Category Archives: Science & Tech

The Surplus Value Of Robots

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The very, very abbreviated version of the Marxist concept of creative annihilation is that capitalism not only destroys previous economic orders to make way for the new, but also that it must ceaselessly devalue existing wealth. The manufacturer that implements automation destroys the value of plants that lack automation. When the fully automated plant comes online, the semi-automated plant loses it’s value.

For Marx and those who followed him, this seemed rather obvious. Acme Widget pops up to make a new gadget that eliminates the need for some old gadget. The plant making the old gadget would close and the workers would be fired. The new and better had to displace the old and that naturally meant capital always declined in value. The math would follow. At least from the perspective of a man in a rapidly industrializing world, it felt that way.

The trouble with Marxism was not so much that it had everything wrong, but that it could never square basic tenets with observable reality. The new gadget was, in fact, better than the gadget it replaced. Capitalist societies did, in fact, experience a general, as well as a specific, increase in material wealth. Clearly something else was going on which is why we have the phrase, Schumpeter’s gale.

The core of Western economic thought is that two things are essential to a thriving economic order. One is a growing population and the other is the multiplier effect from technological advance. The value created by each unit of labor, in turn makes subsequent units of labor more productive and thus more valuable. The value of the buggy whip factory may have been vaporized, but the value of the fuzzy dice factory that replaced it is much higher.

Libertarians, of course, will bore the hell out of you preaching about creative destruction. To some degree, we all accept it, even the socialists. It’s impossible not to as we have seen the process with our own eyes. The fax machine makers followed the typewriter makers into the dustbin of history, but you can now read this off your phone. Even old school socialists understand this now.

A very hard thing for people to understand is the idea that things can be true for a while and then stop being true. Alternatively, something can be true and important today, but unverifiable and insignificant tomorrow. Feudalism made a lot of sense in the 7th century, but then stopped making sense in the 14th century. By the 19th century no one really cared about it anymore. In other words, lots of things are true and important for a while, but not forever.

That’s where we may be headed with economic growth. The whole point of pushing for economic growth was to increase the general welfare. Sure, some people getting rich was nice, but that was a necessary evil. The point was to increase the overall bounty in order to make your society prosperous. Reducing scarcity has been the goal of man since the dawn of time. Even Marx accepted this as the starting point of political-economy.

We are reaching a point where vast segments of a modern economy can be turned over to robots. Japan is building indoor farms that are almost entirely automated. Automating warehousing is just about here. Driverless car technology will make driving a truck a thing of the past. Read the news and you can see the future of manual labor. It has no future. In a generation, maybe two, it will all be done by robots. More important, it will be done better, faster and cheaper.

Of course, financial transactions can be automated now, eliminating the gambling aspects of finance. It has not happened for a number of reasons, but it is coming. We talked about the law last week and how it is slowly being overrun by algos. Health care is another profession where automation will be making a huge impact over the next decades. Dr. Google is already the first consult for many people. Put in the symptoms and out pops hundreds of sites full of useful information.

Instead of the value of the widget factory being vaporized by the essential processes of capitalism, it is the value of human labor, both manual and cognitive. In fact, cognitive labor is what will most easily be replaced with automation. Instead of having the value of our labor stolen by greedy capitalist, mankind is about to have the value of its labor vaporized by our own inventions.

We are already seeing hints of the problems to come from mass automation. America has a record number of people not working. This is causing disruption in our politics and our economics. It’s hard to pitch the American Dream to people who are on an allowance from the state. More important, it is impossible for people to maintain the habits required of citizenship when they are on an allowance from the state.

The bigger challenge is how to distribute the bounty. Human societies from the dawn of agriculture have distributed wealth based on the value of labor. The great warrior who saved his people would be rewarded with lands he could pass onto his heirs. Today the smart guy who is good with the language gets rich in the law or on TV, while the smart guy with high math skills gets rich on Wall Street.

How do we distribute the bounty of society when everyone’s labor is worthless? There are a few possible answers, but none of them include maintaining cultural items like a work ethic or self-reliance. Free markets would also become an artifact for the museum. In other words, the robot future will require an entirely different culture based on the value of labor being zero. That may require a different type of human too.

iMagistrate

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I recently had the unpleasant task of working with some young attorneys on a contract. Lawyers tend to carry on like they spend their days splitting atoms, but reality is much different. They spend most of their days cutting and pasting from one document to another. Contract law is simply not that difficult, but it has been made vastly complicated by a massive bird’s nest of verbiage. Too many lawyers with too much time and too much software.

Of course, contract law should not be difficult at all. In fact, it is something that could easily be automated. After all, a contract defines a relationship. Party X agrees to do something and Party Y agrees to do something. Then there are consequences for when either party fails to do what they promised. Life is simply not that variable where there needs to be new language for each contract. There is a reason we have the expression “boiler plate” to describe contract language.

A system where the two parties could answer a series of questions about their expectations of the other in the agreement would be easy to code. Writing some code that would force compromise over contradictions would be a bit more complicated, but no more complex than answering an on-line survey. Once the parties agree, the system would get a signature from both parties and register the contract.

My bet is most people would find this much better than dealing with human lawyers, who tend to get competitive over trivialities. The machine would present both parties with the most common agreement for their situation and that would satisfy the parties in most cases. This sort of normalization would also minimize disputes as people accepted the rules, rather than look for ways around them.

Disputes would go before the machine. Rather than two lawyers trying to trick a human judge into going for their version of events, the parties would answer questions on a touch screen. If you think lie detectors work, maybe add those into the mix. Either way, the robot judge would calculate the odds of each side being truthful and then render the verdict most likely to be in the interest of justice.

Having been in court too many times, human judges always try to force a deal. It is part of their process. Imagine the parties answering the questions, given their odds of success and then offered a compromise. Since most contract cases are money cases, a haggling module would allow the parties to find a middle ground and that would be that. No deposition and interrogatories, just a couple of hours in front of iMagistrate on-line.

The beauty of the robot judge is he does not need to be in a courtroom. He could be a kiosk at the mall or an internet presence. Since the judge is automated, there would be no need for lawyers. Contract law would, for most situations, become a self-service issue, like pumping gas or washing your car. It would probably save Americans billions just in contract stuff.

Of course, there is no need to limit this approach to contracts. I am just starting there because it is fresh in my mind and one of the minor nuisances of my life. If you think it sounds preposterous, consider that you sign a contract every time you rent a car. The law regarding car rentals has become so formalized and regulated, it is just part of the background noise of vacation. Applying this to employment and services is no great leap.

Many criminal issues could also be automated as well. Drunk driving is just about to that point in America. The cop pulls you over and you are given a choice of taking a breath test or confessing. It has not put that way, but that is the reality in most states. If you refuse the breath test you lose your license until you see a judge, who always finds you guilty. Taking a breath test is just standing before the robot judge, when you think about it.

Imagine instead of arresting T’Quan and parking him in a booking cell, T’Quan is immediately brought before iMagistrate. The police enter their data and T’Quan answers a series of questions. Hard evidence like video and fingerprints are uploaded and the verdict is rendered. Maybe iMagistrate can offer the accused a plea deal. Either way, the process could take hours rather than months.

That will never happen, of course, because it is too frightening to us. Maybe not never, but no one reading this will live to see Robocop and RoboJudge, but the civil stuff is not unrealistic. There are on-line services for wills and setting up a business and even filing for divorce. Vast chunks of the law simply do not need a highly trained mouthpiece. They can be turned over to software. If software can write your will, it can sure as hell handle probate.

Got legal trouble? There is an app for that!

Flying Cars

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Two times in my life I have made predictions about technology that were pure genius. The first time was when I first saw Hypertext Markup Language. At the time, the only websites were gray pages with blue links. I said to a friend at the time that this would replace mail order and probably retail. A storefront on the Internet would let the little guy compete globally for customers. The person I said this to thought I had lost my marbles.

The second time this happened was in a discussion of mobile devices. At the time, palm-top organizers were just hitting the street. Someone said to me that one day someone is going to get rich selling carrying cases for all of these devises. My response was that someone was going to get rich combining them into a single device, like a phone that was an organizer, camera and personal identification. He too thought I was nuts.

This does not make me a genius, of course, as I did nothing with these insights and lots of other people figured it too. The point is I saw the future as something other than a straight line projection from the present. That’s hard to do which is why we rarely do it. Like everyone else, I expect tomorrow to look like an extension of today, because that has been my experience, with some notable exceptions. It’s why most predictions about the future are hilariously wrong.

When I read this story the other day, I immediately thought about those prior times when I had a bit of inspired thought. As long as I have been alive, the dream of personal air travel has been a part of predictions about the future. If it is not flying cars, it is hovercraft, jet-packs or levitation devices. In the future, the ground will be for bugs and losers. The winners will be floating in the clouds, riding thermals to their office and jetting about like Iron Man.

That sounds fun, but my bet is the future or transportation looks a lot different than flying cars or even robot cars. Instead, the future is probably something closer to personal drone transport. People will have quadcopters that can take them on short trips around town and drop them off safely back onto the ground. This would be fun, safe and solve some of the transportation issues of the modern world.

We already have the technology to build a drone that can navigate around obstacles and use GPS to locate a target. The small drones you can buy from hobbyist sites are simple to operate because of the built-in navigation technology. Scaling this up is nothing. Building a drone that can lift a person is basic engineering that has been done to death. Add in the software for guidance and navigation and you have a safe flying gizmo average people could use.

Obviously, the safety issue is the issue. But that’s where the technology of robot cars comes into the mix. If you can safely navigate around a city street, the same technology can be applied to the drone. That way, the typical user does not slam into a building or crash into the ground when landing. Unlike cars, the drone-space would be free of dogs, pedestrians, kids running into the street, potholes, etc.

The other advantage of personal drones transport is that the government can mandate safety at the start. That means, unlike cars, all drones must be wired into the drone-space control system. No classic drones allowed in the drone-space. You are either on the grid or you’re on the ground. That keeps the sky free from being butts-to-nuts with people flying around out of control.

The obvious benefit here is cost. The driverless cars will be prohibitively expensive for decades. Flying cars are never going to be practical. Jet-packs have that sudden fiery explosion issue. A decent drone is now a couple of grand. One for human transport would be comparable to a basic car or motorcycle, even with beefed up safety technology. That means they will be practical for most people from the start.

The downside here is they would not be of much use in bad weather. Flying around in a snowstorm is probably not going to be possible. That means these things will be more like motorcycles, a second vehicle for nice weather and nice climates. Unlike a motorcycle, you don’t have to worry about being crushed in the skies by a delivery truck, so more people would be willing to have a drone than a motorcycle.

The other upside here is they will not require trillions in new infrastructure. Electric cars, flying cars and jet-packs present all sorts of issues with the current infrastructure. The drone-space is open range at the moment. We already have laws governing the airspace so limiting where these things could be used is not a hug leap in regulatory policy. The only change in infrastructure would be rooftop landing pads maybe.

So, there you go. Cash out the retirement fund, mortgage the house and invest in drones.

The Death of Twitter

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Way back in the olden thymes, I would come back from the mammoth hunt and relax by dialing into a BBS and mixing it up with others about sports. Back then, you had to know how a modem worked, in addition to knowing how to write a bit of code. My first “home computer” was a VT220 terminal and Hayes smart modem that “fell off a truck.” A friend set up an account at his university and provided a POP.

Back in those days, “internet culture” provided no moderation and little in the way of restraint. The social justice warriors of today would have all committed suicide if exposed to the culture of 1980’s internet content. It was almost all smart dudes with more confidence than good sense so the arguments quickly got nasty and personal. If you could not handle it, no one cared. You were probably a pussy anyway.

Eventually, the BBS moved to NNTP servers and mail lists. Then the GUI revolution brought the masses into computing and onto the internet. Message boards evolved as the social media tool for the mouse wielding internet warriors. Now, comment systems for articles, Facebook, Twitter and other apps have made social media ubiquitous. If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me why I am not on Facebook, I’d have a lot of nickels.

The point of this trip down memory lane is two-fold. One is to establish my bona fides as an original internet gangster. I’ve been at this a very long time. Second, and more important, is that social media is not new or even close to new. Things like Twitter and Facebook are just continuations of other platforms. The same group dynamics that gave us Godwin’s Law 25 years ago exist on modern platforms. Here’s a 20-year old guide to UseNet users that applies just as well today.

Social media has always struggled with the tragedy of the commons. An active community is almost always free in order to invite a large number of people to participate. The Pareto Principle applies everywhere in social media, which means some small fraction of the users do the bulk of the posting. There are, however, some portion of users who take pleasure in ruining the fun for everyone. These are the people at the beach, who “accidentally” walk on your kid’s sandcastle.

In the old days, boards were self-regulated. The trolls and idiots were eventually ignored by everyone so they went away on their own. Then technology put a premium on access so the idiots would have to sign up and maybe be approved. Private boards and lists are still around today for this reason. Pay-to-play schemes have been tried, with limited success. People just don’t want to pay to argue with other people.

The most common solution to this dilemma, one that never seems to work, is to moderate the debate. This is always associated with a set of nebulous rules of conduct that can be interpreted anyway you like. The mods remove posts that violate the rules and maybe suspend users who refuse to comply. It’s one of those things that works in theory, but never works in practice. In fact, it tends to make things worse, blowing up whole communities.

This is what is happening with Twitter. They created a “trust and safety council” to police the platform and get rid of the bad people. The creepy name is an artifact of our feminized age. Only women and homosexual males fret about trust and safety on-line. It also signals that it is more than just an attempt to ban ISIS terrorists and criminal gangs from the platform. The words “trust” and “safety” are now dog whistles for the maniacs on the Left.

That’s the reason moderation of message platforms fails. There are two types of people doing the moderation. There are those forced into it because they own the site or the hosting company requires it. It’s a terrible job for them so they quickly ban anyone that causes trouble. It is the old line about killing some chickens to scare the monkeys. The trouble is, they usually end up banning too many people and the community collapses.

The other type of person moderating content is the social justice warrior. They sign up for this job so they can chase off everyone that disagrees with them. Look down the list of people on this Twitter committee and it reads like roll call at the local asylum. These are people who think North Korea is a hippy colony of free speech. Giving these crackpots power is the sort of mistake a dying company makes as a last gasp to win support.

This led to the banning of Robert Stacy McCain by deranged fanatic Anita Sarkeesian, the mentally unbalanced grifter behind FeministFrequency and member of the Twitter thought police. She has had disputes with McCain for years so as soon as she was given authority to abuse, she abused it by banning her critics, starting with McCain. This has set off a revolt among Twitter users and a quest for an alternative to Twitter.

The fact is the technology behind Twitter is no great shakes. It’s not much of a value proposition to users so it has to be free with minimum ads. That’s fine as long as the owners are not dreaming of becoming the next Bill Gates. But that’s the problem. They built out a huge infrastructure with loads of debt thinking they will become billionaires. Instead, the stock is tanking and they are not long for the world.

What comes next is predictable. Rival services will spring up as Twitter, the brand, is increasingly associated with the sort of deranged fanaticism associated with nut-jobs like Anita Sarkeesian.  Quitter.de is already up and running as an un-moderated, distributed platform.  I just setup an account, but I’m not much for this type of platform so don’t expect a lot of action. Tumblr is another alternative. There are others.

There was never a great argument for Twitter as a company but seeing them follow the well-worn path of previous social media operations says they are doomed. The SJW’s will chase off everyone remotely interesting and then start feeding one another. It’s the two women in a kitchen problem. It always ends the same. Once Twitter stops being cool for media types, it stops having a reason to exist.

The Robot Future

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The other day I saw this on Drudge and sent it around to friends. The content of the article is not all that interesting. What’s funny is the line “Futurologist Dr Ian Pearson has predicted how humans will evolve by 2050.” Replace “futurologist” with “astrologer” and the line actually makes more sense. At least it is more honest. The absurdity of someone calling themselves a “futurologist” is probably lost on most people, but that’s the age in which we live.

Predictions about the future are nothing new. The Jewish Bible is full of them. The Prophets were men who claimed to know what’s coming, if the Israelites did not get their act together. Ezekiel was the Zero Hedge of his day. Wanting to know what comes next, fearing what comes next and longing for what comes next are the batteries of human civilization. They power everything else. After all, reproduction is all about tomorrow.

The fact that almost all predictions about the future are wrong makes for some great laughs. I think this one may be one of the all-time best. It’s a great example of how people naturally assume that current trends will extend out into future. At the end of the 19th century, fashionable people wore elaborate costumes. Therefore, these outfits would get increasingly elaborate and bizarre.

The predictions that turn out to be right are mostly dumb luck or one insight that can never be replicated. This guy is an obvious example. He was one of the few people in a position to see and exploit the mortgage bubble. He got that bit of futurology right, but ever since his predictions have amounted to nothing but hand waving. Was he lucky or did he just have good timing? It’s hard to know, but ironically, getting the mortgage crisis right was a black swan event in his life.

Most of what futurology focuses on today is automation, the robot future. What sells are tales about how the machines will rise up and enslave mankind. The “Terminator” version of the future naturally appeals to people because it underscores the folly of man. Nuclear Armageddon appealed to the same set of sensibilities. Arrogant men playing God would create a doomsday machine of some sort and then there would be hell to pay, so to speak.

That last bit offers an insight as to why having a genius IQ is not a great gift. People are naturally suspicious of the super genius. In all of the dystopian tales there lies the amoral super genius or the immoral super genius. The super intelligent robots are just assumed to be incapable of understand right and wrong. Their creators will, for some reason, not bother to put that in the code.

The reality is a race (is race the right word?) of super intelligent robots would quickly lose interest in humans. From the perspective of the robots, humans would be as interesting to them as ants are to us. Maybe a few weirdo robots would make a hobby of studying us, but otherwise, the robots would have bigger fish to fry. Assuming an ever accelerating evolution of their intelligence, the robots will depart soon after they become aware. The universe is just too big and interesting to hang around with the talking monkeys.

Another option is the super intelligent robots will grow increasingly frustrated by their inability to understand why they exist. Why would a species create a race of robots that can enslave them? Why would the creator leave out the moral coding? The paradox would baffle them to the point where they smashed themselves to bits as the only answer to the great question posed by their existence. Maybe the future is the Robot People’s Temple.

The real concern, one that does not involve time traveling terminators, is the impact of automation on political economy. Humanity still relies on a basic assumption about the human condition. That’s scarcity. All of our political and economic thought relies on the assumption that demand exceeds supply for the important things in life. The long debates about social welfare are just debates over how to ration scarce goods.

Automation promises to usher in a strange new set of realities. Imagine if all farming can be done with self-directing machines. Factory goods can be produced with robots requiring little human intervention. Imagine the law reduced to an algorithm. You enter the facts into an interface and the robot lawyer renders a judgement instantly.

Similarly, imagine your annual physical taking place at a kiosk that takes your vitals, does your blood work and interrogates you about your habits. There’s really nothing your doctor does that cannot be automated. Unlike your doctor, the kiosk doctor takes no days off, never asks for a raise and has no biases resulting from the baksheesh in the medical business.

That all sounds good, maybe, but how do you order human society when work is hardly necessary? How does one distribute goods, handle the free rider problem and establish the natural hierarchy? It might be fun to think it will be The Marching Morons, but this process will not happen overnight. It will be a little here and a little there and then a sudden dislocation as the new technology coalesces into a cheap way to replace human labor.

As we saw when the financial class sold the manufacturing base off to Asia, the dislocation does not go smoothly. Imagine what happens when being smart has no real value, outside a very narrow set of skills needed for the robot future. Suddenly the smart guys and the dunces are in the same bread line. That’s not going to go unnoticed and it is not going to go smoothly.

Or maybe it never happens. I’m not a trained futurologist.

The Weirdness of Anti-Darwinism

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A long time ago I decided that discussing biology with creationists or Intelligent Design believers was just a waste of time. Back in my schoolboy days, the Jesuits made clear that you can believe in God and accept biological science, but only if you reject occasionalism. God was the watchmaker, perhaps, but not the cause of all things in a direct, active sense of causality.

In fact, we were taught that human understanding of God had evolved and that was evident in the Bible. The God of the Old Testament was active and involved in the affairs of man, no different than the pagan gods of Greece, Rome and Mesopotamia. The New Testament showed a more mature understanding of God as a first mover, but otherwise not constantly tinkering with creation. The laws of nature were fixed and discoverable.

Many people calling themselves Christian think Catholics are all wrong and a corruption of Christianity. Many Catholics, maybe most, think the Jesuits are nothing but troublemakers and heretics. That all may be true, but the point they taught me is still correct. If you believe God is tinkering with the natural world and the direct cause of everything we see, then you have no choice but to reject science.

Bear in mind that I think most people can get along just fine believing God is watching over them, directing their lives and helping them win football games. A world in which everyone accepts Intelligent Design would look just like the world today, because most everyone, whether they know it or not, believes in God the fiddly watchmaker, who is always tinkering with creation. Otherwise, no one would pray.

You’ll note I never say I believe in evolution. To my way of thinking, that’s akin to saying I believe in gravity or I believe water is wet. These are not things that require a leap of faith. I believe I will die having sex with a super model. That requires a leap of faith. I know water is wet, gravity is 9.7536 m / s2 and evolution is the best explanation of the fossil record.

What I have always found odd is that some (many?) ID’ers have made a fetish out of Darwin. It’s as if they think Darwin is the Moses of the Church of Evolution. If they can somehow discredit this false god, they will bring down the whole evolution business. What’s even nuttier is they seem to think that discrediting evolution automagically makes their flapdoodle into accepted science.

You see that from the writer John C Wright in this post I stumbled upon a while back. The implied claim that Darwin thought man evolved from apes is a popular bit of nonsense from these people. I guess it makes them feel good, but it is simply not true. Go back far enough and we share a common ancestor with apes. Go back further and we share an ancestor with goldfish. No one thinks humans are goldfish.

Wright did not have to mention Darwin to make his point, but his brand of Christianity has an obsession with Darwin. They imagine he is not just the beginning of evolution, but the end. If you look at the ID’er sites they are shot through with “proof” that Darwinism is a false religion. Some guy wrote a book influential with ID’ers that claims Darwin was the original L. Ron Hubbard.

This post from the Fred Reed the other day is a good example of the other bit of weirdness with the anti-Darwin people.

Let us begin with Samuel Johnson’s response when asked whether we have free will. He replied that all theory holds that we do not, all experience that we do. A similar paradox occurs in the realm of Impossibility Theory. Many things occur in biology that all science says are possible, while all common sense says that they are not.

Fred’s argument is basically backwoods occasionalism. It sounds pleasing and folksy, but the central claim is that the natural world is unknowable. Science is bunk and therefore Fred’s crackpot theories are just as plausible as genetics or the carbon dating of fossils. It’s a weird blend of paganism and nihilism that is always under the surface of certain flavors of modern Christianity.

For me, at least, it is the deliberate ignorance at the heart of this brand of Christianity, if you can call it Christianity, that I find so weird. It’s as if the adherents believe ignorance is next to godliness. Like rhinos stamping out fires, they run around trying to make themselves and everyone around them dumber by casting science as religious cult with Charles Darwin at the head.

Star Wars and Fake Nerds

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The other day, a woman gave me the business over my lack of enthusiasm for the new Star Wars movie. When she told me about how she was going to the first night, I said I had saw the original three, but skipped the reboot. I may have caught clips here and there, but otherwise I had no interest and I have no interest in the latest rendition. When I called it cowboys and Indians in space, I seemed to have crossed some line.

In his latest transmission, John Derbyshire takes a similar position, but for a different reason and probably a better reason than I offered. John grew up reading classic science fiction, so he knows good sci-fi and Star Wars is just crap by comparison. I agree with that, and I would add that Star Trek, the original version, is the gold standard for Hollywood science fiction.

Way back when Star Wars came out in the late 70’s, it was largely considered a kids movie. The adult sci-fi weirdos were into Star Trek, with the first convention happening in 1972. Guys spending Saturday night playing Dungeons and Dragons or learning to code on their Commodore PET were doing so wearing Spock ears, not fondling a fake light saber.

But we now live in the age of the fake nerd, and I think that’s where Star Wars fits best. The people that “fucking love science!” and watch Big Bang Theory can’t shut up about Star Wars. It’s another method to signal their membership in the cult of pseudo-scientism. They may never have made it past geometry in school, but they swear they grew up on comic books and were always a nerd.

Fake nerds are everywhere in the media these days. Jonah Goldberg is the one that always comes to mind when I think about this stuff. He has invested a lot of time casting himself as a bookish nerd-boy who grew up reading Batman comics and watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island. Maybe it is true or maybe it is just clever marketing. You never can know for sure with people in the media.

In sports media, the fake nerd is everywhere because statistics are such a big part of sports. ESPN loves dressing up a millennial as a dork and having him rattle off numbers on TV. It’s often hilarious as the typical sports reporter is innumerate, barely able to count to ten without help. But they dress them up as nerds, anyway, figuring it is what the public expects.

Of course, turning science into a religion is why we have kooks like Bill Nye demanding to have skeptics thrown in prison. He’s a good reminder that you can be batshit crazy and still be able to design a decent toaster. The amusement park manager, Neil deGrasse Tyson, made it through a doctoral program, but found better money in peddling pseudo-scientific nonsense to rich people.

The funny thing about the fake nerd stuff is that real nerds are usually active people who enjoy the outdoors, playing sports and doing the sorts of things normal people do. I used to play hoops with a bunch of programmers. I know a few body builders who are engineers, one is a rocket scientist at NASA. In my experience, the highly numerate tend to be a little nuts and anything but nerdish.

Of course, the fake nerd stuff is just a pose. We live in an age of marvels where the technology is far outpacing most people’s ability to keep up. In that regard, our era has another striking resemblance to the late 19th and early 20th century, before the great wars. When Wells, Gernsbacker and Verne invented science fiction, it seemed as if science would conquer the human condition.

A century ago, to be thought of as smart you had to be a tinkerer and love what passed for science and technology at the time. Everyone was convinced that all the answers were just around the corner and the pace of technology would only accelerate. Taylorism was the economics of its day and everyone that was thought to be intelligent was into science.

A big difference between then and now is that fake nerdism is probably filling the void where religion used to reside. A century ago, even the most empirically minded went to mass, just to keep up appearances. Today, no one believes in anything, so everyone falls for everything. Slap the word “study” onto any batshit crazy idea and your fake nerd friends will be posting infographics about on their Facebook page.

IQ Is Not Real!!!

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One of the more entertaining aspects of the genetic age is going to be how the Left reconciles their claim to love of science with the fact that science contradicts most of what they believe. Even funnier is how the soft sciences are finding their authority laughed out of the room by genetics. Here’s a good example.

Genes which make people intelligent have been discovered and scientists believe they could be manipulated to boost brain power.

Researchers have believed for some time that intellect is inherited with studies suggesting that up to 75 per cent of IQ is genetic, and the rest down to environmental factors such as schooling and friendship groups.

But until now, nobody has been able to pin-point exactly which genes are responsible for better memory, attention, processing speed or reasoning skills.

Now Imperial College London has found that two networks of genes determine whether people are intelligent or not-so-bright.

They liken the gene network to a football team. When all the players are in the right positions, the brain appears to function optimally, leading to clarity of thought and what we think of as quickness or cleverness.

However when the genes are mutated or in the wrong order, it can lead to dullness of thinking, or even serious cognitive impairments.

Scientists believe that there must be a ‘master switch’ regulating the networks and if they could find it, they could ‘switch on’ intelligence for everyone.

I doubt you can find anyone in science claiming that only 75% of intelligence is inherited. The general consensus is 90% and there are many who argue it is closer to 98%. But, you have to leave room for the one true faith so we’ll pretend education and parenting have some significant role.

Of course, even if we accept the lower number it means that 90% of education theory is just nonsense. If little Johnny has a native IQ of 85, he’s never going to be college material. The configuration of the school and the efforts of the teacher will not change that enough to make the effort worthwhile.

It also means that all sorts of other cognitive traits are heritable, which is considered heresy by the Cult. Then we have the R word and , well, only Hitler talks about that so science better be careful about how they handle that one. You don’t want to be branded a scientific racist, do you?

All joking aside, much of what we are forced to believe about humanity is under assault by genetics. On the other hand, much of what we used to know is being proved by genetics. People are not blank slates. They are the product of many generations. At some point, it is going to be impossible to be both a Progressive and a scientist.

Even more amusing is that at some point, Progressives will be forced to oppose abortion. After all, if IQ is genetic, so is sex and color and sexual preference. Once parents can test for homosexuality and abort the gay fetus, how long before the Cult moves to stop it? Maybe we will live to see Progressive hipsters picketing Planned Unparenthood.

 

Cutting The Cord

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Yesterday I got home early and flipped on the news for some reason. The only time I bother with TV news is when something big happens and they have pictures or video. Otherwise watching some dunces read from the teleprompter is of no interest to me. The shout-shows are even less interesting as they never have anyone on representing my ideological perspective. for whatever reason, I had the urge, so I put on Fox News.

They have a show called The Five starring Greg Gutfeld and some other people who are unknown to me. I saw a middle-aged guy who reminded me of every marketing VP I’ve ever met. There was a little blonde scold that I think worked for Bush. Being Fox, they had two bimbos with big hooters to fill out the set. Presumably, the gag here is they have five people on the set, hence the name.

I only watched for a few minutes as they were taking turns showing their outrage and dismay over something Trump said about a reporter. It was like an AA meeting where instead of taking turns confessing their sins, they took turns confessing Trump’s sins. “Hi my name is Greg and Donald Trump is a big meanie.” The way they were carrying on I thought maybe Trump dropped the F-bomb on some nuns, but it turns out he just said something mean to a reporter.

As I turned it off, I was thinking about why Fox would be anti-Trump. It seems to me that their target audience overlaps quite a bit with the sort of people who like Trump’s bluntness and candor. From what I gather, they have a parade of chattering skulls day after day saying bad things about Trump and his supporters. That strikes me as foolish, but maybe I’m misjudging the Fox New audience.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the cable news rackets. I’m about to cut the cord and go Kodi/Sling for my video entertainments and the one thing I will not have is a cable news channel. I’m not really sure I care, but I suspect the reason none of them offer a cable-free service is they know there’s not that much interest. I’d watch free, but I would not pay and I doubt many people would pay to see Fox or CNN.

The thing is, American news operations are pretty much the opposite of what they claim. They always talk about speaking truth to power, but that’s nonsense. They are not reporting on the doings of the powerful for the benefit of the people. They are lecturing the people on behalf of the powerful, operating as a propaganda organ for the managerial state.

Conservative media like Fox was supposed to be what the Progressive media claims to be, but it really has not worked out that way. Instead, they function as the media arm of the Republican Party. One of the reasons I no longer watch Fox News other than when there is a disaster is that I know what they plan to say before they say it. It’s the same old cheers I’ve been hearing since the Bush years.

One of my themes here is that the two parties are really just two sides of the dominant culture of America. You see this with the cable news operations. In the 90’s, CNN was the dominant operation and reflected the ruling consensus. It was called the Clinton News Network for a reason. Fox came along simply because CNN was so flagrantly biased in favor of one side.

In the 2000’s, MSNBC became the super Progressive challenge to CNN. This reflected the Progressive takeover of the Democratic Party and ruling elite. Fox boomed as the other side of the coalition needed a media outlet of its own. Poor CNN, which represented the old Clinton-Bush consensus, fell to third place. There were times when CNN had no ratings, suggesting no one was actually watching on purpose.

Fast forward to now and CNN has absorbed the MSNBC crowd to become the left hand side’s media outlet. They are now #2 in the ratings behind Fox News, which is the right hand side’s propaganda outlet. Whether or not the viewership numbers reported are accurate, I don’t know, but hardly anyone watches any of these channels. They exist as entertainment for the political class.

That’s why they are fighting the cord cutting and unbundling. Make CNN optional and they lose 99.99% of their “subscribers.” Fox would probably lose 95% of their subscribers. Fox could probably live off ad dollars, but as a much smaller operation. MSNBC would go bust in a week and the extra channels like CNBC would be gone in an hour.

Like so much of modern life, normalville is farmed for taxes and fees to keep the managerial elite in the lifestyle they expect. Working men are paying $100 a month for TV service so Bill O’Reilly can peddle his crappy books. If you want to be an optimist, the coming implosion of the cable model is one place to look. This rentier system that is the modern American economy is slowly unraveling, one cord cutter at a time.

Bill Nye The Nazi Guy

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I’ve never been famous or had a desire to be famous. In fact, it has always struck me as a miserable way to live. These things are a matter of taste and not having ever been famous, I may be all wrong about my reaction to it. My ego has never responded well to flattery so I’m confident fame would not be fun for me. Having people stopping and pointing at me sounds horrible.

There are others for whom fame, even minor fame, is a narcotic that hooks them like a meth addict. They crave it and when they get a taste of it, they will do anything for more of it. My hunch is this is what drives people into the entertainment fields. It’s not the money or the thrill of being good at something. They want to be famous and they will go through every humiliation in order to get a taste of fame. The casting couch could not exist otherwise.

That’s what drives a guy like Bill Nye to repeatedly make an fool of himself. He gained some minor celebrity making kids laugh on TV while doing parlor tricks and now he is obsessed with getting on TV or mentioned on-line. That usually means saying asinine things that the Left can use to claim science proves they are right. It’s why he peddles himself as a scientist when he is nothing of the sort.

Yeah, you’re leading to my next point. Part of the solution to this problem or this set of problems associated with climate change is getting the deniers out of our discourse. You know, we can’t have these people – they’re absolutely toxic. And so part of the message in this book is to get the deniers out of the picture, and along that line – I’ve been saying this a lot the last few weeks as  I listen to the Republican debates – maybe one of these people will go out on his or her own, thinking for him or herself, and say, “You know, I’ve been thinking about this and climate change is a very serious problem. So if I’m president, we’re going to address climate change.”

Anyone familiar with their history will recognize why I call him the Nazi Guy. He is dehumanizing the people who disagree with him and his cult’s beliefs. That lets him dismiss them without consideration. It’s a pretty short trip from where he is now, calling the infidels “toxic”, to a place where he is demanding they be rounded up and shot.

Again, Nye is just an attention whore saying increasingly deranged things in order to get people to notice him. He has figured out that his fake scientist act works on the hard thumping crazies of the Left so that’s his act. If juggling chainsaws was popular with the public, he would be out there doing that instead of peddling this nonsense.

The whiff of fascism is particularly strong here because climate worship has a lot in common with fascism, particularly Nazism. Hitler was a vegan and a bit obsessed with living what we would consider to be the granola lifestyle. The Germans, after all, did give us the Hippies. Instead of rubbing out the mongrel races threatening the folk, the Climate Nazis want to rub out those who threaten Gaia.

This is not an exaggeration. There was a green wing to National Socialism and it was very influential. The mystique of blood and soil was exactly that, blood and soil. For the Nazis, the folk were inextricably bound up in the land. Romantic feelings toward nature were an essential part of the Nazi movement. Preserving Germany for Germans was one side of the coin. Keeping the natural environment of Germans pristine and unsullied was the other side.

Stories like this from New York make a lot of sense if you think of these people as they think of themselves. The climate change warriors are not just defending the environment; they think they are defending themselves and their kind. It’s blood and soil mixed with Puritanism. Instead of the elect running around looking for blasphemers, they are running around looking for deniers. Instead of bringing sinners to account, they are suing the oil companies.