Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, as I see it, conservative – right leaning – people are generally anxious to throw people under the bus. Illegal immigrant? You’re not a person, you deserve to suffer. Black? The cops should just shoot you now. Poor? You should be enslaved so the rich can get richer. And so on.

Now, this is a *LOSING STRATEGY* – which is why for the past hundred years, every time the conservatives get in power the economy in general does worse, individuals do worse, and happiness levels drop. However, humans are programmable creatures, and the conservative news does a good idea of selling, over and over, the idea that it is a winning strategy. They also carefully sell the idea that we’re barely making it, that we’re all going to starve if 10% of us don’t work, which is utter bullshit – humanity is *spectacularly wealthy*. But – as we all know, having power *causes brain damage* – and part of how that manifests is when they get in power, conservatives actually think they are improving the world by throwing people under the bus, as often and as quickly as possible.

Liberals are in love with the radical idea that if we work together we can all get further. Obviously, so am I. Generally to the extent you can build a trustworthy government it is also the best vehicle for making sure people *don’t* get thrown under the bus. Part of the problem is we perpetually have people trying to throw other people under the bus so they can profit – you end up with for-profit prisons, prisons with for-profit telecoms, for-profit immigration detention centers combined with artificially low immigration quotas, and all sorts of similar things. Naturally the for-profit prisons use their money to advocate for making more and more things illegal.

I guess when I look at the government, I see the social services arm as mostly trustworthy but under-funded, the education arm as somewhat trustworthy but someone needs to take away all those stupid tests, and the criminal justice system as downright evil and needing completely retooled. The laws are somewhere in the middle. I go back and forth on whether earth is a dystopia, or just a long way from a utopic center – I definitely am aware that my position is well, well above average on Earth (I am ‘privileged’)

So, I was having a conversation with a friend who pointed out that the US was dangerously close to a birthrate at which bad things would happen. I inquired further as to what they meant, because as far as I knew we were nowhere near a low enough birthrate to risk food production, power, technology, etc. It turned out what they were referring to was “the economy”.

This really underlines to me, not that I needed it underlined, how dumb our current patchwork quilt of rules surrounding resources is. Greta Thunberg had pointed out the folly of a system that exists to perpetually try and get higher and higher GDP – there *obviously must be a point* at which this will fail if GDP is tied to physical resources because physical resources available are a bounded resource.

Now, of course, our economy is doomed to failure for other reasons as well – it is tied to the idea that everyone must have a job and that simply isn’t realistic in the world of increasing mass automation, and it fails to recognize the value that many people who don’t have a official “job” bring to the overall picture.

However, if we were to chase the idea that we perpetually must have more children in order to continue to have GDP rise off a cliff, it would inevitably lead to the extinction of the human race. We have to come to understand that we must live in balance with the system we’re living off of, and we must find ways to live on nature’s interest rather than the principal.

This doesn’t necessarily have to mean losing quality of life. I still like best the idea of shaping a neurological operating system that enables us to experience vast riches by copying access to experiences from mind to mind – think of it as video games, only without the computer hardware. We might need some computer or technological help to pull this off – and we certainly will have to learn to build really trustworthy computer systems before we can do this, which will mean completely taking money out of the development of operating systems because money corrupts, in general, everything it touches, at least from a making-it-trustworthy point of view. It drives via competition it until it reaches a peak, and then it drives it into corruption and off a cliff. At least, that’s my current perspective – I gesture you to Windows 10, not to mention the state of the US health care system, as examples.

Anyway, my point remains. We *MUST* design a better resource allocation system or we must accept that humanity will be extinct within a century. Our current system will chase ever increasing GDP off a cliff.

We almost certainly are *above* the carrying capacity of the planet – we can see this in ever dwindling supplies of all sorts of key resources. We need to be reducing our population, and our current RAS will not encourage that. When people talk about how Americans are having less children because they “cannot afford them”, that sounds like *good* news to me

For those of you who have been missing my orchestral-movie-soundtrack stuff, here is a little bit I did today just to make sure I haven’t forgotten how: Maypole

So, recently someone tried to sell me on that old chestnut, the idea that the universe requires a creator but God doesn’t.

And I was thinking about it, and I realized this idea is beyond absurd. If God is a neural network they are a neural network orders of magnitude more complex than *we* are, and we certainly appear to require a framework within which we can exist. I suppose it’s possible that we would be able to exist without the hardware that is our brain, but the vastly different behaviors that people with brain damage exhibit suggest that this is not in fact the case.

(Of course, a lot of Christians get nervous when I talk about God being a neural network – then again, they want for God to have no free will at all, because that’s the only way the whole “Jesus had to die for your sins” thing even makes a tiny shred of sense. Still doesn’t make a *lot* of sense then.)

Anyway, to return to the previous problem. The universe appears to have a relatively small handful of rigid rules – it’s a framework. I have no trouble at all believing this universe was always here and will always be here. I have a much larger problem believing this hypothetical God was always here and will always be here given that we haven’t even come up with a way yet that a thinking being could exist without somewhere to exist in.

So, my original point remains – if the universe requires a creator, so does God, and you’re stuck. If God doesn’t require a creator, neither does the universe. And, given the rigid and simple nature of the universe, if one came about before the other, I’d vote universe first, God second.

Now, of course, we have to consider other possibilities, as I pointed out to this person. One is that creator and creation may be entangled – God may have been created h*self in the process of creating the universe. Certainly creating a universe would be a evolutionary thing. We also have to consider that time’s arrow may only flow in the direction that it does for creatures of our type. Time may be multidimensional, or not exist at all, for creatures of other types. So the discussion about who created who may be meaningless because maybe it was *all* already here and we’re just experiencing it as this linear thing because of the type of creatures we are.

We also should consider the possibility that God in fact created the universe and h*self and we’re currently in the bootstrapping process before God actually exists. I don’t think this is likely but it does go into the hat.

I still also like the possibility that we’re living as a accidental side effect of some other process and no one knows we’re here. It explains a lot.

I could go on for a few more paragraphs but I’m trying to avoid wear and tear on the paws so I’ll save it for some other time.

I do like from time to time the idea that “God” may in fact be a team – I think I’ve spoken elsewhere about the possibility that *we are the operators* – and then we put on our player hats and we’re the players. There’s a certain beauty to this and clearly we have demonstrated that we are capable of building universes.

While I’m tossing additional thoughts in here – it has always scared me that Christianity disables people’s brains such that they can’t see the obvious flaw in claiming the universe required a creator but God didn’t. At some point I should make a list of all the ways Christianity obviously fails common sense as expressed by someone who is capable of thinking in boolean algebra, and why it scares me that the people who believe in it *cannot* see this no matter what you do or say. (It does reinforce my thought that Christianity is a informational virus that in certain ways blinds it’s host so that it can continue to live and reproduce)

I do wonder if, as a programmer who has done a especially deep dive into programming, I’m more able to see religions as programs for humans – written by people with dubious and possibly even nefarious aims – than the average person.

So, this is a great article that I think sums up why I think windows 10 – and MacOs 11 – are both heading straight into dystopian land. Big corporations believe that it’s their computer, not yours, and thanks to Citizens United, those big corporations own the government as well.

(one of my friends immediately equates me saying this with me being a Trumpian Antimasker who believes the Hollywood Elites and Liberal Academia are responsible for all the ills of the world – and I really don’t think it’s the same thing at all. Trumpanzees and antivaxers believe in things which are *not true* – I believe in something which is *demonstrably* true, which is that Microsoft has placed themselves in a position to install software on your computer without your knowledge or consent and is steadily abusing this position more and more. You *cannot* remove Edge from Windows 10. Nor a whole long list of other applications. Microsoft sincerely believes it is their computer, not yours. Even scarier, in S mode you cannot install Chrome)

At this point I am *hoping* Microsoft screws up in some way which results in bricking millions of windows PCs, because at least that will get the government to notice how scarily dictatorship-like their position is over the desktop market. In the meantime, I will keep running windows 7,

I am curious how many less people would be dead of COVID if there were not religion in the world.

So, I had a interesting thought about a possible use for the blockchain. One thing it could be used for would be store known good signatures for applications – in this particular case, each time someone chose to run a application, you would look up the most recent block with that signature on it and you’d also run some hashes. As more and more hashes got run, the signature would become associated with a block starting with more and more zeros – the idea here is instead of letting Microsoft push a list of signatures as good (and after all, why should we trust them? They gave us windows 10, not to mention a long list of other stinkers) the group at large would decide which signatures were trustworthy. The idea here is that a attacker ideally would not be able to get a large enough bank of computers to do enough hashing to ‘legitimize’ a signature – you could also add things like a restriction of how many hashes per IP address per day could be registered etc.

I would like for us to have some way of knowing which binaries we could trust, I just don’t want to have to trust vendors we already know we can’t trust (i.e. Microsoft) for those signatures.

Another thought that came to me is how much better the world’s software would be if every ten years (say) everyone was *required* to release their source code and then anyone could develop it further. We’d end up with competing companies developing operating systems that ineroperated – it’s good that we have competing companies writing operating systems but it’s less than ideal that they can’t all run the same binaries (for example)

So, I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before or not, but it popped into my head last night and I thought I’d write about it some more in any case.

It’s generally taken for granted by most adherents to darwinism that the fitness function in play on Earth is whether or not a organism survives to reproduce.. and I have to admit, given the results of DNA tests this has a high degree of plausability, however it is easy to imagine a situation where it isn’t actually true, or it’s true but future incarnations of DNA sequences depend on fitness results beyond mere survival.

I am of course thinking about my kittens – often a kitten will ‘survive’ (which just requires coming home with a nonzero amount of coin in it’s little kitten pouch on it’s collar) but still be culled by the algorithm because it’s not good enough (for example, only the top 10% of kittens usually move on to the next generation, and there are also things (like asserting buy and sell at the same time) that will get a kitten cut.

If there were things like this in play on earth we might not be aware at them, both because it would be easy to develop both fake and real DNA (this is the assuming-the-operator-of-the-universe-is-Loki sort of thing) and also because we might have real DNA but still be living a iterative series of lives in which only the top few percent of each generation move on to the next simulation. And that’s before we even get into discussions about the multi-world interpretation and the possibility that we are wandering from universe to universe based on the decisions that we make.

A interesting idea to play with is how something like a genetic algorithm might interface with something like quantum immortality. Not a particularly *happy* idea, though – if no one can actually die, then the people who draw a bad hand genetically will end up worse and worse off.

So, increasingly we live in a world where people believe what they want to believe, regardless of facts – this of course has been true for a long time in the case of conservatives (it’s very clear if you consider the delay line effects that when liberals are in power, the economy does better, yet conservatives always claim their policies are better for the economy, for example – and it’s been demonstrated repeatedly that the laffer curve does not play out the way the politicians claim it will and yet over and over people fall for the idea of the laffer curve – which is the core idea behind the failed Trump-era tax cuts)

One of the problems we have is that our political system exerts no punishment for being wrong, and politicians who are in fact appealing entirely to emotion continue to be re-elected based on doing the wrong thing over and over because that’s what their electorate, who prefer to live in a post-truth world and are aided by lying news sources (i.e. fox news), want and believe.

I think we need to add some sort of closed-loop automatic firing of politicians who guess wrong. It’s already been demonstrated that inside a capitalist system, it’s profitable to keep lying to the people, and the net result is that the system optimizes for the happiness of a few select individuals at the cost of the happiness of the group as a whole. I think we literally do need to automatically fire the people who, for example, vote in favor of the lying about who won the election, or vote in favor of the laffer curve, or whatever the lie of the week is. At the moment this would advantage the democrats, who are by and large making data-driven and science-driven decisions, but I am sure at some future date they will fall victim to the same rot that has taken over the republican party, so this is really a nonpartisan suggestion over the long haul. The decisions we drive the ship of state using should not be based on lies and wishful thinking.

Of course this probably means we shouldn’t have religious folks in politics, since the vast majority of religion seems to be built upon lies and wishful thinking as well. It would be a dramatic departure from history – and I don’t know of anywhere that has actually tried it – to, for example, require unit tests for success to be written for every law that is written, and require the law to be struck if the unit tests fail – and if someone enacted the law after being warned that history indicates this type of law tends to fail, require that person to be looking for a new job as well.

So, I keep thinking about this topic because I keep feeling like if I could just put the right words on my thoughts, it would suddenly make sense to the Christians in my life why I’m so convinced the religion A: was made up out of whole cloth B: contains harmful ideas and C: should be relegated to the dustbin of history

I acknowledge that they’re generally not that likely to be able to integrate this information – that in fact the structure of their minds will prevent it because of the massive neurological upset that understanding would bring them – suddenly their entire mind would need fundamentally re balanced. But it still bothers me, especially when I have people on Facebook very sincerely assuring me I’m going to hell for not believing the right things in the right way.

I know I’ve talked elsewhere about how having a plethora of religions, each claiming to be the one true way and that all adherents to all other religions are less-than, is a awful thing we should be doing away with, especially since we now live in the age of weapons that can kill millions in minutes and we can no longer afford to have wars for no particularly good reason.

In any case, one basic thesis of Christianity that I hear pushed again and again is that man is so flawed that Jesus has to “die for our sins” because “God is a just god and demands that someone be punished for all these sins”. It’s insisted that even people who have only committed minor sins are way too flawed for our perfect God. It’s also insisted that Adam’s failure to obey God was part of what started all this.

But hang on a minute. God *Created* us with neural networks that start unformatted (almost no internal structure, we are mostly born tabla rasa). If God wanted perfect obedience, creating us a state machine (similar to the computer I’m writing this on) would have gotten H* exactly that. God clearly either had no knowledge of how neural networks work (which would prove the all-knowing part a lie) or *wanted creatures that wouldn’t always walk the straight and narrow perfectly*. It is not the nature of a mostly-blank neural network to immediately leap to perfect behavior – some sin along the way is *inevitable*.

Now, mind you, I’m not asserting that we’re designed by a supernatural being at all, I’m fine with the idea that we may have just happened, that a evolutionary process may be all there is that is responsible for our existence. What I can safely rule out, however, is that we were created by a all perfect being that should then be punishing us for being flawed. This has always had a couple of problems in the argument

1) The Christians who argue that God *has to* punish us for all eternity for our limited and temporal sins are

a) Arguing for a evil God. Only a evil creature would punish so disproportionally to the crime
b) Arguing that God has no free will. And yes, they really do argue that! They say he *Can’t* just let our mistakes slide, that it’s outside of his nature because he is a Just God (never mind that eternal torture for temporary errors, especially the low grade errors must of us commit, is about as unjust as I can imagine)

2) The Christians who argue that the only path to redemption is through Jesus are

a) Aruging that God has no problem with the vast majority of human population being misled in a way that leads to them being tortured eternally or
b) Arguing that God can do nothing about the plethora of religions that claim another path or
c) Arguing that their supposedly just and moral being has no problem with expecting us to *guess* in the face of huge amounts of misleading information, *including the observation of the world around us which would *strongly* support the idea that humans are storytellers who manipulate each other for money at the drop of a hat and that religions are just a way for the priests to manipulate the sheep in order to get money

Anyway, the fundamental mismatch between the way unpatterned neural networks behave on their way to learning to be patterned neural networks and the apparent expectations of God as described by the Christians seem to me to be a valid reason to declare the religion is bullshit. That’s before we even get into the abusive nature of “God loves you so much that he built a special place to punish you if you don’t love h* back”. Most of the behaviors the Christians ascribe to God we would call abusive if anyone else did them, and generally I think what’s going on here is the Christians, who have brainwashed themselves into believing the Bible’s threats about God are true, are so afraid of what God could do to them that they apply the “Where does a 600-pound monkey sit? Anywhere he wants to” strain of morality to God.