Sailer has a better idea
A few days ago I was CAUTIOUSLY optimistic about the proposed non-cancel university. Maybe it's just another sting. If not, it still lacks a commitment to avoid tenure, and lacks a 'two-way obligation loop' with its alumni. It should be helping them to stay courageous, and they should in turn be helping to keep the next generation courageous.

Sailer sees the same problem from a different angle.

A big question is how do you avoid having U. of Austin grads blackballed by the rest of academia? For example, if you want to make a career in cultural anthropology, you’d probably be best advised to avoid having a free-thinking university on your resume.

Judging from comments by those involved in this start-up, they tend to be focused more on the humanities and social sciences than on pre-professional training of pre-meds and MBAs. That is admirable, but you need some way to attract bright students.

I could see making alliances with non-woke firms like Tesla, Palantir, and Coinbase and specializing in majors they need, like Comp Sci. It’s crucial to provide potential applicants with plausible career paths.

Smart solution. There's the two-way obligation! But I'm not seeing a recognition of this problem or this solution in the descriptions so far.

Community colleges routinely form these loops with local industries who need a specific skill. The industry pays the college to train welders or med techs, and the students have a guaranteed job offer if they perform well. BUT: What industry wants clear thinkers and courageous truth-tellers? None.

Labels: Answered better than asked, skill-estate

  ¶ 5:08 AM

  Grammar is another name for value creation
MindMatters tries to separate out human language from animal communication:

Believers in human non-exclusivity do not appear to be especially picky about what counts as evidence for their views. For example, here’s a research finding that is supposed to be evidence that birds use grammar:

For a long time, scientists were convinced that animal communication lacked any sentence structure. But in 2016, Japanese researchers published a study in Nature Communications on the vocalizations of great tits. In certain situations, the birds combine two different calls to warn each other when a predator approaches. They also reacted when the researchers played this sequence to them. However, when the call order was reversed, the birds reacted far less. “That’s grammar,” says Brensing.

No. That isn’t grammar. The birds just didn’t understand the wrong-sequence call. By the way, how did we get so fast in the same story from whales to birds? Is that for lack of evidence for grammar among whales and any related species?

Correct on the birdcalls. That's music, not grammar. You could call it vocabulary, but it's still not grammar. A different sequence of notes (pure sines) is a different word, just as a different sequence of phonemes (harmonies) is a different word. Exactly the same mechanism.

People who WORK with animals tend to have the best and most detailed communication with them. Before motorcars, most people knew how to talk with horses.

The trainers at Seaworld, before they were fired by Die-Versity and Animal "Rights", knew how to communicate with dolphins and orcas. Legends say that some sailors and fishermen also knew how to collaborate with dolphins.

The key point is WORK. Animals with a social sense of duty and morality, and a need to be useful, can collaborate with humans.

Grammar arises from work and duty. Without UTILITY there is no grammar.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Languages vary hugely, but there are some fairly distinct asymptotes or pivot points. In syntax and noun forms, the asymptote is NGDA. Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. Many languages have inflections to denote other relationships between an object and the world, but as a language develops it tends to simplify down to NGDA and stay there. Even after the case endings dissolve or merge, NGDA still remains firmly marked in word order.

Why is NGDA optimal? It describes the basic relationships in any social structure, whether we're talking about dogs or humans or bees. When you have NGDA you have a society and vice versa.



= = = = = END REPRINT.

Nominative is the worker. Genitive is the ownership of the material being worked on. Dative is the customer who receives the work. Accusative is the product being worked on. Instrumental is skills and tools.

Verb forms are equally obvious. Imperative is the command to start work. Present is a report on what I'm doing right now. Past is the finished timecard or worklog. Future is a promise to work on the next item, or seeds saved for next season. Reflexive is work done for myself, practicing skills toward the next exchange of value.

Without work and duty and usefulness, there's no REASON for any of these forms. Without two-way obligations there's no need for promises and commands and reports.

Labels: defensible cases, Equipoise, skill-estate

  ¶ 7:08 AM

  Three answers
And while I'm in the usual point-missing mood, here's another easily solved mystery.

Via MindMatters as usual, a puzzle about brain size. Why has the size of brains been gradually shrinking for 40k years while (supposedly) our intellect has been expanding?

Three plausible answers.

1. The broad logical answer is that brain size is an irrelevant variable, or nearly irrelevant. There are some hard limits, which are easy to locate. Crows and elephants and whales are in the same range of intelligence despite hugely different brain sizes. But ants and wasps are NOT in the same range as crows, and bacteria are not in the same range as ants.

2. Engineering provides a more subtle answer for the more subtle question of a 10% shrinkage in one species. Microcomputers are faster than 1957 mainframes because the WIRES ARE SHORTER. The 1957 mainframe had the same calculating and decision power as a modern CPU. The modern version can handle more decisions per second because the electrons only have to travel a tiny fraction of an inch instead of several feet. In an analog system like the brain, shorter wires and smaller coils allow higher frequency resonances. Resonance is thought.

When the associative fibers between cortex and brainstem are 10% shorter, the RESONANT WAVES can be 10% higher in frequency, getting more processing done in each second.





Actually I prefer Door Number 3:

3. Nature starts with the most complex and then simplifies. Evolution is subtractive. We are dumber than Neanderthals. We've built up the materials and methods for superior technology over thousands of years, and as the technology takes over more of our brain function, we LOSE our brain function. Our brains are smaller because we've offshored and outsourced part of their skills.

Labels: Answered better than asked, skill-estate

  ¶ 9:10 AM

  Fitting finale
A fitting conclusion to my series on IBM in the '50s:

Chris Arnade, the chronicler of collapsed America, has a new article on Binghamton and Endicott, the cities where IBM flourished until it moved to China.

Binghamton's Main Street, the commercial spine, bisects downtown and then makes its way through Johnson City and to Endicott. Once you cross west over the river, things immediately feel on edge, ready to burst out at any moment. A busy road of fast-food franchises, vape shops, abandoned and reclaimed buildings, and large wooden homes of single occupancy apartments. It is also filled with college kids, drunks, and various people with no clear motives, all whooping it up and disrupting working people rushing to and from work. All of it is encased in the constant smell of weed that never leaves.

One of the boarded-up buildings, an old cleaners and leather refinisher, has a public notice pasted onto its plywood window. A notice for an upcomping hearing “for the establishment of a Crematory in this building.”

Looking around I spotted nobody who would or could take notice, because almost nobody was around, besides a few cars zooming by. The few people who drifted by looked like the time, technology, or desire to comment was beyond them. Not that anybody would listen to them anyhow.

Says it all.

Watson ran IBM in Social Economics style like NCR and Ford and Conoco, giving his employees a REASON to be loyal and efficient. So the loss was more dramatic than a company of the normal American robber baron style.

In other words, IBM maintained two-way loyalty with its customers AND its employees.

.... I just realized I'm using a Lenovo PC, made by the Chinese spinoff of IBM. Hadn't thought about the connection before. It's a good computer, quiet and fast, ten years old and still holding up. But it didn't contribute anything to the people in Endicott, and didn't use their well-developed skills.

Labels: endless hell, skill-estate, the broken circle

  ¶ 6:44 AM

  Always harder to measure a fadeout....
Interesting observation from Sailer. As other Identity Subcultures get stronger, the Deaf culture seems to have faded out.

I noticed the growth of deaf culture in the '80s because I was working around speech and acoustics. After I started working from home in 2004, I lost contact with those movements and hadn't really thought about them. Still, the culture is notable by its absence in recent years.

Atypically, Sailer gets the history wrong.

It’s useful to think about why there is deaf culture but not blind culture. Wikipedia’s article on the former is vastly longer than its short squib on the latter, which sums up, “…blind people integrate with the broader community and culture, and often do not identify blindness as a defining part of their culture.”

That’s because language can be essential to identity. Just as nationalism in Europe was an offshoot of the consolidation of local spoken dialects into a standardized national written language (such as the French government’s imposition of the Parisian dialect on its sprawling domain), deaf culture exists due to the consolidation of sign languages.

Language is fundamental to communication, of course, and perhaps even to thought. So life tended to be extremely difficult for those born deaf, especially if they didn’t work out an idiosyncratic sign language with their families.

Before computers, deaf people had a much wider range of occupations than blind people. Industrial work and farm work need good eyes, but don't need ears. Noisy industrial environments are actually EASIER for deaf people than hearing people.

Deaf folks were common in printing. When I worked at Cromwells, we contracted our linotype work to Gene Laird, a deaf guy who ran his own linotype shop in a storefront. His wife handled the telephone and talked with visitors. Gene ran the machine and drove around to distribute the finished forms to Cromwells and Vaters and Daugherty. No problem after you got used to talking by writing.

Automation and offshoring were thus especially hard on deaf workers. Computers made life easier for blind people, but actually got in the way of AMERICAN deaf people because AMERICAN deaf people are not good at writing and reading English. This is NOT true in other countries. You can see the difference easily when looking at deaf Youtubers. Most Americans type incoherent descriptions and titles. Others, including Brits, write correctly.

This is not a problem with ears, it's a direct result of the deaf subculture eliminating real English from their schools. And this is a standard procedure. "Human rights" crusaders ALWAYS damage their "protected" groups. The "protected" groups must lose their native skills and niches so they need the "protection" of the NGOs and government.

Labels: skill-estate, Sorosia

  ¶ 2:14 PM

  Speaking of Thiel and Shannon....
Speaking of Thiel questions, and things I didn't know, here's a fine example.

Economist Matt Stoller narrates how we lost our industry and our country to China, leaving only the rich alive.

It was a two-sided pincer movement as always. I didn't know about the other side.

The obvious side was the Friedman twins, Milton and Thomas. Share Value is the universe. Products and factories and workers must be exterminated.

The official opposition was the Consumer Rights Movement, which said that low prices are the only thing in the universe. How do you get low prices? China.

I wasn't aware of this movement, but it fits the pattern. Deepstate always runs "two" "opposites". One side pleased the rich fuckheads, the other side pleased the consumers. BOTH AGREED that production should stop. BOTH AGREED that SKILL is irrelevant. BOTH AGREED that humans have no purpose except enriching the rich.

The consumer pincer evolved into MMT and the web's fake 'everything for free'. These movements tell us that we shouldn't have to pay for anything, which REALLY means that we're worthless and disposable. When you're not a source of money for business, you're NOT NEEDED by business.

Thanks, Stoller! You told me something I truly didn't know, and it's a non-trivial consequential piece of information.

Incidentally, I paid for value by subscribing to Stoller's Substack. It doesn't look especially interesting, but one Shannon fact is worth plenty. Also, Substack itself has SO FAR avoided censoring unfashionable opinions, which makes it worth supporting FOR NOW.

Also incidentally: Before the web, dissidents communicated through obscure newsletters, generally mimeographed or Varityped. Substack seems to recognize this historical resonance. Each of its writers has a newsletter, not a blog or a webzine.

Labels: Aberree, MMT, NOW I SEE, Shared Lie, skill-estate

  ¶ 6:13 AM

  Sequence of closure
Here's a half-baked or maybe milli-baked thought.

Since 1946, Deepstate first closed down the physical channels to information and then closed down the mental channels to information.

Before the Web, acquiring information took physical work, skills and knowledge. You had to own a shortwave radio, or run your own experiments, or take care of your own body, or search on foot through the old stacks of a library, or find and subscribe to obscure newsletters.

Those activities were physically difficult and sometimes expensive, but they were AVAILABLE AND LEGAL. Shortwave receivers were common, and stations were all over the world. You could buy all sorts of chemicals and medications at the hardware store or pharmacy. The libraries were open to anyone. Obscure newsletters were eager to gain new customers.

The physical channels are already closed, and the "replacement" virtual channels are starting to close as well. The shortwave band is abandoned. All chemicals are forbidden by EPA. All medicines are forbidden by FDA. All methods of maintaining health and immunity are LETHALLY forbidden by CDC. Google's online library is removing entire classes of info and maps. Newsletters are published via Facebook, which is shutting them down.

Result: First we lost the SKILLS of acquiring and distributing info physically, and then we lost the CHANNELS for acquiring info without skills.

Parallel to the central/decentral timeline for media described here.

Parallel to Deepstate's ruination of industry. First we offshored the skills to China, and now we're closing down access to the remote skills in China.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, endless hell, MMT, skill-estate

  ¶ 8:35 PM

  Pork-busters are always idiots
I haven't mocked pork-busters in a long time.

While looking up old info about IBM systems, ran across this 1926 report from the US Govt Printing Office. It's a perfect example of idiotic penny-pinching.

Someone in the GPO had the idea of saving cost and eliminating "unfair profit" by making their own tabulators.

Negotiations are in progress with the Post Office Department, and with other departments and bureaus of the Government which are engaged to any considerable extent in statistical work, for the purpose of introducing the tabulating machinery which has been invented, developed, and manufactured in the bureau's mechanical laboratory.

The representatives of the Post Office Department have arranged for a practical test of the tabulating machine. This machine can also be used advantageously on cost accounting, and the bureau is already making such use of it, with highly satisfactory results. It makes possible the preparation, with a minimum of time, labor, and expense, of either general or detailed cost statements, in accordance with the “classification of objects of expenditure" adopted by the General Accounting Office.

I feel very strongly that a material saving can be effected by the introduction of the bureau's tabulating machinery in other branches of the Government.

But those other departments were already using Hollerith machines and Hollerith cards. They didn't WANT to switch, and they didn't even want to start using GPO cards in the Hollerith machines, based on experience. The GPO cards didn't fit right.

GPO tried to assert conflict of interest:

In a letter of August 19, 1925, the Postmaster General wrote as follows: Under the terms of the Hollerith contract with the Government, their machines are leased with the express stipulation that they be used only for the tabulation and assorting of cards of Hollerith manufacture. The Federal Trade Commission also stated in its reply of August 4, 1925, that it had entered into a similar contract with one of the tabulating machine companies. Admission of this exclusive and tying contract, which appears to be a violation of the Clayton Act...

But it didn't work in the end. Hollerith had perfected the SKILL of making tabulating machinery AND the cards to match. This was the unique American advantage, before we threw it away in the '70s. We knew how to turn an invention into a SYSTEM, with all of its pieces and connectors working together.

Using machines that don't work as well, with no service available, and with cards that don't fit, is NOT the way to save costs. The most important cost is downtime, not initial expenditure.

SKILL is always the most important variable. The SKILL of the various departments would be wasted by forcing them to use inadequate and unserviceable machinery. Human capital matters infinitely more than money capital. IBM made huge profits BECAUSE it understood this point.

Now, of course, we aim for Share Value instead of profit, so 100% downtime is the sole purpose and goal of the economy. No work, no skills, no production, no employees, no products, no customers, no humans. Just Bezos and machines.

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 11:03 PM

  Happy birthday Sputnik ... with a special salute.
Browsing through more of the ACM magazine. From Nov 1957, a remarkably sane and objective response to Sputnik. The anniversary is RIGHT NOW, so this is appropriate.

Author Edmund Berkeley gets everything right, with perfect objectivity about all aspects of the achievement.

On Friday October 4, scientists of the USSR opened a new era in the history of the world. Close to midnight, from a rocket launcher north of the Caspian Sea, they fired a three-stage rocket which ejected an instrumented globe named Sputnik into space above the earth's atmosphere. It weighed 184 pounds, was 23 inches in diameter, and had four extendible radio transmitting antennas, through which signals have been coming continually.

This of course is a magnificent, epoch-making achievement. The Soviet people and all human beings everywhere can take great pride in it. Certainly it is on a par with the Italian sailor Columbus's discovery of America.

I'm not entirely surprised by this approach; as a shortwave listener and reader of electronics mags, I knew at the time that the world of science was more united and less warlike than the world of politics.

Berkeley knows the difference between systems from personal experience:

The scientists who launched the rocket had enough resources to make very certain that it would be launched in exactly the way they desired. They oriented the whole third stage rocket to the position, direction, and velocity that they desired, and then separated the parts of it. There was evidently no stinting in the supply of all that was needed - and this time for a basically scientific achievement and not a military one.

I am reminded of something I was told on a short visit in Russia in 1934, about planning in a socialist society: a man might need a great ship to accomplish something worth while, but he would never need 50 pairs of shoes or a house with 50 rooms.

On the fucking dot.

It seems apparent from various accounts that the rocket energy, productive capacity, and skills at the command of the Russians are almost certainly greater than what is at the command of Americans. In the first place, the space satellite planned to be launched by the United States is only about 10 inches in diameter and is to weigh about 30 pounds. Compare this with the 23-inch diameter Sputnik weighing 184 pounds.

In addition, the Russians have stated that they have successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile. At least some American authorities say they believe this statement. The Russians have added that they can place such a missile on any spot on the earth.

Almost all of us in the United States have no access to information which enables us to judge whether this statement is likely to be true or not. In comparison, however, the Americans have only partially tested an intermediate range ballistic missile, and there have been a number of tests that failed.

These facts imply however that the Russians have essentially escaped from the confinement of the ring of American bases surrounding the Soviet Union.

Sound familiar? In this case the FACTS are familiar, but our propaganda, then and now, was the exact opposite of the FACTS. Berkeley stated the FACTS correctly. We were ready to attack Russia from all angles, and Russia broke our ring. Putin did the same thing two years ago with his hypersonic missiles. We are always trying to invade and destroy Russia, and Russia is always trying to break out of our ring and survive.

Why has a Russian moon happened? There are several reasons of great importance, which do not require the elaborate reasoning of automatic computers and data processing to demonstrate them.

First, the Soviet Union has been putting forth a massive effort in good, sound education, especially education in science and technical fields. It is currently graduating something like twice as many scientists and technicians as the United States. And there is good evidence that they are educated much better.

ON THE FUCKING DOT A TRILLION TIMES. As I've hammered a hundred times, we responded to this FACT by making our education even worse than before.

Fourth, professors, scientists, and intellectually able people are highly regarded in the Soviet Union as they are in most of Europe. In the Soviet Union they are well rewarded for good work, with a very high standard of living. They are not ridiculed in a stereotyped way as highbrows, eggheads, queers, and eccentrics. It is not considered that their careers should be secondary to those of good mixers, star football players, and organization men.

It is no doubt true that they may be looked on with suspicion and investigated as likely to be subversive, in the Soviet Union as well as in the United States. Exceedingly few Soviet scientists are permitted to travel outside of the Soviet Union into the Western world; we are sure that they have less freedom than Western scientists. But this fact does not seem to affect very much the quality and quantity of scientific work being done.

Note the remarkably even-handed objectivity about "freedom". Freedom to work means having the resources and training to do good work. Russia valued freedom to work in all fields, not just science. SKILL was valued and cultivated and appreciated in every possible way.

At the end of the article Berkeley converges to standard Cold War alarmism, probably in an attempt to keep his credentials. The facts are easier to digest when coated by normal branding.

= = = = =

Here's a repeat of my usual Sputnik anniversary scene, this time placed in Brahe's Star Castle.

Labels: Alternate universe, Natural law = Soviet law, skill-estate

  ¶ 11:29 PM

  AI non-pointmissing from 1954
The Bitsavers archive includes some old magazines like ACM.

In April 1954, Elliott Gruenberg wrote about thinking, creativity, and artificial intelligence. Page 6 of the PDF.

He got EVERYTHING right.

At that point digital was struggling to compete with analog. 1/3 of the material in the magazine was about new uses of analog computers, or analog controlled and recorded by digital. After digital defeated analog, we lost our ability to think properly about thinking and creativity. All of our metaphors are based on discrete time segments and discrete instructions, with NO FEEDBACK. From this mindset we can't begin to understand how life works. Gruenberg did understand how life works. Or rather he understood THAT life works. Living things are primarily meant to make, not think.

Human personality is characterized by a drive to preserve a self or ego; by an awareness of self, as related to a world; by an urge to survive. In addition, there is a capacity to plan action, to talk about it, to himself and others, and thus to reason. But beyond this, the human being has feeling, emotions.

Activities make him feel good or bad. Certain sights also give rise to such feelings, and certain sounds. There is a feeling of good health hard to describe. A human being has a positive feeling when he has created something: a new book; a musical composition, a report, a new machine, a new room for the house. The struggle of creation may not be pleasant, but the results, if well done, give rise to happy emotions.

I see only one point where recent knowledge has gone beyond what Gruenberg knew in 1954:

Most anti-mechanists emphasize the importance of creativeness as a distinguishing mark of human personality. But before we get carried away with the uniqueness of human personality, let us examine creativity a little more closely.

Mothers who bear babies feel a sense of creative power, and justifiably so. Yet, in what sense does a mother create her child? Her control over the process once it starts is no better than the control of an attendant monitoring the gauges in a chemical plant.

Epigenetics now shows that the emotions and actions of mothers create lasting changes in the baby. Grandma's "superstitions" were right. The anti-mechanists are right.

Labels: Not AI point-missing, skill-estate

  ¶ 9:05 AM

  Reprint on skills and deltas
Ran across this from 2017, and it seems to be worth reprinting again. Vaguely related to this week's topic of rentalizing and one-way obligations.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Returning again to Graybill's Law:

The people of Free-Trade countries are therefore driven into the few occupations which are left, by reason of the destruction of their formerly more varied pursuits. Hence those diversified talents with which men are endowed are not developed but remain latent and unused, an incalculable detriment to the prosperity of their respective countries.

Let's try to expand the notion of skill-estate.

News item about the alleged developer of Bitcoin got me thinking about Gresham's Law.

The last time we had two INDEPENDENT AND COMPETING currencies was before 1870. Since then we've had one currency .... until Bitcoin. I had a hard time grasping Gresham until Bitcoin.

What Gresham really says is this: If two items both claim to be currency, and one of the items becomes much more valuable, the valuable item will NO LONGER BE A CURRENCY. It will become a COLLECTIBLE like vintage wine or classic cars. And that's Bitcoin. It claimed to be a currency until its value rose quickly. At that point it became Picassos.

But the current Bitcoin system doesn't even qualify as a collectible asset, because it requires ALL OF THE HOLDERS of the asset to give permission for every transaction. The permission is automatic through computers and nets, but it's still permission.

Bitcoin is not a thing you can buy or sell openly and freely. Thus it's not even PROPERTY. More like a trust-based inheritance.

= = = = =

Now think of currency in a dynamic way.

A coin represents a DELTA of value. If you have HONESTLY acquired a coin, it means you have INCREASED THE VALUE of something. You have cut down a tree, or turned the tree into paper, or helped to print a book with the paper, or arranged books attractively in a store to raise the sale price.

We can apply Gresham as a verb to the Graybill world of SKILLS as delta-makers.

The skill that yields the greatest number of coins for a given amount of effort will become a collectible, no longer freely transferred.

What's the highest-value skill? Counterfeiting. Money as pure numbers. What's the SKILL or EFFORT that creates counterfeit money? No skill at all, just access to the treasury. If you belong to the correct tribe you have access to counterfeit money. It's an inherited trust from the start!

Among other traditional skills, what's the lowest-value? Farming. Requires long ownership of property and generations of skill development. Payoff depends on weather, speculators, and the actions of other farmers. BUT farming is critically important to the existence of civilization, so a sane civilization takes steps to subsidize farmers.

Most other skills are in the middle. Pottery, welding, weaving, programming, cooking, selling. These are available to anyone with some innate talent, but the genetic aspect is non-exclusive. Doesn't depend on your name. You can learn them in a year or two of apprenticeship.

These skills qualify as currency. They can be transferred freely to anyone who can use them, and they can be used freely by the recipient. The resulting delta of value depends on all sorts of internal and external factors that don't apply to simple coins, but the basic idea is still the same.

Because these skills can be acquired (comparatively) easily, they don't need subsidies... BUT a sane civilization will take steps to maintain their value, just as it maintains the value of coins.

And there's the link between Gresham and Graybill. Our insane "civilization" is depriving ordinary skills of all value. Hyperinflation of skill currency, leaving ONLY ledger money, aristocrat money, vintage money, with any value. The only skill that counts is the skill of being born into the correct ethnic group.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: skill-estate, storage

  ¶ 12:19 AM

  Circling
Some rare NON-pointmissing, via MindMatters as usual....

Does that mean that there is no difference between science and pseudoscience? No, it does not. Although there is no definite dividing line between day and night, we can all agree that clear examples of each are easy to find. In the same way, we can all agree that, say, physics and chemistry are clear examples of true sciences and astrology and homeopathy are excellent examples of pseudoscience. So how are we doing this?

The best approach appears to be one that does not attempt to apply a definitive list of strict criteria but instead accepts that there are certain ‘benchmarks’ that characterise what we think of as good science.

First and foremost, science is a set of methods for attempting to gain veridical knowledge. It is not an established body of ‘facts’ that must never be questioned. Personally, I no longer believe in paranormal phenomena such as precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. I could be wrong, of course, and maybe one day new evidence of a robust and replicable paranormal phenomenon will be presented that will lead me to change my mind. After almost a century and a half of systematic research, I’m not holding my breath.

Getting there. Telepathy and precognition DEFINITELY happen SOMETIMES. They can't be turned on and off like an engine or a flashlight, so they can't be examined in a standard controlled experiment.

A more profitable examination would treat the SOMETIMES as a skill, not a theory. What conditions are conducive to telepathy and precognition? Who seems to be most sensitive? How can we increase our sensitivity? As fucking usual, Russians were working on this SKILL for quite a while, and we were dismissing it just as we dismissed Lamarck. Russian science has a record of being right, and we have a record of being wrong.

= = = = =

When you start from absolute determinism, ESP and precognition aren't a problem. The old Arabs and Persians started there, and the Euros who picked up science from them (Brahe, Kepler, etc) were thinking in the same mold. The universe is a massive clock, with an infinite pattern of interfering waveforms from its parts. An observer who is sensitive to those waveforms should be able to predict the future pattern of the waveforms. Real astrology, as I've been pointing out, was an attempt to systematize those patterns, or at least the part of the patterns formed by our nearby planets.

I've been circling around this question for several months. and still haven't managed to pull it together. Apparently I'm not predestined to cinch up the topic yet.

Labels: Equipoise, Not AI point-missing, skill-estate

  ¶ 8:32 AM

  Y no amortize? 2
In previous item I noted that Nash had built a water-cooled boxer six in 1948, then abandoned it. The engine would have been just right for the 1975 Pacer, but instead AMC designed the Pacer around a Wankel rotary, a totally un-Nashian engine. Rotaries are intrinsically wasteful and short-lived. Even worse, it was going to be outsourced from GM, leaving AMC vulnerable to shutoff at any time.

And the shutoff came just before production, forcing AMC to hastily reshape the Pacer for its own long inline six. The Pacer was a totally awful idea, but it might have been marginally less awful with a squared-off boxer six that didn't crowd the passenger compartment.

Well, the answer to the puzzle is clear. By the '70s the amortizing and saving and HUMAN spirit of Mason and Romney was long gone. Abernethy had mistakenly tried to be GM. When you ARE the big cat, you can make mistakes like Pacer and go unpunished. The mouse can't afford to make such stupid errors, and certainly can't afford to rely on the cat for supplies.

Here's an even bigger Y no amortize question, with the same answer.

From 1959 to 1962, AMC built its own Jeep for the government.

The Mighty-Mite was shorter than the Willys Jeep, and shorter than the Metropolitan. Wheelbase was 65 inches, and total length was 107 inches. It had an air-cooled V4 engine. It had independent suspension on all four wheels, and the 4WD transfer case was sync'd so you could shift in and out of 4WD without stopping. It had a light rustproof aluminum body, and was designed to wade through high water without stalling or damage.







AMC did briefly discuss using this engine in the Metropolitan to copy VW, but at that time they didn't really need an extremely small car because the halfway small Rambler was gaining ground fast. So they phased out the Metro. Just as well. Air-cooled engines are a bad idea, and GM lost ground by attempting to copy VW.



The Mighty-Mite wasn't a prototype. AMC built 3000 of them for the military, which is enough to debug and improve manufacturing methods.

So. Why did AMC need to REINVENT those features for the Eagle in 1980? The Eagle had IFS but not IRS, and switchable 4WD. Those were advertised as 'new' features.

Tech historians bemoan the not invented here syndrome, rejecting an invention because it would require paying royalties. After Mason and Romney were gone, AMC suffered from invented here syndrome, forgetting and rejecting its OWN earlier developments.

= = = = =

Later thought on GM tactics: GM loved playing cat games with its mousy competitors. The fake development of a Wankel was clearly a game to force AMC into a fast fix. Earlier, GM famously forced Chrysler into a last-minute downsizing by letting Chrysler's CEO "accidentally overhear" a discussion of GM's "planned" downsizing.

Mice need to be maximally paranoid. Don't listen to what the cat says or promises. Watch what the cat does, and act accordingly.

THEY KNOW IT'S A HOAX BECAUSE THEY CREATED THE HOAX.

Labels: skill-estate, storage

  ¶ 5:16 AM

  Non-fungible non-products
Pat Foster's book on the Metropolitan was published in 1996. His daughter interviewed Evelyn Ay Sempier, who was Miss America 1954 and also the official Ambassador (heh) for the Metropolitan. She unveiled the Met at the Chicago Auto Show. In 1996 she was about 60. She died in 2008.



Transcribing the corporate part:

The relationship with Nash Motors was one of the finest relationships, and I've had a lot of commercial relationships in the 40 years since. I, as Miss America, was always treated very genuinely. I was not a 'product'.

What allowed me to see much of America [she traveled 270,000 miles in that year] was Nash. If a community had a celebration and they could not afford the small price of bringing Miss America, Nash would say 'I will bring MIss America to your community', and they would pay the fee.

I was not a product.

Good companies recognized the difference back then. Cars and cans were products. Customers and employees were people. People are different. People have genes and souls. Small towns were also important enough and distinct enough to be worth paying for an appearance.

Now we're all products. We're all fungible. We're all mass-produced and constantly inspected by online QC. We're instantly rejected if not 100.0000% compliant with all EPA and NSA and ISO and above all CDC standards.

Footnote: Gracious and generous Evelyn is the exact opposite of another celebrity who was involved in Nash promotion at the same time. Baseball star Ted Williams received a sporty prototype of the Metro as part of a peculiarly misdirected contest. He hated the car and SOLD it to another rich asshole. Ted's arrogance was properly rewarded in an appropriately peculiar afterlife.

Labels: Alternate universe, Equipoise, skill-estate

  ¶ 11:47 PM

  Another wrong metaphor
Via Evolution News:

Our friend Brian Keating, the world-renowned physicist at UC San Diego, interviewed Ben Shapiro for Dr. Keating’s podcast, “Into the Impossible.” Shapiro introduces a new and helpful word — or at least a word that was new to me — “ultracrepidarianism.”

It means “noting or pertaining to a person who criticizes, judges, or gives advice outside the area of his or her expertise.” This is essentially the larger category of error to which a more familiar word, scientism, belongs. Scientism is what happens when scientists (or doctors, one might add) “give advice outside their area of expertise.” It’s an invitation to authoritarianism, trampling democracy because Science (or Whatever) Says, which is why Shapiro brings it up.

No, experts are NOT talking about subjects they don't know.

EXPERTS ARE MISUSING THEIR KNOWLEDGE TO GIVE INTENTIONALLY WRONG ADVICE.

Fauci is a real expert. Before 2020 he was giving correct advice, following real medicine and real public health. In March 2020 he flipped the entire profession backwards. All of the CDC/Fauci advice is PRECISELY WRONG by the standards of medicine.

The underlying pattern is our perpetual and endless WarOns.

Parkinson tells us that bureaucracies create and maintain problems. An ever-increasing problem means an ever-increasing budget. An ended war or a solved problem means that the budget must be cut or the agency deleted.

1920 gave us the War On Alcohol, which created more alcohol and more drunkards. 1950 gave us the War On Commies, which created more commies by direct FBI action and by rebellion. 1965 brought the War On Poverty, which slammed urban blacks down from their relative prosperity and highly skilled jobs into helpless poverty. 1975 started the War On Carbon, which has given us more coal power and more floods and more air pollution. 1980 brought the War On Drugs (after an earlier half-start in the '60s.) The War On Drugs distributed crack in the ghettoes and oxycontin in Appalachia. 2001, of course, was the War On Islamic Terror, with CIA and FBI working together to turn alienated Muslims into "terrorists". And now we have the War On Virus, which takes every conceivable step to eliminate immunity and maintain an epidemic forever.

Simple rule: War On X makes more X.

In each of these WarOns, real experts were bribed or blackmailed into using their expertise AGAINST their normal goals. In our foreign WarOns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military carefully avoids taking any steps that could end the war. A nonexpert might accidentally cause peace. In the War On Virus, Public Health Demons know everything about viruses and immunity, and use their expert knowledge to STOP immunity and maintain the virus forever.

Shapiro thinks that experts are acting outside of their knowledge. NO. When you are giving INEXPERT advice, you might accidentally solve a problem by common sense and intuition. Only a true expert knows how to UNSOLVE a problem or UNCURE a disease.

= = = = =

Later: If guilds still functioned properly, WarOns would be harder to accomplish. These experts are BETRAYING their guild, CORRUPTING the intellectual property of the guild, DESTROYING the value of the painfully developed skills and talents of the guild. Soldiers are supposed to win a winnable war, not design and implement an unwinnable war. Scientists are supposed to solve problems, not UNsolve problems. Doctors are supposed to cure diseases, not UNcure diseases. Police are supposed to ARREST gangsters, not AID gangsters.

In each case we have turned the definition backwards. We now say that a cop who arrests criminals is betraying his badge. We say that a doctor who tries to arrest a virus with Ivermectin instead of aiding the virus with muzzles and lockdowns is betraying medicine. We say that a soldier who refuses to fight a pointless unwinnable war is deserting.

Labels: Parkinson, skill-estate, UNENDING HELL

  ¶ 5:17 AM

  Condensed
During the current unending hell, I've come to appreciate (yet again) the value of a very old brand, Campbell's CONDENSED Soup.

As soon as the muzzle mandate started FIFTEEN FUCKING MONTHS AGO, WITH NO FUCKING END IN SIGHT, I scrambled to minimize Time Under Muzzle. Previously I had been making three store trips per week, with easy loads. The trips were enjoyable, a chance to interact and converse with real humans.

Now that each trip is pure torture, I reduced to two torture sessions per week, with heavier loads. The loads then had to be reduced. Part of the reduction was ordering coffee and barley online.

Previously I had been using Progresso soup, which is uncondensed. At first I switched to Knorr rice mixes, but those were unsatisfying. Then I tried good old Campbells CONDENSED. This turned out to be optimal in two different ways. (1) Campbell actually has more solid food and more varied food. Progresso is mostly liquid, which adds unnecessary load weight. (2) I always 'fortify' soup with barley, vegies, and cheese. The liquid in the Progresso had to be drained off to reach a practical serving size. Wasteful. The all-solid Campbell comes out just right with a small amount of water.



The interactive radio show Calling All Detectives was also condensed, with the same qualities as Campbell's. Each episode on the transcription disk (the can) is just 8 minutes long, but the writers packed in enough solid material to make it feel like a half hour of story. No unnecessary banter, no long pauses, no music. As always with radio, the listener supplies the water, filling in the visual aspect of locations and characters. This show was uniquely fortified by local announcers (chefs) who added an interactive quiz with a substantial reward. Because the quiz was based on a detail in the episode, the fortification boosted the attentional (nutritional) value of the show itself.

This episode is about a restaurant with no customers. The detective investigates what seems to be a gang front, and finds instead that the owner is renting out the kitchen to amateur cooks so they can practice and enjoy in a fancy kitchen.

At the end the narrator says:

Man can't live by bread alone; but if it's bread he makes himself, he's willing to try.

Or as I'm fond of saying,

A MAN NEEDS TO MAKE THINGS. IF HE CAN'T MAKE THINGS, HE WILL BREAK THINGS.

Labels: skill-estate, UNENDING HELL

  ¶ 3:07 PM

  Rentalization 2
After my old computer crashed suddenly in July (my own damn fault) I quickly rigged up a computer that had been in storage. This proved to be inadequate, so I ordered a refurbished Lenovo. This is an excellent computer, QUIET and fast.

Courseware was carefully backed up, so nothing was lost in that department. But I'd been sloppy about things like web bookmarks and my 'amusement' stuff, so I've been rebuilding those.

Yesterday I decided to recapture my local copy of the images for this blog, which had only been backed up from 2005 to 2015. I needed to FTP about 1GB from my web storage to the computer. First I tried to do it in Firefox, which had previously contained its own FTP system. Immediately ran into a prime example of INSANE NANNY-STATE CYBERSECURITY.

From Firefox's announcement:

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) has long been a convenient file exchange mechanism between computers on a network. While this standard protocol has been supported in all major browsers almost since its inception, it’s by now one of the oldest protocols still in use and suffers from a number of serious security issues.

The FTP protocol itself has been disabled by default since version 88 and now the time has come to end an era and discontinue the support for this outdated and insecure protocol — Firefox 90 will no longer support the FTP protocol.

If you are a Firefox user, you don’t have to do anything to benefit from this security advancement. As soon as your Firefox auto-updates to version 90, any attempt to launch an attack relying on the insecure FTP protocol will be rendered useless, because Firefox does not support FTP anymore. If you aren’t a Firefox user yet, you can download the latest version here to start benefiting from all the ways that Firefox works to protect you when browsing the web.

Public Health. Nurse Ratched all the way. You don't need to do anything to BENEFIT from losing half of your data forever. As soon as we GITHUB-LOBOTOMIZE** you forcibly and automatically, you will lose half of your data and you will BENEFIT.

Jesus.

This is an integral part of the RENTALIZATION of the world. You're not allowed to have your own house or your own computer or your own software or your own books or your own data or your own skills or your own mind. Everything must be rented from Lord Bezos, ON CONDITION OF OBEDIENCE AND ORTHODOXY.

And best of all, you will BENEFIT from letting us control your mind and property entirely. You'll never have to worry about being ATTACKED by your own data. You'll never worry about the threats we create, like "hacking" and "terrorism" and "misinformation" and "viruses". You will love Big Sibling Of Indeterminate Gender.

The rulers, of course, don't need security. They don't need muzzles and distancing and lucite and SSL and anti-FTP nurses. They can live normally and breathe normally and use IBM tape drives for storage because they're IN CHARGE OF THE HOAX.

Fortunately there are still some non-Ratched humans in the world. After trying FileZilla, which refuses to do its own fucking job because of "security", I found WinSCP, made in Czechia, which performs perfectly without any quibbles about TLS or other shit. Even better, the UI is rigged in Norton Commander style for easy keyboard use. WinSCP flawlessly transferred six years of MY work to MY computer where I can OWN it and amortize it and gain inspiration from it.

= = = = =

** Protecting you from your own data IS a lobotomy. That's exactly what it does.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, skill-estate, storage

  ¶ 10:16 AM

  You already have what you need.
One of the small pleasures of life is pulling an ace from your sleeve.

One of the BIG pleasures is creating independence and self-sufficiency, defeating the all-consuming Github.

I use Poser intensively for work and play, for courseware animations and blog stuff and just plain entertainment. About a year ago, the makers of Poser decided to turn it into a rental property. You can't use the program at all unless you're connected to the web right now, and the connection CAN AND WILL remove anything the landlord doesn't like.

The change got AGGRESSIVELY PERSONAL when the latest version (12) cut off all usage of old-style Python.

This immediately obsoleted 20 years of hard work.

In the early years, much of my hard work was released to the Poser community, and other programmers started from my examples and monetized their work without giving me credit or royalties. This was annoying, but as long as I could keep using and amortizing my own work for my own purposes, it wasn't DESTRUCTIVE.

When the change forced me to switch all of my own work to the new form in order to USE IT FOR MY OWN PURPOSES, I said no. Demanded a refund and cancellation of the license for v12. Without warning, this also cancelled the license for v11, which would have been usable otherwise.

NOW I'M SERIOUSLY PISSED.

So I fell back to v9, which was the last non-Github version.

But then v9 abruptly suffered an entirely separate Github obsolescence. It somehow used Adobe Flash to run its file system. When Adobe killed Flash, v9 became partly usable. It would load premade scenes, but not any of the parts needed to build a scene.

There was a workaround, a loader developed by one of those monetizers who began with my work. Damned if I'm going to honor a monetizer.

So I returned to the loader I'd written in 2004, which does more than the Adobe shit was doing, and does more than the plagiarized version. I hadn't been using it, because the Adobe-based file system, built into the program, was easier. Now the choice was between my own superior file-handler or the plagiarized inferior file-handler.

No contest, no split decision. It still works.

A meaningful victory against Github 'phone home' tyranny, and a petty personal victory against the plagiarizers.

Polistra sings along with Tycho:



BE YOUR OWN BEACON.

You already have what you need.

Resonate with reality using your own INSTRUMENTS and your own SKILLS and your own SENSES. Don't surrender to the centralizers or the plagiarizers. Don't let them steal your SKILLS or monopolize your SENSES.

Labels: Equipoise, skill-estate

  ¶ 2:46 PM

  Balanced pair
Two articles showed up in my usual website wanderings today. The two form a nice balance or bridge. Both are written by careful thinkers, not blind partisans. Both are on the same basic topic.

Meritocracy.

One defends the standard Shared Lie, the other is proposing realism.

= = = = =

From the allegedly independent leftists at Persuasion, a stout defense of Meritocracy:

Meritocracy was a real creation that took time, and that took a certain self-denying ordinance—we were pushing against some of the most obvious things about human nature. So, meritocracy has a relatively brief history, in the sense that it’s the creation of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and of what I call the the “English Revolution,” the Gladstonian revolution of the 19th century—all of which were taking the old social order and tearing it up, saying, “Let’s reconstitute the social order on the basis of a set of new principles, open competition, testing people’s promise and ability, getting rid of nepotism, getting rid of feudal restrictions.”

Pushing against human nature and reconstituting the social order: true. Psychopaths always reconstruct humans to suit their purposes.

Testing people's promise and ability: False.

We still have a completely inherited hierarchy WITHIN THE RULING CLASS, and we have eliminated the hierarchy of SKILL in the working class. Before Locke and Marat, farmers and blacksmiths and printers trained their sons to take over the business. This also happened within the employed class in feudal systems, where family continuity was important. Serfs could be bought and sold, but mostly they continued to work on the same farm, training their children. The employer had a lifelong OBLIGATION to the workers, and he gained more by maintaining an INTERGENERATIONAL loyalty. Grandparents were supported because they were helping to bring up the kids into effective workers.

Persuasion tries to answer this:

Absolutely. I think if you’re going to take people seriously as human beings, you have to take their talents seriously. You have to take into account the fact that there are people who have potential, who can develop that potential, and who are at their most fulfilled when they are expressing that. I think a good society is a society [with] the development of talent at [its] very heart. You have to be willing to test your talent. There’s a lot of criticism by the anti-meritocratic people about the terrible examination system, [with] everybody spending a life doing examinations. Most of us don’t like doing examinations. But doing examinations is also a way of developing our talents.

Spending a life doing exams? Exams seem to be dominant in Britain and the Orient, but not in America. So maybe I'm missing the point. In any case, feudal systems had room for the RARE genetic variations that led to out-of-family talents. We shouldn't lose the transfer of the MAJORITY of skills solely to encourage this RARE situation, which was already encouraged.

I can think of two obvious examples. Carver's owners recognized his unique skill and helped him develop it to benefit their farm. Astronomer James Ferguson was born poor and spent his early life in involuntary apprenticeships. Some of the masters recognized his unique talent and gave him time and room to develop it.

= = = = =

James Hankins writing in Public Discourse is more realistic and more original. He grasps the current situation accurately:

Suppose you were living at a time when all around you, it seemed, civilization was breaking down. Political institutions were so little respected that the only way they could compel obedience was by increasing surveillance, multiplying laws, and tightening enforcement. People did not trust their leaders and suspected that elites were only interested in themselves. Many leaders were tyrannous, ignoring constitutional norms. Religious leaders engaged in scandalous behavior, and religious faith was losing its hold over the educated classes. Standards of personal behavior had collapsed, and it seemed that most people had forgotten what even ordinary decency was. Examples of upright character were hard to find, heroism almost unknown. The young went to universities only to learn how to earn money and achieve status. Even the military had grown corrupt. A great pandemic had taken many lives and filled people with fear. No one believed any more that medical science was honest about its ability to cope with the disease.

Welcome to the fourteenth century.

On the fucking dot.

Hankins tells how Petrarch created a system to clean up the ELITES:

The scholastic approach to ethics is precisely the opposite of what Petrarch wanted to do with the studia humanitatis. He and his followers invented a new form of education whose principal purpose was to develop good moral character and practical wisdom. In their view, the souls of all human beings contained both good and bad, but a well-designed curriculum could help cultivate the good and make students ashamed to do the bad. It could impart “true nobility” to human nature—not the kind of nobility inherited from forebears or acquired from titles handed out by dishonorable authorities, but the kind of nobility that came from true, personal distinction, a distinction gained through study, effort, and admiration earned honestly from one’s peers. Petrarch’s view and that of his followers was that persons with true nobility could and should provide the leadership to reform Christendom. So you could say that Petrarch and his followers invented a new kind of meritocracy.

In other words, Petrarch created exams that flunked psychopaths. Priests and courtiers had to show an ability to think and work FOR THE GOOD OF SOCIETY.

The concept of institutio (paideia in Greek; inadequately translated as “education”) for the humanists meant not only learning to read old books in school. It meant absorbing the moral and intellectual formation human beings needed to live successfully in civilized societies. It included manners (mores) learned informally in the family and the school. It included the customs of the community, practices like those associated with marriage, with taking meals together, with showing reverence for elders, with other rituals associated with festivals and funerals, and with military service.

Hankins proposes a concrete modern version of the Petrarch project, in considerable detail:

First, we have to recognize that this is a long-term project. It may well take more than one or two generations to revive sound education. It may have to start in private homes and small colleges, but we cannot give up on the public square and the universities.

We need to find ways to acquire cultural prestige. We need to build alliances, form networks, and find patrons who share our vision.

I think also we need to emphasize more strongly the role of the humanities in strengthening skills of communication and persuasion. The precise use of language is an indispensable tool of civilization. We need to hold up an ideal of human excellence and challenge students to attain it.

Amen to the precise use of language. Room 101 is all about ruining the TOOL of language.

In other words, Hankins proposes using exams to limit the ruling class, while Persuasion favors using exams to limit the working class.

Labels: 2000=1000, Equipoise, skill-estate

  ¶ 11:09 PM

  Greta vs Granny. Why?
Continuing from previous.

Experience and skills are dirty. Theory and Innovative Disruption are clean. OCD plus psychopath = total holocaust.

This clicks into another question.

Why was it important to kill the oldest people?

This holocaust was aimed with laser focus at oldies, and it was preceded by Greta's command to KILL GRANNY.

Most genocides have been based on ethnic or religious categories. This one was age-specific.

Experience is dirty. Who has the most experience? Wrinklies.

Oldies know how the world works. In the current situation, oldies remember a period when division of labor created a strong culture and a strong economy. We remember a time when union workers proudly built everything here, using skills that were carefully developed and maintained and stored by the unions.

Above all, we remember and understand real immunity. We recognize a FAKE epidemic because we've lived through REAL epidemics. Our bodies learned from the microbes, and our minds learned about the microbes.

Greta is a teenager, ordering the middle-agers to kill Granny.

Ibsen's primordial Public Death Officer gave the keynote on this as well:

All the old bunglers must be got rid of, you understand. And that in every department! Such endless vistas have opened out before me today, It was not all clear to me until now, but now I will right everything. It is the young, vigorous banner-bearers we must seek, my friends; we must have now captains for all the outposts.

Labels: NOW I SEE, skill-estate

  ¶ 6:29 AM