Birdwatching with AI

This is actually a very cool application. Not one that I will ever use, but nevertheless, pretty cool:

There’s a moment, if you spend any time with the Merlin Bird ID app, that feels like a magic trick. You hold up your phone, tap the microphone, and birdsong that was previously just pleasant background noise starts resolving into names. The app converts sound into a live spectrogram and tags individual species as they vocalize, even when several are singing at once.

Naturalist Drew Monkman captured the experience nicely last November. On a quiet October morning at a provincial park in Ontario, his ears picked up only the chip notes of yellow-rumped warblers. Merlin, listening alongside him, surfaced white-throated sparrow, golden-crowned kinglet, brown creeper, and then, to his surprise, scarlet tanager. He cupped his ears, listened harder, and there it was: a faint chik-brr he’d never have caught unaided. Binoculars confirmed it.

My own AI use is getting more sophisticated, as I’ve upgraded my translation process into a pipeline with repetitive quality control checks that just kicked out a new translation of Natsume Soseki that rated 6 points higher than any of the traditional translations. They still can’t compete with William Weaver or Jay Rubin, of course, but they’re better than just about everyone else.

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Armchair Observations

Armchair Warlord contemplates the prospects for an imminent sequel to the 12-Day War between the USA, Israel, and Iran:

  1. Deployment prior to this week was, as I pointed out at the time, consistent with a show of force to underline a negotiating position rather than a serious operation. Although that has begun to change, US aerial forces in the Middle East remain inferior in strength to the Israeli Air Force that quickly ran out of steam in combat last year. Any air campaign would not be a step-change from that of the Twelve Days’ War.
  2. The departure of huge numbers of tankers to the Middle East, without concomitant massive fighter deployments, indicates that the USAF intends to base its strike aircraft out of the easy range of Iranian short-range missiles on the other side of the Middle East or even farther afield in Cyprus, Diego Garcia, etc. This will dramatically curtail sortie generation compared to aircraft flying out of Al Udied in Qatar and other bases on the Gulf – established for exactly this confrontation but now perfectly useless given the number of short-range missiles the Iranians have pointed at them.
  3. USN forces in the region have a realistic total throw-weight of 300 to 400 badly out of date Tomahawk missiles, which is grossly inadequate for a sustained strike campaign against Iran. Recall that the USN fired almost eighty in a single strike against Syrian WMD targets a decade ago and most were shot down. The USN task force realistically has two or three missile salvos against defended point targets before its magazines run dry.
  4. Iranian offensive and defensive capabilities are formidable and have been overtly bolstered by the Chinese in recent weeks. Any attacks on Iranian soil will need to be – as in the Twelve Days’ War – conducted from a limited pool of standoff munitions. The Israelis, who are expected to join any strikes, certainly have not replenished their own stockpiles. This dramatically curtails the combat endurance of the coalition forces.
  5. The Chinese and Russians are feeding intelligence to Iran. This likely allowed them to stymie a US bomber strike last month prior to latest force buildup. The Iranians can be expected to have an excellent picture of US and Israeli moves at the tactical level.
  6. In the aftermath of the Twelve Days’ War and the insurrection in Iran last month, Mossad’s attack network is likely a spent force and cannot be expected to contribute meaningfully to the war effort.
  7. Iran retains significant proxy capability across the region. Iranian proxies in Iraq and Yemen are practically untouched. Hezbollah in Lebanon sat out the Twelve Days’ War but can be expected to join in a regional Götterdämmerung.
  8. No significant US ground forces have deployed, and the Iranians killed or arrested all of their compradors two weeks ago. Ergo, there is no route to actual regime change in Iran. There’s no Delcy Rodriguez and Vladimir Padrino interested in a coup d’etat by proxy and able to elaborately set conditions for it to happen.
  9. US facilities in the Gulf and the VERY vulnerable US embassy in Iraq (and the somewhat less vulnerable US embassy in Beirut) remain un-evacuated at this time. Evacuation of those facilities is a short-notice indicator of war – as we saw last month when bombers were likely airborne before being called off.
  10. The TACO trade is real. Trump talks a big game until the markets start to believe him, whereupon he reliably beats a hasty retreat and pivots to a new distraction from the Epstein Files. The moral hazard here is that Trump has done this so many times that by this point global markets don’t actually take him seriously and so they’re reacting late and weak to what are objectively very concerning developments. With that said oil prices are – finally – starting to rise. US deployments to the Middle East thus far are to give Trump a credible military option if he decides to use force against Iran – prior deployments were non-credible and the Iranians would have taken them as such – but talk that war is necessarily imminent or that this force is actually adequate to the absolutely colossal task at hand (Iran is a country of 90 million and a geographic fortress) is irresponsible.

It’s certainly possible that Short Fake Trump is bluffing again. Or that he’s desperately trying to keep Netanyahu and his donors off his back a little longer before declaring victory and going home. But it will be a major faux pas and admission of military weakness to send such a comparatively large naval force to the region only to turn around and sail back home again.

Then again, Trump has declared bigger victories with even less in the way of results before, so we can’t count it out.

UPDATE: What goes around, comes around.

China has begun doing to the United States in the Middle East, what the United States has been doing to Russia in Ukraine: Providing imagery of US bases, planes, troop concentrations and more so Iran can use them against the United States, the same way Ukraine uses US-provided info against Russia. Not only is the satellite imagery clear, they overlaid identification tags showing “F-35” or “E-18 Growler” as seen in one image.

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Most Science is Fake

A little preliminary of the sort of thing you’re going to see in HARDCODED when it comes out in April

64% Of Psychology Turned Out To Be Garbage

The warning signs had been there for decades. People just weren’t listening.

In 1962, Paul Meehl was already arguing that psychology’s statistical methods were fundamentally flawed—that the field was “confirming” theories the way a horoscope confirms your personality. He spent twenty years yelling about this. Nobody cared. He died in 2003, still yelling.

In 2005—a full decade before anyone ran the big replication study—John Ioannidis published what might be the most important paper in modern science: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” The title kind of says it. He used mathematical modeling to demonstrate that the way studies were designed, funded, and published made false positives not just likely but inevitable. The paper has been cited over 12,000 times. The field nodded, called it “provocative,” and kept publishing the same way.

Then in 2015, someone finally checked the homework.

A group called the Open Science Collaboration tried to replicate 100 published psychology studies. These weren’t fringe findings. These were peer-reviewed, statistically significant results from respected journals. The stuff textbooks are made of.

Thirty-six percent replicated.

Nearly two-thirds of published findings—the research that shaped TED Talks and bestsellers and Jennifer’s Saturday brunches—couldn’t be reproduced when someone else tried.

Meehl and Ioannidis had called it. The field that studies human behavior discovered that most of what it “knew” about human behavior might be wrong.

As bad as it is in the field of psychology, it’s even worse in a number of other scientific fields. And the institutional incentives are such that it can only continue to get worse in all of them.

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Veriphysics: The Treatise 019

II. The Name and Its Meaning

A philosophy requires a name, something that is more than an identifying label, something that serves to describe its essential orientation. The word should be memorable, pronounceable, and meaningful. It should capture the philosophy’s core insight and clearly distinguish the framework from its rivals. In addition to its identity, it also requires an objective and a foundation.

Veriphysics was chosen as the name for this new philosophy because unlike classical philosophy, which is focused on knowledge, metaphysics which examines the nature of reality, Scholasticism which combines the classical tradition with Christian theology, and Enlightenment philosophy, which claims to be established on reason but is based upon the hidden knowledge known as gnosis, veriphysics is focused solely on truth, or veritas. Every aspect of veriphysics is meant to explore and expand the concept of truth to the greatest extent possible, through every path that is capable to leading to some aspect of the singular, core, and underlying Truth.

The objective of veriphysical philosophy is veriscendance. Veriscendance derives from two roots: veritas and ascendance, suggesting both ascent and transcendence. This fusion is a deliberate choice. Veriscendance is defined as the end result of ascending through the various limited aspects of truth that humanity is capable of perceiving toward ultimate Truth, thereby recognizing the fact that human knowledge genuinely grasps various aspects of reality while acknowledging that the full truth about the comprehensive scope of existence across all its various dimensions intrinsically exceeds both our conceptual grasp as well as the limits of our knowledge.

Even the name of this objective therefore rejects the hubris of the Enlightenment’s epistemology. The Enlightenment imagined that autonomous reason could eventually achieve a God’s-eye perspective of existence, that sufficient improvement in method would somehow yield complete knowledge, and that every aspect of the universe was both a) material and b) would eventually be attainable through human inquiry. This fantasy has been entirely refuted by the very sciences the Enlightenment celebrated. Quantum mechanics has revealed the irreducible indeterminacy at the foundations of matter. Cosmology declares that ninety-five percent of the universe is dark matter and dark energy, unobservable and unexplained, and identified only by its gravitational effects. The Enlightenment materialism that once promised to explain everything now cannot account for most of what its own methods declares to be real and material.

Veriphysics is constructed on a series of very different axioms. It declares that human knowledge is real, but incomplete, genuine but inherently limited. As the apostle Paul declared, we see as though through a glass, darkly. The image in the glass is not an illusion or a shadow, it corresponds to reality, it can be refined and clarified, and it supports both genuine understanding and meaningful action. But the image is not, and it can never be, the thing itself. It can never be more than a small part of the thing. We cannot conceive the whole. The fullness of Truth exceeds and transcends both our present and our future capabilities. We ascend toward it but we do not arrive at it, not in this life and almost certainly not in the next either.

This is not skepticism. The skeptic denies that the glass portrays anything real. Veriphysics affirms that it does. The image is partial, but it is an image of something real. The ascent is incomplete, but it is neveretheless a genuine advancement toward something concrete. Truth exists, it is knowable, we genuinely know what we know, and we know more than the mere fact of our own cognition. The partial nature of the truth that is accessible to us is not a defect to be overcome by improved methodologies, it is a feature of our cognition as creatures, a limit designed into the structure of finite minds approaching the reality of the infinite.

In other words, the distinction between reason and revelation is intrinsically false. They are merely two different paths to the same end.

The objective of veriphysics also carries a connotation of elevation in the political sense, of dominance, of supremacy, and of the correct ordering of intellectual and social life. This connotation is intentional. Veriphysics necessarily means that an orientation toward the truth must order society and intellect, that the pursuit of truth is not one value among many but the architectonic value that makes all the others coherent and meaningful. A civilization that abandons truth as a fundamental objective does not cannot achieve either neutrality or progress, it instead assures chaos, manipulation, and degeneration.

Veriphysics is a necessary goal for the humanist, because the societal pursuit of truth is a precondition of human flourishing.

You can now buy the complete Veriphysics: The Treatise at Amazon in both Kindle and audiobook formats if you’d like to read ahead or have it available as a reference. Thanks to many of the readers here, it is presently a #1 bestseller in both Epistemology and Metaphysics.

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The Infamous: A Review

Scorched and Salted reviews The Mathematics of Evolution:

Years ago, I stumbled onto the blog Vox Popoli by Vox Day. I don’t remember what led me there. I do remember the feeling of not knowing what I was looking at.

It was refreshing.

A break from the incoherent, exhausting noise of the mainstream.

There was an internal cohesion to his writing — an insistence on definitions, on first principles, on following arguments to their conclusion.

Not playing fast and loose with language and logic.

What really puzzled me came later, when I tried spreading the word.

I tried sharing his work — articles, books, videos — expecting others to recognize its merit as I had.

Many dismissed him outright.

Some refused to engage with the material and instead labelled him:

Bigot.
Racist.
Homophobe.

I waited for the showering of compliments to end — to see if the arguments would ever be addressed.

I’m still waiting…

In his 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett describes the concept of evolution by natural selection as a universal acid — corrosive through everything it touches, from the cell to consciousness and everything in between.

Cool story, bro.

Vox just slid through with a cosmos-worth of base and dumped it from great heights over that Darwinian poppycock. (Pause)

But to say Day neutralizes Darwinism is an understatement.

The implications of Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene are devastating to mainstream conventional “Science” incorporated.

These books scorch and salt the epistemic and ontological grounding of secularists, materialists, and champions of Enlightenment values.

What Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene do is more akin to a mercy killing.

A precise numerical execution.

Read them.

Read the whole thing there. Ironically, the most significant aspect of those two books may not be the way in which they have demolished everything from natural selection as the origin of the species to neutral theory, but rather, the way that the way the evolutionary defenders reacted to the arguments contained in them led directly to the development of the triveritan method of investigating logical, mathematical, and scientific claims more rigorously than any previous epistemological method customarily permits.

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Did Iran Miss its Chance?

It appears that Iran, like Russia, just managed to get suckered into “diplomacy” that was never anything more than a means of buying time in order to permit the US military to move its pieces into position for a series of decapitation and incapacitation strikes.

The rapid buildup of U.S. forces in the Middle East has progressed to the point that President Trump has the option to take military action against Iran as soon as this weekend, administration and Pentagon officials said, leaving the White House with high-stakes choices about pursuing diplomacy or war.

Mr. Trump has given no indication that he has made a decision about how to proceed. But the drive to assemble a military force capable of striking Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missiles and accompanying launch sites has continued this week despite indirect talks between the two nations on Tuesday, with Iran seeking two weeks to come back with fleshed out proposals for a diplomatic resolution.

Many administration officials have expressed skepticism about the prospects of reaching a diplomatic deal with Tehran. The indirect talks on Tuesday in Geneva ended with what Iran’s foreign minister said was agreement on a “set of guiding principles.” U.S. officials said the two sides made progress but added that big gaps remain.

It’s really rather remarkable that Clown World’s targets keep falling for this sort of thing, and they’ve been doing so since Desert Shield. The only chance Saddam Hussein had was launching his own ground offensive before all of his assets were systematically depreciated by 100,000 sorties flown over 36 days; by the time Desert Storm began his armies weren’t even in any shape to resist.

Russia, of course, has been able to overcome the challenges posed by its engagement with the deceitful Minsk agreements, but it has paid a higher price for its reluctance to accept the inevitable. Even now, it’s still trying to negotiate and bargain while resisting the need to admit that the only way it can end the war is to win it on the ground.

Iran stopped the 12-Day War eight months ago, and as a result, now finds itself facing a much more formidable US expeditionary force, and would probably have been much better off launching its attacks on the US bases in the region rather than waiting for its air defense systems to be attacked and its launch sites destroyed, then trying to hit back with its degraded capabilities.

Of course, we can’t necessarily assume that the Iranians are making the same mistake again. And there are some signs that Iran has been using the additional time to bring in support from Russia and China, to say nothing of arranging for the arrival of the Russian and Chinese ships for their “joint naval exercise”. But the US assumption is that Russia and China are going to stay out of this, and that whatever help they’ve been able to provide will be less significant than the arrangement of the US pieces.

So, I suppose as with most wars, we’ll just have to wait and see who underestimated whom. But the recent history has not tended to favor the side that is reluctant to respond to overt aggression, whether that is out of cowardice, ill-founded optimism, an unwillingness to abandon the status quo, or simple naivete.

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Prince Andrew Arrested

Of all the Epstein-related arrests we wanted to see, one of the more improbable has just happened:

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on his 66th birthday today and is in police custody after a raid on his new Sandringham home. Thames Valley Police held the eighth in line to the British throne on suspicion of misconduct in public office this morning. The Daily Mail was the first to reveal plain-clothes police, carried in six unmarked vehicles, had arrived at Wood Farm, Andrew’s new Sandringham home, at 8am this morning.

A convoy including at least two royal Land Rovers linked to Andrew was photographed leaving the estate less than an hour later. His arrest was confirmed at 10.08am.

For the past ten days detectives have been probing his conduct as a trade envoy for the UK after emails in the Epstein Files suggested he shared confidential information with his paedophile friend including reports of his official visits and potential investment opportunities.

Sure, there is plenty of reason to suspect that either the prosecutors will whitewash everything he’ll “commit suicide” in prison and be spirited off somewhere in the Middle East, but it is nevertheless a start.

Now do Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates…

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Veriphysics: The Treatise 018

Part Three: The Path Toward Truth

I. Introduction: The Possibility of Renewal

The Enlightenment has failed. Its political philosophy produced tyranny wearing the mask of liberation. Its economics produced models that do not describe reality and policies that impoverish the very populations they claimed they would enrich. Its science produced institutions incapable of correcting their own errors and a theory of life that cannot survive basic arithmetic. Its epistemology consumed itself, beginning with the enthronement of reason and ending with its abdication and abandonment.

The classical tradition that preceded the Enlightenment, though superior in substance, failed to defend itself. It spoke to specialists while its opponents spoke to the public. It defended when it should have attacked. It assumed good faith in a rhetorical war. It possessed the tools of logic, mathematics, and empirical inquiry but did not deploy them as weapons. It was outmaneuvered, outspent, and outpublicized by an opponent whose arguments could not have survived serious scrutiny.

There is an intellectual void left by the Enlightenment’s collapse. Human beings cannot live without coherent frameworks for understanding their reality, grounding their morality, informing their decisions, and orienting their actions. The borrowed capital of Christendom and the societal inertia, upon which the Enlightenment drew even as it denied its debts, has been exhausted.

Something will fill the vacuum. The vital question is whether whatever fills it will be true.

This is not a question for passive observers. The void will be filled by whoever seeks to fill it, by those with the will, the resources, and the vision to offer an alternative. If the heirs of the tradition offer nothing, then something else will take its place: a new ideology, a new materialism, a new paganism, a new barbarism, and a new madness. The opportunity is real but it will not wait forever.

What is required is neither a museum restoration of the medieval synthesis nor an accommodation to postmodernity that sacrifices substance for elite approval. What is needed is a genuine philosophical renewal, the construction of an intellectual framework that recovers what is true in the tradition, incorporates what has been genuinely learned in the intervening centuries, and provides the tools necessary to distinguish truth from falsehood with greater force and rigor.

That framework is Veriphysics.

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NB: You can now buy the complete Veriphysics: The Treatise at Amazon in both Kindle and audiobook formats if you’d like to read ahead or have it available as a reference. Thanks to many of the readers here, it is presently a #1 bestseller in both Epistemology and Metaphysics.

Feature, Not Bug

A young woman is taking legal action against her high school, alleging she was awarded honors at graduation even though she’s illiterate. – Thomas Sowell

The problem is that a class action lawsuit of this kind that encompassed even a small fraction of those for whom this is true would create sufficient liability to end public schooling in America.

Yeah, so, that’s not at all a problem.

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Veriphysics, as requested

The Enlightenment promised to replace superstition with reason, tyranny with liberty, and ignorance with progress. Three centuries later, the results are in.

Democratic governments no longer represent their citizens. Economic models that predicted shared prosperity have delivered stagnation and debt. The scientific establishment cannot correct its own errors. The very philosophers who enthroned reason ended by abandoning it entirely. What we are witnessing is not the corruption of a good idea by bad actors. It is the inevitable collapse of a framework that was flawed from its foundations.

Veriphysics: The Treatise is a systematic diagnosis of that collapse and a rigorous description of what must replace it.

In three parts, Vox Day examines how the Enlightenment’s five core premises — autonomous reason, sovereign individualism, mechanical nature, the fact-value distinction, and inevitable progress — have each been falsified by the experience of history and by the findings of the sciences the Enlightenment itself celebrated. He then reconstructs the intellectual history of how a superior philosophical tradition, the classical and Christian inheritance, was outmaneuvered not by better arguments but by superior rhetoric, institutional capture, and the patient infiltration of universities, academies, and publishing houses over generations.

The final and constructive section introduces Veriphysics as a genuine philosophical successor: a framework built on Aletheian Realism, grounded in the Christian metaphysical tradition, and equipped with a concrete epistemological tool identified as the Triveritas. Any claim that cannot satisfy all three of its conditions — logical validity, mathematical coherence, and empirical anchoring — does not merit assent, regardless of the credentials of those asserting it. Applied to the crown jewels of Enlightenment thought, including the cogito, Darwinian evolution, classical economics, and social contract theory, the Triveritas serves as a wrecking ball. The math doesn’t work. The logic doesn’t hold. The evidence, honestly examined, refutes rather than confirms.

This is not for those who want their current assumptions confirmed. It is for those who have become aware that something is deeply wrong with the intellectual world they inherited, and who are willing to follow the path toward truth wherever it leads.

Authored by bestselling political philosopher Vox Day, also the author of the landmark science work Probability Zero, Veriphysics: The Treatise is a philosophical manifesto for the 21st century. Available on Amazon, Kindle Unlimited, and Audible.

I released this 84-page treatise more so that people could have an easy single reference than as a book proper; it consists of the first two parts, the final section of the latter which was posted today, plus the third part, which I will continue to post here daily until it is complete. Although it naturally comes off as highly critical of the Enlightenment, and, to a lesser extent, their Scholastic rivals, it represents my attempt to transition from the purely critical role to constructing something useful.

I leave it to the readers to decide how effective it is as a post-Enlightenment proto-philosophy, but there are already some signs that the triveritan approach it utilizes is a fundamentally more viable and reliable heuristic than historical truth-metrics.

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