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(Content note for implied gore)

Faulty Thinking: "some things man was not meant to know"

Breakpoint, who I respect in general, just aired a radio article on transhumanism. And their concerns are good, and need to be considered. That doesn't mean they didn't commit a thinking error.

The main point of the article was that knowledge can be used evily, and some forms of knowledge can be put to greater evils than others. With which I agree. It then claims that such areas shouldn't be researched at all. Here they went wrong.

The trouble is that any piece of knowledge that can be discovered, can be rediscovered. History supports this claim just as much as it does theirs, if not more. What matters is when it's discovered, and by who.

(There's a handy example of this in cryptography, the study of secret communication. A group of people working for the british government invented the form of encription now used for internet banking, -- before powerful computers existed. The british government kept it hush, because they didn't have a way to break it. Later, some american academics came up with the same system, without knowing anything about the british version.)

If you'll forgive my archtypes, I'm going to go with a supervillian analogy. Say a supervillain is doing genetic research. He discovers a way to trigger a latent genetic defect in the majority of humanity--a virus that causes cancer, maybe. He can then release it, or threaten to releas it, on major cities or even the whole planet.

But if a good guy scientist has been researching as well, and discovers the trigger first, she and others can research and find an antidote or a vaccine. Then, by the time the supervillain is ready to unleash his disaster virus, maybe it won't work anymore. Certainly it won't be as bad. Now imagine if the scientists hadn't been working on the antidote.

I won't argue with the should-ness of their claim. But as the line being crossed sooner or later is inevitable, it's far better to look in hope for Prometheus than to wait in fear for Pandora.

Stuff I've read this week

Maps in a Mirror (center): 675 pages. Read cover to cover in eight days. I think there may be something wrong with strange about me. Contains a whole mess of Orson Scott Card fiction, and bits of him commenting on it. Quality is all over the map, because this spans his entire career at least up until publication. (But does not cover his entire career. It's only a collection.) I could probably comment on individual stories, if asked.

Epic (left): 364 pages. Read in a day or two, but certainly under 48 hours. Took a break from Maps in a Mirror to read this. Set on a distant planet where economic life and a large fraction of the economy are based around a video game. YA, but there are strong undercurrents of moral and economic philosophy.

The art of Thinking Clearly (right, open): around halfway through, I've read something like 150-160 pages. A collection of short essays (generally 3-5 pages) on thinking errors. Each prevents the error in a colloquial way, some evidence and/or arguments for it, and usually some clues for how to avoid it. I'm not sure how useful it is. It's generally not perscriptivist, but I don't know whether that's a good thing. Though it probably is.

Not mentioned: the large amount of internet reading and downloaded computer-only reading I did this week. Nor the chunks of magazines I read.

Also not mentioned: The first three episodes of season one of Star Trek: Voyager I watched, the first three episodes of BBC's latest Sherlock I watched, or the episode or two of Star Trek: TNG I watched. I'm pretty sure I watched a bit of TNG, anyways. I liked Voyager better, so that's what I stuck with.

What's the thing with microkernels anyways?

I've recently been reading wiki (both pedia and C2[1]) on microkernels and exokernels, and... I'dun get it.

Well, that's enoug derping around on the internet for one day

Over on RationalWiki I stumbled across their page about "QuantumMAN". Not that I'm not endorsing RationalWiki. I don't know nearly enough about them to do so. A lot of their articles I've read have been completely reasonable "okay, really?" examples ranging from "eyeroll" to "facepalm". But QuantumMAN, assuming it's an accurate representation (a fair assumption to make as far as I'm concerned, given what gets mentioned), is actually painful to think about. Anyone with any knowledge of applied quantum mechanics, biology, or computers could tell you that there's no way in the universe for their claims to make sense. Even /r/VXjunkies is more plausible, likely due to the fact that they don't even try to be plausible.

And this is how misinformation gets started

So today, I discovered this nifty bit of music^pic (site content warning: ponies, random crap). I find that sheet music pretty awesome, even if it's an incredibly stupid gag.

Someone then linked to this youtube video:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tds0qoxWVss)
-- Which, admittedly, is a pretty rad song.

Later on in the comments, someone noted that it "sounds like a boss battle". Well, it turns out that's because it is-- some poking around reveals that the song in the video is actually called "U.N. Owen Was Her?", and comes from a Japanese music/bullet hell game bonus boss. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iankyw47vqY)

But wait, that's not all!

The sheet music really is just a stupid gag. Any musician worth their instrument can tell you this upon close inspection -- my brother objects, for example, to the large groups of whole notes in a row and to the illegal gliss between the bottom two staves; but he also enjoyed the explosions and the "remove cattle from stage". With the help of google image search and this post, I was able to trace it to here:

(From whitetreaz.com)

Footnotes:

^pic

Google+, revisited

Oh, gee, thanks a lot, Google. I'll just go through a crap-ton of work to delete my entire Google+ account AGAIN.

Seriously. You'd think they'd mention when they're offering to create a Google+ account for you, but noo...

Faulty Thinking: The Use of Theories

My brother has a fairly rad shirt. He got it from Harvard (yes, Harvard U, that Harvard) when he went there for an "econ bee"¹. It bugs the crap out of me.

See, the shirt has this quote on it:

Sure, it works in practice, but does it work in theory?

Which apparently is rather funny if you're an economist, but I hate it because it reflects (or appears to reflect, and in practice there's no difference in how you get treated) utterly flawed thinking.

The whole point of theories is to reflect (or explain) reality. If a theory or its predictions differ from reality, then it is worthless to the extent that it differs from reality. For example, Newtonian mechanics, the simple version of reality where you add speeds together, isn't the whole picture. It's still useful, because it holds together at any and every speed we humans can actually reach². A theory that doesn't reflect reality (makes wrong predictions) is useless at best -- at worst, people keep using it anyways and they are wrong.

This way of thinking ignores that. It rejects anything that doesn't fit into its existing theory. That's a recipe for irrelevance. Now ordinarily, I'd be perfectly content to let people be idiotically irrelevant into oblivion. But this is expressed by Economists, so-called "experts" who people actually listen to. Almost by definition, they are not irrelevant. And so this is a huge problem.

The lesson here is, if your thinking doesn't match reality then you need to update your thinking. And watch out for your economist -- even if they know what they're talking about, they might still be wrong, maybe even on purpose (the worst kind of wrong).

Footnotes:

¹ Not really an "econ bee", it was an Econ quiz thing. I'm not super sure of the details, and "econ bee" gets most of the idea across by way of analogy to "spelling bee". It was probably a bit more like Jeopardy.

² As of this writing, anyways.