Category Archives: Science & Tech

My Fridge is Spying on Me

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On my last trip out of the ghetto, I rented a car at Logan Airport. It was a nondescript sedan as you would expect from a rental car company. It may have been a Hyundai or possibly a Toyota. All of our cars look the same nowadays so I suppose it does not matter. At some point I stopped to fiddle with the radio, hoping that maybe the satellite radio was working. I don’t have a Sirius subscription, but I would if I spent a lot of time in the car. It’s a great service. Fiddling around, I noted that the car was Bluetooth enabled meaning I could (maybe) play music from my phone, but I had things to do so I went on my way, leaving it for later.

At some point as I was tooling around Cambridge, a friend called and suddenly the radio stopped. Then the phone ringer was coming through the car speakers. When I answered the phone I was hearing the call through the car’s speakers and speaking through a hidden microphone somewhere. It was a little disorienting at first as I was not expecting it. Later in the day I had time to fiddle with the radio again and I noticed my phone had synced with the car automatically. I left the Bluetooth enabled on my phone by mistake. Thus, my phone and this strange car were able to conspire without my knowing.

I noticed that a lot of phone data from previous renters had been loaded into the car’s radio. Who knows if they knew it. I deleted my phone from the list and shutoff my Bluetooth. I keep nothing on phone of any value, but my phone is willing to partner with just about anyone, it seems, so who knows what mischief it could drag me into. My phone has now become another sentient thing I have to look after or beware of, as the case may be.

It’s going to get much worse as our rulers insist on wiring up more of our stuff so they can keep better track of us. The Internet of Things trend promises to let all sorts of people keep tabs on us in our homes. The same people who are always getting hacked and losing our credit card data will now be in charge of making sure the fridge does not tell tales out of school about us. I’m sure that will work out just fine. What could possible go wrong?

Of course, these services will be offered “free” but you will consent to having the electric company turn off your lights at night, the gas company monitoring your heat usage, the diet police watching your beer consumption. At first it will just be friendly e-mails and texts about your wastefulness. I get these now from the power company telling me I use more electric than my neighbors. They include a little graph, I’m always in red, and “hints” about how I can be a better steward of the environment. What comes after the “hints” is probably a knock on the door.

Increasingly, the private space of life is contracting. The government gets to read your private correspondence without notice. They can listen to your mobile phone chatter. They analyze your financial data looking for trouble. Now they have our health care data and will surely be using that in ways that only paranoids from a prior era imagined. If you complain about it at home, within earshot of the television, that could be a problem. Your TV is no longer a trusted member of the home.

All of it is for your own good and mostly welcome by the public. The thing about the custodial state is the inmates quickly get used to the walls, the gates, the guards, the instructions. Even the worst police states on earth have a cooperative and docile population. North Korea is arguably the worst place on earth. They regularly make the uncooperative hold a mortar shell until it goes off. The people have been on the edge of starvation for decades, yet they peacefully submit. Most Americans will have no trouble submitting to Big Google as long as the flow of goodies does not stop.

A world without privacy or volition is not entirely alien to the human animal. Early man surely lived in close proximity with his clan, sharing all of the intimate details of life with the clan. Well into settlement, privacy was a rarity. Heck, well into the 20th century, outhouses for two were common in rural America. If you can share a two-holer with another member of the family, there’s not much you are going to think is private. I suspect communal living amongst the Vikings is why some Scandinavians are so shameless.

In the “hodgepodge” society our rulers are planning for us, privacy will not exist. Everything you do will be monitored by someone and therefore made public at some point. In such a world, there’s no need to for any sense of shame. There would be no point. In prisons and basic training, the near total lack of privacy fundamentally alters human relations. Our rulers with their dreams of trench socialism, are sure the hodgepodge will be like boot camp or an army base. History says it will be more like San Quentin or North Korea.

In a world where even your fridge is spying on you, there can be no trust. We have plenty of experience with low trust societies like those in sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East. North Korea or Albania back in the Soviet says were examples of extremely low trust surveillance societies, but they were homogeneous. A heterogeneous, zero trust society sounds a lot like Angola State Prison, but our rulers are convinced otherwise. I’ll be dead before reach that point, but that’s where we are heading.

The Great Hoax

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I am an empirically minded guy who thinks math is the only important and necessary field of study. In my free time I like to work math puzzles and learn machine languages. That’s not to say all the other stuff is unimportant or useless, but I put it into the leisure activity category. Western society took off with Calculus, not the Canterbury Tales.

That said, a healthy skepticism with science is warranted. Science, in the abstract is pure, but we don’t live in the abstract; we live in the real. In the real world science is financed by men and practiced by men. That means all the stupidity, vice and bias that is a part of the human animal will find its way into the lab. There’s no greater example of that phenomenon than the global warming hoax.

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

A basic rule of science is that data, data collection methods and data normalization methods are always exposed to scrutiny. Heck, it’s true in hedge funds and big data shops. No one takes anyone’s word for it. It has to be right so the data, collection methods and adjustments are checked, rechecked and monitored by multiple people. It’s simply prudent.

In climate science, the opposite is often true. Michael Mann, for example, refuses to expose his raw data to public scrutiny. The “adjustments” are rarely explained and often hidden. The models these guys rely upon are black boxes where even the inputs are not entirely clear.

One of the first examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post, “Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed by those of the past 20 years.

Homewood’s interest in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.

The other old rule of science and of life, is that if you have nothing to hide you have no reason to hide. These guys keep trying to trick the public for a reason and the only plausible reasons are not good. Worse yet, they diminish the people’s trust in science, giving space for lunatics like the anti-vaccine nuts make their claims.

 

Good Government

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It is assumed, by liberal lunatics, that those who oppose them are universally against government. That’s complete nonsense, of course, but that’s what happens when you live in a country run by a religious cult. The truth is the Old Right and now the Dissident Right always thought government was essential to civilization. What must be guarded against is the excess of government.

Men are not angels. That is where the discussion must begin and end when it comes to investing power. Give government too much power and the men in charge will inevitably abuse it. Give corporations too much power and they will eventually abuse it. It is at the heart of Distributism.

Anyway, here’s a good example of what government can do and should do.

Numerous store brand supplements aren’t what their labels claim to be, an ongoing investigation of popular herbal supplements subjected to DNA testing has found, New York state’s top law enforcement official said Tuesday.

GNC, Target, Walmart and Walgreen Co. sold supplements that either couldn’t be verified to contain the labeled substance or that contained ingredients not listed on the label, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office said.

The supplements, including echinacea, ginseng, St. John’s wort, garlic, ginkgo biloba and saw palmetto, were contaminated with substances including rice, beans, pine, citrus, asparagus, primrose, wheat, houseplant and wild carrot. In many cases, unlisted contaminants were the only plant material found in the product samples.

Overall, 21 percent of the test results from store brand herbal supplements contained DNA from the plants listed on the labels. The retailer with the poorest showing was Walmart, where 4 percent of the products tested showed DNA from the plants listed on the labels.

Supplement makers sell products to the public claiming they are safe and possess magical powers. The government should be randomly testing these things to make sure they are safe and that the claims on the bottles are honest. The public needs to know if they are eating sawdust or houseplants.

Now, I know where you’re going to go. The state does not stop at testing. They will inevitably reach out the greedy hand demanding a bribe. The same inspectors who are checking the safety of these pills will be unleashed on some politically incorrect company doing all sorts of damage in the name of the one true faith.

Well, that’s true. There’s nothing magical about any of this. Give people too much power and you get abuse. That’s not an argument against government. it is an argument against big government.

Gluten Free Vegan Magic

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This goes up as I am cooking for a big party. I will be making three to four deep fried turkeys, the corresponding amount of side dishes, as well as appetizers and specialty items. I have been doing this on Super Bowl Sunday for decades now. There is a long and not terribly interesting origin story behind this tradition, but that is not important. The point is I have cooked for a large number of people many times over many years, and I have noticed some things about people and food that I thought would make a good post.

We live in the golden age of man when it comes to food. We have more than enough to feed all of us, even the poorest of us. We also have every variety of food imaginable. In addition to turkey, I will make an authentic Mexican dish with material from Mexico. I will have sides and appetizers with ingredients from around the world. Despite this bounty, everyone is now afraid of their food. Food allergies, moralizing and whack-a-doodle dietary fads has everyone looking at their plate with suspicion.

Back when this annual event started, it was easy to cook a bunch of food for a bunch of people. Besides the turkey and sides, we had beer and some store bought deserts. Then vegetarians started to show up followed by vegans. That meant adding dishes for people who do not eat meat and those who do not oppress their food, whatever the hell that means. Of course, beer was no longer enough so a variety of wines and cocktails were added to the menu. All of which came with a lecture from the food cultist about the morality and science of their new thing.

Recently everyone has become gluten free, swearing they have an allergy to bread. All those years stuffing cakes and sandwiches into their trap was part of some plot by big food to make them tubby. Statistically, I now have 25,000 friends. The reason is simple math. Science tells me that 0.2% of humans have the genetic defect for gluten intolerance.  I know at least 50 people claiming to have Celiac Disease. Divide 50 by .002 and you get 25,000. That or I have a lot of delusional friends.

The truth, of course, is bread has a lot of calories that the human body can use quickly. That is why humans make bread. It is a great way to feed a lot of people. The trouble comes when we eat too much and exercise too little. Modern humans simply do not get enough physical exercise for the amount of food they consume. When you stop eating bread, magically you reduce your calories and begin to lose weight. You lose weight so you feel better and more confident. That makes gluten evil, at least in the mind of the maniac.

My read on this faux-allergy stuff is it is mostly women. The yogurt makers have figured out how to capitalize on their psycho-somatic stomach discomfort by claiming “probiotics” are the cure. Slap a new label on the old yogurt, double the price and you have a whole new revenue stream for the Acme Yogurt Company. I wish I had thought of it.

That said, men have their own food superstitions these days. I know guys who swallow dozens of supplements every day, believing they are the key to losing weight, staying young, getting a boner, living forever, etc. If the label says good things with words containing “-trophic” then they will shell out fifty bucks for a bottle. The more made up words the better. I read some of these bottles and start laughing as the neologisms are usually nonsense.

Modern times are all about the search for the magic pill or the magic food. This site I added to the blog roll has a bunch of stuff on supplements. Most supplements like daily vitamins are a waste of money at best. Some have some benefit, depending upon your lifestyle. A few have real science behind them like fish oil and vitamin D. But knowing what real science is and what is nonsense not so easy. The linked site appears to get that and take a critical view of the research offered up by the pill makers. But I have not spent enough time there to know for sure so do not take my word for it.

That is the thing that I find fascinating. It is not just that we do not know that much about human dietary needs. It is that we have so much bad science floating around. My guess is there is more money in bogus studies that help sell miracle drugs than in studies that debunk them. The result is a mountain of junk science, burying the good science, if it even exists.

Maybe that is the point of all of this. Science is boring, but believing nonsense is fun. Believing that your cheeseburger is out to get you is more interesting than knowing you cannot live on cheeseburgers without getting fat. If your choice of food can also be a way to elevate yourself on the moral scale, then eating becomes more than a bodily function. It is an act of piety.

My own view is less grandiose. I eat a minimum of carbohydrates because otherwise I would weigh 300 pounds. I stick with poultry, eggs, and some dairy. That way I can eat tasty things, like eggs and bacon, without worrying about my weight. On the other hand, life is for living so having pizza once in a while or a bag of chips (crisps) is not going to kill me. If it does, so be it. At least I had fun with the time I had. That is the point of life. Use the time you have and enjoy it as much as possible. Hell is for people who denied themselves pleasures thinking it was their ticket to heaven.

Enjoy the big game and may your balls never go flat.

I Am ODD

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Or maybe I have ODD. Either way, it appears I am clinically insane. A lot of people have made this claim and now they have expert opinion on their side.

Is nonconformity and freethinking a mental illness? According to the newest addition of the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), it certainly is. The manual identifies a new mental illness called “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD. Defined as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed.

The DSM-IV is the manual used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental illnesses and, with each new edition, there are scores of new mental illnesses. Are we becoming sicker? Is it getting harder to be mentally healthy? Authors of the DSM-IV say that it’s because they’re better able to identify these illnesses today. Critics charge that it’s because they have too much time on their hands.

New mental illnesses identified by the DSM-IV include arrogance, narcissism, above-average creativity, cynicism, and antisocial behavior. In the past, these were called “personality traits,” but now they’re diseases. And there are treatments available.

Psychiatry is quackery for the most part. Not all of it, of course. Categorizing types of mental illness is a legitimate science. Studying the links between genetics, brain chemistry and mental illness is very serious science. Working with a patient in order to figure out the proper medication to administer is sound medicine. Talking someone out of being crazy is just voodoo. Talk therapy is exactly that, when you think about it. Would anyone try to talk someone out of a broken leg?

All of this is a symptom of our over-diagnosing and overmedicating culture. In the last 50 years, the DSM-IV has gone from 130 to 357 mental illnesses. A majority of these illnesses afflict children. Although the manual is an important diagnostic tool for the psychiatric industry, it has also been responsible for social changes. The rise in ADD, bipolar disorder, and depression in children has been largely because of the manual’s identifying certain behaviors as symptoms. A Washington Post article observed that, if Mozart were born today, he would be diagnosed with ADD and “medicated into barren normality.”

I suspect chemistry is the blame for some of this. Psychiatry lost a lot of its utility once the pill makers began to produce useful medications for things like depression. Spending an hour a week talking to a guy with a beard and turtle-neck became pointless once you could just take a pill. So, the shrinks went looking for new forms of crazy that did not have a pill.

According to the DSM-IV, the diagnosis guidelines for identifying oppositional defiant disorder are for children, but adults can just as easily suffer from the disease. This should give any freethinking American reason for worry. The Soviet Union used new “mental illnesses” for political repression.  People who didn’t accept the beliefs of the Communist Party developed a new type of schizophrenia. They suffered from the delusion of believing communism was wrong.  They were isolated, forcefully medicated, and put through repressive “therapy” to bring them back to sanity.

When the last edition of the DSM-IV was published, identifying the symptoms of various mental illnesses in children, there was a jump in the diagnosis and medication of children. Some states have laws that allow protective agencies to forcibly medicate, and even make it a punishable crime to withhold medication.  This paints a chilling picture for those of us who are nonconformists. Although the authors of the manual claim no ulterior motives but simply better diagnostic practices, the labeling of freethinking and nonconformity as mental illnesses has a lot of potential for abuse. It can easily become a weapon in the arsenal of a repressive state.

I’d add that targeting children is deliberate. Telling a hate-thinker like me that I have a mental disorder gets you nowhere. I don’t care and if you push it, I’ll punch you in the nose. Getting some half-wit school counselor to tell an unsuspecting parent that their little boy has “oppositional defiant disorder” is a money maker. The busy-bodies at the school get to push around the parents and the psychiatry rackets get another customer.

Psychology has been a favorite tool of authoritarians for a reason. There’s a loads of ambiguity that can be used to torment those who annoy the tyrant. Dragging the heckler off to the lunatic asylum is a less obvious way of handling the problem than having him thrown from the nearest cliff. Once the trouble maker is in the asylum, then the guys in lab coats can finish the job. Given the trajectory of our ruling classes, the shrinks are just getting prepared for the inevitable.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy being ODD.

What We Don’t Know

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We live in a miraculous age. Things that used to kill off large numbers of humans like disease or accidents, are no longer much trouble. People still die from falls and cancer, but not from the sniffles or a broken leg. Every year, science makes various cancers less lethal. New methods from genetics promise to mitigate things like Alzheimer’s Disease. It is hard not to think that man is inches away from conquering creation then, you see something like this and you’re reminded of how much we don’t know.

The most important job inside any cell is making proteins, and they are all made using instructions from DNA. This process is practically gospel in the field of molecular biology, but new research identifies some exceptions. Some proteins, it turns out, can make other proteins.

Proteins are assembled from amino acids inside cellular structures called ribosomes. Normally, the blueprints for every protein—from disease fighting antibodies to structural components that allow muscles to contract—are encoded in DNA and delivered to the ribosomes by molecules called messenger RNA. There, those genetic instructions are used by a related molecule called transfer RNA to build the protein.

The image above,published todayin the journalScienceshows a totally different way of building a protein. The yellow blob is a protein called Rqc2 that’s doing the job normally done by messenger RNA. It is connected to the transfer RNA (the blue and light green blobs), telling the ribosomes (the mass of white curls) to insert a random sequence of amino acids into the protein string.

This isn’t a case of a protein going rogue. It seems to be part of the recycling process that occurs when there’s a mistake in a protein being built. When an error is introduced, the ribosomes stall and call in a group of quality control proteins, including Rqc2. In observing this process, the researchers saw how Rqc2 links up with the transfer RNA and tells it to insert a random sequence of two amino acids into the chain (out of 20 total amino acids).

The researchers believe that Rqc2’s seemingly aberrant behavior might be an integral part of keeping your body free of faulty proteins. It’s possible that it is flagging the protein for destruction, or that the string of amino acids could be a test to see if the ribosome is working properly. People with disorders like Alzheimers and Huntingtons diseases have defective quality control processes for their proteins. Understanding the exact conditions where Rqc2 is triggered, and where it fails to trigger, are the next step in this research, and could be important for developing new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

Even with technological acceleration, it will probably take a generation to figure out how that works. In the process, all sorts of new things will be discovered that present even more mysteries to be solved by future generations. It’s a good reminder that the set of things we do know about the natural world is a drop in the ocean of what can be known.

Real Disruption

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Economist like to throw around the term “disruptive” to describe the latest fads. It makes them feel hip and edgy, I guess. Most of it is crap. Some is just criminal. Steve Sailer often points out that Silicon Valley gets to exempt itself from a lot of rules everyone else has to follow. That’s why Uber gets to exist and it gets to be “disruptive.” I know that makes me sound like an old coot bitching about the kids running on my lawn, but I’m an old coot who bitches about the kids running on my lawn. Whaddaya gonna do?

The point is most of what is tossed around as disruptive technology is bullshit, but that does not mean there’s no disruptive technology. It’s just that culture and IQ blinds our betters to what is about to turn over the apple cart. By culture I mean the prevailing beliefs of those in charge. Back when I was screwing around with my first computer, the smart guys were starting a national newspaper. It was probably not my first computer, but you get the point. Most of us are too locked into the here and now to see what’s coming down the road. The folks who claim to be on top of the new trends are always surprised by what comes next.

That’s the culture part. There’s also the IQ part. Most of the American press corp struggles with basic technology. Back in the 1990’s, I used to love reading stories about the “internet” in the common press. They described it in the same language you describe a conspiracy theory or secret society. Even today, the typical “journalist” is overwhelmed by the technology the rest of us take for granted. That’s why they keep getting gaffed by nonsense like the Rolling Stone rape hoax. How hard was it to look up the facts on-line? It took me no time at all. I never got credit for that. Instead the guy at 28 Sherman claimed credit, but that’s not the point. The chattering skulls in the media are just not very bright so they miss the big stuff coming down the pike.

Anyway, where was I?

That’s right. Disruptive technology.

The thing that is going to toss over the apple cart is none of the stuff the middle-aged dorks at Marginal Revolution talk about every day. The meteor in the sky is DNA.

The social worker said no. The judge said no. The local phone books were useless.

For decades, no one and nothing could help Sue Warthen find the people who gave birth to her in the mid-1960s.

Then her adoptive mother encouraged Mrs. Warthen’s new husband, Rob, a computer whiz, to see what he could do.

He built a computer program that permitted him to “build out” family trees, and he asked his wife to swab her cheek and send her DNA to a genealogy company.

Mr. Warthen put her results into his program, worked with a “search angel” named Karin Corbeil, and found a trail that led to Mrs. Warthen’s birth mother.

Additional investigative work may now have led to her birth father too.

“I’ve always wanted to know where I actually came from that I wasn’t simply dropped off,” said Mrs. Warthen, who was adopted in Maryland when she was a few months old and has been looking for her birth family since the early 1980s, when she turned 18.

Today, hundreds, if not thousands, of adoptees have used DNA genealogy companies like Family Tree DNA, 23andMe and Ancestry.com to jump over bureaucratic barriers and find members of their genetic families.

“People sometimes say we can’t do it unless there’s close DNA matches, but that’s not true — we can do it with distant ones too,” said CeCe Moore, a professional genetic genealogist who has appeared on “Finding Your Roots” with Henry L. Gates Jr. on PBS.

Even “foundlings” can find their birth relatives, Ms. Moore said.

DNA testing is the only way to find family heritage for these people since “opening records can’t help when there are no records,” said Ms. Moore, who has helped find birth families for a woman who was abandoned as a baby behind a grocery store, another person who was left on church steps and a third who was left at a baby-sitter’s house.

People unfamiliar with adoption may not realize that for decades, it was typical for agencies, charities and lawyers to arrange “closed” adoptions.

This meant an adoptee was given an amended birth certificate with the names of their adoptive parents and possibly not told they were adopted.

Legally, their original birth certificates were, in most U.S. states, sealed in courts and not made available to an adoptee except in cases of legal necessity. Sometimes, only medical information about the birth family — but no names — was provided.

This led to widespread private and professional “search and reunion” efforts, as well as campaigns to change state laws to let adult adoptees have their original birth records.

A large chunk of Western culture rests on pretty lies that are hard to debunk. For instance, we know that you really can’t go from poverty to the penthouse with hard work. You can go from the slums to lower middle class through hard work. You can go from middle class to upper middle. You’re going to need something else to jump a bunch of rungs up the ladder or down the ladder. We all sort of know it, but we take comfort in believing otherwise. Think about how different the world would look if suddenly everyone figured out that going to college will have no material impact on your life. That one pretty lie holds up a trillion dollars in financialization.

That’s what the linked story is showing. DNA testing is now throwing over a bedrock feature of western adoption. It’s going to throw over the sperm donor business too. Once everyone knows that they can find their biological family, what’s the point of keeping donors secret? What’s the point of sealing adoption records? Of course, it’s also going to put the lie to the claims about parenting. DNA testing is not just going to reveal lineage. It will reveal the heritability of personality traits and IQ.

Big chunks of the foundation are about to crumble thanks to genetics. Medical insurance is all about risk. Insurance companies hedge their risk by creating large pools. Basically they socialize what they don’t know about their customers health risks. What happens when they know those risk from a simple mouth swab? For that matter, what happens when that same swab can determine one’s propensity for crime? Violence? Homosexuality?

As we have seen over the last few decades, magical thinking like socialism can get along just fine with the microprocessor. It’s not going to hold up to DNA testing. Capitalism probably falls apart too when we can easily divide the population into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. The Alphas and Epsilons have always been known. It’s the folks in the middle. Things work because they all know they are not Epsilons and think they can become Alphas. What happens when that’s no longer plausible?

The Future is Null

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For as long as any of us have been alive, the default assumption is that humans are not the only self-aware beings in the universe. Everyone just knows that out in space, there are intelligent life forms that have evolved on some planet somewhere. Libraries of books and countless movies and TV shows have been created around the belief in life beyond earth. Not just bugs and plants either. Intelligent life along with all the stuff that comes with it.

Alien life is almost always imagined to be more intelligent than earthlings. Everyone just knows that the aliens are our intellectual superiors. Most assume that means they have evolved to be our moral superiors. That lets our scolds project onto the aliens features and attributes they wish we possessed. Others go the other way and the aliens are an out-sized version of our worst features. That means the aliens roam the universe consuming natural resources like locusts or enslaving minorities.

I’m not sure where I saw this, but it fits the pattern.

If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won’t look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It’s likely they won’t be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction, that is—have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper “Alien Minds,” written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

The fact that all of this was thought up by science fiction writers a long time ago is lost on all of these folks. I guess when you have letters after your name, dreaming up crazy nonsense is grant worthy, even when it is someone else’s crazy nonsense. Regardless, the Borg was thought up when they rebooted the Star Trek series for TV. That was ripped off from the first Star Trek movie when Voyager returns after having acquired all knowledge in the universe.

People who take a new spin on this bit are always heralded as futurists, people with grand imaginations that think up out-of-the-box scenarios. The reality is it takes little to no imagination or intelligence. What’s tough is imagining a world where we are are the dominant life form. That’s what pushes the envelope of imagination. It’s what made Asimov’s Foundation series so great. Asimov had an uncanny grip on religion and science, without have strong emotions for or against either of them.

It’s why I find the singularity stuff so dull and stupid. It is just a blend of mysticism and science fiction, without a lot creativity. Instead of reaching a higher consciousness, we end up on a hard drive somewhere on a core Internet server. Great. Living out eternity as CPU cycles would cause a truly intelligent being to unplug one’s self from the grid.

That’s the error in the singularity argument. Life is not driven by survival. It is driven by reproduction. Reproduction, even amongst the lower species, is driven by hope. When times are good and the future is bright, we get lots of reproduction. When the opposite is true, we get the opposite. Put another way, if there’s no tomorrow, there’s no need to reproduce. If there’s no need to reproduce, there’s no need to live. The singularity, therefore, is the nullification of life.

James Pethokoukis and Dunning-Kruger

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James Pethokoukis used to post at NRO about the economy and that’s where he first got my attention. He tended to write things that stupid people say when they wish to sound smart. I looked him up and sure enough, I found a journalism major. I look at journalism majors in the same way I look at communications majors. That is, these are people who were not smart enough to real college work or they were simply too lazy to do real college work.

In short order it became clear he was a fake nerd in the Ezra Klein mold, but maybe not as good at working the bit. Klein puts a lot of effort into it. Pethokoukis seems happy to be a clueless lunkhead that thinks he is the smartest guy in the room. Thus, the reference to Dunning-Kruger. As an aside, I love how is called a “fellow” at AEI. These agitprop houses love bestowing scholarly titles on one another.

Anyway, I saw this gem today and thought it was a great excuse to take some cheap shots at someone.

One big difference between America’s K-12 education system and that of other nations is where our teachers come from. McKinsey has found that top-performing nations recruit their teachers from the top third of college students. As one report notes, school systems in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea “recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third” of the academic class vs. just 23% in the US.

The other big difference, the one that makes all the difference, is the schools in Finland, Taiwan and South Korea are full of Finns and East Asians. When you compare US schools to those around the world, you have to make that adjustment. Once you do that, you find out that our Finns do as well as Finns everywhere. Our Koreans do better than those in Korea. Thinking like that is hard and lunkhead can’t be bothered with that.

Free Riders

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An age old problem in human society is the free loader problem. Economists prefer to phrase it as the “Free Rider Problem” so as not to drag in those icky moral and cultural issues. I prefer to use the more appropriate phrase, “free loader” as that’s the real problem. People unable to provide for themselves are not a problem, even for poor human societies. Every society, not matter how rich, is plagued by a slice of humanity that chooses to live off the labor of others, even when alternatives are available to them.

The better term may be the “entitlement problem” but that one has been claimed for other purposes. An example I like to use is the pizza problem. In my youth a friend had a roommate, who was from a very wealthy family. Having grown up unaware of the restraints the rest of us faced, he had a sense of entitlement. He just expected people to wait on him. Whenever we ordered a pizza, this guy would eat more than his share and never chip in for the bill, unless asked. He seemed oblivious to the fact that food cost money and the rest of us had to concern ourselves with the fact we lacked an abundant supply of money.

That’s one side of the entitlement coin. Spend any time around the very rich and you bump into this. When I worked for a Congressman in my youth, he and his family were often stymied by mundane things like buying gas. They never carried cash and did not have credit cards. Someone else was always there to pay the bill so when caught needing to actually pay for something, they would be stumped. The thing about it is there was always someone there to solve the problem for them. A sense of entitlement can carry you a long way in society.

The other side of the coin is the underclass.It is generally assumed by the ruling class that the lower class is just too dumb to do anything other than be poor. That’s often the case. There are a lot of very stupid people in the ghetto. But, they are not so stupid that they cannot provide for themselves. Instead of investing their time into middle-class pursuits, they work the welfare system, learning all the ways to maximize their return, while minimizing their investment. After all, they are entitled.

That’s the thing you see with the under-class. They view themselves as dependent and they can’t imagine things arranged any other way. Government and the rich people who run it owe them free housing, free food, free booze and so forth. In a weird way the under-class is like modern hunter-gatherers. They forage around their environment, in this case the ghetto and the custodial state that supports it, for the necessities to live. Every once in a while, the males engage in violent conflict with males from other tribes. Afterwards, they get high, eat and screw.

The point of all this is humans have been trying to figure out how best to handle the free rider problem since forever and we still struggle with it. The best way we have discovered is to have everyone pay their own way. A radical idea that has been tried in a few places with surprising success. Colonial New England is probably our best example locally. People were expected to pay their own way, take care of their families and not be a burden on their neighbors. Charity existed, but it existed with lots of strings. Those strings were intended to discourage you from needing charity. I used to live near an old almshouse from the 18th century, for example.

All that was considered crazy so we have struggled to come up with better answers. A good example how the struggle is going is Net neutrality. For reasons he most certainly does not understand, President Obama is pushing for the FCC to arbitrarily force ISP’s to treat all traffic the same.

President Obama urged the US government to adopt tighter regulations on broadband service in an effort to preserve “a free and open Internet.”

In a statement released Monday, Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the principle of treating all Internet traffic the same way, known in shorthand as Net neutrality. That means treating broadband services like utilities, the president said, so that Internet service providers would be unable “to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.”

Obama wades into a contentious debate that has raged over how to treat Internet traffic, which has only heated up as the FCC works to prepare an official guideline. Those rules were expected to be made available later this year, though reports now claim they may be delayed until early 2015. The debate has centered on whether broadband should be placed under Title II regulation under the Telecommunications Act, which already tightly controls phone services.

Proponents argue that Title II regulation would ensure the free and fair flow of traffic across the Internet. Opponents, however, believe the reorientation would mean onerous rules that would limit investment in the infrastructure and in new services, and that toll roads of sorts would provide better service to companies that can support their higher traffic volumes. But that in turn has created widespread concern that ISPs could throttle service in some instances, intentionally slowing some content streams and speeding others.

The problem is the Internet is not a utility. A utility is a special sort of monopoly that provides a specific product that is the same for all customers. Rich people get the same electricity as poor people. The utility charges by the unit at the same rate for all users. The Internet is a wildly varied service that is valuable only because of a millions of other businesses that sells products and services over the Internet. But, there are loads of companies transferring their costs to people who do not use their service, via the miracle of the cable bill. Facebook is the most obvious example.

The problem we have is a variation on the classic Tragedy of the Commons. The public, through their governments, allowed private industry to use public resources to construct the Internet, including the massive cable TV network. In many cases, these companies were paid to build out infrastructure. All of them rely on free access to public roads and sidewalks to maintain their networks, like any other utility. Unlike the electric grid, the Internet is a virtual market place, The ISP charges rent to anyone who sets up shop and charges access to anyone who wants to buy products offered on-line.

Well, sort of.

I pay much more for Internet service that I probably should, given my usage. I don’t watch movies on-line or listen to music on-line very often. The guy down the road has a bunch of kids who each use ten times the bandwidth I use. Their Internet bill is the same as mine. The costs are socialized so he can get cheap movies and I can get expensive e-mails. Much like the cable bill, we have a inverse of the utility model. Instead of metered billing, everyone pays the same, regardless of usage. The ISP’s want to implement what amounts to metered billing, like a utility, except the government is trying to stop them, because they say they are a utility.