Book Investigation: The Genius of the Beast

So I was watching Capitalism Died for Your Sins on the David Horowitz Youtube channel. it mentioned positively the book The Genius of the Beast.

based on the title, which calls men beasts, i expect it to suck.

so i go to amazon to check out the reviews and see what the book is like. i am of course in the market for good books about capitalism. i like horowitz and friends, and they write good books and articles. so i figure giving it a chance on amazon is a good idea. it won’t take long.

so the first thing i read is:
Is global capitalism on its last legs? Is the era of American leadership over? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does American civilization deserve to survive? These are the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009.
jesus fucking christ no.

you know that stupid saying “there are no bad questions”? yeah, it’s stupid. here’s some really bad questions.

and asking them not over something like obama getting elected by millions and millions of fools in the best country on earth. which is scary if you think about how many people are how foolish. he’s a pro-terrorist anti-semitic communist, and millions voted for him, and a lot of that voting is because he’s evil, not in spite of it.

but anyway, no jesus fucking christ some govt-caused economic stumbles are not the last legs of capitalism. no this does not indicate that other countries are somehow better at this stuff (sadly they aren’t). no we don’t deserve to die for giving home loans to poor blacks and stuff like that. no wasting billions of dollars on a bailout and stuff won’t cause a new dark age.

this is so ridiculous. these are not the questions anyone good would be asking and answering. they’re a super bad way to look at the problem situation. they are not designed to set up good answers, they don’t lead into good discussion.
This book presents a radically new answer, insisting that global society has only begun to realize its full potential.
fuck you that isn’t new. see e.g. Ayn Rand. if you’re gonna be a “radical[]” for capitalism, don’t spit in the face of Ayn Rand by pretending she didn’t exist. jfc.

btw how do you do quote edits when ur omitting something? like normally if u wanna change a word ending, like cooked -> cooks, you could write “cook[s]” as a quote of “cooked”. but how do you change cooked -> cook and indicate it? do u just bracket the whole word? see my empty brackets after radical above. not sure best way to handle. thots? so far this aside seems more interesting than the book.
Author Howard Bloom argues that there’s a hidden mandate beneath the surface of capitalism: "It’s struggling to whisper and rumble its message to you and me. That hidden imperative can lift us from economic crisis, can make us a leader in the next-generation economy, and can dramatically upgrade our ability to empower our fellow human beings." Bloom sees crisis as opportunity, opportunity for the whole human race.
the fuck?

and i smell altruism.

and mysticism. and collectivism.

ok let’s skip ahead to user reviews.
I admit I bought this thinking it had been written by Harold Bloom, the Harvard literary don. So I was surprised when I began reading Genius of the Beast and came up against this writer's hyperbolic style, a style which would be familiar to any advertising copywriter.

Bloom is described somewhere in the multiple blurbs all over this book as a marketing genius, and that's what I'll happily take him as. As a revolutionary thinker? His argument boils down to "Technology will save us", nothing I haven't read anywhere before.
oh look, maybe it wasn’t new after all.

this review doesn’t explain the content tho. onward.
As other reviewers have written, Howard Bloom's "The Genius of the Beast" is unorganized and haphazardly written. It is also full of errors, stretched analogies and made up word jumbles (secular genesis machine?!?).
the phrase “secular genesis machine” sounds pretty crap to me too.
As far as errors are concerned, the book has a complete misunderstanding of biology which Bloom claims helps to explain the cycle of boom/bust in a human economy. I'm a biologist, so these errors jump out at me, and I shudder to think about the number of errors in the rest of the book that I didn't pick up because they related to other fields of expertise. For example, Bloom goes on for an entire chapter about the Dictyostelium slime mold, yet continuously calls it a bacterium (which it is not, and is like writing about dogs and calling them snails). He also has no idea about the biological role of microtubules inside the cell, yet uses their inherent dynamic instability (but a small bit of their cellular function) to try and explain worldwide economies. These and his honeybee and evolution analogies show that he has no understanding about these topics besides what he managed to glean from reading one or two magazine articles about them (including references in the back to primary literature doesn't mean he read or understood them).
i’m liking this reviewer! fuck you and your citations-are-scholarship approach, bro.

and reviewer gave what are to all appearances totally legit details about slime mold. that really smells like a correct criticism. and i like his comments about scared of the errors in fields he doesn’t know, that’s a great point to be thinking about. and i like his attitude to citations in the back don’t mean much.
Mr. Bloom may have a modern-day classic in this book. He has managed to perform a work of consilence on the history of man (life, really) and provide insight in the how's, what's, where's, and why's of capitalism and how we treat customers and each other. I must admit as a newcomer to Bloom's work, the first 130 pages left me wondering, "where is he going?”
oh man even the positive review trashed the first 130 pages. (and he writes like a total asshole. perhaps it’s not a coincidence that signs so far were pointing to the book being written like an asshole too). 130’s a lot of pages. and wtf is consilence?

oh dear god it gets a lot worse right after that tho:
Bloom provides an extraordinary grasp of machinations and implications of capitalism, warts and all [...] Strongest recommendation!
fuck you, capitalism has no warts. if you come away from a book on capitalism thinking it has warts and the book agrees it has warts, fuck that book.

i’m convinced now. book sucks. done.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Aubrey de Grey Discussion, 25

I discussed epistemology and cryonics with Aubrey de Grey via email. Click here to find the rest of the discussion.

Aubrey did not reply further.

Note my last email to him began by saying:
If you want to stop talking, or adjust the terms of the conversation (e.g. change the one message at a time back and forth style), please say so directly because silence is ambiguous.
He answered this with silence.

I think that's pretty unreasonable.

I don't really want to write comments on the content of the conversation. It should speak for itself. (And in a fair way with back-and-forth discussion, rather than just me talking.)

But I did want to comment briefly on attitude to discussion.

You can read some of my thoughts on this topic in my Paths Forward essay. I think Aubrey is blocking discussion and preventing there from being paths forward. If he's mistaken, and it's a big deal, how will he find out when he simply leaves various criticisms unresolved and unanswered? If some of the epistemology he doesn't know is true and important, how will he ever find that out while not understanding it, not asking enough questions to understand it, and not having a refutation of it (by himself or anyone else)?

I think it's very important to address rival ideas. Either personally or by outsourcing – it's fine to use someone else's writing in place of your own, as long as you take personal responsibility for its correctness, as if it was your own. If a criticism of your position is not addressed by anyone (in public writing that's exposed to public criticism, comments, question-asking, discussion, etc), then it really ought to be addressed not ignored. Aubrey neither addresses various Popperian ideas (such as the refutation of justificationism), nor does he know of any writing by anyone else which addresses it. Yet he rejects it and stops pursuing it, without having any answer to it. This is not symmetric. The Popperian ideas I'm advocating are exposed to public criticism but are not currently refuted by anything. My ideas meet all challenges; Aubrey's don't; and Aubrey stopped discussing, leaving it like that without changing his mind.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Constructor Theory Paper Comments

Constructor Theory by David Deutsch

The paper omits DD's contact information (i.e. email), which I think is really bad.
The theory of computation was originally intended only as a mathematical technique for studying proof (Turing 1936), not a branch of physics. Then, as now, there was a widespread assumption – which I shall call the mathematicians’ misconception – that what the rules of logical inference are, and hence what constitutes a proof, are a priori logical issues, independent of the laws of physics. This is analogous to Kant’s (1781) misconception that he knew with certainty what the geometry of space is. In fact proof and computation are, like geometry, attributes of the physical world. Different laws of physics would in general make different functions computable and therefore different mathematical assertions provable.
This prestige-seeking reference to Kant isn't useful. Few readers will know what DD's talking about, and he doesn't even try to explain. It doesn't add anything.

It's there as a social convention, both to gain prestige and because just starting by saying "in fact my position" is frowned on. But if you say "Kant was wrong. In fact my position" somehow that's seen as better, even though it's worse. The Kant thing helps disguise the asserting-rather-than-arguing.
But this supposed deficiency is shared by all scientific theories: Tests always depend on background knowledge – assumptions about other laws and about how measuring instruments work (Popper 1963, ch. 10 §4). Logically, should any theory fail a test, one always has the option of retaining it by denying one of those assumptions.
The ideas that make up background knowledge can be assumptions, but don't have to be. They are often pretty good ideas which are argued and explained, rather than being assumed.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Bad Scholarship About Apple

http://stratechery.com/2015/bad-assumptions/
last quarter Apple’s revenue was downright decimated by the strengthening U.S. dollar; currency fluctuations reduced Apple’s revenue by 5% – a cool $3.73 billion dollars. That, though, is more than Google made in profit last quarter ($2.83 billion). Apple lost more money to currency fluctuations than Google makes in a quarter.
Italics in the original.

The sentence in italics uses the word "money" to refer to, at the same time, Apple's revenue and Google's profit.

I emailed the blog author, as well as John Gruber pointing out the error. If either of them corrects it, I will update this post to give them credit. Will anything be fixed or will they be added to the long list of people with bad scholarship? Let's find out!

Update: Ben Thompson of Stratechery replied to my email. He refused to fix anything and expressed that he was unhappy with me for even bringing it up. He said, "my only reason to use the two numbers is to give a sense of scale", and he thought that was obvious and unobjectionable. This is bullshit. It's not OK to call profit and revenue both "money" at the same time and italicize that misleading sentence. And he's lying to me that his "only reason" for choosing Google to compare Apple with was a sense of scale. I hope you learn a double lesson about 1) how terrible Ben Thompson is personally 2) how terrible many people are, you really have to watch out. Lots of people can seem OK if you never challenge them. But if you do challenge them, their awfulness is revealed. Don't go through life blindly assuming the best about people and leaving them untested.

Just before reading that, I saw this other bad scholarship about Apple:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/01/27/zabitsky

Gruber quotes an interview with market analyist who was very negative on Apple stock. I think it's really great how the Daring Fireball blog follows up on disagreements. It's important to look at ideas in retrospect and see who was right and wrong, and why, and learn from mistakes. When predictions are made made on timescales of a few years or less, it's not that hard to hold people accountable, and yet it isn't done nearly enough.
You have a $270 price target. Is that still too pessimistic?

Zabitsky: It’s formally a one-year target, but in 3 to 6 months we’re going to see that play out. The reason I started to make noise was the rise of Samsung. If you say that now, it’s not challenged.
Apple announced spectacular earnings results yesterday. The most profitable quarter of any company ever. Despite that 5% revenue loss to foreign exchange rates mentioned above. So Zabitsky was badly wrong. That's Gruber's point.

I wanted to add that I don't think it's a coincidence that the same guy who is strongly anti-Apple, and wrong, is also very loose with scholarship. He publishes a one-year price target for Apple, then says, "But I don't really mean what I say when I publish formally. That's really my 3-6 month target, and I published it as a 1-year target because I casually lie in formal predictions."

Apple is good. Many people hate Apple because they hate the good. Their immorality has other consequences than being anti-Apple. Dishonesty is unsurprising. (And note this dishonesty is a lot more severe than the one I criticize above from pro-Apple people. The one above I think is bad but fairly normal. This one about doing formal publications and casually not meaning what you say, I think is really fucking bad.)

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Big Hero 6 Comments

Big Hero 6 movie comments. You should watch the movie before reading this.

SPOILERS

starts with main character (hiro) getting arrested for peaceful activities that should be legal. no one objects to this state of affairs, including hiro himself who thinks the illegal activities are good things to do.

within the first 10 minutes the movie is telling HUGE HUGE HUMONGOUS GIGANTIC SUPER BIG lies about what university is like, by presenting a completely fake school lab scene that’s waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay cooler than real ones. Also extremely expensive even after you tone it down from sci-fi to realism.

so then after the utopia-paradise convinces the main character to go to school, he wants to make something awesome to get in. so he ... pulls out a pencil, a pencil sharpener, and paper. umm wait what? this is a sci fi world with advanced robotics technology, this guy is super into technology ... but he doesn’t use an iPad like device or even a computer keyboard for writing, brainstorming, etc? he handwrites?? c’mon. wtf.

so then hiro makes awesome amazing future tech in a short time period, PRIOR TO attending school, in hopes of getting in. note his ability to make this indicates he very much does not need school, even the super awesome fake school.

so then he gets 2 choices: get in to school, or sell out to a capitalist guy criticized for caring about “self-interest”. hiro turns down a fortune at age 14 without really thinking about it or finding out details of his options. which the professor mentor dude and his elder brother both treat as wise.

so after the professor and his brother die, why doesn’t he consider going with the capitalist option at that point?

chasing baymax scene is kinda ridiculous. the SLOW MOVING robot keeps being in sight a little ways away, but hiro is constantly running full speed and just missing him and not catching up.

no, low battery does not make robots act drunk.

Hiro lies to his parent figure when leaving the house to chase Baymax, and lies more when returning. no significant explanation is necessary. plenty of kids watching who understand the necessity of heavily lying to parents...

movie plays a lot on the theme of an outsider (the robot) who doesn’t understand cultural stuff that normal people take for granted. this lack of understanding is supposed to be humorous. one concrete example is when the robot doesn’t understand fist bumping.

the policeman completely ignores his report of major violence and danger. he treats robots like a fantasy story, even though this sci-fi world has significant robotics and Hiro is giving the police report with a very impressive robot standing next to him. that’s really bad. i think it’s a bit unrealistic. i don’t think police are quite that bad. at least for adults. maybe they are when a kid is doing the report. i don’t know. in any case, i think it comes off as identifiable to the children in the audience – the authorities in their lives (parents and teachers primarily) repeatedly won’t believe them, ignore reasonable requests, make them try to deal with stuff on their own. that theme is very realistic for kids.

so why doesn’t Baymax save any photographs or videos from the camera it uses for eyesight? that sure would have been convenient at the police station. also Hiro should have taken a picture or video with his smartphone or something.

the friend group in the movie are all very strong personality archetypes. this isn’t very realistic. most people are more mild, with a bit of some archetypes but also a lot of mild-mannered normalcy, compromises, etc. there’s general pressure on people not to be strong outliers. the strong extremes of the archetypes are a bit rare, but more entertaining and striking for movies.

after the go to the mansion and get upgrades, Hiro does a few grand in property damage while having Baymax show off his new rocket fist. no one takes notice of this.

when Hiro goes flying around on Baymax, he almost dies a few times. people don’t take brushes with death nearly seriously enough. they are too focused on the actual outcome instead of something more like the set of possible outcomes and their probabilities.

they also ignore the issue of acceleration forces acting on Hiro while he rides (and he’s frequently only attached to Baymax at like 2 points on his feet or knees which would put a ton of strain on those points). going high speed then changing direction very abruptly to go high speed another way requires a better setup or you like blackout or die.

also they fly around the city for all to see, which is really stupid given their intent to fight someone using this technology. better if it’s a secret, keep the element of surprise.

now i figure they have enough evidence to get help from the cops or military. like they have Baymax’s medical scan of the badguy. Baymax has some data. and their car got trashed and they got chased through the streets, some stuff must have gotten on camera and had witnesses. but they don’t consider that at all, even though the micro-bot army is VERY VERY dangerous and serious and bringing in the military really is called for, and it’s extremely reckless and stupid for them to go after the guy themselves and also to do it without leaving full data and notes behind in case they die so other the military at least has their info in order to fight if necessary.

the girls in the friend group are real thin.

for the fight after watching the teleporter video, they mostly fight in a sort of one-at-a-time way that is really convenient for showing what’s happening more easily i guess, but pretty damn lame if you think about it.

so Hiro himself, the protagonist a lot of the audience is meant to identify with, becomes kinda murderous pretty abruptly. that’s treated as just how even the best people are.

@Baymax tests and creation: so the first time it gets past saying Hi, on attempt 84 (a very low number, presented as a very high number), the medical scan works perfectly on the first try of that subsystem. that’s completely ridiculous.

so the capitalist dude doesn’t turn out to be the badguy. also he actually spends huge piles of government money.

the professor guy is pretty dumb. his daughter participated in the test voluntarily. now he wants to be a murderer. he also doesn’t seem to mind doing millions of dollars of property damage that hurts people other than his target, and he doesn’t seem to mind trying to kill Hiro and friends who has has no grudge against.

i don’t think the intended moral of the story is that irrational emotional family attachments are one of the more dangerous forces remaining internal to peaceful Western society. yet that’s kinda there.

Hiro and friends have massively higher tolerance for danger and brushes with death than most people. also they are wrong and it’s bad. and it doesn’t even occasion comment in the movie.

so remember how the acceleration was really unrealistic when flying earlier? it’s a lot worse now. when they are through the portal, Hiro climbs onto the pod thing the girl is in and hangs on to that while Baymax flies around pushing it. so now he doesn’t have the special attachment points between his suit and Baymax that kept him from falling off before. but he doesn’t fall off. cuz ... no reason. he barely even tries to hold on, sometimes letting go with his hands and just kinda crouching on it.

shooting the rocket fist to get them out is pretty stupid. cuz he could just shoot it directly away from them and that’d work too and then Baymax would be saved too. it’s not like there was a big hurry, they waste time saying bye. #physics

don’t they have backup copies of the robot’s memory cards, design schematics, etc, etc???

the news broadcast indicates the heroes don’t get credit. why? and how do they manage anonymity after all the public displays?

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Message (1)

Two Firefight Errors

This post contains large spoilers for the book Firefight by Brandon Sanderson. He is my favorite fantasy author. In this post, I explain two errors I noticed in the book.

1) Is Regalia a High Epic?

“Abigail isn’t a High Epic,” Tia said.

“What?” Exel said. “Of course she is. I’ve never met an Epic as powerful as Regalia. She raised the water level of the entire city to flood it. She moved millions of tons of water, and holds it all here!”

“I didn’t say she wasn’t powerful,” Tia said. “Only that she isn’t a High Epic—which is defined as an Epic whose powers prevent them from being killed in conventional ways.”
That made sense to me, but it's contradicted when David kills Regalia:
“No!” My arms trembled. I shouted, then brought the blade down.

And killed my second High Epic for the day.
The page with the ISBN number also calls Regalia a High Epic:
Summary: “David and the Reckoners continue their fight against the Epics, humans with superhuman powers, except they may have met their match in Regalia, a High Epic who resides in Babylon Restored, the city formerly known as the borough of Manhattan”— Provided by publisher.

2) Geometry



The left diagram shows how they were trying to find Regalia’s base. That part makes sense. Every time she appears, you know she’s in a radius of that point, so you draw a circle. The overlap of all circles is where her base could be. (You can also have circles for places she didn’t appear, which then rule out that circle.)

To narrow it down further, you need any circle which overlaps part of the remaining possible city area, not none or all. As you can see in the right hand diagrams, this new circle could be near an existing circle, or off in a new area. Both work. But the book says:
From what I eventually worked out, my points had helped a lot, but we needed more data from the southeastern side of the city before we could really determine Regalia’s center base.
That doesn’t make sense. The key thing is the distance of data points so they overlap part of the remaining area where the base could be. This can be done from any direction.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Mindless or Perfect?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859974
They're not wrong in that people often rationalize their 'instinctual' choices, but to imply that nobody is cognizant of any of their thoughts or biases and that we're all slaves to our lizard brains is a bit of a stretch.
This is a massive false dichtomy.

On the one hand is people are biased in ways they aren't aware of, and aren't in control of their lives. And therefore are slaves to genes.

On the other hand is, since people aren't animal slaves, people aren't super biased, super unaware of their biases, and so on.

I think the truth is pretty straightfoward here: people are hugely biased, unaware of it, and bad at controlling their lives. But it doesn't mean they are slaves. They could do something about it. But evading and dismissing the issue, or accepting that's how people are, won't fix it.

Control over your life is possible but not automatic. It shouldn't be treated as either both possible and automatic, or neither. That's the false dichtomy again.

What will fix this problem is philosophy. Read Ayn Rand and Karl Popper, among others. Or come discuss this matter at the Fallible Ideas Discussion Group. Learn better ideas and integrate them into your life so you actually live by them.

The problem of bias (and more generally mistakes) is real, but also solvable. You don't have to choose from a false dichotomy of denying the problem exists (or downplaying it heavily) or else accepting the problem as a negative feature of human life. You can recognize the problem exists and then take steps to deal with it. A lot is actually known about how to handle this, but most people don't bother learning it.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)