The only UNbroken supply chain
UncommonDescent notes yet another mass retraction of low-quality "science" articles. Most of these are clearly produced by AI and submitted by Chinese grad students who are competing ferociously to get onto the tenure track.

In the real world supply chains are broken because normal people have decided en masse that working for demons is no longer worth the torture and pain.

The only area where we have an OVERsupply is "science" articles. Grad students are eagerly competing to be the next head demon.

Journal editors are in a tough position. The entire tenure system is built to increase raw quantity. More output means more money in a simple linear function. Nobody wants quality. Truth has negative value. Fashionable lies have high value.

But a "reputable" journal may lose its reputation if it's too obviously unreadable. These AI papers are too obvious. Even the titles are nonsense, like

Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and physical fitness detection of basketball

Sucker Filter at work. Select the stupidest readers by sending out the most brazenly stupid title. After being the stupidest readers and publishing the shit, the editors at Springer have decided that they don't like the feeling of being the stupidest readers.

If the Chinese authors had been smarter, they would have made nonsensical connections to FASHIONABLE LIES.

Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and mental illness detection of Trump voters

Now you've got a high citation count, and you're on the ramp leading to a Nobel.

Labels: Editors, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 9:41 PM

  New record for converging to orthodoxy
Saagar and Krystal started their Breaking Points show about one month ago. They made a good start in the direction of independence, bashing CNN and MSNBC and FOX equally. Today they converged to MSNBC. As fucking usual. I wasted $10 on a subscription, always hoping to get value for money. Should have known better. Independence is always fake. Canceled.

This really fits into the category of editing and selecting. The converging episode wasn't their own work, it was some other asshole. They selected it as suitable for their brand.

When people pay for a magazine or a show or a food product, they are paying for a container of a specific substance. When the jar is labeled as gluten-free, the jar shouldn't contain wheat. When the jar is labeled CNN-free and FOX-free, the jar must NEVER include anything that could be seen on CNN or FOX. Otherwise why bother paying for the jar?

Labels: Editors, infinite STUPID

  ¶ 1:54 PM

  Seen unbeauty
This outfit has been advertising its "services" lately. They're latching onto the trend of super-rich securitization of "art". As usual they're trying to suck in some not-so-rich suckers.



ART?

No actual designer would ever produce this shit, even on his worst day.

This is evidence of serious brain damage. That's all you can say about it.

The real tragedy is that THOUSANDS of EXCELLENT artists are working their hearts out, trying to sell in places like Etsy, and making small amounts of money. Some are able to survive full-time, most aren't.

All the money and power belongs to brain damaged bloody psychopaths.

This is a definitive and comprehensive diagnosis of our current situation.

Labels: Editors, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 6:05 AM

  Unseen beauty
Continuing the AMC theme. Dick Teague took over Rambler styling from the clumsy Ed Anderson, and immediately started to improve things. The '63 Rambler was perfect.

The '70 Hornet and Gremlin were neat and respectable but not beautiful. Respectable is what Rambler buyers wanted, so the Hornet lasted 17 years through rebranding as Concord and Eagle.

Every designer has bad days, and the Pacer was Teague's only major bad day.



This is the '79, already failed in the market. Ugly was only part of the problem. It failed to fulfill the AMC brand promise. Small but overweight. Poor gas economy. Poor use of space. The extreme outside width didn't help the interior dimensions, and the engine compartment lumped into the passenger area. (I rode in a Pacer often in '76 while carpooling to work, and it felt cramped. There wasn't enough room for your head or your feet.)

You can't blame designers for a bad product. You have to blame the managers who should have been sensitive to the needs of their specific customers. Smart managers would have known that Teague could do better, and would have urged him to try a different way.

At the same time Teague was improving the Hornet/Concord into a perfect design that I've never seen in real life.



This Concord hatchback is PERFECT and TIMELESS. Every shape is perfectly harmonious, every piece of trim and color and texture is just right. I'm hesitant to dethrone the '53 Studie goddess, but this just might do it.

Only a few of them were sold, for good reasons. AMC was struggling, and needed to focus tightly on the somewhat successful Hornet and Jeep lines. No spare money to push a sporty type.

Labels: Editors

  ¶ 11:39 PM

  I did say it
I wrote this Quora answer, pulling together some themes that I hadn't properly connected before. Worth repeating here. I should have written it here first.

The question was: What's the opposite of cancel culture?

Answer:

Cancel culture is more subtle than usually described.

Censorship and editing have always existed, and are necessary parts of civilization. Before the cancel era, editors and administrators decided who to fire, or which articles to censor, based on experience and laws and internal rules.

Cancel culture gives total power to ONE complainer or accuser, provided the complainer is on the correct side. Admins or editors who had been following the normal rules now fire and censor after one single button-push.

This is part of a much larger abdication of power by editors and selectors and judges and legislators. The abdication also allows the opposite type of unmediated individual power.

One “scientist” who runs obviously wrong statistical models and advocates obviously murderous “measures” can take over the entire medical profession, provided the “scientist” is in the right direction. Ethics boards and FDA regulators and lawyers stand back and let him murder the world.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Editors

  ¶ 12:12 AM

  Y2K returns
Via the fact-gatherers:

Spain reported a large number of young kids "dying" from the "virus", then found out later that the deaths of 0-9 year olds were actually 100-109 year olds. Their database handled only two digits.

Bigger point, as fucking always, obvious from the fucking start: This "virus" has always "killed" people who were already dying. It's a rebrand, an intentional arbitrary transfer from one column to another. An accounting trick that Kills Granny without being detected.

When a person dies at 101, it's not a death from a disease, it's a miraculously long life.

BIGGEST POINT: WHERE IN THE FUCK ARE THE MOTHERFUCKING EDITORS? What happened to careful measurement and careful debugging?

I wouldn't let this type of error happen in my courseware, which is infinitely less important than public "health" stats. The grades are just a small part of a course grade, if the teacher chooses to count them.

Labels: 2000=1000, Editors, endless hell, infinite STUPID, Metrology

  ¶ 8:25 AM

  Random thought about editors and selectors
In recent years I've belatedly grasped the importance and value of editors and selectors. Whether the subject is car design or software or published writing, the editor/selector is always more important than the designer or programmer or author.

I've seen this from both angles, most strongly in the editors dealing with my courseware. A good editor doesn't need to know the details; she can smell poor writing or poor coding, and can guide me to improve the output.

Previous item on Tyson's idiocy is a fresh example of the value of editors. I had seen some reflections of the dispute but didn't know what it was about until Elizabeth Whately curated it.

Here's another angle. I like to check Whitney Webb's reporting now and then, because she manages to pick up sources that aren't easily available. She is hard to read because she doesn't have an editor. She tells long stories with lots of characters and personalities, and the important facts are somewhere in the dialog, not emphasized or outlined. I've bitched about this a few times, but finally realized that the unfiltered details are value worth paying for.

In "news" media, the paid editors are evil. They all serve "one" "side" or the "other" "side" of Deepstate. Unedited raw details are best. It's worth doing my own internal editing to sort the meaningful from the trivial. Like buying fresh vegetables instead of TV dinners.


Later: TV dinners? I'm old! When was the last time that phrase was used?



Surprisingly it was most common in the '80s, not the '50s. The 1986 peak is sharp. A political slogan? The phrase remains about as common now as it was in the '50s. TV dinners never had any connection with TV, unless maybe the marketers were implying that Mom could spend more time watching TV with the family if she didn't have to prepare real food.

Labels: Editors

  ¶ 6:59 AM

  Burning stakes vs burning steaks
EvolutionNews calls attention to a mysterious but meaningful Tweetfight between orthodox Big Science Fuckhead Tyson and an account belonging to a real brand of steaks.

I had caught a dim echo of the fight on Quora but didn't know what was going on. The argument itself is clear and wonderfully straightforward. Tyson, like all corrupt high priests, wants us to trust the high priests because they are SCIENCE.

Tyson first wrote:

The good thing about Science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.

This is violently and holocaustally false. Science is never true. Scientific findings are never true.

Reality is true, whether you believe in it or not.

A few scientific findings, verified by LONG EXPERIENCE, have turned out to be USEFUL PARTIAL REPRESENTATIONS of reality. Most scientific findings, even before the total genocide of recent decades, were just trivial and useless.

Other findings from dreams or work experience or superstition or religion or random shit can also be useful partial representations of reality. Science is nothing special in this department.

The SCIENCE that Tyson represents is demonically superfalse, determined at every stage to OBLITERATE ALL OF REALITY, and to OBLITERATE ALL TRUE REPRESENTATIONS OF REALITY.

= = = = =

The mysterious Steak-Umm account got off some pretty decent responses to Holocauster Tyson, and a few other people in the fight also put in solid responses.

the irony of neil’s tweet is that by framing science itself as “true” he’s influencing people to be more skeptical of it in a time of unprecedented misinformation. science is an ever refining process to find truth, not a dogma. no matter his intent, this message isn’t helpful

Most of the stuff in the thread is the usual proSCIENCE junk or off-topic. So I thank the Evo News author for picking up and filtering out the important argument!

I'm especially encouraged to see a corporation, though not a large one, publicly taking the side of reality and truth. Another first. A few corporations wisely remained silent about both the riots and the "virus", which is good normal business practice. The vast majority screeched SATANIC EVIL on both topics, which used to be considered atrocious business practice.

Labels: Editors, Entertainment

  ¶ 4:39 AM

  Trying to firm up a theme
Returning to a vague theme, trying to firm it up a bit.

Theme: Editors and selectors perform a CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT function, and they've gone missing. Editors and selectors are the negative feedback loop for science and business and government.

Good science or good products or good writing or good governments require experienced and skilled editors who have AUTHORITY. There's no point in having a feedback module if it isn't connected FIRMLY to the inhibitory input of the system. [In other words, the system doesn't get to select whether it obeys the selector, doesn't get to edit its response to the editor. The editor wins automatically and consistently.]

Designers and writers and inventors and programmers are important, but without hardass and authoritative editors, nothing works.

An editor needs to know, in broad terms, what will sell or what will work or what will solve the problem. He doesn't need to know the details of metallurgy or math or art or grammar or null pointers, but he must have a FEEL for those things.

In most areas of life we've lost or destroyed the editing layer, or corrupted it to act as just another designing layer.

In US "government", the Senate was originally meant to be the editor. The House and executive would propose various schemes, and the Senate, directly delegated by the states, would judge whether the scheme would work in all states. If it wouldn't work in a strong majority of the states, it wouldn't be added to federal functions. This setup was lost almost immediately with Madison vs Marbury in 1803, then killed by the 17th amendment that turned the Senate into a more corruptible version of the lower house.

In car manufacturing, dealers formerly performed the editing function. Dealers knew what would sell to THEIR customers, and smart manufacturers consulted the dealers at every stage of design. Since 1980, most dealers are no longer bound by a contract to one manufacturer, so they can't act as consultants. Traveling salesmen performed a similar function in other areas of manufacturing. Each salesman knew what HIS OWN customers wanted, and smart corporations listened. In recent years the salesman has surrendered to the web, and the 2020 holocaust was the final coup.

In science, the big journals like SciAm and NewSci formerly had editors who knew what was useful and real and entertaining, and judged articles accordingly. In recent decades all big journals have become mechanistic agents of Deepstate. Their editors are ferocious inquisitors rooting out and burning heretics, not judges of scientific purpose and scientific fun. The function of editing has been tossed back to peer review, which has ALWAYS been an enforcer of rigid orthodoxy.

In some areas we're trying to replace editors with mechanisms like AI or automatic "program-proving" programs. These tricks don't work. AI consistently fails at editing and censoring online conversations. It enforces verbal orthodoxy at the literal level, destroying normal wit and meaning. "Provers" can spot simple logical flaws, but simple logical flaws aren't where real failures happen.

Editors and salesmen are still functional in smaller enterprises. I've seen this distinction SHARPLY after my courseware switched from the giant NYC LBO company to a small business run for many years by one family. The giant NYC company had multiple layers of "editing" functions, none of which were concerned with utility or sales or even correct facts. They were competing for the favor of JPMorgan, not the pleasure of the customers. With the small company, I deal directly with one editor while writing, and directly with one salesman in solving bug reports. The editor knows what will sell, and the salesman knows what will serve the customers.

I've discovered that I love serving. I love getting to know the customers, and learning how they think and what they need. I love solving their problems.

This discovery wasn't possible with the NYC LBO outfit, because I wasn't allowed to deal directly with the customers. Presumably they had a call center in Bombay for that purpose, but I wasn't even allowed to know that. Deepstate all the way.

= = = = =

Later thought: If editors had more prestige, would they have more authority? If people idolized and listened to editors the way they listen to the murderously wrong misadvice of Elon and Buffett and Neil Ferguson and politicians, would the job be done better? I doubt it. More likely the opposite. The route to fame is through active monstrous evil. This isn't new. Famous newspaper editors, from Hearst to William Allen White to Jill Abramson, were famous because they created war and tyranny and riots and crime and genocide, not because they selected stories to solve the problems of readers. Museum curators become famous by destroying art through brutal modernism.

I can think of some partial and ambiguous exceptions to this rule. Some of the big names in industrial design like Loewy and Earl and Edison were really editors. They rarely drew or invented; they actually guided and selected the work of their employees. They served customers well, without intentionally killing the customers or ruining their minds. But they weren't famous AS editors or curators.

Labels: Editors, Entertainment

  ¶ 4:38 AM

  Stop this incompetence shit.
I'm terminally tired of hearing the idiotic nonsense, sometimes attributed to Heinlein or Einstein or Lincoln or Churchill or Plato or any of the usual attributees:

Always assume incompetence rather than evil.

Dangerously wrong.

When you're talking about an ordinary decision by an ordinary person, then you can start with incompetence or inadequate knowledge.

When you're dealing with a decision by a large corporation or government, you MUST assume

MAXIMUM INCOMPREHENSIBLE UNIMAGINABLE EVIL

and your assumption will ALWAYS be correct. EVERY FUCKING TIME.

Since I happened to be reading a Collectible Auto article on the design of the Edsel, let's take the Edsel as an example.

Looks like incompetence, so it would make sense to assume incompetence.

No. It was evil.

Designers produce a wide range of attempts. Even excellent designers like Brooks Stevens or Virgil Exner produce timeless classics and weird shit at different times.

A large company always invites proposals from dozens of inside and outside creators. The horrible choice was not made by a designer, and we know for a fact that it was evil. McNamara hated the Edsel and wanted it to fail, so he allowed and encouraged the worst possible designs.

Bad decisions result from intentional sabotage** or crime by management. In the current holocaust, normal public health data was easily available to the governments. The governments could have simply continued using normal procedures, which were working normally. There was NO REASON to think that the regular way of handling a flu epidemic would fail.

The governments chose instead to use bizarrely wrong theories and models produced by Neil Ferguson, whose record was UNIFORMLY BAD. Unlike a Stevens or an Exner, Ferguson didn't produce some classics and some weird shit at different times. He was ALWAYS WRONG. The governments KNEW he was always wrong, and his particular brand of RELIABLE INFINITE WRONGNESS was just what they needed to "justify" a universal holocaust. They knew that Ferguson couldn't possibly predict reality.

** Sometimes the sabotage is internal, such as a hostile takeover or LBO or feuding among executives, aimed at destroying the company or the government. Sometimes the crime is committed by the entire corporation or government acting in unison to destroy the world.

Labels: Editors, endless hell, Jackboot stomping forever

  ¶ 11:54 AM

  Three follies that aided science (part 4 of 4)
Following part 1 and part 2 and part 3. Saved the best for last.

Colonel Ned Green was the most influential of these three men. Money talks, and intelligently-directed ENJOYABLE money talks best.

His mother Hetty Green was the equivalent of Buffett. She was generally called the Wall Street Witch. She started out rich and manipulated her rich inheritance up to super-rich. (In modern terms, from $100M to $4B.) Her main multiplication resulted from Madman Lincoln's issuance of high-yield bonds and cheapened currency to run his genocide. Hetty maintained a nominal residence for the family in Bellows Falls, but she actually lived in her NYC office. She didn't enjoy the money, and didn't spend any of it to help her two kids enjoy life. She died when Ned was 48, so he made up for lost time. He enjoyed luxury, and equally enjoyed generosity.

His brief try in politics seems to have happened before the inheritance; presumably he had some control of family money at that point. He didn't inherit Hetty's vicious grasping greedy demonic NYC evil, so he was outclassed and outfoxed by the real politicians and gave up.

He got interested in wireless and became an active experimenter. He understood radio deeply, both the technical and marketing sides. He didn't invent any new technology, but he had solid judgment and knew which developments were worth financing. (In general, editors and selectors do more good than inventors and designers.)

Here's his 'summer home' and the WMAF studio as seen in the WMAF booklet:



I haven't tried to model the mansion. I've done the studio, the water tower with speakers, and his unique electric runabout with radio equipment.

Here's the overview of my version:



The speakers were designed as drive-in radio, so neighbors who didn't yet have wireless could drive up and listen.



The water tower, not the studio, was the sourdough starter for MIT's massive research installation at Round Hill. Parallel to Trinity House's seeding of acoustic experimentation to break through fog, the water tower was the 'beacon' for foghorns. MIT then built a high-voltage lab for Van de Graaff, which morphed into linear accelerators for atomic power; and the fog research blossomed into weather radar research.

His custom-made electric runabout was equipped with a direction-finding receiver so he could locate the boundaries of his station's output.



Colonel Green's generosity with his property and equipment, plus a whole lot of wisely-planned money, helped to give us nuclear power and modern weather forecasting. That's a pretty damn big footprint.

More importantly for the future, Colonel Green showed how to use money and science for enjoyment and entertainment. He was not entertained by politics, probably because it was too much like his mother's Wall Street megalomania. He found that he was entertained by luxury and technology, and wanted to spread the joy.

Labels: Editors, Entertainment, Equipoise

  ¶ 8:00 AM