cerealbad

it's a shortcut to human thinking: sharpshooter fallacy, cherry picking, biased pattern matching, etc.

backdating and forging online content is an interesting concept in itself. you see it accidentally crop up with the way google search indexes old online articles. the technology to convincingly alter the recent past creates a type of time-fraud risk. linked triple ledger networks with unique ids (public)(private)(authoritative) could solve this problem for individuals, but information validity might become as fungible as a memory or an idea. floating around in a byte-stream as easy as backspacing away my last sentence.

whether china does this because they cannot transition into services quickly enough and they need to manufacture a new capital stream to purchase their own products or because of some benevolent world connection plan is largely inconsequential, where there is political will there is a way.

a) china offers to triple your standard of living in the next decade through a massive transnational infrastructure project that will allow increased trade and job opportunities, growing local export sectors and connecting you into the largest economic region in the world.

b) continue to be brain drained by germany and scandinavia while their large agrobusiness interests buy your farmland on the cheap and create a monoculture base of gmo exports to feed their growing welfare states, in the name of human rights and european unity of course.

this is going to be a hard choice for easte-.... western eurasia. crimea and syria are just russia and america trying to get a station on this supercontinental train. the general tone towards china's plans, reminds me of the attitude towards japan and the shinkansen project in the 60s. sometimes pragmatic long term thinking beats moonshots. a traveler in 2050 will likely be on a high speed train from europe to asia than on a spaceship to low earth orbit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3LLgzO_PrI

a lot of the golden age sci fi authors were good guessers.

they were prolific (and their misses fell out of favor), scientifically literate (the foundation sciences have not progressed much since the 60s, biology/genetics being the major exception) and based their stories on old myths and legends (a standard trope in fiction), which allowed a type of reflective writing on the human condition with forward prediction power. many were also tied into anti-soviet/anti-american spy networks and traveled frequently working as information gatherers and agents for their respective governments.

sumna technologiae (stanislaw lem) is a good primer for people working in AI today, as lem attempts to understand cybernetics through the golden age lens. arkady and strugatsky's hard to be a god is about the problems of trying to order society and artificially advance it.

the soviet skepticism towards scientific/technological utopias comes through much stronger, given those authors lived through a failed one. the movement continued into the real sciences, fomenko's new chronology being the gold standard of what happens when you erode faith in your society, truth and the stability of reality. the western system is going through a similar social collapse the soviet one went through, reading the soviet literature of the time will help you understand the coming future of the english speaking peoples, no death or violence, just a disoriented sadness, a type of alien haze which clouds your senses and has you slowly floating down into cold darkness.

explanations for success are post-hoc and wrong. otherwise we would build it into machines and scale.

global interest rates have dropped so low that for the past 10+ years the baby boomer generation was speculating on property as investment, self-managing/leveraging their nest egg and avoiding the stock market or industry funds. this is a depreciating asset especially with declining population numbers.

the bottom should drop out of the market when they all die in another 10-20 years, or if rates rise back up to pre crisis levels, or if people decide to work remotely and buy land and build houses in more rural areas.

in canada the rate went from 16% in 1991 to 0.25% in 2009. the new crisis should begin around the mid 2020s, probably as trump leaves office. similar to the bush-obama transition or the clinton-bush one.

at the rate this is progressing there won't be a permanent moon habitat until the 22nd century. probably a good thing since space humans will need to be genetically modified and quarantined for life.

training sets, big data, network effects, a larger education pool to draw from (genetic outlier-geniuses), the rapid development in asia of world class urban city hubs over the past century, the construction cost of developing a small area versus a wide area [vertical development], the history of europe since the 15th century, the history of china and it's development since the 3rd century, the history of rapid urbanization of city states and the civilizations which emerged from them to conquer vasts amount of sparse-networked human territory, the desire of human beings to live together, the evolution of social hominids and their complex use of tools, rituals and in-group preferences.

it also helps to take geography into account, rivers, especially equatorial rivers seem to be a good predictor for millennial success of the humans who settle there. if you look at australia it is river poor, largely isolated from favorable trade winds and sits below the equatorial zone of predictive success.

australia is a continent nation that has been out of ecological equilibrium for at least 200 years. for the previous 100,000 years the human population was wide spread and used aggressive mass burning of the land to hunt and gather resources. the types of plants and animals that developed in this forced selection event are hardy, drought resistant, fast growing and vastly underutilized by the settler-colonial civilization that developed. the introduced species: cats, dogs, horses, cows/water buffalo, camels, toads, rabbits, deer, goats, pigs, foxes, are causing mass extinction of native fauna species which are either prey or cannot compete in their environmental niches. honey bees thrive in australian conditions since they are bred for efficient pollination and can work almost year round with mild australian winters. ironically the flammable flora is spreading faster than it can be control burned, causing catastrophic wildfires across the habitable coastal and inland regions which get progressively worse every year.

the solution is clearly to promote harvesting of introduced species at scale, while also creating an export market around unique australian products from flora and fauna - because of the lack of natural predators and the general disinterest in controlling their population as a food resource - kangaroos, a native species, are breeding completely out of control and rapidly exhausting their natural environments, and the giant inland deserts grow bigger every year. you add to this powder keg a general lack of understanding between a remote and rural population which must deal with in-climate conditions mentioned above and a well meaning but uninformed city population which fails to grasp the situation and wants to promote a laisse faire attitude towards sound ecological management and you get political wedges which always tiptoe around the major issue.

the idea that australia will create some sort of tech hub to compete with india, china, south korea, japan, singapore, hong kong etc is ridiculous. look at a world map and corresponding population density.

any link between the melted art visual neural networks produce and the visuals that are reported during various psychedelic sessions? how plausible is the theory that what is occurring is just various networks in the brain deteriorating while the drug is being flushed through the system?

a type of audio-visual anesthesia experienced in an otherwise conscious semi-lucid waking state.

trust has become implicit with mass surveillance. the only thing left to do is to read minds, but that's almost an afterthought for distraction and hysteria. what does it matter what you think or believe when everything you do is closely monitored and reinforced?

a reciprocal strategy develops (trust the trusted) even if you have no surveillance,technology or civilization. trust transactions begin with a certain fixed amount and then the balance shifts based around the perception of the participants.

intercepting perceptions, can circumvent trust/distrust which scales nicely if you can have sparse networks and centrally distributed information on the cheap. you can even customize interceptor information for specific networks, to create all types of down stream effects.

so how has it become implicit? well, you can use technology now to create your own trust/distrust network of information, then you can train this thing to judge new information for you, and most importantly you can expose (or hide) any biases you might have with adversarial networks. this will lead to a new type of trust, a type of meta-mathematical consensus, where machines just make trust decisions far better than humans can, and ideology starts to become replaced by dataology. data dissidents may find ways to circumvent trust networks as impostors or use cloned disposable networks, but crime and problems associated with resistance to existing orders will decline precipitously, you may be against roads but you need to use them all the same.

you may even see an emergent class of rebel/terrorist/revolutionary celebrity, since the novelty of not using a valid and accurate trust network geared towards ones preferences will be the same as not using the internet or banking systems for mass communication or commerce. parallel societies can easily exist without conflict, but the mass of humanity always moves together in the direction of simplification, and it's easier to trust machines, so far they have a much better track record than people, given their rapid adoption in almost every critical human sector. the trade off is that machines become difficult to build, repair and understand, but being a human becomes a lot easier, and one serves the other.

this may seem naive to people inside technology networks, but i expect a type of generational dependence to grow, and things that work are rather hard to obsolesce once they establish a critical mass of global adoption. people trust machines, computers, the internet, they will grow to entrust them with trust-proofs.

perhaps wolfram is parodying his main idea in his work output. from a basic origin he's creating monstrous bloat and complexity, as a type of demonstrative self-referential proof.

there are people who write code until it works, and people who rewrite until it doesn't. room enough for both.

if voting was mandatory in america for all adults you would get more competent people running and third parties carrying elections until the major parties shifted away from extreme positions. you don't need to feed into madness, americans are sane people who want unity and common sense.

it's not hard to do, make voting day a public holiday or put in on a weekend, use stamps on peoples hands or use name-residence registries and discount multiple votes.

this would make american elections harder to buy, and the dollar doesn't buy you what it used to anyway...

it's a historical plateau. if you were born in 1899 you may have lived as: baby (vaccinated), child (student), farmer (subject), citizen (worker), ally (soldier), employee (consumer), retiree (investor).

if you were born in 1999 i am hard pressed to imagine over the next 100 years you will see this much of a sea-change. in the most hyper-optimistic development: baby (ivf), child (self-educated), teenager (self-starter), adult (colonist), neural map (biomachine), rebirth (clone).

far more likely you see space stagnation after a manned mars mission in the 2060s, and various forms of "new" movements arising arguing for ethics around engineered reproduction both for humans and animals to be reworked around a global utility model due to various food and water shocks, a type of one-child-world policy.

it could very well be that a dominant monarchy reappears, since empires with long lived monarchs provide at least 50 years of stability if managed correctly, and we are approaching various global inflection points in the 21st century which could cause a large and unnecessary loss of human life due to poor long term planning (family management in the developing world, too many abortions/immigration in the first world causing genetic displacement and social revolutionary movements, extreme weather events stretching global insurance/banking/money markets and the typical decline of the concept of civil liberties for an new enforced set of social civilities with fragmentary groups echoing radical ideas in secrecy - which historically leads to insurrection and civil war).

people don't really change as quickly as their technology does, so it's very dangerous to hear all thoughts without also having some type of pan-humanist framework in which to put them and try to form relative links between superficially disparate ideas. it's much easier to jump to contrast and division, and then force the issue, the radicalization of at risk youth into violent murder in public spaces is especially concerning, the school shooter phenomenon is mutating into a church shooter or a mall shooter, a park shooter, a club shooter. half a dozen coordinated shooters could shut down an entire city, at which point every city will need check points and will have to become gun free, a sort of TSA for metropolitan and then suburban areas. i wonder if at some certain point life would be safer in a prison than outside one. technology will advance towards safety and must necessarily lead to schemes with voluntary basis of total monitoring, eg food credits if you allow permanent personal surveillance. the cheesy 80s dystopia now creeping over the horizon. the hug and squeeze technique of totalitarianism, where you're crushed between abundance and fear is a model that is being exported globally and seems quite profitable and certainly preferable to war, famine and disease.

Outside Board Director, Former Executive Officer at US/Japan Multinationals, Retired Int'l Business Attorney.

you can find him on linkedin.

https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/eneiheisel

The general solar maximum occurred during sunspot cycles in the 50s and it tentatively appears we are in a decline since the early 00s. Anyone lucky enough to have family with anecdotal evidence of auroras over the past 70-80 years?

successful fighters are typically intelligent, defensive minded and gifted physically. power is ephemeral, speed is youth, endurance is training and experience is efficient repetition. what typically links these things together is a deep desire to win at all costs, which is why this and many other sports have their history with drugs, cheating and corruption. features universal to human activities. in competitive environments, advantages accrue from early age adoption. the pressure of intense competition if properly nurtured can be a guide towards incredible feats.

in fighting it is often the case that the best fighters are dirty, meaning they bend and use the rules in a more efficient way than their opponents, and at the world class level most things being equal, this temporary advantage provides them the situations which lead to victory, this is an open-secret in fighting which is largely unaddressed due to romantic notions and fraternities refusing to divulge uncomfortable self-referential truths.

given the contrasting regimes of education between east and west i am observing whether the Chinese system can produce (or select for) the geniuses the Soviets did in mathematics and physics and sustain itself for another century to avoid squandering them. there is a long history in China of promotion from all social classes through intense and rigorous examination, and their sample pool of hundreds of millions of children should provide sufficient cause for concern to anyone who wishes technocratic communism to reach an ignoble end.

China turning into a 1.4 billion person South Korea would destroy any plausible argument for democracy as meritocracy would sweep the world domino nations. a lot of ideologies die on the altar of pragmatic efficiency, and the 21st century is the latest real test for 18th century idealism. boxing and democracy, romantic ideas soon to be retired for safety concerns. the issue here might not even be about the pedantics of birth or education, with international capital flowing east and the largest growth markets for profit seeking business being Asia and Africa it's hard to see how the Chinese model isn't a roadmap for all of Eurasia and Africa to follow. freedom doesn't feed you, and if forced to choose between a bureaucracy that works and one that doesn't the choice makes itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvdoj_D0-RQ

[40:02 minutes propaganda / fluff piece about the century of trade at any cost]

The diffusion of responsibility here is pretty galling. It's not Facebook it's employees at Facebook. Facebook is people not a person. If nobody steps up then the leaders need to take responsibility.

Specifically in the power to kill at a distance. From cannonball to bullet to firebombing and nuclear airburst. The advancement made seems unreasonable and curiously asymmetric. Communicating instantly across the globe sure, even travelling to other celestial bodies fine. But the idea that a small group of people thousands of miles away can decide to evaporate millions without any warning or reasonable form of defense would seem insane to anyone from the pre nuclear age escalating retaliation keeping global peace is an absurd tragedy.

Tribal cultures tend to have long and complex, even tedious oral histories and initiations into them. With a knowledge keeper, shaman, druid, healer etc. Could be that the old druid power structure was in decline and so the typical transmission of information was interrupted. We know a similar thing happened later to the midwives/fertility women who were persecuted as witches with I suspect dire consequences to infant mortality rates. Originally it's hard for me to believe that people could be that stupid, but if pre-romans you had a loose confederation of naturalist-priests which kept practical knowledge shrouded in magic ritual as a means of exerting power any intergenerational disruption would be catastrophic. I think the Scandinavians have a slightly clearer picture of their descent due to the later expansion of the new religion into their territories. If reading declines I wonder if people will move back to a digitally transmitted oral history as a type of living memory which quickly becomes too vast to comprehend and may lead to similar transmission problems in the future with historians studying unimportant but vast repositories of codebases, the clay tablets of our day to piece together what went wrong with the C++ culture.

I would love to see a reasonable explanation for the rapid development of Western Europe. The henge circles all across the world (including the new world) show an advanced mathematics and astronomy for thousands of years before the rise of settler empires say parity ~9000 BC. Jump forward all the way to the late 1800s and despite the glacial pace of social change in Russia they are still designing one of the best rifles and bullets in the world, in use for 100+ years. The success of social organisation must stem from some mixture of accelerated development due to geographic sheltering and island vs mainland conflict- with the island empires (Spain, Portugal, Dutch)proving they don't need to fight landwars if the can control global shipping lanes. The interplay between Japan, China and Korea reminds me of England, France and Germany. Russia plays a role as a cultural glue between these two remote spheres but because of its size proves to be ungovernable. South East Asia gets ignored much like Eastern Europe. Italy, Greece, India, Iran and Egypt great middle civilizations are paralyzed by their ancient past insular and corrupt. Most of Africa, America and Eurasia are mysteries because of contact contamination.

If the answer is a universal religion plus a sea faring civilization gives you world power it still makes me wonder why it took until the late 1400s to kick off. Had the Romans avoided debasing their currency and managed their bureaucracy better couldn't they develop an ocean crossing trireme by the 800s maybe 1000s? So much time has gone by and humans are still just stumbling around unable to organise or understand the emergent forces their complex networks generate. The loss of life due to famine, disease and war in the previous millenium is at a shocking scale of proportionality to the existing populations affected by it. A mistake is being made by not teaching history thoroughly, say 2-3 years of intensive world history for all children. You could introduce a lot of concepts as they emerge in context from religion to agriculture to mathematics, music and politics.

Do men in poor countries still shave with a cutthroat razor? Reusable and repairable products take time but give certainty. I hope a happy medium will be reached between Chinese room products and simple skill based ones.

Power diffusion leads to asymmetric instability (and inverse). It is dangerous to assume non relativistic ethics in a pluralist world.

Conflict will happen in a persons head when holding oppositions simultaneously or inevitably between persons opposing heads simultaneously.

Self interest is true, self negating and both.

The Anglo-American establishment is a power consensus after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, two world wars and decolonisation. It refers to the hand off of power from Great Britain to the US. It has nothing to do with "Anglo-Americans" unless you're talking about a specific small group of anglophile elite families from the north-east of America with political and industrial wealth. A ruling consensus was established after the Yalta conference and Bretton Woods accord. In the immediate post war period the USSR has lost 30 million people and there is only one global nuclear power. Losing this dominance to the degree of the present world order is the second biggest blunder, should these people also then be completely minimized inside their own nation states by the force of global capital they allowed to emerge would be the biggest yes. It's the equivalent of receiving the entire wealth of the world then losing it in a few generations. What do you find controversial about this? A blunder is an unforced error which greatly diminishes your own position in a game, perhaps leading to a total loss. Or do you believe all human beings are playing equally for the interest of all others?

Religious and wealthy people will continue above replacement forever. Probably why these two strategies persist. Who is the poorest person you know? Are they religious and do they have many children? Who is the wealthiest and how many children do they have? Flattening this curve has been the world project of the Anglo-American establishment post WW2, with dubious results - unless replacing themselves and their own populations was the goal. The demographic winter largely of their own making, a case of idealism meeting unintended consequences which may go down as the biggest blunder in world history.

Statistics has become politicized through questionable interpretations of polling and crime data specifically with respect to various demographic markers. Increasing skepticism towards the field is a product of ideological division. No science is immune from its scientists and most humans are irrational creatures with emotive drivers.

A basic internet where people are taught and then tested on logic and bias. Take nations as an example. Nations survive economic hardships by inducing in the population a sense of insular self-defense and struggle for existence (of the nation). When a nation is economically prosperous suddenly it's borders are not so well defined and people naturally develop a cosmopolitan outward and international view based around common union and empire with weaker nations which become absorbed or vassals.

Nationalism is neither bad or good, it's a system wide response to mostly economic signals in a given population or subgroup. If the average internet user understood this, public discourse would be more civil and solutions oriented. Since the issue is not clearly addressed because the political and intellectual class have been purchased by the business elite which engage in transnational profit, the entire concept of the nation state is being undermined from first principles in order to prop up new exploitative economic zones. This will lead to popular uprising and revolutionary war, as it has in the past.

You can of course replace the nation with something better for the individual. America did this in the 1960s by replacing the nation as a people (race) with the nation as an idea (free markets, individualism, equality), this influenced many other nations and won the cold war. And we are probably in a similar replacement phase now, as an Anglo -American -European identity emerges in order to face the challenges of central and east Asia, Africa and South America. The intellectual framework for this new union is not there yet since it is unclear why nations and world zones are in constant competition- far left is offering freedom far right is offering tradition both are struggling to sell the middle who simply want stability.

isolationism and nationalism IS america....

selecting for highly intelligent immigrants is eugenicism, one step above racism - since racism at least allows for prejudicial morality, biological determinism doesn't have space for free will, let alone natural genetic variability or universal morality. rich european nations engage in various varian disasters in order to push through more regulations. america engages in predatory forced immigration by destabilizing ripe nations and then preying on their elites with faustian bargains. it's colonialism of the mind.

if world power cared about the poor of africa they would stabilize it with a permanent global peace keeping force for one or two generations, and allow people the freedom and space to develop outside of the debt structure which has crippled them since independence. yes, they would do this by forced occupation, at the gasp cost of national sovereignty. china is engaged and accelerating in this process for the coming decades, and in return will secure resources for the next century of cold war.

assad said something very telling when asked before the 2016 us presidential election who he preferred, it was something to the effect of "we don't listen to what the american politicians say, because they always do the opposite when they come to power. we will wait to see what they do."

it's unfortunate that so many people just accept what america says, and avoid looking at what it does, has done, will do.

can a democratic society vote itself into a dictatorship? what if some citizens want to subvert democracy and liberal social norms, but do so democratically? democracy is a discussion of ideas. it is your job to convince people that freedom is advantageous to global governance or that they can be combined.

with freedom you will get fracture and economic decline, conflict and instability. with global governance you will get a monopoly on stable world trade and endless economic and civic prosperity, as the best ideas will be rapidly adopted by the most number of people, ensuring benefit for all generations of mankind yet unborn.

what if it turns out that your perception of freedom is not maximal freedom unless people freely choose it? and if they abandon it (for what you might consider a type of mental slavery) to a dynamic but perpetual system of control-information with new benefits far outweigh any negative consequences, like the ability to understand all preceding human knowledge in one lifespan or avoid all disease and aging related problems.

humanity once we reached the age of writing, became the game of convincing other people to think and act alike. i cant think of a more illiberal and limiting idea than what i am doing right now - forcing my words into your head - yet this is the structure upon which everything we see has been built.

you will find yourself in an increasingly marginalized position, and eventually your views will be silenced, as they should. you may be civilized, but barely register as a barbarian for what is to come, which will take yet more centuries to unfold.

(28m42s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TQZ-2iMUR0

Is Japan a benevolent dictatorship (psuedo-imperial corporate fascism and guaranteed political monopolies) in exchange for social cohesion. Is there an equivalent concept to a zaibatsu in a republic or democracy? Monopolies here are hidden behind the trident of usury, corporation and government spending; beyond terms like corporate capture, manufacturing consent, military/health/tech/energy industrial complex, conspiracy... With the American Republic at least it seems stability was replaced by extremes, and an active tension is rather encouraged in the population in order for dialectic opposition thesis+antithesis->synthesis. This rule by fear tends to sacrifice a lot of civility and social harmony, as an outsider it appears tiring, but Americans must prefer it or it would have never sold in the post ww2 era as the new normal.

smartphones are in their smoking is cool so do it everywhere phase. the novelty will wear off. i enjoy patiently waiting in silence. if i am travelling on public transport, or sitting in waiting room, or standing in a long queue, i find my personal quiet contrasted by the various background noises relaxing and beneficial. i can remain aware of my surrounding/map, people and objects, clocks and time, scenery. i can play memorization, prediction or pattern games, revisit some old problem or simply turn my brain off and let the time pass without incident.

am i a silence addict? if i enjoyed striking up conversations with strangers everywhere i went and talked their ear off in a friendly manner, would i be a social addict? some people enjoy looking at text and images on a screen during downtime in their day, it's a habit. a potentially useful one that helps connect to a world outside of immediate physical space, should _we_ disincentivize public escapism? what about reading or drawing in public then? perhaps it's dangerous if people look at each other too much. and why don't _we_ standardize clothing so that everyone feels more equal. and do _we_ really need so many words, how about _we_ reduce it down to a few hundred useful ones and just stop teaching the others. who is we, we is us, and us is we.

if you give people freedom to do a lot of different things, they may not make good individual choices which can lead to bad collective actions. if they were individual choices they will be individually self-corrected. do you value freedom or outcomes? because you're going to need a big hammer to get all your outcome nails nice and flat. alternatively you need to build your civilization on a different moral foundation, something like social harmony or public good. you might find a strong central government, no immigration, with an insulated and culturo-ethnically homogeneous population with a tendency towards being socially and fiscally conservative, family oriented and not prone to large unfunded liabilities in domestic ponzi schemes and international military escapades; as pre-requisites to your social engineering utopian fantasies. america is about fuck you and fuck you too.