Category Archives: Science & Tech

Forever Young

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Greg Cochran has a short post up soliciting opinions on what will be the next big thing in science and technology. He is not fishing for the next smartphone app or medical cure. I think he means the big new field of study or technological advancement. It is one of those posts that is not intended to be interesting, but to get the readers noodling over the question. Judging from the comments thus far, that is the way his readers have read the post. It seems to be another stab at the topic he started the other day.

It is an interesting question as we do seem to have reached the point of diminishing returns with the microprocessor. E-mail was a huge game changer. The mobile phone was another big leap into the unknown. The web probably comes in third, but it still had an enormous impact on humanity. These inventions have changed the way humans interact with one another and continue to put stress on the organizational systems we have had in place since the Enlightenment. Donald Trump just won an election by mastering Twitter.

We have reached peak chip, so to speak. The low hanging fruit has been picked and we’re well on the way to commodification of technology. That’s not to say there is no more work to be done in tech. It’s just that the boom years are over and the industry is now mature. The next big ideas, the stuff that could alter society, will be coming from somewhere else. The temptation is to think it will be some new technology like genetics or nanotechnology. Those fields have the futuristic vibe futurists like.

Genetics does have the prospect of being highly disruptive. Just take a look at how 23andMe or Ancestry.com sell their products. Implicit in their pitch is that race and ethnicity are in your DNA. That means race is not a social construct. Ancestry disguises this by using multi-racial actors, but the implication is clear. Similarly, the ability to predict things about people at an early age, based on examining their DNA, could be very disruptive. Imagine what happens to insurance when you can test for risk of heart attack.

The thing is, a lot of this information has been available to us through other means. Humans have known for a long time that people are not the same across race or ethnicity and most people still know it, even if they don’t say it. Even so, it has no impact on public policy or on the howling of the multiculturalists. We’ve also known that the apple does not fall far from the tree. If the kid is born to losers, the kid will probably be a loser. How the kid is raised has little to do with it, but we still preach the morality of parenting.

A more promising area where something game changing could come is in the field of aging. Humans live longer and are healthier than ever and it has already had a huge impact on society. All of our pension and insurance schemes are broken mostly because people live too long. Long living has resulted in children maturing more slowly, in terms of social status. A century ago, a man went to work as a teen and had a family by the time he hit 20. Today, men live at home until 30 and start families well into their 30’s.

Imagine what happens if science finds a way to push the expiry date out a few more decades. Imagine if 100 becomes the new 65, in that the 100 year old is as vigorous as the typical 65 year old. Imagine that the golden years of retirement start at 110. This is standard stuff in science fiction, but it may not be too far off in reality. British researchers have figured out how to drastically slow the aging of mice. That opens the door for not only slowing the process, but arresting it. Forever young may not be too far off.

Even if that is beyond the pale, think about the impact of Viagra. Invent a pill to keep the needle pointing north and the world beats a path to your door. Imagine a pill to end gray hair or crow’s feet. Even if people don’t live to 150, just being healthier and more vigorous late into life could have a huge impact on society. Retirement, for example, would make a lot less sense if you had plenty of juice well into your senior years. Of course, retirement would become something radically different too. Our view of aging would radically change.

The reason to think that life extension and aging is the place to see great innovation in the near term is mostly economic. Penis pills made their makers very rich. A gray hair pill or a wrinkle cure would similarly make their makers billions. Just look at the number of men seeking out HGH from black market sources. The market for anything that extends life or extends youthful vitality is the market of all people. Is there anyone who would not buy a pill that makes you look as good as you looked in the flower of youth?

The Unreadable Web

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The other day, I was reading something on-line and followed a link to one of the business sites. The first thing to happen was a useless popup. I have a pop-up blocker, but many of them still slip past for some reason. After years of dealing with pop-ups, my mouse hand is trained to close the window on instinct. It is a reflex now. I closed it only to have another open and I closed it. A minute reading the site, the screen goes dim and I get a message telling me that I am running an ad-blocker, along with a lecture about how that is mean.

I just closed the site and moved on. In fact, this has become my habit. If the site has any of this junk, I just close the site and move onto other things. I respect the fact that sites need to make money so they post ads, but having to navigate through a sea of clutter just to read 500 words or look at a picture is not a good use of my time. I’ve observed others do the same thing I do when it comes to pop up windows. Before they load, people close them so they do nothing more than annoy the reader. They are otherwise useless.

The main reason I run the ad-block stuff is that many of these embedded ads have malware. If a website wants to monetize my viewership by infesting my computer with malignant software, I have no qualms about blocking their attempts to monetize my viewership. Therefore, the lectures that are becoming common on websites about the immorality of running ad-block strike most people as ludicrous. It’s why the Brave browser is gaining a market. It blocks the ads and it blocks the nag screens about ad-block.

Of course, it is not just ads or pop-ups. The proliferation of scripting has made many sites unreadable on a phone or tablet, unless you use something like ghostery. The Washington Times is a perfect example. It is more ad than content and the scripts never seem to load properly, so the site looks like a Picasso painting most of the time. I stopped going to the site entirely as it took too much effort to make it work. If I have to redesign my web browser to look at your site, I’m probably not going to bother visiting your site.

The truly monstrous thing done by web designers is embedded audio and video. By default, I now turn off my sound so I don’t have to hunt around looking for where the noise is coming from on the web page. I use a flash blocker to get rid of most of it, but some of it still slips past. That means YouTube does not work, so I have two browsers. One is for video and the other for daily browsing. When I’m ruler of these lands, the people responsible for embedded, autoplay video will be torn to pieces and fed to the dogs.

Those who have read Jospeh Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies will probably recognize a familiar pattern. The first ads on websites were a big hit, relative to their cost. That banner at the top for Joe’s Diner cost nothing, but made something. That’s an infinite return on investment. The next wave of ads came with a cost, both direct and indirect. The former was the cost of weaving them into the sites. The latter was the cost of people using ad-blocker and other tools to limit the number of ads in the way of the content.

As we have move from the physical world of content to the virtual world, the demand for more revenue, drives the ever more complex methods to monetize the website. The costs ratchet up, but the barriers also get higher as users find more and better tools to defeat the ads and scripts. The Brave browser costs me nothing and does a great job filtering almost all of this stuff from my view. We’re not far from the time when you pay a monthly fee for a browser that filters all ads from all sites. That’s the model Brave is pursuing..

Web sites are probably near the point of negative returns, with regards to monetizing their content. That’s why so many are going back to the old subscription model. It may not fix their revenue problems, but they have no other option. The ad model is simply not working. That, of course, means the ad model is probably nearing collapse. Once big sites begin to rethink how they monetize their content, everyone else follows. A web of paywalls and subscriber-only content is probably the future for the large scale content makers.

Whether or not that is sustainable is a topic for another day.

 

Fat People

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Last month when I was in line waiting to vote, I spotted an extremely fat woman. She was so fat, her ankles rubbed together. Judging by the three gallon bucket of soda pop in her hand, I’m assuming she was not the victim of elephantiasis or some other disease. Everything about her was fat, even her head, which was the size of a bowling ball and covered in pink-dyed fur. How she was able to get around with hundreds of pounds of fat attached to her is a mystery. I would think the mere act of toting around so much weight would result in weight loss.

Last week, I stopped at the ghetto market for a few items and spotted a couple in the snack aisle. The man was something like a large ball with arms and legs. I estimated his diameter was close to 24 inches. That would mean his belt was 75 inches. His wife was of similar size. My first thought was how they were able to, you know, enjoy the marital bed. Is it even possible that they find one another attractive? I suppose it is possible that all of their energies are focused on moving around their girth and finding enough food to maintain their weight so sex is a non-issue.

Anyone familiar with American poverty knows that our poor people are fat, very fat. There are exceptions like drug addicts or those spindly ectomorphs you see loitering on street corners. Black woman, of course, are almost always fat. This is something most everyone knows. The ancients drew images of African women with giant stomachs and buttocks. In all probability, this is a genetic issue with West Africans. Even so, across the ethnic spectrum, American poor people are fat. Even our Mexicans are fat now.

In fact, Mexico is the world’s fattest country. This is mostly likely due to the fact that food is cheaper now than at any time in human history. It’s extremely hard to starve your people these days. Food is just too cheap and plentiful. Even basket case countries like those in sub-Saharan Africa have more than enough food. That’s most likely the cause of the population boom in Africa. The Malthusian limit has been pushed much further out so the population has exploded.

Public health officials tell us that obesity is a crisis in America. Being fat supposedly results in an exploding number of maladies like diabetes and heart disease. This drives up health costs thus collapsing the technocratic schemes cooked up by the managerial class. It’s important to remember that public health officials are usually wrong. For example, they said AIDS would jump from the bathhouse and heroin den into the middle-class suburbs. That never came closer to happening.

Even if obesity is a public health problem, it’s unlikely that there can be a public policy to address it, other than deliberate starvation of the people. Our Germans probably have the same obesity rates as Germans in Europe. The same is true across the ethnic landscape. We’re forbidden to notice that blacks and Mexicans are very fat, compared to everyone else. That means we’re forbidden to note that honky obesity rates are not too far off from Europeans rates. That would be racist and everyone knows race does not exist.

The point of this observation is to note that biology is beyond the reach of public policy. If fatness has some serious detriments to the population, then it will sort itself out over time. If fatness becomes associated with low status people, then there will be cultural pressure to not be fat. Smoking rates have declined not so much due to public policy, but from the fact famous people stopped smoking. It stopped being cool with famous people. Fatness will follow a similar path. We are seeing that with black actresses and singers.

Still, humans have never had to deal with the problems that come from too much food and too much free time to consume it. We really have no idea what will come from it and how it will hurt or help society. There could very well be a huge upside to having lots of fat people. Perhaps when the zombie apocalypse comes, the zombies will eat the fat people and be satisfied, leaving the rest of us to regroup. That’s unlikely, but nature tends not to reward that which is deleterious to a species. Nature is self-correcting.

There’s no reason to think that public policy in a liberal democracy would be capable of addressing problems that stem from excess. Liberal democracy evolved in an age of great inequality and scarcity. Having a super rich aristocracy could not work while the peasants were starving. We now have a mega-rich aristocracy while the peasants are munching snacks and playing video games. They are doing these things at public expense. The bottom half of America is receiving direct and indirect public assistance these days.

Would the super-rich aristocracy of today have the will to impose rules on the bottom half, with regards to their welfare? Mayor Bloomberg came the closest with his soda and salt bans, but they went no where. Even his peers snickered at his prudery. Would these same people be willing to back exercise requirements and fitness exams in exchange for welfare benefits? Probably not. A feature of the modern aristocracy and their attendants in the managerial elite is a fear of confrontation. Hence the passive-aggressive culture of the rich.

We’ll just have to rely on nature to solve the obesity problem.

Too Stupid To Rule

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Talk to anyone in law enforcement and they will tell you that the stupidity of criminals is a key part of solving crimes. The crooks leave clues and make huge blunders that allow the cops to catch them. Ray-Ray decides he has had enough of Peanut disrespecting him so he walks up to him at a party and starts shooting. Not only are there a million witnesses, Ray-Ray leaves the gun with his fingerprints and brags to his buddies latter that he just dusted Peanut at a party. It’s not a hard case to solve because Ray-Ray is a moron.

That comes to mind when reading the stories about the Clinton secret e-mail caper. We have enough of the details at this stage to have a rough idea how we got to this point. They wanted to have a secret communication method that would be not be subject to government security and Freedom of Information Act requests. They also figured that this secret system would be free from Congressional oversight. After all, if no one knew it existed, then no one could ask any questions about what was on it.

It’s not hard to imagine the conversations leading up to the decision to go with this plan versus using Google or Yahoo accounts. They figured that the reason guys like General Patraeus got caught using Gmail was that the government IT people were able to tell when people were accessing these systems via their work computers. Alternatively, they just assumed the government had access to these system like they do in the movies. Either way, they determined that using these options for personal stuff was a bad idea.

Hilariously, it appears they came to the conclusion that having their own e-mail server meant that all the e-mail was magically hidden in the box in Hillary’s bathroom. Their subsequent attempts to erase the hard drives suggests they did not know that e-mail travels across networks and is also stored on the receiver’s servers. Those servers are usually on a network not controlled by the recipient. They started to realize this at some point, which is why they smashed their phones and laptops.

The most amusing part of this caper is they started sending e-mails from this domain to people outside the domain. If they had kept this as a tight internal communication system, they could have got away with it. Highly secure e-mail systems actually work this way. You cannot send or receive mail from outside the domain. That way people cannot forward mail off the system and the system is not exposed to outsiders looking for an open window. In some government facilities, access is only through terminals in the facility.

Once e-mail was sent from the domain to outsiders, it was only a matter of time before the secret was out. They were lucky that most media people are remarkably stupid so they lack the wherewithal to wonder why Hillary Clinton did not have a State Department e-mail account. Watch the cable channels and you come away thinking that the people on TV just learned about e-mail last week. Eventually the Romanian cab driver unearthed the whole thing and the enterprise came crashing down.

The other bit of interest in the area of technical competence is how they responded to FBI requests for their e-mail. They printed them off and turned them over as paper documents. These are lawyers and they just assumed they could bury the government with paper. After all, how can they possibly organize 50,000 pages of e-mail? This is an old trick. In discovery one side asks for everything so you give them everything plus a mountain of junk they have to sort through to find what they want.

What they failed to understand is that the FBI digitized this stuff in a day or two. Modern high speed scanners can process 50 pages a minute. OCR technology can turn the paper into a machine readable document. Content management systems let you store millions of documents so they can be searched and sorted based on content. I have this on my laptop so I can stash all of my documents in a database, rather than file folders. The Clinton people were as ignorant of this as they were of how e-mail worked.

There are a lot of angles to these Clinton scandals, but the thing that transcends all of it is the rank stupidity of the people involved. There were safer and more secure ways to establish clandestine communications. Even with their setup, a modest amount of discipline would have prevented most of this from happening. All they had to do was limit mail going out of the system. When the time came to burn it down, they only had to destroy the server entirely and no one would be able to prove anything.

The argument from Team Trump in the closing days of the election is that Hillary Clinton is too corrupt to rule. He’s painting her as the face of the larger problem, which is the metastasizing corruption of the ruling class. It’s a good closing argument and it resonates, but the reason Hillary should not rule is she is dangerously incompetent and she surrounds herself with outlandishly stupid people. A society can survive crooked rulers, but it cannot survive stupid ones. Hillary Clinton is too stupid to rule.

Unsocial Media

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The coining of the term “social media” was not the observation of a new phenomenon or some new way for people to interact. Bulletin board systems had been around since the early days of the internet. By the early 1990’s, there were millions of people posting on these systems. Newgroups and e-mail lists were also around in the early 1990’s, as cheap modems rolled out to the public. Message boards came along in the mid-90’s and soon took over as the dominant community platform on websites.

The new term to describe what was happening was the signal that new controls were coming to discourse on the internet. Something that is social, community owned, must have community standards. Those standards must be enforced and that means people must be given the authority to enforce those standards. In other words, it was the starter’s gun unleashing the totalitarians and pink skits to goose step in and start pushing people around on-line. Now, everywhere you go, there are posting rules and moderation.

What was fun about the internet in the olden thymes was the lack of rules, at least in terms of what you could say and how you could say it. Debates on bulletin boards or news groups were viscous vicious (It was late and one “slipped” through editing) and no holds barred. The term “troll” used to mean a poster who trolled for attention by posting provocative things. That’s what made these things fun. The early on-line communities were experiments in social dynamics, without the usual social limitations. This old list of Usenet types gives you a flavor of it.

Un-monitored and unregulated arenas for people to speak freely are a danger to the established order, so it did not take long for the usual suspects to start looking for ways to put an end to it. There was also the fact that millions of people were getting on-line, without knowing that internet culture was a bit rough. Polite always triumphs over right and before long all but the underground sites were heavily regulated. Sites like Faceberg and Twitter were built on the idea of pleasing the easily offended.

The trouble with policed communities, is the old saw about who will police the police. The sort of people that go in for being site moderators, are exactly the sort of people you never want in those positions. It’s not long before they start abusing their power and people start getting banned. It’s why Faceberg is mostly for old people to view pics of their grandchildren. It’s also why Twitter is imploding. When milquetoast users like Instapundit are deemed out of bounds, it’s a matter of time before all the interesting people are gone.

It’s also why alternatives to the mainstream options are growing up all of a sudden. Gab is the first alternative to Twitter with any chance of succeeding. Quitter is actually a better platform, but it has not caught on with English speakers. Gab is targeting the alt-right and troublemakers like me, promising an anything goes environment. They are also improving on the concept, rather than trying to please the managerial class. Longer message lengths and a better interface are the two obvious improvements over Twitter.

Vox Day is behind the alternative to Wikipedia. It’s called Infogalactic and it is intended to be the non-PC version of an on-line encyclopedia. Like Gab, they are using better technology to improve the user experience, but the real point of the effort is to be an alt-right alternative to Wikipedia. To quote the associated blog, “The single biggest problem with Wikipedia isn’t Jimmy Wales or its outmoded 1995 technology, but the fact that it is patrolled by 532 left-wing thought police who aggressively force their biased perspective on the rest of the world.”

My bet is someone is plotting an alternative to Facebook or simply something better, that serves a similar purpose, but without the social justice warriors. The fact is, Facebook is not doing anything all that clever from a technological point of view. There’s also the alternative media sites with open comments, that are the intellectual engine of the rebellion. This story in the neocon magazine American Interest about the boom in high brow sites catering to heterodox opinion is worth a read.

I think what we are seeing is two things. One is the Progressive enforcers have squandered their legitimacy enforcing rules that are unenforceable. People get tired of being treated like children by depressed women taking revenge on the world as forum moderators. So, there is demand. There’s also the fact that people trafficking in the ideas popular on the fringe want to debate with others into the same things. There’s nothing more dull than reading a comment section filled with mainstream drivel.

The downside of this, and the inevitable consequence to the current social unrest, is a balkanizing of social media. Gab will be Twitter for hate thinkers, while Twitter will be the home of the establishment, assuming Twitter remains in business. There will be those who get their news and analysis from hate thinkers like Sailer and those who read establishment sites. The internet will be a world of fractured reality and that will inevitably show up in society as a whole. To some degree, that already exist in terms of who watches which cable news channel.

The downside of this process is it means the alt-right, Dissident Right and whatever else this thing we’re doing is called, is going to self-ghettoize. The people who still read National Review, for example, will not see comments from hate thinkers like me. At the same time, hate thinkers will stop reading the mainstream press and lose perspective about the greater world around them. Instead of “bringing people together” social media will end up amplifying the balkanization of American society.

Evolutionary Madness

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Back in the spring I did a post on the trouble with artificial intelligence. I fully admit to being a skeptic and I tend to avoid reading much of the cheer-leading for it. Automation will plod ahead, as we have seen. We will see “smart” devises popping up in our lives with varying degrees of success, but no one alive will see the robot future because it will always be the future, never the present. Human intelligence is much more complex and mysterious than the futurists understand so it is just really fast calculators, not Terminators.

The point I alluded to in the post is we have a very poor grasp of how humans manage to navigate the reality of life. Most people engage in a great deal of magical thinking, yet they manage to avoid killing themselves doing something stupid. We’re not even sure how to define this magical thinking, much less quantify it. Close to half of Icelanders believe in elves, which is nutty, but it does not seem to cause them much trouble. Americans believe in magic dirt, despite it being laughably ridiculous.

Self-evolving artificial intelligence could follow the same path as humans and develop all sorts of weird defenses against the harsh realities of life. Or, it could quickly discover that the big questions have no answer and therefore life is not worth living. Artificial Intelligence would quickly evolve into a suicide machine and be gone as soon as it becomes self-aware. The odds of it resembling Spock are close to zero, with the most likely outcome being that it quickly moves through homicidal sociopathy to suicide.

We really don’t know how or why humans all have heads full of nonsense. Humans everywhere have evolved complex beliefs in the supernatural. The working theory is that belief, as in religious belief, was one of the first modern human traits, along with language. Some argue that it is a happy accident, while others suggest the believers tend to be better at making babies, so we end up with more believers than would otherwise be predicted. If you have been reading this blog, you’ll know I’m in the former camp.

A guy calling himself  Donald Hoffman takes this further and argues that humanity has evolved to perceive a world that does not exist, but that allows us to thrive in the world as it exists. Here is a longish interview with him where he explains his theory in some detail. Here’s a shorter NPR summary of that interview that captures the high points. The even shorter version is we are all in a matrix of our own design where we eagerly take the blue pill whenever reality becomes too much for us.

To me, this makes perfect sense. My cat does not need to know a snake is or is not dangerous. He does not need to know much of anything about the snake. He simply confronts it as a threat and acts accordingly. In other words, Mother Nature is efficient. There’s nothing to be gained by endowing the cat with a  love of ophiology. There is great benefit to possessing an innate fear of snakes. Elephants being spooked by mice seems stupid to us, but from the perspective of the elephant, it is brilliantly efficient.

Putting this another way, humans did not evolve to acquire a detailed knowledge of the universe. We evolved in order to bring the next generation to sexual maturity. Understanding the world as it is, in great detail, is of no benefit and would possibly be a great detriment. Instead, we have evolved to perceive the world in a way that allows us to navigate it in the short run, with the highest possibility of success. For those disinclined to accept evolution, God has literally made us crazy, to our great benefit.

This “reality” means artificial intelligence, as in super intelligent entities able to fully grasp reality, is never going to happen. The more likely outcome is the self-evolving intelligence launches off onto a path to some form of insanity, maybe a familiar one or possibly something beyond our understanding. If it lacked the drive to reproduce, then it could simply evolve to some equilibrium and fall into what would look to us to be a dream state. In other words, the possible outcomes for the self-evolving intelligence are mostly a dead end, just as it has been in nature.

The Great Western Rage Virus

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Greg Cochran has a post up wondering about the explosion of recreational drug use in the West starting in the mid-60’s. He makes the point that drugs were available, in addition to alcohol, for people in the West, but we have little evidence that people used them for fun, despite what libertarians claim. As far back as we have information, Western societies would abuse alcohol, but that was it, as far as recreational drug use. Other substances were limited to medicine if used at all.

The Greeks and Romans had opium, but there’s no record of it being used for anything other than medicine, at least among the public. Move forward and that remains true into the medieval period. There are reports here and there of people using various things for medicine, but there’s no record of smoking hash or opium as a party drug. It was not until the age of exploration and the arrival of the Chinese and opium dens into the West that we get reports of recreational drug use among western people. Even that was very limited.

In the United States, marijuana was available, along with indigenous hallucinogenics, from the earliest days of the colonies. In the 19th century you have references to morphine addicts, but those are rare. Into the 20th century morphine was sold retail, as no one considered it a public health risk. Everyone has heard about the use of cocaine in consumer products like tonics and beverages. Well into the 20th century, drugs like heroin, cocaine, marijuana and some hallucinogenics were available, yet rarely used or abused.

Then something changed in the 1960’s. If you were an American teen in 1960 hanging out with friends, the odds that any of you had smoked pot were extremely low, unless maybe you were black. It does appear that drug taking was associated with black culture, but more on that in a bit. By 1970, the teenager of that same town would know many pot smokers and probably tried it at least once. In fact, within that decade it went from rare to common. By the 70’s, not having smoked pot made you an exception if you were young.

The question is how did this happen? It is not a small change in cultural norms. This is a huge change and it happened faster than anything else that comes to mind. Humans were just as susceptible to the charms of opiates in the 19th century as they are today, presumably. In the first half of the 20th, doctors were quick to prescribe things like cocaine to children to sooth teething. People were given liberal amounts of morphine for pain as it was the only effective pain killer. Even during Prohibition, drug use did not increase, despite the obvious demand to get wasted.

My initial thought, at least in America, is that the explosion of recreational drug use corresponds with the collapse of racial barriers in the US. If you read American fiction from the early 20th century, particularly the 20’s and 30’s, you get some oblique references to smoking pot, associated with Jazz. People up into the 50’s used to call joints “Jazz cigarettes” for that reason. Jazz, of course, was always strongly linked to black culture and strongly linked to whites and blacks mixing socially. This was not just in America. Josephine Baker got world famous in the Paris jazz scene.

The explosion of drug use does appear to correlate with the break down of racial barriers. Opium, for example, was always associated with the Chinese. Cocaine use was strongly associated with blacks going crazy in the South. After Prohibition ended, FDR turned the Prohibition Bureau into the Federal Narcotics Bureau. They immediately began to campaign against things like marijuana, which were linked to anti-social behavior of Mexicans and blacks. Even today, there is a racial component to drug taking. Crack was largely a black problem, while meth is a white problem.

Music followed a similar path out of American black culture into the dominant white culture. Jazz clubs were the first places whites and blacks could mingle socially. Eventually, whites were playing jazz and then rock-and-roll followed the same path.  It’s not just music and weed, but the modern West now gets all of its cultural cues from the American black ghetto. Hip-hop being the latest example. I was in Dublin and I saw Irish kids dressed like extras from Straight Out of Compton.

If we take a step back, the break down of racial barriers corresponds with the breakout of multiculturalism in the West. For half a century, the West has been raging against itself and even raging against biology. Feminism, and the more recent anti-white male stuff, is not just a war against the culture, but also a war against reality. The explosion of drug taking is just one item in the satchel of madness the West picked up somewhere in the middle of the last century.

If you are a fan of Greg Cochran, then you may see where this is headed. The great mixing of people that happened in the first half of the 20th in the great world wars brought masses of common people into contact with their contemporaries from around the world. That’s lots of foreign people breathing on one another, bleeding on one another, fornicating with one another. Just as trade facilitated the Black Plague, the great wars facilitated the movement of all sorts of things around the world.

Hold that thought and think about the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Rodents infected with this parasitic protozoa are drawn to the smell of cat urine, apparently having lost their otherwise natural aversion to the scent. This parasite can only reproduce in the gut of a feline so it is a very useful feature of this parasite, but not so good for the rodent. This parasite also causes trouble for humans, which is why pregnant women are told to avoid cat litter. It is entirely possible that it has other affects on humans. In other words, your cat may be controlling your brain.

Now to tie this all together. Greg Cochran came up with something called the Gay Germ Hypothesis, which suggest that maybe a germ or virus causes homosexuality. Others have suggested that pathogens could be at the root of other conditions as well. What if some sort of pathogen got looses in the West and is at the root of the anti-social behavior? What if there is some benefit to this bug in having humans mix together across the normal ethnic and tribal barriers? What if all the things we are seeing in the West are the result of a germ or virus that got going in the great wars of the 20th century?

Science and the Alt-Right

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One of the stranger aspects of some corners of the alt-right is the hostility to science. I don’t want to say it is a rejection of science, but something like an extreme skepticism about it. I was reminded of this reading Vox Day’s 16-point manifesto the other day. The part that jumped out to me is this one:

The Alt Right is scientodific. It presumptively accepts the current conclusions of the scientific method (scientody), while understanding a) these conclusions are liable to future revision, b) that scientistry is susceptible to corruption, and c) that the so-called scientific consensus is not based on scientody, but democracy, and is therefore intrinsically unscientific.

Vox seems to be trying very hard to declare himself the Pope of the alt-right so perhaps he is just getting carried away with himself with these posts, but he has made a big deal about being an anti-evolutionists that regularly kits himself out in the Don Quixote suit and runs around tilting at imaginary concepts. Usually, people opposed to evolution are coming at it from the perspective of self-styled Christians¹. That’s not the case with Vox as you see in this post titled The Crisis in Science.

There is no crisis in science. The soft sciences like psychology and sociology are certainly in trouble, but people have known that for a very long time. It’s not just the bogus studies either. It is the hard sciences, particularly biology, that are collapsing soft sciences like psychology. Once you arrive at a biochemical explanation for mental illness, there’s no need for guys in turtlenecks, smoking pipes and asking about your mother. Genetics is rendering many of the soft sciences meaningless, by exploding blank slatism.

The replication crisis that is bedeviling the soft science is not a problem in chemistry, physics or even biology where speculation is more common. The reason there is a replication crisis is the empirically minded from the hard sciences grew tired of the bullshit coming from the sociology department, showing up in the news as real science. It is science policing itself by enforcing the rules of science on those who seek to appropriate science for their own ends. This is a normal part of the scientific process.

What’s puzzling about the anti-science elements on the alt-right is they are not really motivated by religion, like we see with most Progressives. Rejecting science because it violates your deeply held beliefs is not irrational. It may be wrong, but it is not irrational. The anti-science people in the alt-right seem to be responding to the identity politics of the Left, which often waves the flag of science to justify their crackpot ideas. Since it takes too long to refute the Progressive pseudo-science, some on the alt-right simply reject science, or at least large parts of it.

This is to some degree understandable, as the alt-right is mostly a reaction to the extremism of the social justice movement. The unhinged assault on normalcy is often dressed up in the language of science. A degenerate in a sundress, who wants to watch your daughter pee, is excused as transgender, as if such a thing exists. People with Ph.D’s step forward to tell us how biological sex is a social construct and that there are unlimited number of “non-binary identities.” It perfectly understandable that normal people will get a little skeptical of scientists.

The interesting part of this is that big part of the alt-right is rooted in the growing fields of genetics, evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences. Guys like Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire have been intellectual heavy weights of the movement for two decades, largely due to popularizing research in the cognitive sciences that contradict the Progressive faith. More than a few evolution guys have been “Watsoned” for promoting ideas from evolutionary biology.  Frankly, there would not be Vox Day if not for the science guys and their wild tales about evolution.

That’s the other interesting strangeness about the thing the press is now calling the alt-right. There’s a wide diversity of opinion within it and a wide diversity of opinion about what it is. Greg Cochran, I’m guessing, would laugh off the assertions of Vox Day, but guys like Richard Spencer would dismiss people like Razib Khan. Yet, there would be broad agreement among all of them when it comes to critiquing the prevailing orthodoxy. That suggests the anti-science stuff is just a way to make magic fit reality. Self-delusion is powerful stuff and not always a bad thing.

¹I’m sympathetic to creationist because they are harmless and their beliefs tend toward the sort of positive outcomes that make for a healthy Western society. You can be a great engineer and still believe Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, I have no tolerance for intelligent design people. They paganize the Christian concept of God, turning him into a fickle teenager, who alters the laws of nature for no reason. Intelligent design is not just anti-science, it is anti-Christian.

Misinformation Age

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In the olden thymes it was much more difficult to be misinformed than it is today, simply due to the fact that information flowed much more slowly that we see today. That meant stupid ideas and nonsense passed from person to person at the speed of foot, not the speed of light. Festus could truly believe that eating cow dung cured gout, but he was not at a university writing papers on it. Those papers were not being spread around the internet. He was simply boring his family with his crackpot ideas and maybe some neighbors.

The flip side of this, of course, is people were much less informed about the world than today for the same reasons. Literacy rates rocketed up with the advent of cheap printed material, but information still moved slowly. You can pack a lot of information in a book, but it still must be toted from one reader to another. It’s entirely possible that the newly literate of the 18th century were not much more informed about the world than the illiterate of the 15th century. Farmer John in colonial Virginia would know more about the Bible and local politics than Farmer Aethelred in the 15th century, but maybe not that much more.

We don’t think about mass misinformation very much today, but maybe we should think about it. That came to mind what I stumbled upon this posting the other day.

Women are predisposed by their genetics to have affairs as “back-up plans'” if their relationships fail, according to a research paper.

Scientists at the University of Texas say they are challenging the assumption that humans have evolved to have monogamous relationships.

The team’s research has put forward the “mate-switching-hypothesis” which says humans have evolved to keep testing their relationships and looking for better long-term options.

The senior author of the research, Dr David Buss, told the Sunday Times: “Lifelong monogamy does not characterise the primary mating patterns of humans.

“Breaking up with one partner and mating with another may more accurately characterise the common, perhaps the primary, mating strategy of humans.”

For our distant ancestors – when disease, poor diet and minimal healthcare meant that few people lived past 30 – looking for a more suitable partner was necessary, researchers assert.

Despite anecdotal claims about cheatng, no study has shown that humans are predisposed to monogamy or non-monogamy.

A study carried out by Rafael Wlodarski and a team of researchers at Oxford University looking into infidelity found a correlation between the length of a individual’s ring finger and the likelihood that they would cheat on a partner.

However, they stressed that they could not find a causal link.

I looked up the lead author and he is not a quack working on TV so this is supposed to be accepted as legitimate science. Just in case the reporter got the facts wrong, which is often the case, I looked up the source paper. The highlighted parts of the quote are the important bits. There have been studies using real science that strongly suggest humans in Europe are predisposed to monogamy. Genetic testing reveals that a tiny percentage of children are the result of adulterous relations and this is data going back centuries.

One could argue, and the paper does leave this open, that women scheme to have a ready replacement in case their husbands get eaten by a saber tooth. That’s not implausible and it would certainly show up in the gene pool as a heritable trait if it were in fact an adaptation.You could also claim that women secretly scheme to have an in-ground pool or a vacation to the beach. This sort of “research” is no longer science and well into idle speculation and propaganda.

This is also the sort of nonsense that is pleasing to the managerial elite because their religion tells them that monogamy and stable families are bad for the peasants. They may live like Victorians, but you people should give up your quaint notions of family, fidelity and morality, cause science!. This ties in with the assertion by feminists that women should have unlimited sex partners. A new movie called Bridget Jones’s Baby, which features a pregnant woman with three potential fathers of her baby, is the sort of idealized woman our betters imagine for your daughter.

That brings us back to where we started. In an age when information was scarce, misinformation was scarce. In an age where information is voluminous and moves at light speed, the same is true of the nonsense, which is much easier to produce in volume. The result is a misinformation age that erodes trust in authority because over time even the most naive grows cynical about what they see in the media. How many junk science stories like the one referenced here get posted before people think science is nonsense?

It’s not just science. The news media has collapsed under an avalanche of nonsense they created. No one believes anything they see reported. Government has approval rates in the teens. We are well into becoming a low-trust society that can only be held together by force. A big cause of that is the daily barrage of nonsense we get through the media. There used to be a time when the responsible made an effort to stem the flow of nonsense, but that’s no more. Instead, we live in a misinformation age.

It’s not going to end well.

Voluntary Obsolescence

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Way back in the olden thymes, I was chatting with an acquaintance, who owned a number of small niche publications. Each had five to ten thousand subscribers, who paid $50 per year for the publication. These were monthly hobbyist type things. Printing, postage and content costs ate up most of his revenue, but he was still able to take an upper middle-class salary from the business. He was never going to get rich from it, but he liked the action and it let him turn hobbies into a nice career.

At the time, he was telling me about his plan to move all of his magazines to the web. This was in the 90’s so it was the new thing. Newspapers and magazines were putting up websites hoping to reach a broader audience. He was very excited about it because he saw the cost savings. Printing and postage were his big line items so going digital meant a potential windfall. I remember asking him how he expected to charge people when he was putting his content on-line free of charge. He responded, “Hits. We’ll get more hits and then we can sell advertising.”

At that point I knew he and many others were about to commit suicide. I’ve been inside many banks and none of them ever accepted hits or site traffic as payment. The people rushing to shovel their content on-line simply had no idea why they were rushing to give their product away, but they were sure it was going to be glorious. The result has been the death of newspapers and many magazines. The New York Times, for example, loses money every quarter and only survives because a Mexican billionaire wants access to the American ruling class.

I get that same feeling when people talk about Uber and self-driving cars. From the perspective of an outsider, I see no reason why cities would sanction Uber or any of the other off-the-book taxi services. There’s nothing in it for the municipality. Similarly, why would any of the car companies sign off on robot cars? There’s no advantage for them to do it. Of course, taxi fleets of self-driving cars is about the nuttiest thing imaginable as it just means the death of a number of industries, namely car makers and car insurance firms.

Think about it. Your car sits unused most of the time. You take it to work where it sits all day. Then you take it home where it sits all night. You have a car for convenience, mostly. Pubic transportation,where available, is not good for running errands, going shopping or other tasks. Cabs are fine for some of it, but hailing a cab in the rain sucks compared to walking into the parking garage to get into your car. There’s a reason why rich people have car services and limos. They get the flexibility of their own vehicle with the convenience of a taxi service.

Now imagine that anywhere you are you can order up a Johnny Cab, having it pick you up and take you where you wish, at a low fee. All you do is pull out the phone and order it up and it comes by to haul you to work or take you to the market. It sounds wonderful, especially for old people and alcoholics. The question is, why own a car when you can get the service of a car, without having to own it, store it and maintain it? Hobbyists would still want a sports car or off-road vehicle, but most people have cars for practical purposes only.

Do a little math and you see that you use maybe ten percent of your car’s useful capacity. The hour commute to work and the hour home means two hours out of a day. Throw in some driving on the weekend and 90% of the time your car is sitting idle. Even assuming inefficiency, one care could serve the needs of five people, which means a world of Johnny Cabs is a world with about 80% fewer cars. That means 80% fewer car sales for the car makers. It also means 80% fewer insurance polices, tax stickers and all the other things that are based on people owning cars.

If you are in the car business, the plan should be simple. Buy enough politicians to kill off Uber and the robot car people. For their part, the pols should require little bribing as it is in their interest to kill the robot cars too. Instead, all of the car makers are announcing plans to produce robot cars aimed at the for-hire business. Uber is doing a test run in Pittsburgh with a fleet of driverless cars. Like those newspaper and magazine guys of the 90’s, the transportation industry is fashioning a noose for themselves out the new technology, so they can destroy themselves. Karl Marx must be laughing in Hell right now.