still is a very important language for the study of Germanic and Indo-Europeanism because it is the only language of "Eastern Germanic" so well attested. Eastern Germanic languages are distinct from other Germanic languages in their lack of umlaut and some other characteristically Germanic features, while Gothic still retains some earlier Indo-European inflectional categories.

I mention Gothic only because one of the best ever language learning books I've ever seen is written for it, and that is Thomas Lambdin's Introduction to the Gothic Language. I actually took a Gothic class flippantly in graduate school, but the book stuck out to me as being perfectly designed for the typical target audience of Gothic in historical linguistics.

The book has very well designed lessons and activities, but I think greatest is that in the back of the book, for each chapter there is a corresponding lesson on the historical grammar of the content learned. It goes through what conjugates of each word exist in English, Latin, Greek or Sanskrit or other Indo-European languages and provided comparative paradigms of noun and verb inflections. No word or concept is left without a real mneumonic device, not a fake one fake from some joke about the word, but one tied into the actual historical facts of the word.

I've said before that one of the reasons I never use things like Anki and "spaced repetition software" is that the real way to retain information is to understand how it fits within a wider web of information. In historical linguistics, you have an ideal of this because the more you learn, the easier it is to "remember:" remembering that the Gothic word for "field" is akrs is incredibly simple when you realize it's the same as Latin ager, Greek agrós, Sanskrit ájra and English acre.

Sanskrit

Sanskrit is the crown jewel of Indo-European languages and there are very few resources for it. Luckily, there is Devavanipravesika by Goldman and Sutherland, which again is a star in terms of language books.

I do recommend you have some of these abilities before attempting Sanskrit:

Some grammatical knowledge of a classical inflected Indo-European language like Latin or Greek.
Knowledge of the Devanagari script which is used for Sanskrit nowadays (also the script of Hindi and many other modern Indian languages).

Sandhi

In English, if you say the sentence "What are you up to?" it usually comes out closer to "Whatchu up to?" This kind of phonological compression is a natural and systematic process in all languages. What is interesting is that when written language was younger, it was very common to express these phonological changes in the writing system itself. It looks slangish in modern English to write "whatchu," but it is more accurate after all.

Sanskrit overtly writes every alternation like this, including when words seem to combine together into a single prosodic word. The term for this is [Sandhi]{.dfn}.

The tricky thing that newbies to Sanskrit must understand is that knowing the principles of Sandhi are the first priority in knowing Sanskrit because it's impossible to even parse a basic sentence before you understand it. Phonemically, many Sanskrit words end in an -s, but one of the first rules of Sandhi is that words are not allowed to end in -s in most cases. So -s might show up as -h or -o or something else depending on the phonetic context.

I say this because before you get excited about diving into Sanskrit, you have to make sure you know the basics of Sandhi or it will all be a mess.

Classical/Koiné Greek

Greek, much like Spanish, I never really sat down to learn. Greek is close enough in form to Latin that I learned it from reading a biglottic Bible in both languages. Its grammar presents very few concepts alien to Latin, the only big hurdles probably being the novel uses of the article and if you want to learn classical Greek like a pro, the pitch accent system.

What I mean is that I only read very little of Greek grammar before I could pick up my Latin-Greek Bible and start reading the Greek with the aid of the parallel Latin. This was also a nice experience because you can see the similaries between the two languages, but also how the expressiveness of Greek is sometimes lost in translation.

Greek, for example, has such a complete and elegant paradigm of participles that many of them are unstranlatable in Latin. Latin has only passive perfect participles and active present participles, while Greek has participles for the whole spectrum of voice, tense and aspect. What that means is that Latin has to talk around some common Greek expressions, often utilizing Latin deponents (which can have perfect active participle) to get the meaning across.

Command Line Bibles

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I've made a couple very useful command-line accessible Bibles for a quick and scriptable lookup of Bible verses and passages. They exist not only in English, but for Latin and Greek as well.

English King James Version (including Apocrypha) — Github, Gitlab
Latin Vulgate — Github, Gitlab
Greek Septuagint & New Testament — Github, Gitlab

Installation

git clone https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/kjv.git
cd kjv
sudo make install

Or just replace kjv with vul for the Latin version or grb for the Greek.

Usage

Single run

Run the program name followed by a passage. The text will appear to you in your pager. Arrows or vim-keys to scroll, q to quit.

kjv rev 3:9
Revelation
3:9     Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are
        Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and
        worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.

Note that you may also give whole books or chapters. kjv genesis will give you all of Genesis. kjv mat 1:1-10 will show only Matthew 1:1-10. Note also that you can usually abbreviate books.

Searching

/ searches for patterns. For example, kjv /offering will search the whole Bible for the word "offering." You may specify a book/location before it to search only that book.

Interactive mode

Just type kjv (or vul or grb) alone to enter interactive mode. You can then just type verses/books without prefixing them with the command name each time if you prefer.

Origin

I forked the original software from this repository which is an incomplete English King James Version (without the Apocrypha). With the use of coreutils and vim, I found online texts of the Apochrypha, Vulgate, Septuagint and the SBL New Testament and formatting them to function with this program.

Learn Chinese

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Chinese is the hardest language to learn according to normies who have never tried to learn it.

In reality, Chinese is really easy. It has literally no complex morphology: no tense, plurals, gender. It doesn't have irregular verbs or nouns because it has no verb and noun endings whatsoever. It's almost difficult to explain how easy Chinese is.

The only different thing is the writing system which is I hesitate to say anachronistic. The Chinese character system is more structurally similar to Sumerian cuneiform than to English morphophonemic writing. That presents a unique hurdle, but one if properly tackled is not too difficult and also edifying. It's important to realize in any case that learning a language and learning its writing system are two separate things.

Knowing this is important for mastering or even beginning Chinese.

These are the best Chinese Books

The Yale series by John DeFrancis is not just the absolute best for learning Chinese, but they are an eternal exemplar of basically the best you can do for any language. The books all have generic names and they're linked below with audio. The books are massive. Even if you just get "Beginning Chinese" and "Beginning Chinese Reader, Part 1," you'll know around 4 semesters worth of Chinese compared to your average university course. They have free audio too. Remember that if you get nervous about their price tags, which might be as high as $50. These books are severely worth it though.

There are actually two parallel book series in the DeFrancis/Yale series: the green books, which cover the spoken language (in Romanization) and the red books (the readers) that cover characters. It might sound strange to cover the language itself and the characters separately, but it is massively superior.

The Green Books (for the language)

The great thing about the main series is that they come with many, many exercises and drills which are actually good for individual use. Books that expect you to read something once and internalize it are irreparable.

Links are to the official Yale site. Probably better to buy on eBay or something though. Worth the money even when they are expensive.

You can get .pdfs of all these books on Library Genesis. I have physical copies, except some an ex-girlfriend borrowed and never gave back. If you read this, you better send them back!

Note that I've also linked audio that was recorded for these books, which is great. They used to cost a lot too, but now they're free!

The Red Books (for characters)

The reason the language in transliteration and the characters are in two books is because learning them is really two different processes. The green books are more typical language learning books. The red books/readers are different.

Every chapter, they teach you 10 characters, but with those 10 characters, you might learn to combine them into 50 new words based on them. The pacing here is for only learning the essential and most used characters as simply as possible as you advance. The readers do not explain grammar and expect you to be advancing in the green books to understand grammatical things.

The Blue Books?

I won't link them because they sort of the defeat the point, and I don't have them, but there is also a blue series which is just the green series but with the language in characters. I think it's intended more for classes that can't do the DeFrancis method due to bureaucratic constraints. If it has the exercises of the green books, that's good and all, but really the value of the system is the fact that when you do the spoken language in the green books, you don't have to worry about unknown characters and when you do the characters in the red book, that's all you need to pay attention to.

I'm not dismissing the blue books, because the quality of the Yale/DeFrancis series is still light-years ahead of all other series, but I'd stick with the classics here.

Notes about Chinese

The tone cope

I remember having normalfriends in my Chinese class (which was a waste of time, just get the DeFrancis books) who would say that Chinese wasn't too hard "except for the tones." Mandarin Chinese has four tones that distinguish words. If you've sat through your first day in Chinese class or even seen a YouTube video on Chinese, you know this.

Normies see this alien concept of having tones and they turn their brains off. There were kids in my class who said they'd "just not learn" the tones. Which is sort of like saying you're going to learn English, but not the vowels "because they're too hard."

Actually around half of the world's languages have tones. They are not bizarre or highly "marked" in an objective sense. They are much more common that the "th" sound in English. You can bear it.

Learn Latin

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Latin was the first language I learned and has probably been the most useful. Here I'll talk about some of the things it's gotten me and some recommendations for how to learn it well.

What I've gotten out of learning Latin

You get multiple languages for one.

Latin, as you probably know is the ancestor of Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc. Once you know Latin, it is quite literally downhill learning any of these. In college, I decided to take Spanish for a degree specialization (I was doing an international business thing and required a foreign language). Merely based on my knowledge of Latin, I just tested into fifth-level Spanish and figured it out from there. I don't even remember learning Spanish, but I can speak it and still do every once in a while.

In grad school I took classes taught in Spanish and French. I can basically read all Romance languages. I even read Rhaeto-Romance poetry for fun (the languages of Switzerland). All of this is nearly free stuff when you learn Latin.

Latin will unironically red-pill you on many subjects.

Looking to other cultures in the world might change your view of things in some superficial way, but looking into the past will revolutionize how you see it. A recurring point I make in many contexts is that the past is literally an alien civilization. Most of what people pretend they know about it is repeatedly cited modern rumors about it. Seeing it in its own words is very different.

It's insane the amount of writing done in Latin in the medieval period and antiquity, so much of which isn't even on the mind of translators. A lot of historians just cite modern historians. Theologians cite modern theologians. Scientists cite modern scientists. Once you crack open a traditional book on any of these subjects you realize the provinciality and oblviousness of modern "frameworks."

In generative linguistics, people who have never read anything written before 1950 pat themselves on the back for all the "problems" they've solved not knowing they are only retreading paths long established by Stoics, Modistae and early Indo-Europeanists. There are a lot of theologians and philosophers who are trapped in modern citation circles because they don't have the power of Latin that can bring them in touch directly with Aquinas or Augustine or other philosophers of the early periods.

Knowing Latin is like an academic superpower and supposed intellectuals will fear you. Latin used to be the bare minimum of a respectable intellectual... actually... you know what, it still is. Now is your chance to have an actual one up over more pompous people whose only function is writing lit reviews with a disability to read original sources. Being privy to an original and long-neglected source will be a continuous content mill which will unironically be the envy of others in academia.

Knowing Latin is better academically than an undergraduate degree in linguistics.

The process of learning Latin and the lore around you will equip you with all the terminology and principles to make you superior to someone who just studies "linguistics" without any actual application. I really mean this. When I was a grad student in linguistics, all the brightest undergrads had one thing in common: Latin. I actually came to judge people based on how they first got interested in linguistics. The smartest ones always started with Latin, the biggest plebs always started because they liked some Steven Pinker book (sorry Pinkucks! Those are the honest facts!)

How to Learn Latin

What I used

When I learned Latin, all I had was a copy of this book: Collar & Daniell's Beginner's Latin Book. The truth is that most old Latin books are good (old being at least 70 to 100 years old). After language learning became commercialized, it all became dismissable. You can see a list of downloadable Latin textbooks and other materials here here.

The only other source I used in the past to learn and read Latin in a biglottic Latin/Greek New Testament (i.e. Greek on the left and Latin on the right). This is probably actually the single most significant book I own, now that I think about it. I learned Greek from it too and I've had it for around 15 years now.

Lingua Latina per se Illustrata

Although I didn't know about until later, there is another very unique and excellently made Latin series called Lingua Latina per se Illustrata "The Latin Language Illustrated by Itself" by Hans Orberg. You can see an English publisher here, but you can also find them on eBay or pdfs on Library Genesis or Pirate Bay (along with audio for the books).

LLPSI is unique and really stands out. The entire book, including explanations is in Latin. Latin words and grammatical concepts are explained by illustration and example. This sounds absurd frankly: how are you supposed to learn a language from a book written in that language? But the design is so perfect that it works.

I recommend to get LLPSI and some classical grammar primer like Collar & Daniell's because I think especially for newbs, it might be necessary to have explicit instruction about grammar points in English.

Read this

Read this article: "Latin by the Dowling Method." It's back from the early internet and its recommendations have stood the test of time and I agree with them.

Latin links

You may've known about these already, but they're worth noting.

The Latin Library – Massive collection of classical and medieval Latin works
Textkit – Greek and Latin resources and forum

Learning European Languages (Michel Thomas)

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I've said on a couple livestreams that the ideal way for an English speaker to begin learning or excel in learning other major European languages (Spanish, French, Italian and German) is to use Michel Thomas's audiotapes. They can be found for free on Pirate Bay and other sites, but you can also buy them on his official site.

This style of audiotapes is so far above any other, it's hard to even put it in words. They make really exceptional promises: "learn a language in 8 hours" and in some sense I'm inclined to agree.

They certainly give a reflexive foundation that makes learning anything else about a language very easy. There are multiple courses and they're worth listening to multiple times until it's a totally internalized.

Explanation of the Method

The tapes all have Thomas locked in a room with two people who don't know the language, one male, one female. Thomas simply teaches and illicit basic responses from the two students, teaching them as they go. As the listener, your part is to say the proper responses to yourself before the example students. At all points in time, the students are creating novel sentences, combining basic concepts.

Lack of vocabulary

Probably the most important part of the tapes is the lack of vocabulary taught. You don't get 20 irrelevant nouns with each lesson to memorize that you don't even now how to use. What new words you "learn" are mostly shared in common with English. The goal is to make you fluent before you have to memorize words.

Thomas, instead, actually teaches the language and how to be constructive in it: the verbs, the verb inflections, how to combine them, basic pronouns and the like. Only once the students understand them does he move on to the words for real-world objects. Thomas will sometimes explain why he does this in the course, but it amounts to what I've said in other places: you can guess or figure out nouns or talk around them, but if you don't know how to put verbs together, you just don't know the language and you can't even fake it. It is much easier to learn nouns after you actually learn the structure of the language and can actually use them.

Lack of "comprehension"

You're never told to "listen to this passage and think about what it means" in the Thomas method. The Thomas method is entirely productive: you make the sentences and you have to put yourself in the mindset of how the language works.

A lot of other audiotapes, say Pimsleur, have you sit and listen to text and implicitly ask you to "translate" it. This in essense, keeps you thinking in English, or thinking in translating mode. The also keep you chained to canned responses in a single dialog. When people do this, they ignore the actual structure/grammar of the language, listen for big noticable nouns, and then piece together what the sentence means. This is always a bad idea.

Michel Thomas actually just knows what he's doing.

It's honestly rare that you even ever see a "good teacher." By that I mean someone who can easily keep track of what his students know and can devise questions perfect to pry their knowledge. Thomas is just honestly good at this and it goes a long way. In the tapes, if he notices that a student repeatedly messing something up, he knows how to elicit better responses and remind them of what they need. This is 99% of teaching, despite the fact that it's a really rare skill.

Don't bother getting the tapes without Michel Thomas

After Michel Thomas's death (or perhaps a little before) the company running his website above put out tapes for many other languages: Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, etc. under his name. They are done "in his method" theoretically, but they are no good. They do weird things like have two different teachers: one who instructs the students and one who is a native speaker of the language to say the sentences in it. I think the idea behind it was to make sure you hear a "perfect" accent, but it's a total waste and the sponteneity required for actual teaching is lost because you have these two different people trying organize among themselves. I think the teachers lack the introspective skill to keep tabs on the students' learning that I mentioned above, so all-in-all, I think they're awkward and fake.

Donovan Nagel (you may know him from his YouTube channel on BSD) gave Michel Thomas a negative review after using the "Michel Thomas" Arabic tapes. I listened to part of the Chinese tapes and they were not worth it (if you want to learn Chinese I've written about what I recommend).

But the real Michel Thomas tapes: Spanish, French, Italian, German, done by the man himself, are the best for all their respective languages.

Making Free Money off Credit Cards

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While I've done a video on this topic before (PeerTube, YouTube), some people asked me for more information, so here it is.

Aren't you glad to be an AMERICAN?

In America, people are so notoriously dumb with credit and money that credit card companies can literally give out free money by the hundreds to attract new customers. For brainlets who don't bother to understand the basics of credit and debt and the fact that you apparently have to pay back the money you spend, this is like a fly trap. For non-retarded people it is what it is: free money.

Exploiting introductory offers: "Churning"

Many credit cards have introductory offers like this: "If you spend $500 on this card in the first 3 months, you'll get a free credit of $200." That would be a cool offer in the first place, but since there are so many cards that have offers like this, a pattern emerges:

Open a card with an introductory offer, for example: "Get a $200 credit when you spend $500 in 3 months."
Use it for your normal daily life until you spend that $500 which you would be spending anyway.
Get/redeem/spend the credit/cashback/points on that card. Literally free money.
Lock away the card and don't use it anymore unless it has some other extremely good offer or cashback perk.¹
Rinse and repeat, this time with a new card and new offer.

This cycle is often called "credit card churning" and some people like me don't mind living off of it.

Every year I go through a couple cards like this, making a couple hundred or a thousand dollars back. If you do the math, it can be like living with a permanent 20-25% off coupon that you use on literally everything. Individual cards will have even more perks to pump-and-dump for extra cash back.

I recommend especially young guys to try this out: it's a way of saving money, while improving your credit by paying off many lines of credit, and once you're done churning, you have a wide selection of credit cards to use for their various normal features.

Cards to churn

Here's a brief list of some cards whose introductory offers I've taken advantage of. This is just an example list, there are many more.

Links to more cards per company:

That's it! That's all you need to know, to take advantage of this, but the rest of this page is just details that people ask about. Read on for more!

How credit card companies try to mitigate this

As I said, introductory offers exist primarily to get dim-witted people who don't know how credit works into using cards unwisely or at least normal people into switching to a different company. They know that high-agency people can exploit this system, so there are some rules they put in place to mitigate the extent to witch you can take advantage of their offers.

Chase, for example, will not approve anyone for a credit card who has gotten five other cards in the past two years. Wells Fargo will not allow you too open cards with introductory offers without a 18 month gap in between. Those are the main ones; other banks like Bank of America don't bother preventing it at all, but it's possible that they will start something like this soon.

Cautionary note for credit brainlets

I suppose it goes without saying that credit cards are not magical money devices and everyone who has a credit card should only spend what they have the account that autopays their card or even better, do what I do and never let my head hit the pillow before paying off all debts. This might sound like a condescending thing to say, but obviously some people out there don't understand how credit cards work and are going into debt for no good reason. I know everyone who follows me is smart of course, but I say this rhetorically.

When I did a video on this I was surprised to learn that there are also people that resist and detest credit cards but still don't understand them. Some people have this strange idea that merely possessing a credit cards causes debt to occur in some cultic fashion outside of your control. And for people who can't know better, maybe it's better for them to think of credit cards as essentially magical objects if it means they aren't misusing them. For everyone else, credit cards are easy to use and exploit and benefit from.

Other advantages of having multiple cards

It's actually nice to have a number of rewards cards from different companies. I will occasionally check the bank or card's web interface and there will often be additional perks especially for points-based cards. It can often mean 10% in addition to everything else from buying from a hardware store or grocery store. There are many niche businesses and I don't recommend into getting roped into buying something you wouldn't be buying anyway, but I keep tabs on if there is anything familiar.

Similarly, it's nice to have "rotating category" cards that offer say, 5% on a certain type of buy for a period of several months. The Chase card I mentioned above, for example is giving 5% cash back on every purchase made on PayPal as I write this in Q4 of 2020 (it looks like they do PayPal every year or so). I've actually been deliberately making all purchases I would be making anyway over PayPal, just so I can maximize earnings. I'm even going to be paying bills in advance with PayPal so when they are actually due next year, they'll be paid, and I'll have the extra cash back.

Common questions about exploiting introductory offers

A lot of people hear this and think, "sounds too good to be true." Makes sense, but we live in a complex world which again is primarily targeted to the unwise. I've been doing this for years and have made back a lot of lot of money and even increased by credit score.

Let's talk about some of the concerns people new to credit card churning might have:

"But what about muh credit score?"

I'm not entirely sure why people think this, but there's this idea that somehow you're scamming or defrauding credit card companies by doing this. You aren't. You're just obeying their terms of service. You're certainly not neglecting payment or proving yourself a bad investment for a loan, which is what a credit score is actually about.

Opening new credit, including credit cards, will mean an inquiry on your account and for a time being, you'll be marked as "looking for credit." This will decrease your credit score by a small amount; it's normal. But over time, having lots of credit which you have paid off is good for your credit score. That's, like, what a credit score is. Having more credit cards and properly paid off is a great plus on your account.

"B...but that's unethical!"

You gotta be an extreme simp to see these companies massively ripping off retards and nickel-and-diming people and say something stupid like, "I mean is this really ethical?" You're an idiot. You don't deserve free money. Why use your principles to defend people who obviously don't share them?

A lot of these companies even charge people to have checking accounts. Just in case you don't know how banks work, they make money loaning out their reserves. They are already making money off of every account. Charging you extra so they can make money off you is just more icing on the cake for them. There are many banks who are less shills who simply don't do this because it's totally unnecessary.

People who think this, do you go to the grocery store and chide people who get free samples as unethical? It quite literally is the same thing except for the store never makes money off people who just take samples. A bank whose offer you exploit still might make a lot of money loaning out money you put in a checking account there or even on the credit card transaction fees they charge merchants. And if they didn't, who cares?

"Do I need a checking account?"

If you get a bonus from, let's say, a Chase credit card, do you need a Chase checking account to redeem your bonus or points? Usually not.

Every credit card company I've used allows you to set up automatic payments from another bank. So you shouldn't have to worry about remembering to paying your bills, although I usually pay everything manually anyway just to be careful.

If you get an account credit, that will appear as a negative number on your card and you will be able to spend it without paying it off. If you get points, it might be that you need a checking account to redeem it as cash, but you can also usually redeem previous purchases or sometimes receive your bonus in the form of a bunch of gift cards.

This is an important question because some companies like Chase or Bank of America will charge you several dollars a month to have a checking account open, which I find utterly ridiculous. In both cases, you can waive the fee if you have either direct deposit into the account or if you just have a certain amount of money in the account (I think it's $1,500 in the case of Chase). Either way, you can avoid this problem as having a checking account is not usually necessary.

Three important notes on Credit Cards

The psychology of spending

One aspect of human psychology is that people are more likely to be okay with spending or wasting money if they're using credit or debit cards rather than paper money. It makes sense. If you have to part with a physical object to spend something, it can hurt. It doesn't hurt as much to use a card.

I find that the antidote to this is actually in introductory offers. If I get a card that gives me a bonus for spending $500 in 3 months, I treat that $500 as my absolute budget no matter what. Bills included if possible.

Additionally, I started pasting sticky slips on the back of my cards where I keep track of the exact amount of money I use on each card so I know when I hit the required amount for the bonus. Each time I spend, I deduct that amount from the original number. This actually serves the double purpose of making the money-spending more real to me. I'm not just swiping my card, but subtracting the amount and can feel what I'm spending.

Don't use cards with annual fees.

Or at least if you do, be smart about it.

None of the cards I recommended above have any annual fees. So you can get them and not worry about canceling them. You can logically exploit the offers of cards with annual fees and cancel them afterwards to avoid paying the fee, but I don't do this myself.

Firstly, annual-fee cards are usually targeted to big spenders: their offers will be something more like "spend $4000 in the first 3 months and get $750." If you're making a big purchase, that might be worth it, but I personally am the kind of guy who feels guilty for spending too close to $300 a month. I would definitely contemplate one of these if you know you're going to spend some massive amount of money though. Don't forget to cancel it later!

The bigger issue with annual-fee cards because they are used primarily for social engineering and corporate sponsorships. That might sound strange, for example, but some cards which cost several hundred dollars a year might give you a big free annual credit on their favorite airlines or on Uber or Lyft or Amazon or some other godless corporation. That makes them work for people who are loyal consooomers of their chosen affiliates, but for most people, getting the benefits of those cards requires you to use the products they want.

I've seen some cards that give you bonuses for using them 30 times a month or something else. Sure you can juke the system, but I feel like the incentives they put forth are too strong and will probably manipulate you into spending more than you usually do. The reason I recommend the other cards I do is because you can easily spend that much if you're an independent person without feeling like you have to spend more.

Minimizing Privacy Exposure

Now if you're someone principally concerned with privacy, there are ways for you to take advantage of these kinds of offers without exposing your daily purchases. Obviously opening a credit card does require some basic information, like who you are and where you live (other things your bank already knows). But you can minimize your exposure by using the money on the card for a single recurring payment credit.

For example, let's say you pay an electric bill every month. Many power companies/co-ops allow you to prepay or accumulate a credit, so if you open a spend-$1,000-get-$250 card, you can immediately prepay $1,000, wait for your free $250, then prepay that amount as well.

In that, you've got your free $250 (and you can forget about paying bills for a year or so) and the only new thing the credit card company knows is your power supplier (which they could probably guess anyway from where you live). You could do the same with other recurring payments.

A lot of people I've talked to plan on using these offers to by over-the-table cryptocurrencies. That works too.

Additionally if you make a large purchase like a car that is going to have to be registered with "the system" anyway, it might be a good time to get one (or maybe more) of these cards.

The most important thing, however, is that you are the one ripping them off and never the reverse. Do not spend more or waste more because you feel richer because you have something that feels like a free money card.

"Daily drivers"

When not pumping-and-dumping a credit card for an introductory offer, there are also generally good cards that you can keep to maximize idle cash back. Obviously the true red-pill is using cash, but if you'd rather get bonuses from cards, here are some options I use with links:

5% on gas and purchases on military bases (unfortunately USAA is very exclusive (you must have family in the military), but great for members)
5% on groceries (only for first year, but there are multiple cards that do this can can be cycled (or get your wife to get it next year))
5% on bills, specifically, you get 5% on rotating categories and home utilities is one of them.
3% at restaurants and on travel expenses
2% on everything else

It should also go without saying that you should have fixed costs/bills set to charge credit cards just for the free cash back. I mean if you have $250 dollars in bills a month and hook them up to a 2% cashback card, that's $60 back a year. It adds up over the years.

Again:

"The NEET will work harder than the wagie to stay out of a job." —Nullennial (YouTube comment)

"I'm Jewish and I find this video Jewisher" —shiran (response to my original video on this)

Note: Never close a credit card. It looks bad on your record, while having many credit cards over a period of time which you pay off looks good. Just store your old cards away and you can often disable them on their websites.* ↩︎

Notes on Learning Languages

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I get asked a lot about learning languages, so I have a few comments about it here. Hopefully I can awaken you from some dogmatic slumbers about language.

Vocabulary is the least important part of learning a language.

This is hard for people to understand because I think most monolingual people think that languages are just different word lists that people use. As a result, 101 students will manually look up every word in the dictionary to translate. This actually increases the mental load of learning a language because people have the idea that to speak it, they have to think of something in English, then translate the sentence word by word, then say that. What a pain.

So what is a language if not words? It really is a set of constraints as to how words can go together: what order they go in when modifying each other, but also languages are morphology. Verb endings and tenses and such are literally the most important part of a sentence. If you don't have a productive and reflexive use of verbs, you are literally just going to be reciting nouns you know like a monkey.

This is actually why I recommend people learning Romance languages or German to use Michel Thomas's audio. Thomas doesn't lecture at all about what he's doing, but he focused only on using verbs and building up basic expressions from the bottom up until it's understood reflexively by students. To actually learn any language, this is more or less what you are going to have to mentally do anyway in the process.

I would say it's actually possible to fluently speak a language knowing only about 50 words. If you understand the "grammar" of a language, you can basically get by anywhere anytime with a couple dozen words only. What words you don't know can easily be figured out, but you can't wing it with grammar and you can't wing it with morphology.

Computer metaphor

Granted, the same is true of programming "languages" as well, weirdly enough. No one would think "knowing a [computing] language" means just knowing all the function and variable names. The important thing is knowing the syntax of how you put functions (loosely verbs) and variables (loosely nouns) together. After all, variable names are always different and functions can be easily invented too or called from some obscure library. Someone who knows a language is someone who can use its syntax to produce novel expressions. If you take a Python script, replace its functions with C functions, it's still Python, just calling a bunch of undefined functions. People can only get away with even sort of believing this in the domain of human languages if you just don't know enough and end up assuming that all languages just work the same.

Then what is a language?

So really when you learn a language, you can't look at it as new words, but new patterns of speech that interconnect in a logical way.

Speaking fluently in that language means being able to use and combine its basic constructions into complex thoughts put in words. This is why I'm really against "translating in your head." If you're doing that, you're not actually using the language. You're teaching yourself a silly English-word-replacement game. I know it's very hard for word-thinkers not to think in words, but if you can't stop doing that for a second, you're not going to be able to learn a new language.

You will not learn a language by consoooming media.

There's this lazy idea that somehow if you passively sit around and watch people using a language this will somehow endow you with the ability to flexibly produce a language in the same way you see others using it. People want to believe it because they want to be able to watch TV or play a cell phone game like Duolinguo or valueless Rosetta Stone-like software and somehow gain competence in a language.

It's not going to happen ever. Learning to play a boring computer game using words from a different languages is not the same as learning to speak the language.

You might say of "just listening to speech" that "that's what children do," but that's not true at all. Children try pretty hard to participate and understand conversation. They sometimes have a desperate personal need to understand each passing sentence and hear the language they are trying to learn for hours a day for years. You watching some forgettable movie in the background as you play with your phone don't.

Are you actually thinking?

If you want to know if you are actually learning a language, ask yourself that. People are weirdly afraid against actually thinking through things and making new expressions in other languages when that's exactly how you learn them.

A lot of language nerds love to email me about their Anki cards or their harebrained schemes for mass-memorizing words as if they're an Asian studying for a chemistry test. Given what I've said about "learning words," you can guess my opinion on that. Once people abandon the lazy route, sometimes they take up the via dolorosa: the route of suffering and assume that training themselves like a Pavlovian dog will help them become fluent in a language.

In reality, the only question that matter is: "Are you actually thinking?" Are you actually going through the mental process of creating new sentences in a new language?

When I was learning Latin obviously I had no Latin-speaking friends and could barely get my hands on anything Latin-related. But after I learned the basics of the language I started thinking in it constantly. First that starts in my always implicitly translating English song lyrics or ads in my head into Latin. That's actually difficult if you're dealing with something modern and idiomatic. Not as bad with church songs. As time goes on, I would overtly remember things in Latin sentences instead of English. If I mumbled something under my breath I would make sure it was Latin. At all points in time, I was thinking about how the language was structured and what it meant to produce sentences in it.

The sad fact is that most people who "learn" languages in school treat them as advanced cross-word puzzle like games where they don't actually think in the language, but have hilarious mnemonic devices in their head for relating what they want to say in English with something in the language they're learning.

Translating is a bad habit.

If anything, you should become worse at translating the further you go on and the more independently you can stand on your own in another language.

Latin is a good example. I can read and comprehend Latin very well, but if asked to translate what I'm reading, I find that more and more difficult the better I read Latin. Now it's easy for me to report the meaning of a passage, but phrase-by-phrase translation is something you have to think through because Latin and English are structurally very different. This isn't just word order, but even how a Latin speaker approaches expressions and the kinds of phrases they use can translate only very delicately into English.

The problem nearly doesn't exist between English and Spanish, which are basically the same language. I'm sure someone who only knows Spanish will feel like English and Spanish have many differences, but in the context of other languages, like Latin or Chinese or Japanese, it's hard not to view English and Spanish as having basically the same kind of syntax 95% of the time. That actually goes for most modern European languages.

You sound stupid if you don't sound stupid.

Every language has its own set of phonological rules that determine what particular sounds are said how and where. Phonological rules give us "our accents." When someone speaks English in an accent, they are really just speaking English using the phonological constraints of whatever language they're more familiar with. If they speak English competently, there's at least some extent to which they are abandoning their native phonological rules.

When you first start learning a language, you might read something aloud and say "I sound stupid." This is because your natural way of speaking is obviously to say everything with an accent consistent with English. You can probably remember the apathetic jock in Spanish class or whatever who religiously pronounced every Spanish word he mindlessly read with an almost intentionally non-Spanish accent.

To actually speak another language is to adopt the phonological tendencies and even the prosodic and tonal traits of that language. When you initially do that, you will probably sound very stupid to yourself since violating phonological rules you're familiar with always sounds wrong. If you do overcome that illusion of felt stupidity, you won't sound stupid when it counts. If you refuse to improve your accent immediately and from the beginning you will sound like an utter moron forever.

There's actually a trick too: when you imitate a foreign accent, you are actually implicitly adopting the phonological rules of their language that you have noticed in real life. My suggestion is when you are starting out, read the other language in what you'd guess would be a stereotypical accent of the person speaking the language. If your imitation is good, you're speaking their language without an accent.

"The Critical Period" is fake.

That reminds me.

There's an idea in academic and clinical linguistics as well as popular culture that children have a magical plasticy of the brain that makes them uniquely good at learning languages. This is supposed to be the reason why children learn languages "fast" and adults don't. I think this is a myth. You don't have to send me all the "proof" about this (don't worry, the Universities of Georgia and Arizona would've failed me totally if I hadn't seen it for my linguistics degrees there). I sort of assumed that this was true for years, but on further thought, I think it's just a conspiracy of irrelevant data and copes... or at least, it's not nearly as true as people pretend it is: adults are just about as capable of learning languages in most senses.

After all, think about it, children actually take several years to function in a language, which is often much longer than an adult that knows what he's doing. The Michel Thomas style tapes which I alluded to above are good at giving an adult a passable diving-board for a language in about 8 hours. It can be done. You can also give an adult a crash-course in phonology and articulatory phonetics that will make it easy to understand and with practice produce the sounds children take years to master.

The motivation of a child and adult are utterly different. A language-less child has lots of reasons to invest most of his mental life in attention to language. Apathetic adults don't.

What I really get sick of is doomer adults who cope with their laziness by talking about how hard it is to learn a language as an adult. Many adults still learn languages all the time. There is some circumstantial evidence that infants cue into some acoustic cues and other things quicker than adults, but I think in most cases we're just looking at infants semi-consciously honing in on what details they've acknowledged to be linguistically relevant. In reality, developed humans have huge institutional and intellectual advantages to learn.

Only Use Old Computers!

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The ideal ThiccPad

If there is a single point of advice I can offer novice computer users, it is stop using modern computers.

If you look at "technology YouTube," by which I mean the massive multi-million subscriber channels, nearly all of it is devoted to constantly reviewing and comparing every new computer, processor, graphics card and product. There's big money in it because obviously all of these companies put money in it, but also if you're a normal person, you automatically assume you need the "best" technology.

Do you need a modern computer?

Absolutely not. More than 95% of people could be using a computer from 2008 or before without any problems. Needing a recent machine is limited to people who:

Do extreme, professional, processor-intensive video-rendering.
Compile massive programs and operating systems with severe time constraints.
Play recent triple AAA video-games on high settings.
Use many massive Electron apps and other inexcusably bad software written by soydevs and other people who shouldn't be writing software.

The last two reasons aren't really real reasons at all because they are totally unnecessary and avoidable things.

But to the point, watching YouTube videos and using a word processor does not require last month's new release.

Every video I upload, I transcode for settings optimal for YouTube, meaning I render each video I record. On my computer from a decade ago, that still takes only a couple minutes. A fancy $5000 computer might be able to do it in less than one, but it is honestly not worth the pain associated with modern computers.

How much should a computer cost a normal person?

Either nothing or just around $200, I say. I use a ThinkPad X220 I got for $90 on eBay. Before that, I used another ThinkPad X220 I also got for $90. Like anything else, if you are buying things on Amazon, you're doing it wrong.

The Pain of Modern Computers

Modern computers are more breakable

As computing has become more and more popular, companies have started to realize that a consumer's first reaction on having their $5 wifi card die is immediately buy a whole new computer. This means two things: (1) they don't bother to make computers easy to repair, in fact, they make it more difficult and (2) there is absolutely no need to make computers durable at all. In fact, it's probably better to let computers break so you'll get yet another sale.

Apple is by far the most anti-social computing company because of this. I'll let the larger tech channels show you the specifics, but every Apple product is brilliantly designed to make it difficult to fix very basic and otherwise fixable problems. They have quite a racket licensing out the ability and tools to companies that want to fix their terrible hardware. Apple even used pentalobe screws just so normal people couldn't open their computers up with a typical screwdriver. Of course nowadays every other computer manufacturer imitates the Apple style where apparent "sleekness" is supposed to be a signal of high quality.

Modern computers are increasingly monitoring devices and come with proprietary junk.

The Management Engine

You might've heard that all Intel i3/i5/i7 processors (that is, after the Intel Core 2 Duo) have an onboard alternate processor that is meant to function as spyware. This is called the Intel Management Engine. It can view your memory and connect to the internet: basically all modern computers have this permanent back door. In older computers, say the ThinkPad X200, you can, with a little hardware action, remove the other processor and replace the proprietary BIOS with Libreboot or Coreboot, but that is not possible on more modern computers (you can install Coreboot on a more modern machine, but not all of the components of the Management Engine are removed).

More recent computers, however are non-removable spyware by design and, yes, the NSA can monitor any machine with a Management Engine. There are actually even rumors that one of the taps that the FBI under the Obama administration put on Trump during his campaign was a Management Engine bug.

Note that AMD (Ryzen) processors have what they call a "Platform Security Processor" that is equivalent to the Intel Management Engine, so you're not escaping the issue by using one of them.

NVIDIA

Again, unless you play modern videos alone all day, you literally have no reason to have a modern computer, especially one with an expensive graphics card. NVIDIA is a great example because they make graphics cards and develop proprietary drivers for them to make it harder and harder to use them on machines that aren't running whatever the most recent spyware variant of Windows 10 is. Linux works perfectly on all computers ancient and modern, but if you plug some NVIDIA thing up to it, you might lose your screen or not be able to boot. A lot of gaymers whine about their NVIDIA products "not working" on Linux without realizing that is by design. NVIDIA and other companies and all CPU designers go out of their way to keep their source code and standards private which makes their products tangibly worse because it is harder for other parties to write drivers for them. Why? Because most of them have partnerships with Microsoft.

The Problem of Windows

How many times have you heard a normie explain to you that their computer is slow because it's "really old" and they bought it "way back in 2015?" It's an absurd statement of course. Computers don't just get magically slow... ...unless they've been running Windows.

In the future, once even Microsoft has switched over to a purely Unix-based backend for their operating system, we're all going to have a good laugh about how Microsoft Windows, literally the worst and least functioning operating system ever devised, was the largest consumer market share for decades.

I might go into how Windows is poorly designed in another page or video, but I want to be clear that there is no such loss of speed on any Linux distribution, which is what you should be using. I am one of the first to complain about the feature bloat of the Linux kernel and Linux software, but compared to Windows, it's no contest: Linux runs fast on old hardware. You'll know from some of my videos, however, that I'm not big into "Linux Evangelism," mostly because it's sort of strident and doesn't really work with a high success rate. Using Linux is just something that normies have been immunized against (mostly because "It's what smart people do"), but I always find myself in a position where someone's Window installation has permanently crashed and they're at the awkward decision of having to buy a license to reinstall the dysfunctional and slow operating system they've grown to hate.

There is quite literally no problem that normal people have with computers that is not immediately alleviated by installing Linux.

Why do people use ThinkPads?

As I said above, I use a X220 ThinkPad. Older ThinkPads are fairly popular among people who think and care about doing things effectively and economically on a computer. Why is this?

ThinkPads were always designed for enterprise environments, meaning the financial incentives for the manufacturer are not always planned obsolesce, but a long-standing reputation among large companies of having durable, fixable and expandable machines.

To replace a hard drive on the X200 requires unscrewing just a single screw. Same to replace the memory. To replace a spoiled keyboard is no more than three screws. Modern laptops, including the degraded modern ThinkPad have abandoned this simplicity and opt for the Apple-Mac/cell phone design technique of making batteries, memory and the rest functionally soldered and irremovable.

How far can $500 go?

Over the years, I’ve had many things break on my laptops, but since I’ve been using ThinkPads, it is incredibly easy to keep a working computer even after rough use. I estimate that I have never spent more than a combined total of $500 on computers, which is usually a bare minimum for what someone can buy a “modern” laptop for nowadays.

When the keyboard on my ThinkPad breaks, I can just buy a replacement keyboard for $30 or $40 and replace the old one much easier than any other model. That’s the modularity of these computers.

Even in the worst case scenario when something on the motherboard makes the computer unbootable, I still get to keep my “broken” ThinkPad and repurpose the memory, wifi card, keyboard and everything else. I still have some parts of every laptop I’ve had just because they do come in a lot of use. The other month, a friend’s wifi on his desktop went out and I could replace it with one of my old ThinkPad modules.

This is the kind of thing you lose with modern computers. This is purposeful on the part of manufacturers, and it’s important not to pay them huge amounts of money to incentivize this behavior. It’s very easy to live off of 10 year old computers nowadays. The eBay-and-etc resale market is massive even thought many of us have gotten wise to the value of these old computers.

Reviews of All Linux Distros (That Matter)

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Firstly, once you reach basic competency in Linux, different distributions don't matter. A lot of newbies analyze distros based on what they look like when you install them, often not realizing that it's a pretty simple affair not just to change superficial things like your theme and setup, but entire desktop environments. Basically all distro reviews online are wastes of time for people who know what they're doing. When I came to YouTube, all Linux YouTube was was people constantly installing distro after distro in a virtual machine and critiquing minutiae. It was a bleak and boring world. One of my first and greatest achievements on YouTube was making this video: How to choose a Linux distro: Stop Thinking!, which went semi-viral and sort of put a damper on distro reviews. Either way, I'll say what I think about different distro minutiae here.

Things that matter

Free software. If you are switching to Linux, there is no point of you just using junk proprietary spyware "apps" that you used on Windows. Any distribution that advertises proprietary software as a feature should be viewed as suspect. You can always install proprietary software if there is some particular need (usually the only "need" is a lack of knowledge of free software that is more extensible and performs the same tasks and more).
Up-to-date software. This matters because if you want to install a program, you're often going to need recent libraries/depencencies. This is especially important if you want to use software in active development: say software for video-game compatibility on Linux.
No gimmicky additions. Probably the worst thing you can do is install a distribution that puts a giant wall between you and the system itself. One of the biggest advantages of using Linux is the ability to understand what's going on on your computer and optimize it. If you use a distribution that hand-holds basic things, it might seem convenient at first, but as time goes on, you won't have a clue when that fragile system fails.
Consistent and reliable maintainence. Lastly, you'll want to make sure that your distribution has humans on the development side that are at least fixing basic problems. As programs change and are updated, it often requires some changes in your distro's repositories and more. Unmaintained distributions are usable, but it becomes annoying to deal with as time goes on if you want to install software with the distribution's package manager.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a common distribution because it is the distribution shilled by the company Canonical. Canonical has probably had a positive effect on making GNU/Linux more widely used and accessible, but Ubuntu has a lot of long-term headaches that will plague users.

That said, Ubuntu is nearly the worst distribution for new users. It is maintatined at least, but fails on all the metrics above:

It advertises proprietary software in its software center and encourages users to use programs because they are "familiar" from Windows.
It releases slowly and you'll run into problems if you try to install something out of the box.
It is full of gimicks, the elephant in the room being the Snap system, but Canonical has thrown in a lot of junk features in the past and a lot can break.

Debian

Debian is just a more reasonable version of Ubuntu: it separates free and non-free software clearly—it has a optional version that allows unstable and testing packages for some recent software and it has so few gimmicks it's probably the most boring distro!

I haven't used Debian much as a desktop system (I do use it on my servers), but the package manager and even the release speed of the testing versions isn't quite fast enough for me personally.

Artix and Arch

Artix is the distribution that I use and have been using for a while. It is really the same thing as Arch, except for Artix allows the usage of different init systems (I use runit).

Arch and Arch-based distributions are "bleeding-edge" in their release time and have access to the Arch User Repository (AUR) allowing the single widest software library of all major Linux distributions.

Artix offers many installable desktop-environment ISOs for newbie users, but thankfully they don't over-bloat them with gimmicky features. Arch itself only has an official minimal installation, and that's kind of its thing.

If I had to choose, Artix is the distribution that I recommend for both novice and most veteran users.

Manjaro

Manjaro is another Arch-based distro. I've even recommened it before for new users in the past and installed it on many people's computers in real life, but I will admit that my view on it is souring. They have definitely started to go the way of Ubuntu by adding lots of extra features, directly people to rely more on flatpak and "harmful" systems and generally adding more layers of abstraction between the user and the system.

All the good things that can be said about Manjaro can also be said of Artix, which also has easy to install ISOs, so I consider Artix the superior system.

Parabola

Parabola is the FSF-approved, all-free software version of Arch Linux (it also has an OpenRC version for soystemd-haters). In the abstract, Parabola is my optimal distribution, but I don't actually use it anymore for two reasons:

It uses the Linux-libre kernel, which is all free software, but networking will not function with laptops with proprietary wifi cards.
It is not quite as well maintained as Arch and Artix, and you'll be a little more likely to run into package breakage.

The second problem isn't the end of the world, but it can be annoying.

Gentoo

Gentoo is one of the best distributions and excels in all of the 4 requirements I give. Not only is non-free software obviously separated, but it isn't too difficult to have your Gentoo install with a Linux-libre kernel if you want.

Gentoo is also unique because it is a source-based distribution: you can set basic compilation settings for your programs and have a lot of control over them. While Gentoo is very well maintained, you actually end up with a good bit more control over your system. That is a responsibility that has some prerequisite knowledge of course, so Gentoo has a reputation of being difficult to install.

If you want to look into Gentoo, you should first be familiar with Linux and what specific kind of system you want. When you first install Gentoo, because you can customize it so specifically, it obviously helps to know what exact network backend you're comfortable with, whether you want to use GTK or QT, or many other little things that a Linux noob might not know too much about.

Void

Void is another great distribution. It's notable also for using runit instead of soystemd, having a musl version, and having a package system reminiscent of Arch, but in many ways more minimalist and extensible. It again separates free and non-free packages, and has a wide repository of them, included even more installable via the xbps-src system which is somewhat analogous to the AUR, although unlike the AUR, I don't believe it's quite as easy to update packages.

Void has had a somewhat tumultuous development culture. It was originally the brainchild of one man, one man who went missing for a year... After he returned, drama eventually caused other member of the team to encourage his retirement. Either way, while I used the distro for a while and was one of the first people advertising it online, I never remember this translating into any downstream problems on my computer.

Distro not here?

This is only a list of distributions that I've used for a bit. I don't do "distro reviews" or just install random distributions just to test them, so if it isn't here, I'm not going to have an experience-based opinion.

Science vs. Soyence

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There's nothing necessarily wrong with science, reason, knowledge etc. To some degree, they're fundamental for survival in this world in one way or another. But one of the more worrisome problems which have arisen since the Enlightenment, and especially in the past several years, is the fact that whenever scientific knowledge has increased, human arrogance has accelerated even faster. This isn't a metaphysical, moral arrogance; it's one that is more and more jeopardizing the human cosmos.

We live in a pop-scientific and pop-technological world. Because common people are constantly weighing themselves down with new gadgets and state-of-the-art genetically engineered food, there's a tendency to want to pay homage to the amorphous blob of "knowledge." Of course, much like the Greek Gods, we cannot seem to speak to "knowledge" directly, or to mentally murky academics, but only to official mediators: journalists and "science communicators" and the like.

The religious metaphor is intentional. Of course the actual view of Popperian science is that scientific "advancement" is less of an increase in knowledge than a decrease in falsity. We can never be sure of what is true, but we can gradually establish what is false and contradictory; science does exclusively the latter. Real scientific work refutes and calls into question established fact and is in a constant self-regeneration. Facts mean nothing in themselves.

And scientific models, from our models of the atom, to models of the Earth's weather and climate, to models of our body are highly circumstantial, and as a rule, will nearly all inevitably be proven false. Theories are the narratives we cast over facts which have not yet been ruled false. We know nearly nothing of how the brain works. Sure, we know there are synapses, and we know what brains end up doing in some circumstances, but we haven't begun to scratch the surface of how a brain is actually engineered (computational models be damned). The same is true of the human body and is especially true of human society.

Now Neil deGrasse Tyson has the annoying mantra that he repeats at every possible opportunity, which goes something like: "the good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it." First off, I don't know what's good about that; it'd be pretty damn convenient to live in a world where we could imagine away gravity or CO2 or cancer, but aside from this, science, actual science as a critical methodology is manifestly not true and is not the truth. Science is a way of marginally approaching truth by discovering falsity, and in most endeavors, this approachment is so marginal as to be inert in all our daily lives. There is nothing to "believe in" in science anyway, because it's an exposer of non-truth.

But in pop-science, Science^® is "knowledge" and deviation from the scientific catechism is "irrational." It's not just irrational to dispute consensus, but irrational to fail to implement it in your personal life.

In Practice

The greatest danger of pop-science is the unquestioned assumption that life should be led "scientifically." That we should "look for evidence," "question everything," and universally "challenge authority" (unless that authority is a professor). The problem should be blatantly obvious in hindsight.

An obvious example: in the 20th century, Western societies had to deal with the very real problem of a bizarre increase in lung cancer rates. We "know" now that smoking tobacco and other substances apparently cause drastically higher lung cancer rates, but this was lost on the people at the time.

The relationship between smoking and cancer was highly circumstantial; there were some statistical correlations established, but as any pop-science guru will tell us "correlation is not causation!" For decades, scientifically minded people looked for evidence while millions more died. Smoking companies took refuge in the fact that there was no mechanism understood behind how smoking could cause lung cancer. With all scientific rigor, they insisted for decades that the increase in lung cancer was due to something else, or merely an increase in diagnosis capacity. And they were on the side of scientific skepticism!

Only now that there is some understanding of how carcinogens in smoke can damage the lungs can we say that the "scientific consensus" is that smoking causes lung cancer. Cute, but if people had been "irrationally" cautious, the human tragedy would've been substantially mitigated.

The problem is that "looking for evidence" before acting or non-acting is personally and socially dangerous. In nearly all circumstances, our intuition (crafted by millions of years of evolution) or social norms (which keep us to established safe routes) are much better guides to life than the scientific consensus, despite them being "irrational" (and sorry, religion is part of this too). When someone guzzles down some newly fabricated energy drink or gallons of soda, they're nearly certainly damaging their bodies in ways science does not yet understand. Don't wait 40 years for some longitudinal peer-reviewed study to prove that eating plastic is bad for you. Trust your instincts before you give credence to some YouTuber who says inane things like "There's no evidence that..."

My favorite little "irrationality" that we all commit is of course, sleep. After millennia of trying to understand it, there is no established scientific reason or justification for why humans "need" sleep. Sure there are hypotheses (memory processing, repair, maybe even something Freudian), but none close to common currency. In the words of one of the world's most prominent sleep researchers, William Denent, "As far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy." Of course the absence of logical evidence to the necessity of sleep keeps no NdGT fan from wasting their time on the "Bronze-Age Myth" of the importance of sleep.

(Not) (Mis-)Understanding Complex Systems

The human body is a complex system in which every "system" is overlapping, somewhat redundant, all-affecting and fundamentally beyond linear analysis. Our scientific studies can find binary variables that correlate with a low p value, but that tells us nothings about what's actually going on and nothing about the underlying mechanisms. Again, the same is true of the human brain and the same is true of human society. Nothing is a simple input-output system.

What this means is that basically nothing from the world of pop-science can ever affect the basics of our lives because the interaction of our component parts are just non-amenable to any kind of generalizations that make intuitive sense to us. Everything we do affects our bodies in ways we can't predict so the proper strategy is always an "irrational" precaution and avoidance of novelty.

Things, of course, get especially touchy when talking about the "rational" management of society. Every good denizen of the post-Enlightenment world, even most of those on the "Right" have the idea that the economy and social relationships are simple one-to-one hydraulic systems that can be managed like a little steam engine. Now we've been rationally managed to hell and not back (and the solution is always more rational management).

The terrible truth is that traditional social norms are irrational and still do exist for a reason in the perennial gale of social evolution. Social change and social progress (note the lack of scare quotes) have always been happening, but only now do we have the naive idea that the units of society (people) have the competence to design and contribute to an otherwise unconscious evolution of social memes.

Anyway, I'll give the last word on this issue to Noam Chomsky, who somehow manages to say something clear and admirable on the subject:

“Science is a very strange activity. It only works for simple problems. Even in the hard sciences, when you move beyond the simplest structures, it becomes very descriptive. By the time you get to big molecules, for example, you are mostly describing things. The idea that deep scientific analysis tells you something about problems of human beings and our lives and our inter-relations with one another and so on is mostly pretense in my opinion—self-serving pretense which is itself a technique of domination and exploitation and should be avoided. Professionals certainly have the responsibility of not making people believe that they have some special knowledge that others can't attain without special means or special college education or whatever. If things are simple, they should be said simply; if there is something serious to say that is not simple, then, fine, that's good and interesting. We can perhaps find deep answers to certain questions that do bear directly on issues of human interest and concern, but that is rarely true.”

"'Science' 'Communicators'"

One of the worst aspects of all of this is that this understanding of pop-science encourages people to distrust what they know or can judge of the world in favor of the caricature of the consensus of institutionalized academics. People have this idea that there are these intellectual, peer-reviewed demigods in universities who discover the secrets to the universe and communicate them through their messengers stationed at BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post. Betraying their infinite wisdom would make you "irrational" or a "fundie." The reality is that these demigods really just went to graduate school because they were lazy and initiativeless, and even in the abstract, most of their real work has nothing to do with your life whatsoever. It's only the messengers that convince you of that because it stimulates their power trip.

Science journalists, much like journalists generally, are people too incompetent and emotional to work in the private sector, too dumb to be academics (and the standards are abysmally low these days), too full of themselves to work in charity and too bumbling, weak and arrogant to work in a blue collar or manual occupation. Journalism is an attractive career to many because it demands the least rigor and honor and promises the greatest power and influence.

Their self-ordained duty is to overwhelm the public with a confusion of "studies" that increasingly seem to micromanage a neurotic person's life. "Studies show that" classical music may help infant brain growth, or that gluten ravages the intestines, or that simply owning more books causes higher scholastic achievement, or that Vitamin C or antioxidants or kale or whatever health-food de jour solve all the world's problems.

At the end of the day, the worst part is that we talk about "science" as if it's some kind of anthropomophic creature with desires and feelings and a plan for us all. It's a uniquely modern flaw to say things like, "Science tells us that..." "Science is about.." "Science is against..." Does this not strike anyone else as creepy? The interpretation of science forced on the public is a scriptural one, where law to live life by are codified in "peer-reviewed" journals and communicated by intermediaries. 'Science's' purview is infinite and any failure to conform is some congenital failure or reason.

The Fragility of Physics

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Physics has a reputation of being a uniquely "scientific" field. In other fields, you might hear of the concept of "Physics Envy" which is supposed to be a deep-seated desire of academics of other disciplines for the rigorousness and elegance of physics. Only physics, so the popular understanding goes, is truly able to abstract away from the messiness of detail and create truly beautiful and solvent models of their subject matters. Physics is thus the queen of the "hard sciences."

I object to the very idea of "hard vs. soft sciences" for reasons that will soon be clear, but I think it is most important to remember that for all its pretensions, physics is the most fragile science. That isn't necessarily bad, but it's true.

Why "fragile?"

Put simply, physics, partially due to its somewhat abstract nature, is exactly that domain where our interpretation of the universe is most likely to change radically in the event of any kind of theoretical sea change. That is, while in other more terrestrial sciences, the data is well-known and the theory is in debate, in physics, the opposite is arguably true. In astrophysics, quantum mechanics, the study of gravity or relativity, this should all be obvious.

Even without departing the cuddling embrace of mainstream physics, we can actually see this clearly. What is the ultimate fate of the universe to be? A continuous expansion of the universe until heat death? Perhaps gravity or some other force will pull everything back in a Big Crunch? The correct alternative is a statement of very specific and tendentious data which changes quite a great deal with any kind of new interpretations of what we see.

It's worth it to remember that for most of man's history, including the initial development of what we nowadays call physics, the "normal state" of the universe was assumed to be the state of affairs we're familiar with on the surface of the Earth: everything falls down to the ground and things propelled in space will slow down until they stop.

But modern physics now looks at the nature of our life on Earth as an exception to the general rule of frictionless and continuous movement in the vacuum of space. A valid question to ask is how much more that we take to be normal is a special case of reality? As we encounter more and more abberrant data, such as quantum mechanics, we might soon find ourself unifying seemingly disparate forces in the same was that Newton in a novel and seemingly absurd way the fact that objects fall to the ground with the apparent fact that the Earth orbits the Sun into one new concept: Gravity. Such a unification religates all our universals to a special case.

Does light really go the speed of light?

Physics is fragile because it is like a game of Jenga. Pull out or change one piece and the whole thing is either reordered or simply collapses.

As an example, say that within several years, we realize that the speed of light, for some known or unknown reason, doesn't function with the universality we assumed. Suppose that there is some kind of interaction of light and gravity such that light is faster in some parts of the universe. The reason isn't important. Or suppose we merely find out that in the past, there has been a systematic principle (similar to the Heisenberg Principle) that has miscalibrated all of our measurements of light.

Even if we have minutely mismeasured, the Jenga piece of light will radically alter everthing: our ideas of how old the universe is, our relationships with other planets, the solvency of general relativity, etc. You might say that there is a "concordance of evidence" that attests to our single known speed of light, but another way of putting that is that we have many other things tied into our interpretation of light that will have to change if we realize our models of it are flawed.

Poverty of data

Especially in the astronomical domain, it's worth remembering exactly how circumstantial our ideas of space are. We sometime speak of the traits of other solar systems' planets as if we've been there. But in reality, astrophysicists guess the chemical compositions of foreign planets based on their light frequencies and other fragile data. Any systematic error in observation over those thousands or millions of lightyears and we have been counting angels on pinheads the whole time.

People have the idea that because astrophysicists make extraordinary claims about planets, galaxies and time periods far beyond our mortal ken that they must have extraordinary evidence for them. That is frankly not the case. We have a piece-meal and jury-rigged set of circumstantial reasoning leading us to these claims. Seeing them computerized in full color in a science documentary doesn't make them more real. It just makes them look more official.

Physics vs. "soft sciences"

I remember talking to someone over the internet who accused me of having a low view of institutionalized science and being a dreaded epistemological anarchist because one of my degrees is in the "soft science" of linguistics. While I have a lot of bad things to say about the current state of linguistics, as a field, it is substantially more advanced and its findings are substantially more solid than physics. At that, formalizing ideas in math doesn't just make something a better or a more rigorous science anyway, which is the assumption of many people have.

While linguistics undergoes theoretical changes every several generations, the data, or really more importantly the phenomenology of linguistics is as secure as ever across all theoretical frameworks. That is, we know how language works. We can see abstract relationships between morphemes and syntactic structure. Even if we totally rewrite our narratives and theories about linguistic basics, there is no debate about the structure of language and how basic data relates to other data. This is absolutely the opposite of physics.

Physics is pretty solid on earth, and solid when you are running objects at each other in a vacuum, but once we broach the territory of astrophysics, relativity, gravity and more or less anything else that we as humans lack direct intuition of most of the "facts" of physics are theory-internal facts, and will fade away or be rendered obsolete when the next theoretical fad comes around.

My standard for theoretical frameworks

I think any serious scholar needs the ability to operate cognitively with multiple different theoretical frameworks in mind.

For example, (on linguistics) I don't really take Generative Grammar very seriously, in fact, despite it being on of the most well-funded dialects of linguistics nowadays, it's pretty inert. Despite that, I view it as very important for me to be able to process linguistic problems within Generative Grammar and word explanations within its ideas. It's nice to be able to say to someone "this alternation is accounted for if this DP occupies the spec of CP." I don't believe in CPs or specifiers as being psychologically real, but I can recognize the language as communicative.

A good theoretical framework is one that can produce facts and observations that can be recognized and explained outside of its framework as well.

That is, a framework should cue us in to finding utterly novel observations and thus a new phenomenology. This goes against the egocentric motivations of a lot of scientific frameworks whose practitioners are trying to edge out "the competition." Fields that spend most of their time trying to formalize previous observations within their own theoretical language are mostly a waste of time (this is Generative Grammar, frankly, although due to historical ignorance, many people in GG do not know they are re-treading steps).

One of the biggest issues of modern post-war institutionalized science is that the funding and peer-review mechanism is self-reinforcing: all fields converge to be "unipolar": only one methodology or framework is deemed "scientific." This creates a community of "scientists" who are more an more incestuous and generally oblivious not just to other possibilities of inquiry, but don't even have to be aware of their own priors or assumptions.

The blinders of positivism

As I've interacted with physicists more, I'm often surprised by how irrelevant they think even the most basic theoretical awareness is. That's "philosophy" for them. It's not uncommon to hear zingers like these:

"Science isn't about truth, it's about creating models."
"Physics is about fitting equations."
"We don't do philosophy."

Things like these are said as if they are some kind of statement of universal and well-consented-to truth, when in reality they are absurd Zen koans of the positivist religion. This was a loony opinion a hundred years ago and people saying these things now know that they are ludicrous. They have just become identifying marks of the social club.

Yep, science is about creating models... models that replicate reality, i.e. Truth.

A scientists who doesn't do philosophy isn't a scientist: he's a meter-reader. A philosopher who doesn't do science isn't a philosopher: he's just a stoner. The attempt to sever these two words from each other is part of the problem.

Physicists seem to be particularly touchy on this point. On one hand, they insist that philosophy is "not their thing" and "not related." On the other hand, they get incredibly angry when anyone else dares to either put the methodology of modern physics to any kind of philosophical tests or even to look into philosophical ramifications of their work.

In reality, modern scientists and positivists have their own metaphysics, it is just an implicit one that they advertently or inadvertently sneak into their theories. They can only do it because its clumsy sterile "materialism" is the background-radiation of the modern world.

The Parable of Alien Chess

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A parable on the Logical Positivist “interpretation” of scientific models.

The Parable

Suppose an alien race comes to Earth and wants to observe our games. They are very interested in chess, despite the fact that they have eyes with properties that make it impossible to make out what actually happens on a chess board. (The whites and blacks of the squares and pieces all blur together.)

They can still learn about chess experimentally, they know they can sit two players (a so-called “white” and “black” player) down to play it, and they can tell behaviorally who at the end wins.

After extensive experimentation, they realize this: 50% of the time, the white player wins and 50% of the time, the black player wins (we’ll ignore draws and any first-move advantage for the example).

The “best” model

A logical positivist alien thus creates the ultimate, long-term model of chess as an iterated game: half of the time white wins and half of the time black wins, therefore we can model chess with a simple simple coin flip.

Obvious any coin flip doesn’t not necessarily necessarily predict an individual chess game, but over time and iteration, the coin-flip model of chess matches the data perfectly. While this statistical technique might not be useful for predicting a single game, over the long run and over iterated games, it is the most efficient and parsimonious possible model.

The model is so parsimonious it has no place or need for concepts like chess pieces or opening strategies (or strategies generally). It is as effective and simple as a model can be.

“Inferior” models

Suppose, however that a “crank” scientist of the alien race posits that “God doesn’t play dice” and that chess is a more complicated game, despite the fact that the aliens cannot observe it. Suppose even he asks around and determines from humans that there are actually pieces on the board with functions, and he even devises a machine that allows his alien eyes to see the first move of the game of chess.

Seeing this move allows him to create a new theory and model of the game, one that takes into account the first move made and he tries to generate a new set of probabilities of victory based on that move. The model he makes, is of course highly arbitrary, stipulated and ad hoc. In fact, this model is inferior on many inevitable accounts. For example:

It is less predictive over iterated games than the coin flip model.
It is not as parsimonious/minimal as the coin flip model.
It adds new variables to the theory (chess pieces) that are suspect.
There is no known causality behind how the moving of a piece has anything to do with victory in chess. Supposing that moving a piece somehow relates to the victory of a player is a novel kind of metaphysics, one that seems constantly disproven considering a certain first move does not always guarantee a loss or victory.

Which model is “right?”

Which model is closer to truth?

Unlike the aliens, we are not prevented by congenital defect from observing chess. We know that the second, “inferior” theory of chess is truer in the sense that it is aware of piece and understands that how a player moves a piece contributes to victory. We also know that the “better” model of iterated chess games: the coin-toss is only accidentally accurate and the statistics of a coin-toss has nothing whatsoever with how the victor of chess is determined.

The new model’s theoretical categories, such as the concept of chess pieces and moves, if apparently arbitrary in the eyes of the aliens, are getting at the actual underlying mechanics of chess. Even if the model is less effective, it is certainly righter.

Which will cause fruitful scientific inquiry?

The coin-flip model is a scientific dead-end. Firstly, the coin flip model is constructed statistically, which presents the underlying mechanism to be randomness, and thus unworthy of inquiry. This isn’t statistics hoisted above random variation we know to exist, instead, it’s utterly blind statistics that covers over whatever principles underlie it.

Secondly and more importantly, in order to actually improve that model, it has to lose or at least jeopardize empirical solvency and/or parsimony: embracing the abstractions of chess pieces means introducing mess and deviating in some way from the empirical generalization that half of all chess games are won by white and half by black.

This is not an abnormal circumstance.

The parable here, really an example, is not abnormal. In most affairs in science, whether that be physics or neuroscience or economics or chemistry, we are exactly like the partially-blind aliens.

This presents a very clear contrast between a simple and parsimonious theory that works and a radical theory that adds new and questionable content at the price of both effectiveness and simplicity, but is nonetheless closer to the truth.

“But science isn’t about truth!”

Yeah, it is dude.

Even if you are pretending that science is about “models” or just fitting equations and the like, again, the well-fit 50-50 statistical model of chess made by the aliens is impossible to perfect, while the flawed, yet more true to reality model does have a potential over the long-term to be a superior one as an alien researcher learns more.

After exhaustive inquiry, an alien race might not only discover the chess pieces and the full set of rules behind chess, they might be able to predict what moves are good or bad and predict individual chess games. Even on the standards of mere instrumentalism, the mindless positivistic theory is still actually inferior.

In this case, can the positivistic alien scientists bear to tolerate an alternate “metaphysical” theory until it gradually acquires the descriptive adequacy that the preexisting theory have?

Local maxima

The plot

One way helpful to think of scientific truth and model accuracy is to visualize an optimization plot—a three-dimensional surface peppered with various mountains and valleys of various heights and depths. “Truth,” is upwards and the goal of science is to get further that way—or if you deny truth as being “metaphysics,.” how about “accuracy in data” or “well-fit equations.”

At the point you’re at, you can tell which direction is “up,” you can tell which incremental changes to your theory or equations move you upward, or, which little changes you can make to improve your model. That is what incremental science is, after all: don’t change assumptions and just fine-tune your equations. The continued fine-tuning is sometimes thought of as “progress.” Of course I don't think that this is bad, but it is a very minor and scientifically less important part of science as a whole.

But the reality of incremental science is that once you’re at a local maximum, a peak on the plot—once you’ve fine-tuned your equations about as perfectly as possible, it’s over! Science is completed, but you might not actually be at the absolute maximum of truth, but you might be languishing on the peak of a local maximum, thinking nonetheless that you are the smartest guy in the universe.

Everything next to you looks like a disimprovement. It looks just like those inferior theories of alien chess that posit the existence of chess pieces. From that, you might erroneously conclude that you have found the global/absolute maximum, which due to the nature of the complexity of the universe and the multiplicity of possible answers and theories, you flatly haven't.

Logical positivism is kind of theoretical lobotomy that implicitly tells scientists that they should never, ever, ever change foundational assumptions: tweaking equations like an oblivious autist is Science^® and everything else is “philosophy” or “metaphysics” or “pseudoscience.” This amounts to keeping each scientific field on whatever local maximum is closest, utterly unable to extricate themselves from it even when they see on the horizon abberant data. If you want to understand the stagnation of science or any other specific field, this is where it comes from.

Purposefully “bad” science

In Against Method, Paul Feyerabend, in what an unreflective mind might misinterpret as a “troll,” says that it is important for science that people have biases, financial interests, interfering religious and political doctrines and the like in science. Looking at the plot, you might now see why. When we are stuck on a local maximum, every new data keeps our already-optimized model where it is no matter how low that maximum actually is. What you need to shake it up is an external shock that totally moves our theoretical position somewhere new on the plot where we can try to optimize at another point, and then compare.

Basic assumptions

A prudent person should be able to question, “Am I even on the right track or am I playing with some model that has a fundamental flaw?” I can guarantee you, optimizing for data and fitting math and equations is easy. All theoretical programs are wrong because they make incorrect core assumptions. This is very hard for the ego of scientists because it means:

Possibly illiterate dilettantes on the internet might see and bring to attention legitimate theoretical flaws.
All the years you spend in graduate school counting angels on pinheads in your respective theoretical framework is mostly a waste of time.
The borders of science are borders more of a sociological club than being the border of raw rigor.
Most of the scientific work is not meaningful outside of the theoretical framework that gave rise to it.

Why I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Every piece of software I write I license under the GNU Public License Version 3 (GPLv3) unless I have forked it from something else.

The GPLv3 is the premiere copyleft license, meaning that it not only allows users to run, modify and distribute their own versions of what I write, but it also requires that no one in that chain of development restrict and close-source that software: it and software deriving from it must forever remain open, usable and sharable. Richard Stallman, one of the minds behind the GPL has described it as a "hack" of the copyright system because it uses the legal infrastructure of copyright to ensure software is free rather than restricted.

But occasionally I get asked why I don't use so-called permissive licenses like BSD or MIT. These are free software licenses, but they do not require that forked versions of the code be free and open source software. In other words, you can take something written with a BSD or MIT license, put it in the next version of Windows and no one will ever know. If you did that with GPL code, you'd be in for big legal trouble if found out.

I and others have recently taken to calling these permissive licenses Cuck Licenses.

Why "Cuck Licenses?"

Why be mean and bully BSD and MIT licenses calling them "Cuck Licenses?"

Quite simply, using them is precisely analogous to being cuckolded. When you really look at it, the similarity is uncanny.

I understand GPL free software and its ethical vision for software. I also understand that desire for people and businesses to not release their source code for commercial and monetary benefits. What I don't understand is simultaneously releasing free code with no requirement that it remain free. It can now be used against you and others—if you had moral qualms about that, you could've at least made money off of it yourself.

Using a Cuck License especially for "ethical reasons" or "because I like open source software" is beyond absurd. You're simply writing code and effectively abandoning the privileges of intellectual property while allowing any large corporation to come and close-source and monetize your software and sell it back to you without any other obligations. You have also abandoned your ability to ever complain about IBM, Microsoft, Apple or any other tech giant because you are literally writing their proprietary software. These companies even sometimes take very simple code from minor projects and use it to save a buck and a little effort.

When you license with a permissive license, you don't have a say anymore.

At the end of the day, using a Cuck License is little different from either releasing software in the public domain or just not licensing it (in some jurisdictions, at least). It has the pretense of a license, but for no real function. I suppose depending on which you use, you at least get your name on the license, but I hardly think that that's how internet fame and glory is actually distributed anyway. As far as I'm concerned using a Cuck License is worse for user freedom than just releasing it in the public domain. This is because at least public domain software can be taken and later additions can be protected by the GPL. The legal case for doing that with a Cuck License is not so clear.

No whiners!

The funniest thing is when Cuck Licensers complain that people are abiding by their licenses. They will complain that people took their code and made money off of it. They will complain when they don't get some social credit they feel like they deserve when their code is used in a project. They will complain if people fork their project and it becomes more popular than the original. They will complain when some tech giant takes their code and makes spyware out of it.

If they were serious about stopping any of this, they easily could've by licensing their project as anything other than a code giveaway. If you want praise for some contribution, put it in the license. If you don't want your software used for proprietary software, use the GPLv3.

A Cuck Licenser gets what he deserves (and we all pay the price).

One of the funniest and saddest horror stories of Cuck Licenses I can think of is Andrew Tanenbaum, who released MINIX, an operating system, under a BSD license. Intel silently took this software (thanks to its license) and unbeknownst to him, used it for their Intel Management Engine, making it the OS of the spyware microprocessor/backdoor now running in all Intel CPUs. We all have a permanent NSA backdoor because of the Intel Management Engine—all made possibly by Cuck License cuckery.

Only many, many years later was this even revealed to Tanenbaum. Read that blog post of his as he slowly externalizes his mixed feelings, tinged with guilt. After all, on the "bright" side, he says:

"I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS."

Wow, what a proud achievement. But regardless, Tanenbaum already feels some regret about the fact that his permissive license allowed Intel to withhold this:

"This was a complete surprise. I don't mind, of course, and was not expecting any kind of payment since that is not required. There isn't even any suggestion in the license that it would be appreciated.

"The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all."

You can feel the regret. With Cuck Licenses, you get the worst of two worlds: You get no credit for your work, nor money for licensing fees like other proprietary software and your software will be used to violate your and other users' privacy when it is used in closed-source environments. Oh, no... copes incoming:

"Many people (including me) don't like the idea of an all-powerful management engine in there at all (since it is a possible security hole and a dangerous idea in the first place), but that is Intel's business decision and a separate issue from the code it runs. A company as big as Intel could obviously write its own OS if it had to." emphasis added

If Tanenbaum had released MINIX under the GPL, we wouldn't be at the mercy of Intel's business decision. They would've had to release the source code for the microprocessor, keeping user privacy ensured and irradicating the permanent spyware liability all computers have nowadays.

If they wouldn't want to do that, they'd have to just write an operating system themselves. Tanenbaum is right, they obviously could've taken the time and money to write an OS themselves if they had to, but they didn't have to, because a BSD license cuck wrote it for them. Thanks a lot, sucker! Now our computers are being monitored at a lower start-up cost and we have you to thank. It would've been a lot more respectable to not use a permissive license and instead license it proprietarily if he has no moral issues with proprietary software: he could've at least gotten Intel to pay him to use his operating system. Heck, if he had used the GPL and if they took it anyway, he could become an insta-millionaire by suing them right now.

The moral of the story is perhaps lost on Tanenbaum, who finishes up his blog post with:

"If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users."

"Maximum amount of freedom to potential users" is somehow mass-surveilance of every computer user thanks to the BSD license. Thanks for your contribution to "freedom."

The Freedom that Cuck Licenses "preserve"

"Freedom" is an incoherent buzzword if you don't define it. There are some people who might argue that the fact that they can't kill and steal freely is a violation of their "freedom." That's very true in some sense.

In the same way, the GPL (unlike Cuck Licenses) "violates" the freedom of all people to close-source code and hide it from the public and (in effect) do annoying or privacy-violating things with it.

The goal of the Free Software Movement, defended by copyleft licenses like the GPL is for all software writers and users to live in an environment of publicly auditable, editable and exchangable code. The goals of the Open Source movement have a similar goal, albeit often guided by practical considerations.

He does it for free.

Cuck Licenses, however, undermine those goals. They will say that they maximize freedom by placing no requirement on those who distribute When you release any code under a Cuck License, you are simply writing free commercial code for corporations that will inevitably use it against you. You might as well just actually get a job with them so you can get paid for what you do instead of just getting cucked. When you release code under the GPL, you write free software that benefits other people who write free software.

The Free Software Foundation and the GPL people have correctly realized that just being "permissive" with licenses is unworkable in the current environment. The legal infrastructure incentivizes and defends proprietary software and gives it a systematic financial advantage. The GPL is a viral antidote to that. Obviously if all software were free and no laws protected "intellectual property" in publicly obtainable software, everything would be "permissively licensed." We don't live in that world. The GPL and other "copyleft" licenses are ways of undermining and disincentivizing and making impossible the close-sourcing of software. Not using the GPL and using a cuck license is just the same as writing proprietary because you literally are because all of your software can be snatched up and proprietarily licensed.

“B...buut the GPL isn't enforceable!”

I've heard some people pass around the idea that somehow the GPL is unenforceable. After all, if you have close source software, how can anyone really tell what's going on? In some cases, that might be true if you have perfect op-sec. That wouldn't be the case for the Intel Management Engine above, and that wouldn't be the case for Windows XP, whose source code recently leaked.

I have known people in industry writing proprietary software and worrying about the GPL is real. The "virus" of GPL taking over everything and making it free is something people have to take heed of. I'm sure there is some level of GPL-violation going on in some places at least, just because lifting simple routines or copy-and-pasting some things from GPL with significant enough changes could go unseen even if leaked, but integrating larger GPL programs would be nearly an impossibility.

At the end of the day, though, what does it matter? What is a totally unenforced GPL? It's just a Cuck License—Isn't that what license cucks want? So why should they care? At their very best, BSD and MIT licenses are only what GPL might be at its very worst.

The GPL is a permanent liability for any company that crosses it. Some companies might be so bold to lift GPL code and hide it, but there is always a risk and a worry that prevents its general violation.

Addendum

Are copyleft licenses always best even for freedom?

No!

Here's a question I got about this article that I'll reproduce here because it touches on something good.

[personal details omitted for anonymity]

However, I read your article, and I can see your point. I have an idea for an
Operating System and due to your arguments, I would definitely license that
under the GPL, as well as any new programs I write. I might even change most or
all of my current programs to GPL, with the exception of that bc, which needs
to remain BSD since it is default in FreeBSD now.

That said, I have a library I am working on, and my experience is that
libraries under the GPL do not get used, unless a commercial license is offered
as well, and often, not even then. You can see this with glibc, which has a
special linking exception and the fact that the LGPL is fairly popular for
libraries.

First question: what is your opinion on the linking exception and the LGPL? Are
they Cuck Licenses? I mean, they do require that the library and any
modifications be put under the LGPL, which means that the library remains libre
software. However, they can also be put into proprietary code, which is the
entire reason you call MIT and BSD licenses Cuck Licenses.

Basically, it seems as though you are correct when it comes to licensing
programs themselves. But it gets murkier when talking about libraries.

[other personal details omitted]

This was my response to this email explaining this finer point.

Yeah. There are sometimes times when it is tactically better to license
things under a permissive license if for institutional reasons:
mass-adoption is required and companies and such might be unnerved by
the GPL. Libraries might often be like that. So it's not necessarily a
purity-spiralling point.

RMS actually advised that ogg/vorbis should use a cuck license to
maximize adoption (it originally used the LGPL, but switched to BSD):

https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

It's thanks to this that it has now become a usable and wide-spread
format, used now on nearly every proprietary web service because of its
small-size, good fidelity and general superiority.

So yeah, if you're writing a standalone program, I'd use the GPL, but I
would choose licenses ultimately in terms of which would maximize the
possibilities for users of using free-software. In some circumstances,
that means using a cuck license. Same is true of the LGPL. I think
GNU/FSF recommend LGPL only to be used when it is competing with a
proprietary library, and if that's usually what you are writing, you
might end up writing a lot in the LGPL.

Politics matters most to slaves.

Sat, 09 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Now onto the second point I didn't get to in my post yesterday: politics only matters so much when you're a slave. Or as I put it there, "You will need politics less than you think."

That is to say that if you live in a city where your every action is watched, if you use proprietary software and communicate only via social media services, if you have no marketable skills because you have some inert degree and questionably productive and definitely replaceable job and a large company, you need politics quite a great deal.

Your entire existence in the system is based on being a good boy within the established boundaries of what is deemed by the mass media to be socio-politically appropriate. Maybe you've gone into debt, but you definitely rely the whole "system" for all the basics. If you don't think you do, just ask yourself whether your life has changed for the better after the Coronachan Panic of 2020.

What's the alternative? Well, boomer rants viewers might see some of this coming...

The fact of the matter is that both the daily ins-and-outs of politics and the overarching trends of politics matter very little the more independent your are of the system. Earlier, I always mumbled about how conservaboomers seemed a little too apathetic about the cultural changes being forced on them. This social engineering still is the most serious problem in all technologically-complex mass-media societies, but I must admit for people who choose personal independence and independence for their families and local communities, it is much less of a problem.

When I was plugged into the system, minorly red-pilled and generally peeved because I actually paid attention to the media as something other than to laugh at, I found the idea of Political "Exit" pretty cucky. How much sense does it make to leave the "political process" altogether? Sounds like giving up.

It sounds like giving up because the "political process" is something internal to the media system at large. That's why even when the political process does something the media doesn't like (like electing the Orange Boomer, for example), its actions are immediately rendered inert by fakery.

The actual solution is creating and participating in organic society, which still very much exists outside the purview of the media and NGOs and the like. People still need plumbers. No one is going to fire a plumber because he says trannies are mentally ill men in dresses—otherwise there'd be no plumbers. Or electricians, or builders or anyone who actually does anything productive. It'd just be HR, journalists and professors left... and some open source developers who write more codes of conducts than they do software. Do you think they'll be able to feed you?

Exiting the system is actually the opposite of surrender. Why would you think the solution is something like voting or even "owning the libs" or something publicly advertised as a solution? The actual solution is building an alternative. Or maybe rebuilding the alternative.

Do you really want to make your boss rich if you think he'd turn around and betray you because of a media witchhunt? It's better for you to be doxxed and fired now rather than wait 20 years for it, getting more ensconced in the insanity. Start becoming more independent now.

A lot of people LARP about what they're going to do when they take over "the system" by revolution. Revolution, the idea of abrupt enforced change, however, is fundamentally their idea and if you buy it, you're going to keep running your head into a wall.

Being independent, living out of the city and the Matrix, however, is simultaneously like transporting yourself back in time to when things were saner, but at the same time, transporting yourself into the future where "the system" has already collapsed and we're already rebuilding. Be a part of it now rather than later.

Why do I so rarely talk about politics on my channel?

Sat, 09 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It's not a huge secret that I'm somewhere in the high echelons of the red-pill, however you define it. I'll openly talk about pretty any topic that people organically bring up in streams, or that I'm asked about, but I've never really made any kind of political content on my channel, aside from jokes and memes. That might be surprising because especially three years ago before the mass-bans and algoritm tampering, right wing political channels were a dime-a-dozen and an easily way to get views. There are two main reasons I never took part. Arguably "fear of being ZUCCed from YouTube" could be a possible third, but I have a kind intransigence that makes me relish me being banned. I'm also pretty tired of YouTube, and am increasingly questioning if using it is even a reasonable compromise...

So why do I not do political videos? Why do I not have a set list of deep facts that will blow you away and red-pill you? The two reasons:

Reason one: 道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。
Reason two: You will need politics less than you think.

Okay, reason one there is just the first line of the Daode Jing. The Daode Jing is the basic book of Daoism (Taoism), and Dao (literally "Way") is an amorphous concept in Chinese thought that could be crudely comparable to Western concepts of "natural order/law" or maybe even "spontaneous order." "Sounds gay," you say. So what does this famous first line mean and how is it relevant to why I don't talk about how to get red-pilled? I would say it's hard to translate, but even saying that would sound even more pretentious as if I actually know classical Chinese as a native language, but here's a rendering.

The Dao (way) that you can follow isn't the true eternal Dao. A name that you speak, isn't its true name.

An aside, it should be a capital offense to translate classical Chinese. It is so perfect and terse and everything autisitically limited to four elegant syllables that it's just criminal to mutilate it into another language, but we'll forgive it this time.

So what do I mean by quoting this? I mean that the journey to getting red-pilled is not something that can be explained. If I could just explain it, tell it to you, it wouldn't be the true story. It is a varied, and in each case, personal journey, that one goes on.

Although you've been lied to, it's not the lies that's the problem. As an adult, you can a lot of the times tell when the media is manipulating you, especially in the last past decade it's gotten so obvious even a Boomer could see it. But what you don't see is how when you were lied to (or told selective truths) as a child, you didn't have the same BS-detector, and that allowed a lot of deep-seated impressions about the world to be formed. So a lot of people who don't believe anything the media says now (rightly) are still mind-cucked. They accept the programming and differ on the details.

I will give you this hint. Basically all of your programmed emotional responses are your enemies. There was an old Moldbug blog post where he talked about even far after "awaking from his dogmatic slumber," he still was surprised that if he saw a group of Nazi LARPers, he would reflexively have a pang of emotional stress, but if he saw Stalinist LARPers, he wouldn't have the same kind of emotional reaction. I think everyone raised in the West has that same programmed reaction. You might know with your head that the communist death count is supposed to be higher and the suppression wider, but it doesn't click because you weren't made sensitive to it.

A good heuristic is whenever you see one of these emotional responses, especially an emotional response to a political term: democracy, equality, racism, feminism, literally all of them actually, your Pavlovian conditioning is telling you to avoid an intellectual area specifically because it is the ideological weak spot of the background propaganda of modernism. If it was not a weak spot, there would be no harm in you being allowed to calmly investigate it. People's thoughts are regulated in liberal democracy not by laws, but by psychological programming that goes off when someone is tempted to evaluate an idea they're not supposed to. Okay, actually I guess in Europe they're regulated by that and laws, and it's coming to America very, very soon now.

All of this is to say that breaking out of this programming is not so much of an issue of me or anyone else explaining a series of facts to you. 道可道，非常道。 That's what Laozi said. As cringe as it sounds, it is primarily a battle against yourself, or at least the part of yourself that has eaten up the tacit assumptions of modernism. Before you own the libs, you must own yourself. Laozi said that too.

In case quoting classical Chinese and talking in floating, general terms isn't getting across, I'll say that getting red-pilled is sort of mystical... literally. Of course, "mystical" in the old, original Greek sense. A "mystic" in Greek is just a synonym for an "initiate." Many cultic religions of two millennia ago where like modern Freemasonry: not a ideology one could just go and read about on Wikipedia, but one where people were slowly initiated in the thought and mindset of the religion over time. While people were born into Paganism, they were initiated into Gnosticism, Hermeticism or even early Christianity. The only difference is that you are being initiated out of the cultural bubble of modernism. Into what? It can vary person to person, experience to experience. You'll always be in some bubble, so don't be arrogant, but you will be out of the big bubble that's going to pop everywhere and is dominated by liberal cat-ladies, professors, sanctimonious NGO-members and journalists.

All of this is to say that it is simply impossible for me to provide you direct direction. Even direction might sound stupid before or after. Maybe I can lay out some random disorganized recommendations.

Years ago as young college student, I remember reading Steven Pinker's Blank Slate (dl) and thinking I was finally red-pilled. Now I think Steven Pinker is a moron (that book and only that book of his is good, the rest is beyond garbage). I've actually met many people for whom this book was the first step away from basic boomer-tier progressivism. I suspect that Pinker almost regrets writing this book because he's actually very basic in politics. He wrote it back before the elite recognized any threat of a resurgence of energy on the right.
I think everyone knows that Uncle Ted's manifesto is another favorite on my channel. I never read it until long after I needed it, but since it's a meme now I should recommend it explicitly.
If you're prepped for harder stuff Radishmag has it. This one tries to evoke that programmed emotional response in a devilish way, but it might be exactly the next step with plenty of actual original sources on historical articles to follow up with.
Everything Nassim Taleb has written is good. He might be the only living author worth reading now in fact, which isn't saying that much considering our age, but Taleb is pretty based and has attracted a constellation of non-retarded people who employ the very useful concepts he's popularized: antifragile, Lindy, buttercuck... (okay maybe the last one he didn't coin himself, but I'm buttercucked and proud). Read his books before you even look up videos of him or shadow him on social media. His books are lucid, but you won't get it based on mere social media. He also has no patience for brainlets.

Also, you can be red-pilled too quickly and end up like that guy in the Matrix who looks like me and betrays his friends so he can be put back in the matrix to have nice juicy steaks again. Did he make an appearance in Runescape as well?

Anyway, I wrote more of this than I thought I was going to, and I never got to reason two! I'll write it tomorrow after church. You can read it once you get back from church providing it isn't banned where you live.

Speaking of church, for those interested in early Christian theology, or frankly Greek philosophy generally, notice how similar 名 name/word "míng" in the Chinese above is equivalent to logos. In fact, 名 is even used both in the particular sense "the name that you speak" as I render it, and in the universal abstract sense of logos. This pun, which doesn't exist in English without some explanation, does exist in both classical Chinese and Greek. More on that later.

In Defense of "Pseudoscience"

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you keep up with my random asides in videos and elsewhere, you might know that I'm extremely disappointed with the current state of institutionalized science. The post-war era was a disaster for scientific epistemology, in fact, epistemology and science commentary mostly became an exercise to exclude one's enemies by technicality. Academia became an enormous state-funded enterprise, and the best way to ensure that your research program got funding before your rivals was to develop advanced reasoning to exclude their methodology altogether from science.

Thus the term "pseudoscience". In former centuries, there was no such division between "science" and "pseudoscience". Researchers wrote tomes on subjects which were amalgams of hard analysis and what we would now consider baseless or unwarranted speculation. Each were understood for what they were, all ideas were on the table for analysis.

The thing is, all academics—at least all remotely intelligent ones—quietly harbor fringe beliefs. If you push any of them in private, or with vindicating evidence, they'll quickly bounce to support their deeper intuition. One example that comes to mind is geologist Robert Schoch, who after a little empirical prodding, became a vocal supporter of the idea of a prehistoric dating of the Sphinx, and then later other Mesolithic civilizations. Nowadays he brushes shoulders even with the ancient aliens crowd, and why shouldn't he? Once you've earned the designation of "pseudoscientist", you might as well go full-bore and have fun.

The other best-kept secret is that by definition, "pseudoscience" drives advancement in "real science". All new ideas start out as baseless speculation—Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift, based on the trivial and child-like realization that South America sort of fits into Africa, was mocked as pseudoscientific by Americans for decades. Now it's science. I wouldn't doubt if Schoch's Sphinx water erosion hypothesis will be similarly vindicated, partially by the many Mesolithic constructions found since then.

In linguistics and archeology, we have a recent "pseudoscientist" in Marija Gimbutas. Gimbutas unearthed many female idols/dolls from pre-Indo-European Europe and jumped to far-reaching, "pseudoscientific" conclusions: Old Europe was a feminist utopia, there was no violence and complete harmony, etc. Because Gimutas's politics were socially unassailable, you don't hear "pseudoscientist" around her much, but that's certainly the word on everyone's lips. If pseudoscience is what Schoch is doing, it's certainly what she was doing. Regardless, this pushed her into making specific claims about the origin of Indo-Europeans, that they originated from the Kurgan (Yamnaya) culture, a claim that has now become consensus due to further archeological, linguistic and nowadays even genetic research.

I've seen first hand that there are really two types of personalities in science. On one had, there's the conventional and petty academic who is "detail-oriented" and "rigorous" in some sense that means religiously adherent to theoretical priors. These people will only truly fight for something when they're on the side of consensus or when the issue is of no social importance. On the other side are the "pseudoscientists", or in other words, the people who actually have something interesting to say.

The Problems with Utilitarianism

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I originally wrote this essay in 2014 or 2015 in a Chinese buffet in Athens, Georgia. I've changed some of it and am re-adding it here. I talk about the issues with Utilitarianism and a bad book by Sam Harris.

Utilitarianism

At a dumb intuitive level, the "ethical" idea of Utilitarianism in principle gets pretty close to what most modern people reflexively want from social-political affairs: the greatest good for the greatest number of people—who doesn't want that?

The problem is that that intuitive idea is incoherent. It sounds good, but there's not really such a thing as "the greatest good for the greatest number of people." If there were, it wouldn't even be actionable.

"Maximizing"

So the first problem is one any mathematician will realize right off the bat: it's rarely (really never) possible to maximize a function for two variables.

If we had the means, we could maximize (1) the amount of good in society or (2) the number of people who feel that good, but nearly certainly not both (if we can it's a bizarre coincidence).

It's sort of like saying you want to find a house with the highest available altitude and the lowest available price; the highest house might not have the lowest price and vice versa, the same way the way of running society which maximizes happiness is nearly certainly not be the way which maximizes all individuals' happiness.

There are some classic moral puzzles that bring this out: Let's say there's a city where basically everyone is in absolute ecstasy, but their ecstasy can only take place if one particular person in the city is in intense and indescribable pain. Or to put it another way, to maximize my happiness, we might need to make everyone in the world my slave and allow me to rule as I please. Although this might maximize my happiness, it might not maximize anyone else's (if it does however, we might want to consider it).

The Well-being of Conscious Creatures

So I recently read Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape which is either a failed attempt to bring Utilitarianism back to life or a misguided book simply ignorant of what the problems with it were. I don't actually recall Harris using the term "utilitarianism," although that is really just what he's arguing for.

Harris repeats one mantra basically every paragraph of the book: "the well-being of conscious creatures—the well-being of conscious creatures—the well-being of conscious creatures." In addition to being repetitive, the term is problematic for important reasons. So Harris wants our Utilitarian engineers to maximize "the well-being of conscious creatures," but the problem is we can't just add up enjoyment in the first place. There's no way of taking my enjoyment of candy, subtracting the pain of a broken nose and adding/subtracting an existential crisis or two.

Now his hope is eventually we'll understand the neurology of the brain enough to do just that. I don't take Harris for a fool, and he does have a Ph.D. in neuroscience (obviously I am being sarcastic), but I think he's ignoring all the important problems either to appeal to a public audience or just to convince himself. We can study the neurology of feelings and get readings of neural activity, but objective neural activity is certainly not subjective experience. Twice as much neural activity doesn't mean "twice" the subjective experience.

We can no better look at brain activation to understand subjective experience any better than we can look at the hot parts of a computer to see what it's doing.

You can't do math with feelings

Of course one of the problems of qualia/subjective experience is that they are necessarily unquantifiable: imagine how you felt the last time you got a present you really enjoyed—now imagine yourself feeling exactly twice as happy—now 1.5 times as happy—now 100 times as happy.

You can't do it, and even if you could, you couldn't compare that experience with other experiences—you can't really understand what it means to be as happy as you were sad a month ago, and that prevents us from actually adding up your experiences into one number to be maximized.

But again even if we could it would be impossible to add that number up with someone else's experience. Humans have different subjective experiences: caffeine affects me demonstrably different than other people, but I can't quantify that; some people are more affected by pain (to my understanding, women seem to have a neurology more pain-prone than men), but how can we precisely relate the precise ratios of every individual person?

And of course, although Harris wants to maximize "the well-being of conscious creatures," we have no clue what kinds of conscious experiences define animal life, or how many animals are "conscious" in any recognizable sense. As Thomas Nagel noted, we can't even begin to imagine what it's like to be a bat, but to quantify their experiences and compare them to our own? Forget about it!

Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy presented the idea of a genetically engineered cow which not only was made to be able to speak, but to enjoy the prospect of being eaten and encourage others to kill and eat him. Experience itself is not some kind of thing arbiter of morality. Pain, in fact, might be a negligible or incomplete guide to what is not good. Children have to put up with being drug around to do many things they don't enjoy. That doesn't mean some immorality in anything.

The philosophical problems here are so endless as to make any kind of objective application of Utilitarianism based on neuroscience far beyond even fancy. I will be so bold as to say that this will simply never be possible, regardless of what chips Elon Musk wants to put in your brain.

To repeat:

We cannot quantify any particular feeling.
On top of that, we cannot compare the values of different feelings.
On top of that, we certainly not weigh the subjective feelings of all humans or beasts against other humans' feelings.
On top of that, even if we could do that, we can't maximize for utility in such a way to maximize all individual happiness and collective happiness simultaneously.

Utilitarianism isn't just impossible, it's impossible every step of the way.

To be clear, these are not technological problems that a future totalitarian government might be able to "solve." There really is no coherent sense in which we can put a number to a certain feeling of happiness and subtract from that another person's feeling of unhappiness. Qualia are qualia. It's like subtracting the sound of an airplane from the color blue.

What Utilitarianism really is

Anyway, the tradition of Utilitarianism was always a failure, but it's an interesting sign of the times. The Enlightenment was a time of some (less than usually thought) scientific advancement and the idea was that as we began to understand the nature of the body and the stars and everything else, we could fully understand too human society.

Eventually we could engineer and control them all. But as fast as we learn things about the world, even faster do complications arise and we end up "[restoring nature's] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain" in Hume's words.

The only really unfortunate thing is that the ruling class of the West either doesn't know or does care. There's a cynical sense in which they are attempting to re-engineer or "Build Back Better®️" the world on Utilitarian principles where every decision is determined to be acceptable by some centralized utilitarian calculus.

"I Have Nothing to Hide" and Comments on Totalitarianism

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is an article recovered from my old site. The date must be around 2012 or shortly after.

About forty years have passed since an American president, in an as-of-then unprecedented act resigned from office. It might be too much of an exaggeration to say that the Watergate Scandal singularly fomented a newly sardonic and cynical attitude in the United States, but the public has certainly moved in that direction. The illegal break-in and wiretapping at the Watergate Hotel subjected only several people to constitutional violations, but it was met with public outrage that would come to destroy the otherwise highly popular and successful presidency of Richard Nixon (who really was only indirectly involved), whose very name to this day embodies corruption in the American psyche. Yet in our times, when it has been casually revealed that the American government has been systematically wiretapping and cataloging information on millions of Americans, most citizens respond with despondency, apathy and an impotent and uncreative cynicism.

More importantly the very issue reveals precisely how unimportant constitutional limitations are to the public in the first place. I wasn’t my intention to either induce controversy or promote conspiracy theories in using the word “totalitarianism” in the title of this essay, but in a literal sense, the United States, and most other modern democracies, have literally become totalitarian. A totalitarian state is simply one in which there is no theoretical or practical distinction made between areas that are legitimate grounds for government action and what are not.

In our society, we refuse to place any area of life, whether driving, eating, hiring, charity or privacy beyond the purview of government: this is literally totalitarian. The American government may be properly called happy, democratic, caring and genuinely concerned about the public’s interest, but its lack of practical constitutional restraints literally makes it a totalitarian state. We may not have laws that regulate how long we can spend on the internet or drive or how much we can eat (except in New York), but no one would dare suggest that the demos and the state don’t have their divine right to regulate just that. Everything good must be mandatory; everything bad must be illegal.

Of course the public’s reflex is to say that the problem is a certain set of politicians or policies or judges, but the fact is the largest and most significant change has been in the electorate itself. Decent judges still grapple with constitutionality quotidially and politicians have always tried to violate constitutional convention, but it was the public and cultural values that held them to their job and to general integrity. Nowadays appeals to “natural rights,” limitations on power and constitutionalism are met with queer stares and confusion. People who dare to restrict the government’s pen to its original constitutional limitations are lambasted as either “Far-Right” or “Far-Left;” it’s almost comical how members of our two main parties vacillate on which is a civil libertarian or authoritarian depending on which holds the seat of the presidency.

The thing is neither party has the legs to stand on. Republicans used to laugh it up when Ron Paul pontificated on the constitution in the debates and when Democrats insisted on civil liberties in wartime, while Democrats (save a brief and politically advantageous interlude from 2005 to 2008) have been deriding constitutional “obstructionism” since the Roosevelt Regime. If there’s one common denominator among all modern political streams of thought, it is that they all have big plans for themselves and everyone else, requiring a nation unburdened by individualism, privacy and governmental limitations. No one can live and let live anymore.

Additionally there is a status quo bias in the public apathy to the entire issue of government abuses. Only a land of madmen or masochistic fascists would voluntarily support legislation that allowed and ordered government agencies to collect data without court order or justification from cell phone providers and internet services. Nevertheless, because agencies in the government have skipped the oh-so-stringent bindings of popular consent, legislative approval and the constitution itself, we apathetically remark that “that’s what governments do” or “I have nothing to hide” or “I mean there’s no way of stopping them.”

I openly wonder how far government agencies can go before arousing public antipathy. There is literally nothing stopping the state from compiling everything from psychometrics to internet passcodes and history and to clandestine nude photographs; it would be entertaining to see how deep the chasm of cynicism goes. Keep in mind that it is not just true that the state is the largest and more organized stalker in the nation; it’s perusing its desires at the public expense. It would tangibly be better for us to save ourselves the money and openly send our personal information, browsing habits, call logs, locations, and weekly itineraries to the government directly. Surely anyone who would object to that must simply have nothing to hide. Put simply, it isn’t an issue of privacy: I’m not worried about the government knowing my data, but allowing it to compile that data without my own or constitutional or even legislative permission is a precedent that allows for unlimited breaches of personal liberties.

Why People Do or Do Not Leave Religion

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Dawkins arguably gave religion a far better explanation and dissection in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene than he ever did in The God Delusion. The Selfish Gene may lack the polemical nature and the specifics of his recent religious commentary, but it nails on the head the key behind religious belief and apostasy. This of course the book where he coined the term "meme" and memetic evolution, and he employs religion as one of his most common examples of these both.

Naturally it's not only true that religion functions as a bit of cultural heritage, but as Dawkins explains, memes have a tendency to link themselves to together, sometimes prolonging their lifespans by association.

Building off that, if we say that the concept of a creator god is one meme, it should be obvious that religion is the framework that links that meme with others: a meme that expounds on what behaviors are permissible, a meme of a specific creation mythology, a meme for eschatology, a meme for proper family behavior and thousands of others. Thus in a way, religion is not so much a set belief that can easily be switch on and off, but abandoning the concept of god can easily undermine foundational moral and social beliefs as well. To change one's religion is to alter essential one's entire memeplex, with a desperate need to replace not only factual beliefs, but social understanding.

In a more personal way, if someone becomes an apostate, they would lose a lot of the religion-specific justification for their family life, their moral persuasions and likely even their politics. Religion is so powerful over people's lives because it connects with so much of the foundations of their everyday interactions, perhaps not practically, but ideologically, and it aids in putting human action into context given the wide worldview attached to religion.

Although it sounds practically Kuhnian, discussions on religions are not so much mediated by the facts, but by the immense ideological threat non-belief poses to one whose life relies heavily on religious ideology. Both the religious and non-religious know what side is "right" before they approach any issue, and this is mostly due to religion's memetic ubiquity.

This should also give us insight into what conditions make religious people more likely to abandon their faith. Convincing counter-apologetic arguments are nearly certainly a prerequisite, but seem obviously insufficient alone. Instead, people are more likely to leave their faith if religion's other memetic counterparts have been compromised. That is, if they lack a religious family or friends, if they don't participate in any religious services and if they don't invoke religion to justify moral or political actions, they'll probably be able to disbelieve in God with greater facility. A person in these situations frankly wouldn't be too troubled by the idea of a godless universe.

Religious people are variously dispersed between having religious beliefs that interlock with every other belief or meme of theirs and having religion as a tenuous and localized meme that could be switched on and off on demand. A lot of the difference between fundamentalist and liberal Christians or between moderate and extremist Muslims can be accounted for by how much of the rest of their beliefs are determined or influenced by the meme network of religion. Fundamentalists and extremists view religion as fundamental to understanding anything in the world, thus in their own minds would be ludicrous and immoral not to let religion guide them in all political and social affairs. On the other hands, believers who only have a tiny and insular memetic network for religion are likely the ones to want to keep religion separate from politics and their interactions with their friends.

Everybody's error has been to understand religion as one or a set of beliefs. It is incredibly rare or likely non-occurring for a person of fervorous religious disposition to hear one or two off-the-cuff arguments against God's existence and then on the spot relinquish their religion. It's an issue of intellectual economy and the ideological support of other associated memes. Perhaps an argument can cause some questioning about the existence or justice of God, but at the same time it would be unlikely for a believer to toss out the God meme and every meme associated with it, as to them, the testimony of their family, church life and moral convictions have not been rebutted and thus are supposed to constitute evidence confirming their ideology. Of course in a way, religion survives because the memes of religion have taken the memes of morality and social cohesion as hostages, and for the religious, losing the former means losing the latter.

Why Modern Art Is So Awful

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This is a restored old article from my site years ago. Not exactly sure when I wrote it, but it was between 2010 and 2012.

Historically, although this past seems long forgotten, artists were beloved founts of creativity in the eyes of the people. Their works, albeit not to everyone’s liking, demonstrated human and natural beauty and were loadedwith accessible and intended symbolism with pride and talent. There was a fairly obvious point in time, perhaps at the turn of the twentieth century when this changed for worse. Art became perceived as elite and snobbish. Public taste for art seemed to sour nigh instantaneously, manifesting itself in declines in museum and gallery attendance along with art’s new prestigious place behind the cold shoulder of those who lacked the “special training” necessary to appreciate it. The problem was not that an industrious populace which was becoming more enraveled in material developments had relinquished their “useless” interest in art, but art itself, in a way, simply betrayed the modern man.

Modern art is indeed genuinely awful and it has only recently become that way. Still modern developments in technology and culture do indeed bear important geneses of this occurrence.

Although some would construe art as an entirely magical process of self-expression, art does indeed serve several important utilitarian purposes. For the artist, it highlights his creativity and insight and bolsters his social standing; for the consumers of art, it brings visual or aural pleasure, and it also represents reality in a visual medium. Art has been used through out the ages to adorn the simple tools of daily life, from silverware to weaponry and from baskets and buildings. Contemporary developments in technology have thrown several quite interesting changes into these purposes.

Years before, painters might painstakingly dedicate hours on end to producing a mural or simple portrait which could easily be appreciated for the skill of the craft. A sculptor might as well chisel away for an equivalent time on an idiosyncratic sculpture, or with much tedious concentration, build identical sets of beautiful clay- or glass-works.

Yet the mighty engines of industrial production and technology melted away quite a bit of this novelty. Consumers could then buy cheaper and more esthetically pleasing jars, plates, nick-nacks and decorations which were products of the newly mechanized assembly line. The simple yet decisive invention of the color photograph served as a functional coup de grâce for the niche that the more laborious method of hand painting depictions of scenery had formerly filled.

Thus modern artists, many of which with feelings of effective emasculation, had been outdone by their craft. Ingenious yet soulless machines suddenly seemed to have become superior founts of creativity even with humans’ advantage of actually having their hands of the levers and in all the creativeprogramming.

The consequent reaction in the modern schools of art was to rebel against the beauty and meaning which had and remain to be fundamental to artistic production. Instead of gratifying depictions of humankind or natural wonder, art took to depicting nonsensical scenes with objectively ugly and poorly drawn figures. So dawned the much maligned age of the that-painting-looks-like-the-asshole-just-threw-paint-randomly-on-the-canvas models.

Artists seem to be entirely ignorant of this systemic change. They oft recoil with surprise when common people mock art in public and refuse to dole out cash for the “starving artist.” There seems to be a general consensus amongart critics that the quality of art has not exacerbated at all, rather people have simply changed their minds without due cause.

At that artists have unfortunately come to embrace their lack of popularity. In their ideas, the public, who inexplicably demands that art be something artistic, simply lacks the capacity to evaluate the new outcomes of the purposefully deficient artistic production of the day. All manner of pretension is famously strewn about the floors of museums as “professional” art critics patter on about the symbolic meanings of deliberately nonsensical work. Beauty, utility, consistency, symmetry, meaning and enjoyment are often construed as undesirables in art as the elite of the art community think of anything shining, blight and beautiful as bourgeois, vulgar and passé. This sentiment has spread out of visual arts awell; in combat with increasingly precise and gorgeous electronically generated music, bands and individual music artists have taken to creating rhythm-less, tone-deaf, or low-fi music which ‘ironically’ form the basis of contemporary hipster culture.

With the origins of snob art having been noted, (these origins in the perceived “obsolescence” of true fine art due to technological advancement), one might erroneously jump to the conclusion that man-made art is either a thing of the past or the “modern” style of non-art is here to stay. It’s nonsense.

If anything, the competition of technology has forced the most talented to produce further outstanding works by jumping greater lengths of creativity and mystery. The area of abstract art, which although has to some degree been marred by the unfortunate revolution against beauty, still supports various artists constantly developing the standard of the field. It indeed may seem like photographs thoroughly excel in landscape shots, but that hasn’t prevented many from expanded into space-scapes and scenes which although may never appear in nature, can temper human love of landscape in tremendous ways. Indeed in the days of Bob Ross, the joy of painting is one of the artistic journey and expression, not even of the finished result, regardless of how appealing it may be.