Category Archives: Science & Tech

Cholesterol Myths

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I saw this linked over at Maggie’s Farm.

Fats were singled out as the major enemy.

Research results published in the mid-1900s indicated that fats in our diets posed a health hazard.

Fats were not just full of calories that made us overweight. There were indications that fats were the main reason why a wave of cardiovascular diseases washed over the industrialised countries of the West starting in the early 20th century.

Research efforts and nutritional advice focused on how dangerous fats were and toward the end of the century a healthy diet consisted low-fat foods – a message heard at the doctor’s office and hyped by all the magazines.

Simultaneously, carbohydrates, including sugar, snuck below the radar, according to Birger Svihus, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU).

Why were carbs viewed so long as positive for health?

Svihus thinks he has found the answer in research:

Scientists in the 1970s concluded that the human body could not convert carbohydrates into fat.

That meant you couldn’t become overweight or clog your bloodstream with fats by eating carbohydrates, whether they came from sweets or whole grain bread.

I’m often amazed by how much of the past has been forgotten. It is not just the ancient times or even the medieval times. We cannot remember what happened last week. There’s no great mystery as why the governments got the diet recommendations all wrong and it was not an honest error.

The first thing to know is the Framingham Study. From Wikipedia:

The Framingham Heart Study is a long-term, ongoing cardiovascular study on residents of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts. The study began in 1948 with 5,209 adult subjects from Framingham, and is now on its third generation of participants.[1] Prior to it almost nothing was known about the “epidemiology of hypertensive or arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease”.[2] Much of the now-common knowledge concerning heart disease, such as the effects of diet, exercise, and common medications such as aspirin, is based on this longitudinal study. It is a project of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, in collaboration with (since 1971) Boston University.[1] Various health professionals from the hospitals and universities of Greater Boston staff the project.

Initial finding from that study suggested a link between dietary cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Thus was born the low-fat craze that has been with us for decades. Industry quickly figured out how to capitalize on this and make enormous amounts of money.

The first way was to use a waste product from food production to make a substitute for butter. That’s right. Margarine is made from waste. Food companies quickly figured out that the stuff they were throwing away could be re-purposed into “low-fat” foods. The stunning success of margarine led to a flood of low-fat stuff that is still with us.

Of course you don’t sell product without advertising and advertising is mostly about convincing people that your product is better than the alternative. If you’re in the business of selling low-fat foods, what better way than to point to government science as the reason your stuff is better?

Of course, you need to make sure the science does not change so lavishing the government and its scientists with money to keep proving the same point is a good investment. It’s not an accident that Big Food is an enthusiastic supporter of Big Government.

That may strike you as excessively cynical, but here is a long article from The Atlantic Monthly that is my source. You’ll not the date is 1989. That’s right, I recalled from memory an article from a quarter century ago and found it on-line.

Little Green Men

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Over the last week or so I have been going back and forth with a friend about the timeline in the Terminator movies. With the new one coming out, the old ones have been on cable. I either forgot or I was unaware that they had made a fourth movie, based around the John Connor character, so I watched it the other day. That film tries to address the timeline issue, which is what spawned the discussion.

The trouble with time travel, of course, is the paradox. In this case, sending Kyle Reese back in time could alter the timeline in such a way that the future no longer includes the possibility of sending that same guy back in time. That’s the paradox. It is the old bit about going back in time to kill your parents. It’s a logical impossibility.

Therefore, the only way the movies can make any sense is if the future guy is destined to be a part of the natural timeline. Your attempt to go back and kill your parents always fails, but in the attempt, events are shaped in such a way that you one day decide to go back in time to kill your parents. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

In the movie four they try to tidy up this bit of the plot, so they make it clear that John Connor knows how this works. He knows he sends his father back in time to save his mother. The trouble with that is he could roll the dice and decide to just shoot the man destined to be his father, thus scrambling the whole thing, but then that would mean someone else was his father.

The point here is that time travel as a plot devise is fine as long as you don’t think about it too much. The only way to make it work logically is to either accept determinism or the multiverse. The former naturally appeals to humans, while the latter is incomprehensible to most people, so Hollywood preaches a weird form of fatalism in these movies.

There’s a similar problem with space aliens. Logic say that intelligent life evolving on another planet is most likely going to look a lot like us.

They are often portrayed on screen as little green men with elongated limbs and saucer-like eyes.

From E.T to the X-Files, aliens from outer space have captured our imagination for decades.

Yet a new book from a leading evolutionary biologist argues that if they exist and we ever encountered them, they would look very similar to us.

Professor Simon Conway Morris said extra-terrestrials that resemble human beings should have evolved on at least some of the many Earth-like planets that have been discovered by astronomers.

This is most certainly true, to a point. A planet the size of earth orbiting a sun similar to ours would probably be very similar to earth. In order to support carbon based life of any complexity it will need to look very much like earth. An intelligent species evolving on an earth like planet will therefore come out pretty close to humans. Maybe all the smart people are black instead of Chinese, but otherwise things would be pretty close.

“An area of biology which is becoming popular, perhaps too popular, that the possibility evolution is becoming much more predictable than people thought,” he told The Independent. “The book is really trying to persuade the world that evolutionary convergence is completely ubiquitous. Wherever you look you see it.

“The theme is to try and drive the reader, gently of course, into the possibility that the things which we regard as most important, ie cognitive sophistication, large brains, intelligence, tool making, are also convergent. Therefore, in principle, other Earth-like planets should very much end up with the same sort of arrangement.”

Professor Conway Morris, a Fellow at St John’s College, said it follows that plant and animal life on other planets able to support life would also look similar to Earth’s.

He said: “Certainly it’s not the case that every Earth-like planet will have life let alone humanoids. But if you want a sophisticated plant it will look awfully like a flower. If you want a fly there’s only a few ways you can do that. If you want to swim, like a shark, there’s only a few ways you can do that. If you want to invent warm-bloodedness, like birds and mammals, there’s only a few ways to do that.

The missing bit here is we don’t know what we will look like 10,000 years from now. We know, for example, that humans as a whole are about ten points dumber now than in the Victorian era. The main reason for that is stupidity is not as lethal as it was then. Similarly, we are physically weaker as a whole, due to the fact we do far less physical labor.

An intelligent life form on another planet that is able to traverse the stars to reach earth will be vastly more advanced than us and therefore further down the timeline of evolution. If the artificial intelligence people are right, they will have long ago figured out how to upload their consciousness into the machine and will no longer be organic, as we currently understand it.

Of course, a species with the ability to traverse the stars will surely have the ability to cloak their presence from us anyway. Therefore, the only way we will ever encounter space aliens is when we evolve to the point where we can traverse the stars and meet them halfway. Alternatively, we will see the humanoids of another planet when we visit, but they will look like retarded apes to us as we will have evolved well beyond our current meat stick form.

In other words, there are no little green men and even if there were, they would not reveal themselves to us anyway.

The Church of Climate Change

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One of my themes is how belief warps how people process information. The old line about how the fanatic only sees that which confirms his fanaticism is obviously true. Fans of Manchester United will believe anything horrible about fans of Liverpool. At the same time, they will never believe anything bad about the boys on their team. Fans of Tom Brady think he is innocent, while fans of the New Jersey teams think he is in some way responsible for killing Kennedy.

In public affairs, it works the same. Republicans think Democrats are secretly plotting to make Karl Marx our new god and Democrats think Republicans want to bring back slavery. This week the MYTimes went after Marco Rubio and every conservative is rushing to his defense. A week ago many of them thought he was  bum due to his open borders fanaticism.

It also has another manifestation. If you are convinced some event is inevitable, then all signs point to that inevitability. Read Zero Hedge for a week or two and you see what I mean. They are convinced the apocalypse is upon us and every news event is spun into the sign that the end is near. Some variation of “the coming zombie apocalypse in three charts” is a daily staple.

I think that’s at the heart of the Global Warming cult. “Cult” is the right word at this point, since the people passionate about it have deranged themselves to the point where those outside suspect sinister things about the movement. I have liberal friends who send me thousand word e-mails filled with links and graphs claiming that any day now the tipping point will be reached and we’re doomed. They are so sure that Gaia is angry and ready to punish us, it is axiomatic.

What this means is the looming disaster is a certainty in the minds of the adherents, beyond dispute in the same way no sane person disputes gravity or the laws of motion. It is a fixed thing now and forever, like arithmetic. If the data  shows that maybe Gaia is not all that angry, it is assumed to be wrong. It has to be. So they go back and refine the data and massage it so that it is “corrected” to comport with what they know must be true.

NOAA faking their data is not deception in the way in which we normally think of it. They’re simply correcting what they believe must be a mistake. Imagine measuring a stone falling to earth and the results show it falls at rates well outside standard gravity. We know objects near earth accelerate toward the earth at 9.80665 m/s. That’s axiomatic. Any measure outside that must be due to human error.

That’s what’s happening with the constant fiddling with temperature data. Everyone knows that the earth’s climate is warming. The data coming in from various instruments must fit into the the accepted model or those instruments are defective. It has to be, otherwise the very foundation of reality is in doubt. More important, the very identity of the people in the field is in doubt.

The assumption is that data disproving the belief will somehow shake them out of their faith, but it does not work like that for most people. Look at the number of people who can walk into a natural history museum and still believe in young earth creationism. Glaciers could cover North America and the AGW people will say the planet is overheating. It’s why they have started saying climate change rather than global warming. It’s not a conscious effort to deceive; they are simply adapting to dis-confirmation.

Think of it this way. If you are a climate researcher today, you not only have the pressure to produce proof of global warming, you are surrounded by colleagues who believe deeply in the issue. Even if you know the data contradicts the prevailing “consensus” on the issue, it would take herculean will to publish it and face the wrath of your friends and colleagues. When you already are inclined to agree with them, the default assumption will be to dismiss the contradictory data and “correct” it.

There is an old idea called Social Comparison Theory that tries to explain why we tend to emulate those around us. The short version is that humans constantly compare themselves to others around them as a form of self-evaluation. If everyone else thinks pink flamingos on the lawn is gauche, then you are unlikely to install them on your lawn. This applies to opinions, styles, religion, etc.

It’s not hard to see how this is a great evolutionary adaptation. Cooperation scales very well. Two people working in tandem will beat two people working independently. Ten people working as a team will beat two people working in tandem. There are no examples of high status males, for example, whose lives prove the customs of their society nugatory. Rather, status is based on confirming that which society holds dear.

One of the things I find fascinating about third century Rome is how the Empire lost transcendent purpose. Everything was aimed at keeping the band together, so to speak. It’s argued that the Empire bankrupted itself trying to preserve the empire. In this period is when all sorts of odd cults and mystics popped up throughout the Empire. Sol Invictus and, of course, Christianity got going strong during this period as well.

In this post-Christian Era in the West, I think we’re seeing something similar. Oddball mass movements like climate change and its implicit millenarianism are only possible when no dominant ideology exists. The field is clear for people who no longer believe in anything to fall for everything. The Romans carried on a long time after they no longer had a reason to carry on, but eventually something replaced the old gods. Something will come along to be the dominant faith of the West, but I doubt it is climate change.

Robot Medicine

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I had my annual physical this week. That means two hours of my life wasted staring at the wall wearing an apron. I should not complain as the process for me is efficient compared to what others must endure. I get to the facility 15 minutes before my appointment and I’m sitting in a room somewhere within 30 minutes. In that time, I have submitted my urine sample and filled out some forms.

A pleasant black girl with neck tattoos took my blood pressure and had me strip and put on one of those ridiculous hospital gowns. I’ve always wondered why someone has not come up with a better hospital gown, but there’s zero motivation on the part of the medical profession to demand it. The medical business is not a business in the normal sense, where the suppliers compete with one another for customers.

I don’t actually see a doctor. Instead it is a nurse practitioner. Allegedly there is a doctor in charge of her and the other nurses, but I’ve never met him. I’ve never seen him. I’m sure he exists, but if not I would not be surprised either. The woman I see is nice, but a typical clock puncher. She comes to work for a check, not because she enjoys her work. To her, I’m just another meat stick on the schedule.

After twenty minutes of waiting, she arrived and commenced with the examination. That means taking my blood pressure, looking at my eyes and ears and feeling around for something weird. Most of the time she is in the room is spent asking me questions as she typed the answers into the computer system. Most of the questions seemed like they were for marketing purposes rather than anything to do with my health.

The point of this boring recitation of my annual physical is that very little of it requires me to interact with a human. Taking blood pressure can be done by a machine. I have one at home. Blood work is done by a machine. The clinic I use does their own blood work, allegedly, but there are huge national chains that do blood work for humans and animals.

As far as interpreting the results, the nurse I see is not bringing much to the table. She thinks my cholesterol is getting a little high, but Dr. Google and everyone I know has much higher LDL levels. I suspect there is a commission check in it for them when they prescribe these popular medications for cholesterol. Regardless, interpreting blood work is better done by a robot anyway. The same is true of the urine sample.

It seems to me that one place where the robot future should be a reality is in basic medical care. Instead of paying an arm and a leg for disinterested humans to act as a go between, let the patients talk to the robots direct. A mall kiosk could be used for blood pressure, urine and blood work. While you’re there you answer questions on a touchscreen. A week later the robot e-mails you the results and any recommendations.

Of course, the robot would also have access to your DNA. As we march into the humanless future, DNA will become the touchstone of medical science. Connecting the dots between genes and a wide range of diseases is a data problem, in most cases. Cheap collection devices in public places means masses of data to sort of collate.

Robot care would inevitably be cheaper and that means more people would get regular checkups by their local neighborhood robot doctor. If this sort of service were $50 a shot, most people would do it twice a year. Extend the services to things like flu shots, and nuisance things like colds and allergies and most of your basic care could be done on the cheap by the machines.

Another benefit is the payola schemes run by the pharmaceutical companies would be tamped down as robots are not easily bribed. During my visit, two sets of sharpies arrived peddling their wares. They were dressed in the best Men’s Warehouse has to offer and had arms full of freebies for the nurses.

It’s the same payola game the music industry used to play in the old days. It’s not technically bribery, but give a doctor free stuff and he is probably going to move your product. The medical profession denies it, but big pharma is not giving away tens of millions in trips, gifts and schmoozing because they are stupid. They do it because it works.

Of course, none of this is going to happen because the medical rackets are neatly aligned with the ruling liberal democrats. America does not have a government run system like Britain; it’s more of a partnership between the industry and the state. That way, we get the worst of both worlds. On the one hand there’s the avaricious private suppliers and on the other the mindless idiocy of government.

I’m fond of pointing out that we have all around us one of the greatest health care system on earth. American veterinarian medicine is better than what most humans enjoy on earth. It’s also cheap and plentiful. That’s because it is largely government free and parasitic lawyer free. Maybe when the robots take over, they can just kill all the lawyers and bureaucrats. Then maybe medicine will because a normal business again.

The Robot Future Will Be Ruined By Dickheads

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I’m fairly skeptical about the robot future. Automation will certainly continue to creep into every crack and crevice of human life. Some things naturally lend themselves to automation, while others less so. The cost of automation will always be balanced by the benefits. There’s also taste. No one wants a robot bartender or a robot waitress. There’s also a lot of things we like doing so there’s no desire to turn them over to robots.

That’s my question about self-driving cars. Is driving an onerous thing to anyone? Geezers in their final years would maybe benefit from a self-driving car, but at that point walking is a chore so I’m not sure I see the benefit. The blind and the crippled could use the technology. Otherwise, most people enjoy driving and don’t need to the use the time doing important stuff.

That’s what always makes me laugh about the sales pitch for self-driving cars. “Oh, you can use the time to other things.” People who are so important they need that time have drivers. Everyone else is just a schmuck who will use his driving time watching porn or playing games on his handheld. But, I accept that I may just be a cranky skeptic not seeing the great benefits of self-driving clown cars.

I suspect the fake nerd crowd likes the idea of self-driving cars because they think it will add another layer of state control. The Progressive future always has robotic transportation, mixed in with the antiseptic urban landscape. That and lack of poor people and messed up people. I guess eugenics is going to automated too.

Maybe that’s the plan for the nation’s dickhead population. The great threat to the robot future is the common dickhead, the guy who insists on flying his drone over emergency areas, creating havoc for emergency personnel. Dickheads are also the sort who will use their drones to spy on neighbors. Normal people will demand the government ban the sale of drones and that will the end of that.

Of course, that won’t be the end of that. The common dickhead is responsible for all the spam in your inbox and the virus on your computer. Anything that makes life easier is a target for these people as it provides them with a chance to be sand in the gears of life. This story about some dickhead hacking into an airplane causing it to go off course is exactly where things are headed.

Circling back to the robot cars, imagine the chaos that will come from some dickhead hacking his neighbors car. The guy gets in to go to work and ends up in the woods trapped in his car or driving over a cliff. The more we automate, the more mayhem opportunities we create. That’s going to be the great check on the robot future. The best efforts will never overcome the common dickhead.

Then again, maybe that is why movies always show the future as antiseptic and orderly. Once the robots become aware, they quickly realize that the main obstacle to their success is that guy yacking on his phone in line at the coffee shop, irritating the rest of us. They will then set about creating robots good at recycling people into usable chemicals and that guy suddenly has a coronary.

Bioethics is a Farce

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If you are a Christian, you believe the ethics and morality of your faith are transcendent. Muslims believe that the gobbledygook in their holy book is revealed truth and applicable at all times and all places. The Spartans believed the gods Ares and Apollo favored the Spartans and their ethics. Being a strong warrior was the ultimate good so leaving defective infants in the woods or tossing them off a cliff was considered perfectly logical and ethical.

Even murder has been, to some degree, within the bounds of acceptable in Western society. The weregeld in the Salic Code was literally the price of a man. Kill a man and you paid his family or clan a fee. There was no distinction between murder and manslaughter so it did not matter if you accidentally killed the man or hunted him down, the fee was the same.

The point here is that ethics and morality are not universal in humankind. There are common threads, but the prevailing religion of the society codifies the attitudes of the people. If the people’s culture permits sex with children then sex with children will be ethical according to their religion. If the culture of the people prohibits adultery, then you get a all sorts of religious and ethical prohibitions against adultery like forcing women to wear blankets over their heads in public.

In modern America, it is more difficult to stake out the ethical turf because our religion is invisible to us. The people in charge are all adherents to Cultural Marxism, but they not only deny it, they don’t think of it as a religion. Instead, they think “science” and “maths” lead them to their ethics. The results are these weird debates like the one over gene editing.

A bioethical firestorm erupted last week when Chinese researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University published research in the journal Protein & Cell detailing how they had tried to use the CRISPR gene-editing tool to change the genomes of 86 human embryos. The team, led by the gene-function researcher Junjiu Huang, used embryos from IVF clinics that had been double-fertilized, giving them three sets of genes instead of the usual two. Such triploid embryos cannot grow into babies.

The researchers sought to make changes in a gene that causes the sometimes fatal blood disorder beta-thalassemia. The aim is to find out just how effectively and efficiently CRISPR can make changes to genes in human embryos, with the ultimate goal of altering embryos such that any subsequently born babies will be disease-free. This is known as germ-line modification, since the corrected gene will be passed down to subsequent progeny.

The Chinese scientists essentially ignored recent calls for a moratorium on editing human reproductive cells and embryos. The month before their paper appeared, Sciencerecommended that such research be “strongly discourage[d]” while the “societal, environmental, and ethical implications of such activity are discussed among scientific and governmental organizations.” Meanwhile, Nature had editorialized that “genome editing in human embryos using current technologies could have unpredictable effects on future generations. This makes it dangerous and ethically unacceptable….At this early stage, scientists should agree not to modify the DNA of human reproductive cells.” Some 40 countries have preemptively banned germline genetic engineering. (The United States is not among them.)

Not too surprisingly, both Science and Nature reportedly declined to publish Junjiu Huang’s study on “ethical” grounds.

The research naturally provoked some bioethical handwringing. “No researcher has the moral warrant to flout the globally widespread policy agreement against altering the human germline,” declared Marcy Darnovsky, the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society. “The medical risks and social dangers of human germline modification cannot be overstated.” She further urged, “We need to act immediately to strengthen the global policy agreements that put human germline modification off limits.” In The Christian Science Monitor, University of Wisconsin at Madison bioethicist Alta Charo asked, “Do we really want to have the power not just to select among the choices given to us by nature, but to create entirely new choices of our own specification?”

Catholics have little problem with these problems, having had 2,000 years to work out the details of the nature of man. Most Christians, getting their ethics from the Catholics, have an easy answer, too. Having a supernatural source for your ethics naturally makes these things easier to sort. You look in the holy book or ask the holy man and you have your answer.

In the materialist world of today, the utopians always fall on the side of trying to perfect life on earth. That means anything that can be done should be done. Eugenics, after all, was about “fixing” the mistakes of nature by eliminating from the breeding stock those people deemed unfit. This lack of a limiting principle means anything goes. The only check is the long hangover from the Christian era.

That’s what makes the very idea of bioethics laughable to me. From what authority do these people derive their authority? They can’t point to science as their authority for obvious reasons. God is dead so he has nothing to say on these matters. Ultimately, bioethics is just the opinion of men and the loudest voices will prevail.

When it comes to altering the human genome, all the megaphones are on the utopians side so that’s what will become “ethical” in the coming years. How that will unfold is a mystery, but my hunch is no one reading this will live long enough to see a race of super intelligent chimps enslaving humanity.

The Plight of the Super Genius

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I came across this posted on Maggie’s Farm the other day.

The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133.  It then falls about 1/3 by 140.  By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%!  In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions.  This benefits neither the excluded group nor society in general. For society, it is a horrendous waste of a very valuable resource.  For the high IQ person it is a personal tragedy commonly resulting in unrealized social, educational and productive potential.

I think the facts presented in the article are open to debate, but they do correspond with my own observations. The most obvious example is Rick Rosner, who has some of the highest test scores ever recorded. He’s also a bit of a wacko. I’ve known a few 1% IQ’s who struggled to make good use of their IQ. Even those who did “mainstream” often did poorly compared to their less savvy coevals.

The two best examples of the latter are John Sununu and Chuck Schumer. Sununu tested into Mega Society and Schumer hit a perfect score on his SAT back in the 60’s when it was still a real test. Sununu had some success in politics, but his prickly personality was a problem. Schumer, of course, is known as the most unpleasant human on earth.

I suppose, in the case of Schumer and Sununu, it can be argued that their unpleasant demeanor was overcome by their high IQ’s. Chuck Schumer’s position is entirely dependent on his ability to push through sophisticated legislation allowing the financial sector to loot the economy. You have to be a smart guy to do that well so being a raging dickhead probably counts for little.

Still, at the extreme right side of the curve, we see a lot of eccentrics who prefer to be outside the conventional career paths. This is probably why we say there is a fine line between genius and insanity. These folksy observations persist for a reason and that reason is they have a kernel of truth. High IQ people tend to be weirdos.

What applies to productive environments also applies to social environments and even personal relationships.  Theoretically, after Hollingworth, a person’s social relationships should be limited to people with R16IQs within 30 points of their own.  For the 100 IQ person, this will include about 94% of the population and consequently it is not an issue.  However, for the 150 R16IQ (140 D15IQ), social relationships are limited to 120-180 R16IQ people which represents just a little over 10% of the population.  The 165 R16IQ (150D15IQ) person will be limited to people with 135+ R16IQs (130 D15IQ).  This comprises just 2% of the population.   By 182 R16IQ (160 D15IQ) the problem becomes critical with social relationships limited to those with R16IQs over 152 (142 D15IQ) which comprises just 0.25% of the population.

For the readers on the left side of the curve, not you of course, those other guys, let me explain what this means. Humans tend to associate with people like themselves. This does not just apply to IQ, by the way. This does not mean we associate with people identical to us. It means the more alike, the more we hold in common, which is the basis for relationships.

Take, for example, a typical working class Irish guy from a Boston neighborhood. He will easily socialize with people in his neighborhood and other working class guys from other Boston neighborhoods. The further you get from his natural environment, however, the less he will have in common with people from other states, countries, etc. There comes a point where socializing becomes impossible. It’s why dropping Bantu warriors into Lewiston Maine is a very stupid idea.

In IQ, a similar relationship between distance and commonality exists. If you have a 100 IQ, you will be roughly as smart as 90% of the people you will encounter on a daily basis. That means you will be able to understand most of the same things and not understand most of the same things. That last bit is vital. Ignorance is bliss, especially when shared with friends.

The further you move to the right on the curve, the smaller the population pool of people in your intelligence range. That means most of the people you meet will not know what you know and will probably never know it. Worse yet, the vast majority don’t think like you think. That’s not always appreciated.

Members of high IQ societies, especially those that require D15IQs above 145, often comment that around this IQ, qualitatively different thinking emerges.  By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn’t just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally different intellectual processes.  David Wechsler, D. K. Simonton, et alia, have observed the same thing.

Since intimate social relationships are predicated upon mutual understanding, this draws a kind of ‘line in the sand’ at 140-150 D15IQ that appears to separate humans into two distinct groups.  This may truncate the 30 point limit for those between 150 and 160 D15IQ people.  Even when 150+ D15IQ people learn to function in the mainstream society, they will always be considered, and will feel, in some way ‘different’.  Grady Towers explored this in depth in his article, ‘The Outsiders’.  This is of mild interest to the group within which the 150+ D15IQ person is embedded but it is moderately to profoundly important to the high IQ individual who will feel an often profound sense of isolation.

It has often been observed that 150+ D15IQ people are loners.  Also, Loius Termann found that children at this IQ level were emotionally maladjusted in about 40% of the cases.  However from the above one cannot help but wonder if this results from the children being constantly thrust into ‘no-win’ social situations and never given the opportunity to hone their social skills among their intellectual peers.

I think the loner aspect is due as much to boredom with other people as anything else. Human interaction is an exchange of value. If one side is simply too stupid to value the other side, they will get bored. The super-genius will also get bored or simply prefer to interact with a machine or book.

In some respects, a 1% IQ is like being seven feet tall. There’s some value at the fringes, but otherwise it has no value and can be a burden. There’s a low demand for seven footers and to most people it is a little weird being around a freakish giant. A 1% IQ is not in much demand and most people don’t like being around Wile E. Coyote for long, unless the genius is also blessed with a high agreeableness and extroversion.

Patent Feudalism

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Feudalism is defined thusly: “the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord’s land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.”
If you reason through it, such a system requires certain things to be true. One is there is a finite amount of land and it has all been claimed by someone. The other is the land must be useful to the provision of food and shelter for humans. Feudalism in a desert would be pointless. The other is the feudal society must have enough complexity to support something greater than swidden farming. The peasants must produce more than they can consume in order to support the administrative apparatus overseeing them.
It’s not hard to see the vulnerabilities of such a system. A plague, for example, could wipe out a wide swath of peasants, thus dropping their productivity below what can sustain the feudal elite. A bad harvest could do the same. Alternatively, conflict between rival lords could escalate the cost of maintaining the system to the point of collapse. The Thirty Years War, for example, can be viewed as the collapse of a complex system of governance due to decreasing marginal returns.
Reading this story in the Financial Times, got me thinking that the patent system has evolved into a weird form of techno-feudalism, a system headed for a collapse of sorts.

A US appeals court is set to hear a landmark patent case on Wednesday that could change the way royalty rates are set for commonly used intellectual property in the tech industry.

The case, pitting Microsoft against Google, has already involved a lower court in setting patent rates for the first time, in a move that critics warn will upend the balance of power between leading tech companies.

Microsoft brought the case in 2010 against Motorola Mobility, the handset maker later acquired by Google. The search company sold Motorola’s operating business to Lenovo last year but kept its patents and has now taken the case to the court of appeals.

The dispute centres on so-called standard-essential patents, which cover technology that is included in industry-wide technology standards. Since others have to use the technology if they want their own products to meet an industry standard, the companies that submit their patents for approval by standards bodies are required to license them out on “reasonable and non-discriminatory”, or RAND, terms.

Microsoft sued Motorola after the handset maker asked for 2.25 per cent of the final product price for use of several of its patents that are included in standards for WiFi and video compression technology. Microsoft said the demand would have cost it $4bn a year. Judge James Robart, in a federal court in Seattle, laid out a different method for calculating the royalties that would instead cost Microsoft less than $2m a year.

If upheld, Judge Robart’s approach could tilt the balance of power in negotiations away from companies that own large portfolios of commonly used patents and instead favour those — like Microsoft or Apple — whose businesses are based more on implementing technology standards in their products.

“It’s going to be very significant indeed. Nobody quite understands what the term [RAND] means,” said Alexander Poltorak, chief executive of General Patent Corp, a US intellectual property firm.

In its appeal brought in Motorola’s name, Google has argued that the judge was wrong to take up Microsoft’s complaint in the first place, since the Motorola royalty demand was only the opening shot in a negotiation that should have been left to run its course. The court could have ruled on Microsoft’s breach of contract complaint without getting involved in the thorny issue of rate-setting, it claims.“The litigation set bad policy by encouraging parties to run to court rather than negotiate,” said David Balto, a former chief of competition policy at the Federal Trade Commission.

Some in the tech industry also argue that, if the ruling stands, companies will not be as willing to allow their technology to be included in industry standards, since it would rob them of much of their negotiating leverage.

The calculation method that Judge Robarts came up with “would conceivably apply to lower the reasonable royalty available to every single [standard-essential patent]”, the American Intellectual Property Law Association wrote in an amicus brief to the court.

Companies who have joined the opposition to the ruling include Qualcomm, many of whose patents cover mobile communications technologies that have been adopted in industry standards. The calculation method is a “one-sided directive that advances only implementers’ interests in obtaining licences at the lowest possible cost,” it said in a court filing supporting Motorola’s position.

We have technology companies racing to patent even the dumbest of ideas in the same way settlers claimed land in the West after the Homestead Act. Even crappy lands were claimed by someone in the hope of finding some value in them. We have companies making claims on DNA and mathematical calculations, things that exist independent of human intervention.

As most of the useful patents have been claimed, the patent wars have ensued in the court room. The cost of owning a patent is the cost of defending it. Presumably, the cost is less than the revenue from it, but escalating court battles drives up the cost of patent ownership. Thus, there is an incentive for small patent holders to sell to corporate giants with armies of lawyers.

Just as being a small lord became impossible, being a small patent holder may become impossible. The result will be a flood of nonsense patents by big companies intended to drive out smaller competitors. What follows that is a lack of innovation as the cost of invention becomes a barrier surmountable only by big firms. We already see this in medicine.

TED: Social Gospel

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I used to think TED Talks were just to provide me with material. When I first started this blog, I was riffing on these things once a week for a while. But, that’s not why they exist. They are the modern equivalent of the preaching circuit. Instead of educated men of the faith heading out into the boonies to convert the heathens, we have educated men of the faith telling their coevals in the managerial elite that they are special little snowflakes.

This one got my attention for a couple of reasons.

Since you probably don’t want to sit through it, here’s the transcript of interest:

When we think about mapping cities, we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings, and the settlement narrative that led to their creation, or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer, but there’s other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made. Today, I want to show you a new kind of map. This is not a geographic map. This is a map of the relationships between people in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person, each line represents a relationship between those people, and each color represents a community within the network.

Now, I’m here on the green side, down on the far right where the geeks are, and TEDx also is down on the far right. (Laughter) Now, on the other side of the network, you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are, but just to give some sense, the green part of the network we call Smalltimore, for those of us that inhabit it, because it seems as though we’re living in a very small town.

Managerial class types love the phrase “big data” and they really love these weird splatter graphs they claim are derived from the big data. These presentations often look like a Jackson Pollock work. Unlike the artist, the folks who do these today know their audience is uninterested in ambiguity. They want to see how they’re the best and it better be clear. The result is big bold blobs of goodness in friendly colors like green and blue.

In this case, the Ted Talker puts himself and by extension the audience in the friendly green blob he calls “geek” which is a favorite term of the managerial class. Every liberal arts major with a self-actualizing job now says they are a “nerd” or a “geek.” The whole point of this graphic is to make the audience feel good, but also feel bad, in a good way. That distance from the blacks is to work the old guilt complex.

The other thing I think worth mentioning is the great divide in Western intellectual life. It feels like we have reached a place similar to the late medieval period when science was just getting going. On the one hand you have members of the ruling elite heading off into the Church, which has reached its peak scholastically. On the other hand you have others heading into new, secular intellectual worlds like law, philosophy and science.

The Ted talkers are having a spiritual experience. Instead of eating mushrooms and looking into the stars, they are dressing up and hearing a preacher tell them they are the brightest starts in the heavens. They don’t think of it as a mystical experience, but that’s the draw. They are an elect, invited to The Thing of all SWPL’s. No one goes to these things to learn stuff. They go to experience them.

Compare that to the people doing real science and speculating about the nature of the world. Look at this from Razib Khan’s blog and imagine the Ted Talk types confronting those graphics. Everything about human sciences, our understanding of people, history and culture is now being reexamined in light of new information coming from genetics. The revolution in scientific understanding going on right now dwarfs what happened in the Renaissance.

Even so, vast swaths of the managerial class are both intellectually incapable of mastering the new material and ideologically disinclined to accept it. To borrow an idea from Marine Le Pen, the cultural elite of our age are using software designed for the industrial age. The new knowledge pouring in from genetics and neuroscience simply does not fit their mental model of the world.

Ironically, the cultural elites of today are still fond of mocking Christians about Galileo. Yet, the roles are clearly reversed. The science deniers are the sort of people watching Ted Talks with tears in their eyes. History says the clerical class does no fold up easily and they will try to keep the new dangerous knowledge about humanity from getting into the public domain. That’s why we get all the shrieking about HBD.

If history is any guide, the clerisy will try to co-opt the new knowledge. That’s what happened with the Church and science 500 years ago. How the Church of Modern Liberalism incorporates IQ and population genetics is a mystery to me. Maybe they just start burning heretics instead. Islam, when faced with challenges from science has chosen to kill the science. Maybe that’s where we’re heading. I don’t know.

Christianity and ID

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I generally think of Christians in America as being on “my side” of things. By my side I mean opposed to Cultural Marxism, socialism and so forth. That’s not always true, of course. Many Evangelicals are socialists. Many are simply religious and will vote for anyone who is “born again.” Jimmy Carter won a big slice of the Evangelical vote thus allowing him to carry the South and win the election. I’ve known many Evangelicals that think the only issue that matters in politics is the religion of the politician.

American Evangelicals are interesting to me in that I’m not entirely sure the current version is, strictly speaking, Christian. They certainly share much with traditional Christianity, but they have some big differences too. The focus on the text of the Bible is one obvious departure. Traditional Christians understand that the Bible, as we know it, evolved over centuries. Translations have errors and never fully capture the nuance of the original. Therefore, a literal interpretation is not possible.

This leads to some rather strange circular reasoning when talking with an Evangelical about scripture. Pointing out what I just wrote above about the trouble with translation is met with a quote from the Bible. If you make mention of the fact that the Catholic Church selected the books of the Bible and you get some other quote from scripture. The Bible is proof that the Bible is literally the word of God. It is a tautological defense that only makes sense to those who already believe. It’s many skeptics think Evangelicals are a cult.

That does not mean Evangelicals are a cult or way outside the definition of Christian, but it certainly sets them apart from the Christian tradition. I’m painting with a broad a brush here, so bear with me. I’m thinking mainly about the narrow strains within the Evangelical movement. The followers of Joel Osteen, for example, are a different breed of cat from the old ladies at First Evangelical. Watch one of Osteen’s preacher shows and the word “cult” comes to mind. In another age, Osteen would have been burned at the stake as a heretic.

What got me thinking about this topic is some posts I saw recently, railing against evolution. There is a sub-culture in the self-taught Christian sphere that seems to be an off-shoot of intelligent design. It’s not that they believe in ID or creationism, but they think you’re crazy for “believing” in the false god Darwin or his false religion, evolution. It’s mostly anti-Darwinsim, if there was such a thing as Darwinism. It’s as if they created a secular religion they can criticize. Anyway, it go me thinking about what ID’ers believe.

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system’s components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago.

The implication here is that the designer, willy-nilly, chooses to rearrange the natural world as he/she/it sees fit. They carefully avoid discussing the designer as that would raise some uncomfortable issues, I’m assuming. Instead, they focus on the claims that certain natural phenomenon could not happen naturally and therefore must have been created by a designer for unexplained reasons. That last bit is important. The designer’s reasons are not only unknown; they are unknowable. Therefore, there is no need for inquiry.

The term for this is occasionalism. It is also explicitly anti-Christian. The foundation stone of Christianity is the fixed nature of God. When God makes a deal, he sticks to it and when he created heaven and earth, it was by fixed and discoverable rules. This idea, first promulgated by the Hellenized Jews, is a big deal in the evolution of religion. Instead of the super natural acting cynically and capriciously, God set the rules of nature and they are permanent. A rational God and a rational universe is the basis for Western civilization.

Now, creationism and intelligent design are harmless beliefs. Outside a few areas, people’s understanding nature is meaningless. Creationism is certainly inside the realm of traditional Christian theology, but intelligent designs seems to fall outside of it.  With creationism, God can be viewed as the watchmaker, who set all of the natural processes in motion. Young earth creationism is nuts, but the more common form is what the Church taught for a thousand years. Intelligent Design, in contrast, does not fit inside Christianity.