The Brain

You’re written in code that’s conditional and self-transforming upon its input. This volatile code projects your brain through the continuum that is time and space. Your brain is conditional and self-transforming upon its input. The projection of your brain projects your mind through the continuum that is space and time.

Your code propels through its environ at a constant rate of self-modification while your brain accelerates. It’s the design modifies through time while the designed modifies through time.

Your mind = parent’s combined genetic information + your genetic information * time + your brain * time^2/2

Why should the Occupy Wall Street Protesters be angry?

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.

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While the housing and credit bubbles built, a series of factors caused the financial system to both expand and become increasingly fragile, a process called financialization. U.S. Government policy from the 1970s onward has emphasized deregulation to encourage business, which resulted in less oversight of activities and less disclosure of information about new activities undertaken by banks and other evolving financial institutions. Thus, policymakers did not immediately recognize the increasingly important role played by financial institutions such as investment banks and hedge funds, also known as the shadow banking system. Some experts believe these institutions had become as important as commercial (depository) banks in providing credit to the U.S. economy, but they were not subject to the same regulations.[23] These institutions, as well as certain regulated banks, had also assumed significant debt burdens while providing the loans described above and did not have a financial cushion sufficient to absorb large loan defaults or MBS losses.[24] These losses impacted the ability of financial institutions to lend, slowing economic activity. Concerns regarding the stability of key financial institutions drove central banks to provide funds to encourage lending and restore faith in the commercial paper markets, which are integral to funding business operations. Governments also bailed out key financial institutions and implemented economic stimulus programs, assuming significant additional financial commitments. [...] The U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported its findings in January 2011. It concluded that “the crisis was avoidable and was caused by: Widespread failures in financial regulation, including the Federal Reserve’s failure to stem the tide of toxic mortgages; Dramatic breakdowns in corporate governance including too many financial firms acting recklessly and taking on too much risk; An explosive mix of excessive borrowing and risk by households and Wall Street that put the financial system on a collision course with crisis; Key policy makers ill prepared for the crisis, lacking a full understanding of the financial system they oversaw; and systemic breaches in accountability and ethics at all levels.”[25][26]

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Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. _ (2010), was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court holding that the First Amendment protects corporate and union funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections. The 5–4 decision originated in a dispute over whether the non-profit corporation Citizens United could air a film critical of Hillary Clinton, and whether the group could advertise the film in broadcast ads featuring Clinton’s image, in apparent violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly known as the McCain–Feingold Act, in reference to its primary Senate sponsors. [...] The New York Times stated in an editorial, “The Supreme Court has handed lobbyists a new weapon. A lobbyist can now tell any elected official: if you vote wrong, my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.”[61] Jonathan Alter called it the “most serious threat to American democracy in a generation”.[62] The Christian Science Monitor wrote that the Court had declared “outright that corporate expenditures cannot corrupt elected officials, that influence over lawmakers is not corruption, and that appearance of influence will not undermine public faith in our democracy.”[63]

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Luntz frequently tests word and phrase choices using focus groups and interviews. His stated purpose in this is the goal of causing audiences to react based on emotion. “80 percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think.” “If I respond to you quietly, the viewer at home is going to have a different reaction than if I respond to you with emotion and with passion and I wave my arms around. Somebody like this is an intellectual; somebody like this is a freak.”[2] [...] In an article in The New Yorker Luntz is quoted as saying, “The way my words are created is by taking the words of others…. I’ve moderated an average of a hundred plus focus groups a year over five years… I show them language that I’ve created. Then I leave a line for them to create language for me.”[4] [...] Luntz’ description of his job revolves around exploiting the emotional content of language. ”It’s all emotion. But there’s nothing wrong with emotion. When we are in love, we are not rational; we are emotional.” “…my job is to look for the words that trigger the emotion.” “We know that words and emotion together are the most powerful force known to mankind..”[2]

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“We are looking for Predictive Modeling/Data Mining Scientists and Analysts, at both the senior and junior level, to join our department through November 2012 at our Chicago Headquarters,” read the ad. “We are a multi-disciplinary team of statisticians, predictive modelers, data mining experts, mathematicians, software developers, general analysts and organizers – all striving for a single goal: re-electing President Obama.”

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To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

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The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that states how propaganda, including systemic biases, function in mass media. The model seeks to explain how populations are propagandized and how consent for various economic, social and political policies are “manufactured” in the public mind due to this propaganda. The theory posits that the way in which news is structured (through advertising, media ownership, government sourcing and others) creates an inherent conflict of interest which acts as propaganda for undemocratic forces. [...] Following the theoretical exposition of the propaganda model, Manufacturing Consent contains a large section where the authors seek to test their hypotheses. If the propaganda model is right and the filters do influence media content, a particular form of bias would be expected — one that systematically favors corporate interests. They also looked at what they perceived as naturally-occurring “historical control groups” where two events, similar in their relevant properties but differing in the expected media attitude towards them, are contrasted using objective measures such as coverage of key events (measured in column inches) or editorials favoring a particular issue (measured in number).

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Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them. Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals. And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

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But already since the May event, Nanex’s monitoring turned up another potentially disastrous situation. On July 16 in a quiet hour before the market opened, suddenly they saw a huge spike in bandwidth. When they looked at the data, they found that 84,000 quotes for each of 300 stocks had been made in under 20 seconds. “This all happened pre-market when volume is low, but if this kind of burst had come in at a time when we were getting hit hardest, I guarantee it would have caused delays in the [central quotation system],” Donovan said. That, in turn, could have become one of those dominoes that always seem to present themselves whenever there is a catastrophic failure of a complex system. There are ways to prevent quote stuffing, of course, and at least one of the members of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee thinks it should be outlawed. “Algorithms that might be spoofing the market are something that should be made illegal,” said John Bates, a former Cambridge professor and the CTO of Progress Software. But he didn’t want this presumably negative practice to color the more mundane competitive practices of high-frequency traders. “There is algorithmic terrorism and then there is reverse engineering, which is probably just part of good business practice,” Bates said.

Atheism

Alright, so definitions are important. If we’re using different definitions, and then begin discussing something using those definitions, then eventually we’ll find ourselves in differing positions even though our thoughts agree (while our language disagrees).

What’s an atheist? I don’t care. Define it however you like.  But, for me, an atheist is someone that disbelieves in a personal God. E.g., I’m a Yahweh atheist. I’m a Vishnu atheist. Currently, I’m an atheist to every God proposed by human religion—that I know of. When I say “I’m an atheist,” I don’t mean that I disbelieve in every possible concept of God. For me, it’s just an approximation for my thoughts on a bunch of claims. It’s an approximation, because I’m agnostic towards a deistic God.

Basically, I don’t know (less than or equal to 1:1 odds) if there was ever an entity that set the universe into motion, and then left the universe alone. Likewise, I don’t know if there’s space debris floating in orbit that’s in the rough shape of a teapot. However, I do know (greater than or equal to 1:2 odds) that there isn’t a teapot in orbit. Why? Because how would it get there? Ask yourself that, and then try to find an answer that gives you an explanation significantly more likely than “leprechauns put it there.”

So, why do I disbelieve in Yahweh (or insert any personal God)? Because nothing about Yahweh squares with the reality I know. When’s the last time you saw a verifiable miracle, or a verifiable anything having to do with Yahweh? Cancer ridden children that consistently pray with higher than average remission rates? Nope. Does nature, as we’ve uncovered it, allow for miracles? Nope. In light of these facts, which is more likely: Yahweh created us or we created Yahweh?

Really, that’s all atheism is to me.

Is the skeptic movement a failure?

Yes. Although, let me qualify: it’s been a failure if the purpose of the movement is to generate rationalists. That is, people that are capable of evaluating their beliefs and others, and then placing those beliefs along a continuum of naïve truth. Now, why do I believe this? Two reasons: the skeptic community doesn’t generally act in a way that you’d expect a rationalist community to act, and the necessary prerequisites to become a rational thinker aren’t the same prerequisites to generally be considered part of the movement.

How would a community of rational thinkers act? Well, they would understand most logical fallacies, cognitive biases, social biases, and methods for mitigating those irrational qualities inherent in all humans. As it stands, most people in this community are expected to understand a few logical fallacies, but, following that, not much else. For example, you’ll find podcasts from within the community discussing fallacies, or skeptic dictionaries or webpages discussing these fallacies, but not much on bias or rational training.

The most recent test for the skeptic community was Elevatorgate, and preceding that accomodationalism. You can google this and find the relevant information, but, suffice it  to say, the skeptic community failed both tests. With the recent test, on every skeptic forum or community, you could find examples of irrationality on both sides of the issue, and you could see that the irrational comments vastly outweighed the rational. (To clarify: my criterion for an irrational comment in this context is one that appears to deliberately fail to understand the opposing side, and to make a flagrantly unsound argument.) Basically, Elevatorgate showed us a community that acted in a way that you’d expect a rationalist community to not act.

“But, wait…,” you say. “Doesn’t the skeptic community act more rationally than others? Don’t they oppose pseudoscience and other nonsense?” Yes, but how has the community come to act in this way regarding those topics and not Elevatorgate? I think the likely explanation is that there are skeptical leaders that lead the otherwise irrational community to their own rational conclusions. And, unfortunately, they do this through persuasive argument. They’re politicians. They should be teachers. But they’re politicians, and because they’re politicians, when they’re met with a topic outside their remit, they fall silent, and then their followers feel free to vocalize their thoughts. And chaos. Pure irrational chaos. We then see the movement for what it is: a skeptical republic.

The followers vote for their leaders with viewership. They give them power within the movement. The leaders are then tacitly tasked to follow through with the platform they ran on—lest they lose viewership and power. Here’s how it works: someone becomes popular through a science podcas. They make the decisions regarding what’s science and pseudoscience, and their voters live with the decisions. And, generally, I think this works. This generates a community that acts rationally in those areas. These leaders are elected because, typically, they are experts on the platforms they ran on, and so we can expect that they have a significant amount of knowledge within that area. However, this makes them act rationally qua them knowing what is and isn’t wrong within their remit rather than them acting rationality qua them being rational. They work backwards from what they already know to be true, and then find the flaws, any flaws, in their opposition.

So, if this model works for the most part, then there really isn’t a problem, right? No, I think there is a problem, and it parallels the problem faced by all systems where the majority has influence. It’s the signal to noise problem. As more people join the system, the noise grows and we eventually lose the signal. So, for example, as more people join the skeptic community, there will be more incentive to become a skeptical leader. More reward. With more reward people are more likely to forego their passion—to see a truly rational community—and then quell that passion with more demanding ones (e.g., money and power). Also, people that were otherwise not interested in the movement will see a dollar to be made, and then market themselves to the broadest segment of the community. When you market yourself to the broadest segment of a community, you don’t appeal to their high-mindedness. You appeal to emotion. To tribalism. You provide entertainment at the cost of intellectualism. Over time, this will degrade the purpose of the skeptical movement, and it will become just another subculture with little inherent meaning. “Oh, you’re a skeptic? I’m a new atheist.”

A skeptic should be able to evaluate a claim on its evidence. It doesn’t matter if the claim is regarding economic policy or climate change. Now, of course, we don’t have the time to evaluate all the evidence for most claims. However, we can evaluate some of the evidence, and we can use strategies that lead us attaining a reliable confidence interval for claims. For climate change, do we need to evaluate all the evidence used to come to the conclusion that there is climate change? Almost certainly not, because how likely is it that an entire field of experts would falsify the data? How likely is it that they’re interpreting the data incorrectly, where you, a non-expert, would? How likely is it that they would falsify data given that someone could make their career out of that kind of fraud? And so on.

For economic policy, it’s the same. How likely is it that the consensus in macroeconomics is wrong regarding the debt crisis, for example? Politicians and fringe economists disagree with the macroeconomic consensus, are they likely to be right? Probably not, but is there a chance they’re right? Yes, but why should we assume they’re right? Oh, they have what appears to be a sound argument. But, wait, I have unknown unknowns (i.e., I can’t know the depths of my ignorance) regarding macroeconomics. While their argument appears valid, how do I know there isn’t some knowledge in the possession of popular macroeconomics showing one of the opposing premises is false? I don’t unless I’ve studied the relevant information to a sufficient degree. In which case, I’m most likely to be on the correct side if I default with the expert consensus.

Now, this is all lovely and nice, but it only applies to The Big Things. And it’s just a rule of thumb. It’s deontological. It’s a guideline. But what if your friend thinks it’s a good idea to stop eating apples because for the last month every person he’s seen eating apples has gotten sick? Something about this feels wrong, but this isn’t something you’ll find an answer to by perusing the skeptical community. However, I admit, you will probably find the answer by asking. But, remember, this is an example. Reality can generate significantly more subtle situations than anything my imagination can come up with. So, here, a heuristic won’t work. You need to understand how to actually evaluate a claim, and in some situations you won’t be able to rely on the community for that ability. So, you have to be taught the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Great, now you can spot this fallacy when you feel something about a claim is wrong. I mean, you’re not applying this ability with claims that sound right, are you? E.g., people that become skeptics are generally smarter than others. Now, if you know anything about cognitive biases, you know how horrifying the qualifier “when you feel” is. That qualifier means you’ve activated your ability for pattern matching, and when a human wants to see a pattern, by God, they will see it.

So, now, we’re in a situation where a skeptic sees a fallacy in their friend’s line of reasoning. They’ve committed the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy! Except the skeptic wanted to see this because he felt something was wrong with the claim (it went against some preconceived beliefs! he’s eaten apples all his life without getting sick!) and so he found it. If he had noticed that he was being influenced by his own bias—i.e., he wanted to confirm his preconceived beliefs—he might have not been so quick. He might have asked for more information, and he might have tried to understand the non-skeptic’s position better. He also might have found that non-skeptic actually had multiple reasons for concluding that the apples weren’t safe for eating. Like, for example, his cousin supplies the apples to the market where all his friends bought their apples and subsequently became sick. He knows his cousin has poor hygienic practices, and so he concluded from that premise in combination with the premise that all his friends that became sick eating apples that the apples aren’t safe to eat. Except, he thought the only relevant premise was the one about his friends getting sick, because was the last link in his chain of reasoning preceding his conclusion.

Now, if this skeptic were never able to communicate with his friend again, he would go on thinking his friend was wrong. And the skeptic would be wrong. Is that rational? Really, all a rational person could say is that “given what I know about these apples, I don’t see any reason for them being unsafe to eat.” The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy shouldn’t come into play until you can verify that there are no unknown unknowns. But this isn’t taught in the skeptic movement, and this is just a scintilla of the kind of prerequisite knowledge you need to be a rational thinker.

Now, you might be thinking, “what the hell does he mean it isn’t taught? We don’t have classrooms for skepticism.” I mean, to be a skeptic, you’re generally expected to know a few things. You’re expected to trust science. I.e., to apply that heuristic I described earlier. You’re also expected to know some logical fallacies—like the one that led to the wrong conclusion. The community kind of applies a peer pressure to those within it to know these things. It’s like being a photographer. If you’re around a bunch of photographers, they’re not going to think to explain forced perspective to you when they bring it up in conversation. There’s a tacit understanding that to be a photographer means to know these kinds of things.

I’ve basically outlined two problems with the skeptic movement: the societal structure and the pedagogy. I’ll discuss how I think these problems can be fixed in future posts.

Gategate

One of the horrendously dark desires of people that decry the usage of the postfix “gate,” is that eventually there will be a conflict involving a gate so that we’ll have Gategate. Then, maybe, we can have another fiasco involving Bill Gates and Gategate, and we can then give it the lovely title of Gatesgategate. So, basically, I’ve noticed people cringing or whinging when they hear of a new -gate, but I don’t sympathize with them because their position is usually one of the following.

1. -gate was created from the Watergate scandal. The Watergate scandal has no relevance to other scandals, and therefore we shouldn’t use -gate.
2. It’s ugly.

The first position shows an ignorance of how language works. If the etymology of a word was important, calling someone a “dork” would be significantly more insulting (for me anyway—I’d rather be thought of as tweed-ish than as a whale penis …actually). So, basically, we create maps for our cattle ranch or territory. The combination of an event or pronoun is part of our territory. We think of those two things as being connected. Before the use of -gate, we still had that connection, but we didn’t have a map to show other people how to get to our thoughts or territory. (Actually, that’s not strictly true, we kind of did, but it was a much lower resolution map, and we had to explain to others what the little pixelated bits meant. I.e., today Jesus Christ descended from heaven and shat on the Whitehouse lawn. We’re calling it “the incident where Jesus Christ shat on the Whitehouse lawn.”) Essentially, -gate is a useful way to approximate a thought, and that’s what language is for. So, really, if you’re arguing against -gate, you’re arguing against language, but you’re using language to argue against language, and so you’re in a whole jumbly mess of logical fuckery (not really, but it’s a nice thought).

The second position is more reasonable, actually. I mean, you want language to be beautiful, right? Shakespeare, Faulkner, and so on (I say “so on,” but, really, those are the only two people that come to mind) did sunset-9thsympony things with language. New things. Well, -gate is also a new thing, and I’m sure there were people that thought of Shakespeare’s habit of turning a noun into a verb was ugly, but they were wrong. We like using nouns as verbs. It’s new shiny tool for our toolbox. For language, the function eventually becomes the form. It’s just some resist function over form, and instead want things to start from form—the Ferrari before the engine.