Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, one of the things that I think I’ve gone on about a few times before is how Christians, who ostensibly want Heaven, are busy making the world Hell.

I thought I’d list a few things that Christians – not all Christians, mind you, but enough of them – do which make the world less like heaven and more like hell. Whenever someone engages in one of these behaviors, I feel they are doing the work of the devil

1) Encouraging people to believe that if they are members of any other religion, they are wrong and are going to hell

2) Encouraging people to believe that $SUPERUSER is in the business of torturing people *e doesn’t agree with – or in general, that you should fear God. We’ve got enough to fear in the world we’re actually in.

3) Slut-shaming. Sex is one of the most positive experiences on earth, but Christians have this disturbing idea that you should only have it under certain circumstances, and if you do otherwise, you’re a bad person.

4) Encouraging people with alternate sexualities to think that they are less-than, sinners, incomplete

5) Encouraging everyone to believe that they are so flawed that someone “had to die for their sins”

6) Starting or promoting wars which are primarily over resource allocation (i.e. not sharing) or religion

7) In general encouraging people to think that they are less than, often for things which have no direct bearing on the Christian doing the less-than-ing at all. “If you’re not a member of my religion, you’re not as worthy of a person” “If you don’t do well on standardized tests you’re not as worthy of a person” “If you’re not interested in learning what *I* think are the important things to learn, you’re not as worthy of a person” “If you enjoy playing with your body chemistry, you’re not as worthy of a person”.

8) Promoting monogamy as the only true way, even though we seem to be neurologically and biologically wired to fall in love more than once. The bible even alludes to the fact that in heaven things would work differently (Luke 20:34-36). Why exactly are we not doing the optimal path now?

9) Making and promoting laws against freedom, even when the freedom doesn’t harm another person. Blue laws, laws against nudity, laws against flag-burning, things of that nature. Even worse, laws against people who like to have sex with members of the same gender, even though if we were really engineered, clearly said being had to put in a fair amount of neurological work in order to make things like being on the receiving end of anal sex feel good.

10) Encouraging people to believe that they should be required to have children if they conceive, even though it’s inconceivable that a omnipotent being would connect a soul to a body that wasn’t going to be extant and, if one is of a more scientific bent, highly unlikely that bodies that don’t have a large, functional neural network are self-aware.

11) Encouraging people to embrace a system of beliefs that contains unresolvable logic failures, which damage their ability to think rationally

12) Encouraging parents to try and encourage their children not to be sexually active, promoting a inevitable neurological war

13) This may be kind of a repeat, but thinking that they are “God’s Chosen People”, and by extension, everyone else isn’t. This is again the kind of ‘I’m better than you’ thinking that I feel like is at the root of a lot of the evils of the world. In the old testament, this “I’m better than you” goes as far as “It’s okay for me to slaughter you like cattle even though a you’re thinking, feeling, self aware creature just like me because God Said So”

14) Encouraging children to imagine a being of pure evil – children have a lot of unassigned neurons, and imagining the devil literally brings him to life in their mind. (Of course, as my friend Jeremy points out, it is far from clear that the devil is evil – if he was against the being described in the old testament, he was at least sometimes for humanity, although clearly from the story of Job he wasn’t all good either)

15) Encouraging people to wait for heaven, instead of building it here now.

16) Encouraging people to believe in a $DIETY that builds traps into the world – Just one of many examples is that the bible says “Suffer not a witch to live” (Ex 22:18) but if witchcraft works, it’s clearly because the universe has a built in API for modifying reality which $DIETY would have had to have created – and if it doesn’t, then it’s pretty harmless.

17) Promoting the idea that the bible is a book we should be using as a yardstick to measure our lives. It was written by people thousands of years ago wandering around in a desert, people who knew far less than we know now, people who mistook their prejudices for natural laws. It contains numerous irresolvable logic failures, one of which I discuss above. Yes, it’s got some beautiful ideas and some beautiful poetry in it, but it’s far from a perfect book that you should make the center of your universe, in my opinion. I’m not the only person to have doubts on this subject, see this and this.

18) Attempting to slow down medical technology – in particular I’m thinking of things like Stem Cell research but I suspect this is going to come up with cloning, artificial neural networks, and all sorts of other things of that nature. Look, there’s supposed to be a all powerful diety, why exactly do you need to be the moral guardian of things which don’t hurt self-aware beings in any way and could alleviate suffering

19) Encouraging people to spend time in prayer that they could otherwise spend actually figuring out how to fix the problems that they’re praying about

20) Encouraging people to ‘trust the $SUPERUSER’ for things that in fact there might not be a superuser watching – I’d use global warming as a example of this, but I’m sure there are numerous examples

21) Encouraging the idea that if $DIETY does it, it must be moral – the “Where does a 900 pound gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants to..” theory of reality.

22) Promoting the idea that women are “less than” men and should be silent (1 Corinth 14:34) or submissive. This is abusive to both women and men.

23) Giving a group of people temporal power who probably should not have it – I’m thinking of the catholic church here, and the pope in particular – although I like the current pope, I’ll like him a lot more when and if he comes out and says that birth control is not immoral.

24) Encouraging parents to brainwash / indoctrinate their children while they are still too young to understand the isuses and questions involved, which seems to have a very bad effect on neuroplasticity.

Christians, it’s not that I hate you – I hate the software you’re running. I love you and want you to stop making the world a worse place, because among other things you have to live here too, so you’re not just hurting me, you’re also hurting yourself.

I also recognise that it’s possible that the religion is perfect and it’s being degraded inside my neural network or that the problem has more to do with the fact that different people want different things. However, what do you do when the things you want are getting in the way of the things I want?

(See also a list of good things about Christianity)

It’s my intention that this be somewhat a dynamic and collaborative document, so feel free to comment with your own list entries.

So, I’ve been thinking about the challenges of getting my upcoming solo album to turn a profit. In terms of Sheer Time, if we estimate each track at 20 hours, I’ve got to sell a total of 20,000 units, or have people stream 2 million times in order to break even with my hourly rate at my day job.

This is harder than it looks. Even if we assume that I’m skill-wise the equivilent of Pink Floyd (probably a questionable assumption, but let’s run with this) we still have to figure out some way to get the public to notice I exist. With a band, there’s at least some hope that friends of all four or five guys are going to notice and tell their friends. With me, my word-of-mouth seed starts from one person.

Also, I’m definitely tuning this album for my personal tastes, rather than what’s currently ‘the popular sound’. As a result, it’s going to be that much more difficult to get people to notice it. I think this makes sense insofar as I’m not likely to move enough units for it to make a profit, so I might as well enjoy myself, but it’s still worth noting that I’m not exactly taking the shortest course here.

My gut feeling is that it will be my next album, not the one I’m releasing in December, that breaks even. I’m guessing by my next album I will be past that magic 10,000 hours that everyone says you need to have to make it.

It’s a little frustrating that if I were a pointless political facebook meme, I’d have no trouble getting 2 million views.

Recently I realized that while I’ve played it many times live, I’ve never done a studio version of House Of The Rising Sun.. as it’s my favorite blues song to cover, I figured I should do something about that.

http://sheer.us/stuff/2016/Sheer.HouseOfTTheRisingSun.mp3 is the result. I gotta say, I dig it. I haven’t decided if it’s going on the album yet or not.. perhaps you all can vote 😉

Complete credits:

Everything: Sheer (it reminds me of the Pump Up The Volume bit where Nora asks HHH “You did this?” “Me and Radio Shack”. Only it’s “Me and a multitrack deck..” )

Note this later appeared on Believing Is Seeing.

So, after years of frustration setting gain levels, I have discovered a protools plugin that returns me to a metering format that I understand intuitively and can use even when I’m using one hand to choose patches and the other to play riffs – yes, the old school analog VU meter has come to pro tools in a *excellent* emulation by Klangheim

You can’t tell me this doesn’t just warm the cockles of your heart:

The emulation is extremely faithful, although to get the behavior of the meters of my youth I had to yank the rise time down to 150ms. (And yes, you can tweak the rise, overshoot, and fall times)

Because it’s a plugin that goes into a protools plugin slot, you can also easily do things like sticking a meter both before and after a compressor – and with four skins to choose from, you can easily tell them apart. When tweaking a vocal that won’t sit right in the mix this can be a real timesaver. It doesn’t appear to use any CPU to speak of. As a side bonus, when doing faster than realtime bouncing, the peak lights still work, so you get a nice sanity check if you put it across the master fader on bounce.

I would give this my ‘best plugin under $10’ prize.

Here’s a remix of HOM – this is much closer to the version that will be on the album..

Sheer – History Of Modern

Note this later appeared on Believing Is Seeing.

This is one of my posts that I make so I can link to it from facebook instead of repeatedly typing the same things in comments.

You’d think you guys had never watched pro wrestling.

Trump is playing a Heel. By choice, and I imagine to his great entertainment. It’s pretty clear, since he and Hillary are friends, that they decided to get together and rig a election. Nothing in the rules says they can’t do it, and I have to say, it’s starting to be a lot of fun to watch. He’s clearly having a lot of fun with his mustache-twirling villain role – now he may actually believe the things he’s saying, or he may not, but I would take anything he has to say with a grain of salt.

For me, this is a pretty winning situation. A heel is not going to win the election, and we don’t end up with a right-wing whacko running the country. But if you’re actually feeling outrage about Trump, well, I guess he’s playing his role well. What I really wonder is whether he will break kayfabe at the end or not. If he’s genuinely a force for good, he will, just to help his supporters understand how broken they are. Assuming they’re not just part of the gag as well, which – to be honest – they might be.

So, this is a example of my sense of humor. Personally, I think it’s quite funny. I wasn’t going to release it, because I assumed it was just me who would think it was funny (sometimes my sense of humor is a little out of phase with everyone else’s), but then I ran it by a couple of friends and they also thought it was funny, so here we have..

http://sheer.us/stuff/2016/Sheer.12BarBach.mp3

How this track came to be – I recently purchased http://www.garritan.com/products/classic-pipe-organs/. After much struggling with getting it installed, I spent some time messing with it, and then decided to try doing something absurd with it, just to see how it stacked up. And what could be more absurd than using a pipe organ for the 12 bar blues?

From there, I was reminded of a theory I had discussed with my dad a long time ago, that J.S. Bach was a jam musician. And, of course the talking blues are a traditional thing.. so..

So, in a comment to http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=3006, Alderin said “I agree that the software needs adjustment. The difficulty is that we don’t have the source code, we have to decompile and reverse-engineer it before was can being to find the bugs we need to fix.”

I think this is part of the hope of what we might gain through making a ANN the size and shape of a human.

1) It would let us find out what happens when you run our memetic software with a different instinct table
2) It would let us find out how our memetic software ends up rendered ‘on the iron’, which might be very instructive.

One of the questions that’s still very much open for debate is whether, even if we did know what to do differently for software, we’d be able to change the existing running software on the thundering herd of humans out there, or if all we could do is improve future generations. It is worth noting as a side note that, much as I loathe aspects of Christianity, I also recognize it was probably a significant upgrade from what was being memetically distributed prior to it being authored. Ideally a *really* good software upgrade would tend to be viral because the people running it would be better adapted – this I think was the plan in the fictional work Stranger In A Strange Land.

I’m proud to announce the first track from the upcoming 2016 Sheer solo album – Featuring Arthur St James on vocals and Bruce DeGrado on drums – http://sheer.us/stuff/2016/Sheer.BelievingIsSeeing.mp3.

Complete credits:

Lead Vocals: Arthur St James
Backing Vocals: Sheer
Guitars: Sheer, Arthur St James
Mixing: Sheer, Arthur St James
Piano, B3, Synthesizer: Sheer
Lyrics: Sheer
Music: Sheer
Arrangement: Sheer, Arthur St James
Drums: Sheer, Arthur St James, Bruce Degrado
Producer: Sheer
Associate Producer: Arthur St James

Note this later became the title track for Believing Is Seeing, which was released in 2022.

To what extent were the Jews in WWII the 1% of Germany? I kind of wonder if we’re seeing a repeat of some of the same patterns that led up to that war, and if maybe we shouldn’t back up and consider taking a different path. I mean, granted, you’ve got one set of people hating on the 1%, and another set of people hating on the immigrants, gays, etc, but you certainly have a bunch of people all saying that all our problems are caused by $SOME_OTHER_GROUP, when in fact almost none of them are.

Our problems aren’t caused by the 1%, because there’s as much food, steel, and concrete as there is. They’re caused by how we think about resources and resource allocation – beliefs that lead to food rotting in the field while people go hungry and people being homeless while houses sit empty. But that’s not the fault of the 1%, it’s the fault of the software we’re all running, the things we all believe about property and resources.

I could make similar points about the fatal flaws in the rule of law, in the criminal justice system, in our religions and morals, but what it all adds up to is that we’re running some truly crappy software, memetically distributed, and part of why that’s true is we’re afraid to write something better. And there’s no doubt that writing a new memetic operating system for humanity would involve a fair amount of risk, and would be something that would have to be done carefully and with some consideration, and that most of the people here apparently are not willing to open their eyes far enough to see that the current software we’re running is not that great. (Although, increasingly, there are people who are, and there’s always the hope that if and when we get a working neural network smarter than we are, it could help, or that the current generation, who see a situation where working full time won’t rent you a apartment because of our very stupid beliefs about inflation and the value of time – will rise up and come up with something better. Of course, it’s more likely a bunch of people will get shot and nothing will get better, but one can always hope)

And then, of course, this might all just be my conscious experience. I know there’s something wrong with my mind, and I know it has plenty of crunch, computing wise, so it may be painting me a picture that’s far darker than the real world for reasons of it’s own. If so, I wish it’d stop doing that.