Reprint again on aliens
For once an author DOESN'T miss the point:

Victorians of the late 19th century, living in the era of ambitious engineering, looked at Mars and saw globe-spanning canals – evidence, they believed, of a grand industrial civilisation mirroring their own. In the Cold War 1960s, as millions lived under the shadow of potential nuclear annihilation, ‘neocatastrophism’ – the theory that extraterrestrial civilisations are inevitably wiped out by violent events – emerged as an explanation for our apparent cosmic solitude. The Argentinian Trotskyist J Posadas was convinced that advanced aliens would be socialists; more recently, the Vatican’s then-chief astronomer José Gabriel Funes suggested in 2008 that extraterrestrials might share a close relationship with God.

We scientists tend to believe that intelligent extraterrestrials will be builders of technology, fluent in the universal language of mathematics. In Contact, the aliens announce their presence by beaming prime numbers at us, and many of our messages broadcast to the stars consist of physics and mathematics wrapped up in binary code. This perspective on aliens as scientific rationalists underlies most of modern SETI. It’s a viewpoint that I happen to agree with. Then again, I’m a scientist: of course I do.

Good candor at the end. I'm more of a technician than a scientist, so I've been arguing that the aliens wouldn't need math at all, because WE DIDN'T NEED MATH.

Reprinting from January, still valid.

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.... The article goes on to discuss which formulas and theories would be good candidates for interplanetary chit-chat.



Polistra begs to differ. The supposed "universality" of math is a myth.

Our new Facebook Friends on Alpha Centauri could have the technology to text us, while knowing very little math. Let's look at the start of electrical communication on Earth. Sam Morse was an artist, not a mathematician, and his telegraph was built by trial and error. Alex Bell was a speech teacher with a deep visual comprehension of wave action. Early radio sets (spark-gap transmitters, cat-whisker detectors) were also built without fancy math, though a certain amount of measurement was important for meaningful testing.

You need a way of remembering size and comparing this size with that size. When testing antennas, you'd need to see that a longer antenna worked better than a shorter antenna, and you'd need to know when the lengthening stopped improving the performance and started making it worse. In other words, you need GRAPHS, or the mental equivalent of GRAPHS.

Even without trying to imagine an alien mind, it's easy to see how we Earthlings could have developed a communication system able to reach distant planets, all without any math beyond measurement.



If we look at human history, societies that developed PROBLEM-SOLVING technologies like dams and aqueducts and plows didn't die suddenly. They weren't killed BY the dams and aqueducts and plows. Sometimes they were conquered by enemies (eg Mayans), sometimes they lost their technological edge but continued functioning (eg Persia).

Societies that focused on THEORY were killed directly by the THEORY.

We can see the distinction RIGHT FUCKING NOW in the realm of medicine.

Vaccination was developed WITHOUT THEORY 500 years ago by the Circassians. It was brought to England and "reinvented" 200 years ago. Since then, vaccines for many different diseases have been developed by continual refinement of techniques and constant endless TRIAL AND ERROR. NEGATIVE FEEDBACK. The ERROR part is crucial. Before 2020, clinical trials were HALTED when too much ERROR appeared. None of this development used or needed any theories, except the OBSERVATION that the immune system can be trained to reject a disease by seeing a preview of the disease.

In 2020 we explicitly DELETED the entire concept of immunity. Public Death Officers still understand that it exists, but they use their understanding to ELIMINATE immunity, not to BOOST it. Now clinical trials are conducted to improve genocide, not to improve health.

Now we're operating on a magnificently maniacal THEORY that disease is caused by heretical beliefs. We still use the word "virus", but what we mean by "virus" is witch powder, not a microscopic package of RNA.

We are committing FAST suicide. Or more precisely, Deepstate and its branches are MURDERING us faster than ever before.

EXPERIENCE SURVIVES. THEORY KILLS.

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Labels: endless hell, Jackboot stomping forever, Not AI point-missing

  ¶ 12:14 AM