Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, as we talk about various types of collectivism, and various pundits try their hardest to convince us that socialism will make us all poor, I thought I’d bring out a few facts.

The first thing I’d point out is that generally conservatives are anti-collectivist, and generally whenever conservatives get in power in the USA, a recession almost immediately follows. Now the powers that be would *really* like you to forget this fact, or stop noticing it – just like they’d like to convince you that the cause of the failures of the Soviet Union and China were the result of collectivism.

What they carefully ignore is that A: sometimes collectivism works. Sometimes it works quite a bit better than individualism. B: In the places where it doesn’t work, *often* there is a attempt to pair it with dictatorship or oligarchy. This is certainly the case in both China and the Soviet Union. C: In small scale places where it doesn’t work, often the USA, which has capitalism as a state religion, was responsible for repeatedly blowing things up and/or enacting sanctions in order to make sure it would fail. Cuba is a obvious example of a system that probably would have succeeded wildly without repeated abuse by it’s collective-phobic neighbor.

However, there are a few things to remember. We see a lot of what I call ‘stupid greed’ – that is to say, greed that makes everyone, including the greedy person, poorer. Part of why I think we see it is that having large amounts of power leads to a special type of brain damage. People with large amounts of power lose the ability to empathise with those beneath them, which leads increasingly to them forgetting that a dictatorship is generally not a winning combination. People in power also often come over time to vastly overestimate their intelligence. I’ve been reading about the downfall of Commodore Business Machines, which is kind of a tragic play in 3 acts, but definitely one of the acts is the result of Jack Tramiel having this sort of brain damage.

So, the powers that be, who have a lot of money to spend on propaganda and attempts to change our minds, want very badly for us not to choose collectivism because they – in their generally brain damaged way – think that life is a zero sum game and they’re going to be less rich if they have less money.

However, as I’ve talked about before, this type of greed is generally stupid – it costs the person who is exercising the greed potential experiences, because it leads to hoarding pointers to resources instead of spending them intelligently to garner more resources. It’s important to understand that there are resources which are multiplicative in value – obvious examples are intellectual property like the transistor, but you also have technologies which have a network effect, such as the fax machine and the personal computer – every one that you add to the world increases the value of all of them.

However, there seems to be no hope of getting through to people who have fallen into this mindset. They are convinced that conservative politicians and conservative policies are exactly what they want. You can run into people who generally acknowledge the value of research and intelligence, who would never attempt to compete on things like configuring computers, designing circuits, or writing software – but suddenly whenever the topic turns to politics they know best because you are promoting liberalism and collectivism and they are deeply convinced they know what history says. They in fact are cherry-picking from the history that ended the way they wanted, and then furthermore carefully ignoring that a lot of the failures of collectivism have been the result of single-party thinking, oligarchy, or dictatorship. But you can’t generally get them to understand that.

The good news, I suppose, is ultimately conservatism is likely to fail in a evolutionary point of view. Conservative policies, consistently carried out, will kill off our species – because conservatism wants to keep things the same, and ‘keep things the same’ includes things like a fork bomb (be fruitful and multiply) and epic stupidity (there’s plenty of oil, we should continue to fight wars to get resources we want, etc), and hopefully the next species will be a little smarter.

This didn’t end up being as much of a roundup as I hoped.

I did want to mention, because I don’t always get around to putting a comment on each individual post to the effect, that the vast majority of tracks I publish here are co-engineered by Arthur St James, the other set of ears at Sheer Sound Studios. Pretty much all of them are all me, but occasionally they will include drum loops from public libraries or from Superior Drummer. When other musicians play on them I try to make sure I mention it in the “liner notes” that go on the blog with the published track.

Here we have my favorite Springsteen song – The River, covered by me. 😉

The River

So, those of you who have talked to me about my ideas for a neural operating system to enable humans to experience much greater freedom with the same resources know that one of the things that I’ve talked about is ‘conditional virginity’, or perhaps ‘programmable virginity’ – the ability to forget something you’ve learned so you can experience it for the first time again, but only temporarily so you can compare the two experiences. Now, while human experiential memory is well suited for this kind of stunt, the way we learn decision trees (and muscle memory) *really* is not – both because these things involve more than one system in the brain and also because of the way they are stored – for obvious reasons they are indexed against need, not against when and how they were learned. So you can never *really* achieve beginner mind again once you’ve learned about something because even if you were to lose the memory of the first experience you would not lose the decision trees you built the first time you had the experience. And maybe this is just as well – I’ve been reading about a form of degenerative disease similar to alzheimers except involving the decision trees instead of the memory, and it sounds terrifying. I imaghine you would experience it almost as if someone else were driving the bus instead of you.. which does underline the fact that the part of us that is making the decisions and the part of us that is having the experience are two different things, and I’m still not at all sure if the part of us that is making the decisions doesn’t occasionally slide in a totally false experience on the part of us that is “on the ride”. It seems like this would have a distinct evolutionary advantage.

So, I had a long series of conversations with someone on my recent Africa adventure about whether or not we are living in a simulation. Most of you already know that I have noticed that both evolution and intelligent design would discover virtualization fairly early on as a way to do a lot more with the same resources. Virtualization opens a lot of doors vs. running ‘on the iron’ – we already know that we have some virtualization features, such as dreaming and imagining possibilities, but I think it likely that we probably go a good deal further than that.

One of the thoughts i had never been struck by before which struck me on this particular version of enumerating the age-old discussion was that humans do not really have instincts to speak of – so one appropriate use of virtualization is to build the neural structures necessary to survive before we meet the real world. It’s quite possible that we’re still in our mother’s womb, living through recordings of various situations so we can build the neurological structures and be ready to deal with the real world, which may be far stranger and wilder than anything we’ve experienced thus far. When you think about it, if evolution hasn’t already found this, it’s a bit of surprise, because surely the child that experiences training simulations in-womb is going to have a *far* higher survival score than the child who does not.

Anyway, one can think of a number of scenarios in which simulation or virtualization would be a winning strategy – if we’re the product of intelligent design we’re almost certainly inside a virtualization envelope, because it protects the designer from us. One amusing possibility that’s occurred to me is that we may be the result of someone trying to develop a really accurate video game that simulates life forms – so accurate that those life forms turn out to experience the world as real. It would be, it seems to me, a easy mistake to make.

So, I recently went on a African safari – a lot more about this later, including pictures and the like – most of the trip was amazing, but it did have a few disturbing moments. Today I’m going to talk about the one in which someone asserted a number of untruths as facts.

The whole thing started because I was talking about the opiod epidemic and mentioned marijuana in a list of “relatively harmless” drugs. Someone at the table I was at – and this person will remain nameless, but I’m fairly sure they have a significant mental illness – asserted that MJ had killed many, many people.

It came out that his sister was killed by a drunk driver who also had MJ in his system. And, I agreed with a couple of his points, which I’ll get to later – but he kept asserting increasingly obviously fictional, increasingly disturbing statistics.

Now, I’m generally disposed to believe things people present as facts, with the obvious exception of certain political figures who I know lie constantly and without limit. It wasn’t until he stated something directly opposed to personal experience and also widely reported group experience that I realized that he was, in fact, insane. Or else trolling me, but I prefer to believe insanity.

I do feel for him that he lost someone he loved. I do feel confident that he totally misidentified the root cause – the root cause is humans driving cars – we really shouldn’t drive cars, we’re not good a it – and the secondary contributing cause would be the alcohol. MJ earns tertiary status.

I finally told him to drop it – which is rather out of character for me, but once I had done some internet searches and confirmed that the things he was saying were not true, I found it *very* disturbing to listen to him talking about the subject because I knew he was injecting false information into my mind. I suspect he’s got a cohort of anti-MJ friends who egg him on and tell him things that *he* believes are true, although it’s possible that he makes all this stuff up himself. I also am fairly sure he didn’t *know* the things he was telling me weren’t true – but he certainly wasn’t ready to listen to a dissenting opinion. He was not in general willing to let anyone get a word in edgewise.

I’m sure I have been that person in terms of talking too much. I hope I haven’t been the one presenting utter fiction as fact.

Part of what I found interesting is how, as I listened to him, his point of view which was opposite of mine seemed more reasonable and plausible until he made statements which were clearly and obviously false, at which point I found listening to him frustrating and alarming. I do hope he finds whatever help he needs – I seem to know a lot of people that start to throw the baby out with the bathwater after losing a sister. (I am not sure if I’ve written about why I am absolutely against Marsy’s law for all, but that would be another example of someone pushing for a excessive solution because their sister died)

Anyway, I kept running web searches to verify that the “facts” he was telling me weren’t. One of the thoughts I of course had is it’s possible I am the insane one, and my mind was swapping out the text the web sites were returning with the text that I expected to see. But there’s no way to tell if that’s the case. It’s possible he and I live in two different universes and in his all the things he said are true. Again, no good way to know.

Another thing I noticed is he has the typical disease of certain lawmakers and other individuals of thinking that addicts are worthless and should be jailed for life or killed at the first convenient moment. I of course understand both that many addicts are also our most creative people, and that history owes much to people who were flawed in that particular way. But, see elsewhere, the people who tend to end up in power are the worst of us – because the best of us generally don’t want power over anyone but themselves. And probably thus will it ever be. I can only hope my insane table-mate doesn’t end up with any political power, because I have no doubt that he would make the world a worse place.

OK, to bring this back home to the original topic.. one of the weaknesses of the way humans are put together, as we know from the Milgram effect, is we tend to trust authority more than we should. Authority apparently can be something as simple as speaking in a authoritarian tone of voice. This is alarming because it means I might have many “facts” stored which aren’t, simply because they were spoken in a authoritarian tone. He *really* had to say something obviously not true (he stated that MJ has no medicinal value and that the idea that it is one of the best anti-nausea substances we know of was completely false – of course part of his defense of that statement was that it was listed as something to use only when all else had failed – which I’m not surprised, big pharma doesn’t make much of a profit on MJ. I note that TMS for PTSD sufferers is also listed as something to use only when all else has failed, whereas I would use it as one of the first things I would attempt. Big Pharma owns the medical industry and has no ethics at all. but we all already know that, and I digress..)

One other interesting thing to take away – if he had let it go after our first discussion, I would have researched it much more heavily than I am now likely to. I am pretty thoroughly convinced that adding MJ to the list of legal drugs has gained us far more (in terms of bright, creative, helpful people we are no longer putting in jail) than it has cost us (traffic fatalities might go up by a few)

I will mention there are a few points he made that I agree with – 1) You shouldn’t drive when stoned. It does increase your RT. 2) You DEFINITELY should not even THINK about driving when stoned and drunk. I don’t know exactly what that would do, but nothing good. 3) We are breeding more and more potent weed, and we should think about whether that’s really such a hot idea.

As you all know, I don’t partake myself so I don’t really have a horse in this race, other than a number of my friends do and I don’t think any of them belong in jail. I actually think the people *putting* them in jail are the people who belong in jail.

Heavy Christmas

For those of you in a holiday mood..

Greensleeves

I’ve been playing a lot with the blues in my repeated attempts to get my left hand a little more into the game. As a side effect, I ended up writing this piece, hope you all enjoy it:

Major Mellow G

So, I’ve got several things in the pipeline, but here’s a cover that should take at least a few of my friends *waaay* back:

Sheer Covers Emmet Swimming – Broken Oar