Author: VD

TOTAL DECLAS

Red October appears to be in session:

I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!
– President Donald Trump

Meanwhile, Facebook has gone to unprecedented lengths to dismiss QAnon because it is obviously nothing more than a silly LARP.

Facebook said Tuesday that it is banning all QAnon accounts from its platforms, a significant escalation over its previous actions and one of the broadest rules the social media giant has put in place in its history.

The NBA waves the white flag

They haven’t learned anything. But they desperately want the beatings to stop.

Rachel Nichols: The NBA has certainly been the most visible billion-dollar organization championing social justice and civil rights. As you noted in your press conference the other day, though, that has not been universally popular. How committed are you to being that going forward?

Adam Silver: We’re completely committed to standing for social justice and racial equality and that’s been the case going back decades. It’s part of the DNA of this league. How it gets manifested is something we’re gonna have to sit down with the players and discuss for next season. I would say, in terms of the messages you see on the court and our jerseys, this was an extraordinary moment in time when we began these discussions with the players and what we all lived through this summer. My sense is there’ll be somewhat a return to normalcy, that those messages will largely be left to be delivered off the floor. And I understand those people who are saying ‘I’m on your side, but I want to watch a basketball game.’

Translation: “We still hate you and want to destroy your nation, your culture, and your faith. But we’ll stop rubbing that hatred in your face, for the time being, if you’ll just come back.” And the sports fans whispered, “no”.

Another church damns itself

Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, this is what happens when you allow the wolves to infiltrate the church leadership.

A shocking new inquiry has found that, not only did the Church of England forgive some 400 pedophiles, but it allowed them to continue working with children. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) found that between 1940 and 2018, some 390 people employed by the church, as clergymen or in trusted positions, were convicted of child sex abuse.

They were ‘forgiven’ for their crimes by the church and allowed to continue their duties, often in close proximity to children, the IICSA found.

“The culture of the Church of England facilitated it becoming a place where abusers could hide,” the report reads. The inquiry found the church repeatedly failed to respond in a consistent manner to victims and survivors of abuse, compounding their trauma over a period of decades.

Never continue to attend any church that “forgives” the moral failings of its leaders. The only correct response to a pastor, a priest, a deacon, or an elder publicly wailing about “sinning against my God” is: “you’re defrocked and you’re fired.”

Penitent men should be forgiven. Fallen leaders must be replaced, whether they repent or not.

The limits of simulation

In a rather clever confluence of Bostron’s simulation theory and the Fermi Paradox, Anatoly Karlin hypothesizes the possibility that the reason there is no extraterrestial life in our simulated universe is that it lies beyond the simulation’s limits:

In a classic paper from 2003, Nick Bostrom argued that at least one of the following propositions is very likely true: That posthuman civilizations don’t tend to run “ancestor-simulations”; that we are living in a simulation; or that we will go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage[58]. Let us denote these “basement simulators” as the Architect, the constructor of the Matrix world-simulation in the eponymous film. As Bostrom points out, it seems implausible, if not impossible, that there is a near uniform tendency to avoid running ancestor-simulations in the posthuman era.

There are unlikely to be serious hardware constraints on simulating human history up to the present day. Assuming the human brain can perform ~1016 operations per seconds, this translates to ~1026 operations per second to simulate today’s population of 7.7 billion humans. It would also require ~1036 operations over the entirety of humanity’s ~100 billion lives to date [8]. As we shall soon see, even the latter can be theoretically accomplished with a nano-based computer on Earth running exclusively off its solar irradiance within about one second.

Sensory and tactical information is much less data heavy, and is trivial to simulate in comparison to neuronal processes. The same applies for the environment, which can be procedurally generated upon observation as in many video games. In Greg Egan’s Permutation City, a sci-fi exploration of simulations, they are designed to be computationally sparse and highly immersive. This makes intuitive sense. There is no need to model the complex thermodynamics of the Earth’s interior in their entirety, molecular and lower details need only be “rendered” on observation, and far away stars and galaxies shouldn’t require much more than a juiced up version of the Universe Sandbox video game sim.

Bostrom doesn’t consider the costs of simulating the history of the biosphere. I am not sure that this is justified, since our biological and neurological makeup is itself a result of billions of years of natural selection. Nor is it likely to be a trivial endeavour, even relative to simulating all of human history. Even today, there are about as many ant neurons on this planet as there are human neurons, which suggests that they place a broadly similar load on the system [9]. Consequently, rendering the biosphere may still require one or two more orders of magnitude of computing power than just all humans. Moreover, the human population – and total number of human neurons – was more than three orders of magnitude lower than today before the rise of agriculture, i.e. irrelevant next to the animal world for ~99.9998{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3} of the biosphere’s history [10]. Simulating the biosphere’s evolution may have required as many as 1043 operations [11].

I am not sure whether 1036 or 1043 operations is the more important number so far as generating a credible and consistent Earth history is concerned. However, we may consider this general range to be a hard minimal figure on the amount of “boring” computation the simulators are willing to commit to in order in search for a potentially interesting results.

Even simulating a biosphere history is eminently doable for an advanced civilization. A planet-scale computer based on already known nanotechnological designs and powered by a single-layer Matryoshka Brain that cocoons the Sun will generate 1042 flops[60]. Assuming the Architect’s universe operates within the same set of physical laws, there is enough energy and enough mass to compute such an “Earth history” within 10 seconds – and this is assuming they don’t use more “exotic” computing technologies (e.g. based on plasma or quantum effects). Even simulating ten billion such Earth histories will “only” take ~3,000 years – a blink of an eye in cosmic terms. Incidentally, that also happens to be the number of Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars in the Milky Way[61].

So far, so good – assuming that we’re more or less in the ballpark on orders of magnitude. But what if we’re not? Simulating the human brain may require as much 1025 flops, depending on the required granularity, or even as many as 1027 flops if quantum effects are important [62,63]. This is still quite doable for a nano-based Matryoshka Brain, though the simulation will approach the speed of our universe as soon as it has to simulate ~10,000 civilizations of 100 billion humans. However, doing even a single human history now requires 1047 operations, or two days of continuous Matryoshka Brain computing, while doing a whole Earth biosphere history requires 1054 operations (more than 30,000 years).

This will still be feasible or even trivial in certain circumstances even in our universe. Seth Lloyd calculates a theoretical upper bound of 5*1050 flops for a 1 kg computer[64]. Converting the entirety of the Earth’s mass into such a computer would yield 3*1075 flops. That said, should we find that one needs significantly more orders of magnitude than 1016 flops to simulate a human brain, we may start to slowly devalue the probability that we are living in a simulation. Conversely, if we are to find clues that simulating a biosphere is much easier than simulating a human noosphere – for instance, if the difficulty of simulating brains increases non-linearly with respect to their numbers of neurons – we may instead have to conclude that it is more likely that we live in a simulation.

Norman Castles

Episode 11 of The Forge of Tolkien is now live on Unauthorized.

Tolkien famously insisted in the Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings that, “in the intention of the author,” the story had no “inner meaning or ‘message’… It is neither allegorical nor topical.” Rather, Tolkien said, he had always preferred “history, real or feigned”—without explaining which he thought he was writing in the story of the Ring.

In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown tackles the puzzle of what Tolkien meant by history and its relationship to myth through a close reading of Night 64 of The Notion Club Papers. We meet the barber Norman Keeps and his stories about the Dark Ages, compare the barber’s version of English history to the history everyone remembers in W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That (1930), and look out with Lancelot and Guenever on Arthur’s Merry England in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (1939-1958). Was Tolkien simply crafting an elaborate joke claiming that he was writing history—or did he have a more serious purpose in interweaving the mythical with the historical?

Bringing the agencies to heel

It’s long past time for the elected representatives of the People to make it abundantly clear to the intelligence agencies that they do not have the right or the responsibility to refuse to disclose any information requested by the President, the Senate, or the House of Representatives.

Two top House Republicans issued a rallying call on Sunday to combat resistance from intelligence agencies to disclose classified information that they argue will blow wide open a controversy surrounding Russia’s role in disrupting the 2016 election.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, went so far as to raise the possibility of an overhaul of the U.S. intelligence community if leaders are not more forthcoming with their findings, even as national security experts warn of sources and methods being put at risk and Democrats charge Republicans with pushing Russian disinformation to boost President Trump ahead of the 2020 election.

“We want every damn bit of evidence that every intelligence agency has, or it’s maybe time to shut those agencies down,” the California Republican said on the Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures. “Because, at the end of the day … our liberties are more important than anything else we have in this country. And they have been stampeded over by these dirty cops.”

Nunes and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, another California Republican who also appeared on the show hosted by Maria Bartiromo, both confirmed they have seen underlying evidence to a letter released last week from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe that said in late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies received “insight” into a Russian intelligence analysis alleging that Hillary Clinton, then a candidate for president, approved a campaign plan to “stir up a scandal” against Trump tying him to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

“Every member of Congress should read the underlying information behind this,” McCarthy said. “This is really a bombshell of what we have wasted so much time on, that it was created by Hillary Clinton.”

The only “national security” threat more dire than that of a rogue intelligence agency is a rogue military. And given how far out of control these agencies are, and how questionable their loyalties are, shutting them down would be a lot less risky than permitting them to continue to operate without effective oversight.

Leadership, Patreon-style

One of the three members of Patreon’s executive board has publicly called for killing those who aren’t on board with corporate political activism:

Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo has set Twitter ablaze by suggesting that those who disagree with the push to inject political activism into the workplace will be “lined up against the wall and shot.”

“Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary,” tweeted Costolo, who ran Twitter between 2010 and 2015.

Costolo was replying to a tweet related to how Coinbase’s CEO has decided to separate business from political activism and offer an exit package for those employees who feel they can’t work in a company that doesn’t want to be hindered by politics and activism, as so many other companies have been distracted by in recent times.

“We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission,” Armstrong wrote.

But Costolo wasn’t impressed. “This isn’t great leadership. It’s the abdication of leadership. It’s the equivalent of telling your employees to ‘shut up and dribble,’” Costolo wrote.

Silicon Valley is “extremely left-leaning” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once admitted and, more increasingly than ever, many employees are trying to inject their activistic politics into the culture of many companies.

Costolo’s tweet is incendiary, not only because it was made during a time of political violence, but also because of the vocalization of a growing sentiment of intolerance to others expressing their viewpoints and threats toward those who don’t want to see homogenization of thought across many industries.

In light of this statement, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Costolo was the inspiration behind Patreon’s remarkably self-destructive decision to breach the very contract it unilaterally imposed on its users by suing them in a group action.

Ironically, under Patreon’s own professed standards, Costolo should be banned from Patreon.

Marketing doesn’t hold a monopoly

On corporate stupidity. The engineers, both hardware and software, also exhibit a reliable form of stupidity that has been known to prove terminal. From IN SEARCH OF STUPIDITY, which is the best business book I have ever read, and other than CORPORATE CANCER, which addresses an even more critical problem, possibly the most important.

SMS: Joel, what, in your opinion, is the single greatest development sin a software company can commit?

JS: Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug-prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuilt from ground zero.

SMS: What’s wrong with that?

JS: Because it’s almost never true. It’s not like code rusts if it’s not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it.

SMS: Well, why do programmers constantly go charging into management’s offices claiming the existing code base is junk and has to be replaced?

JS: My theory is that this happens because it’s harder to read code than to write it. A programmer will whine about a function that he thinks is messy. It’s supposed to be a simple function to display a window or something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I’ll tell you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low-memory conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly, but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.

SMS: Well, let’s assume some of your top programmers walked in the door and said, “We absolutely have to rewrite this thing from scratch, top to bottom.” What’s the right response?

JS: What I learned from Charles Ferguson’s great book, High St@kes, No Prisoners, is that you need to hire programmers who can understand the business goals. People who can answer questions like “What does it really cost the company if we rewrite?” “How many months will it delay shipping the product?” “Will we sell enough marginal copies to justify the lost time and market share?” If your programmers insist on a rewrite, they probably don’t understand the financials of the company, or the competitive situation. Explain this to them. Then get an honest estimate for the rewrite effort and insist on a financial spreadsheet showing a detailed cost/benefit analysis for the rewrite.

SMS: Yeah, great, but, believe it or not, programmers have been known to, uh, “shave the truth” when it comes to such matters.

JS: What you’re seeing is the famous programmer tactic: All features that I want take 1 hour, all features that I don’t want take 99 years. If you suspect you are being lied to, just drill down. Get a schedule with granularity measured in hours, not months. Insist that each task have an estimate that is 2 days or less. If it’s longer than that, you need to break it down into subtasks or the schedule can’t be realistic.

SMS: Are there any circumstances where a complete code rewrite is justified?

JS: Probably not. The most extreme circumstance I can think of would be if you are simultaneously moving to a new platform and changing the architecture of the code dramatically. Even in this case you are probably better off looking at the old code as you develop the new code.

SMS: Hmm. Let’s take a look at your theory and compare it to some real-world software meltdowns. For instance, what happened at Netscape?

JS: Way back in April 2000, I wrote on my website that Netscape made the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make by deciding to rewrite their code from scratch. Lou Montulli, one of the five programming superstars who did the original version of Navigator, e-mailed me to say, “I agree completely; it’s one of the major reasons I resigned from Netscape.” This one decision cost Netscape 4 years. That’s three years they spent with their prize aircraft carrier in 200,000 pieces in dry dock. They couldn’t add new features, couldn’t respond to the competitive threats from IE, and had to sit on their hands while Microsoft completely ate their lunch.

Coinbase cleans house

And the SJWs are panicked at the thought that other CEOs will follow the example set by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong:

It’s obvious what is motivating Armstrong. For years, activists concentrated in dead-weight departments like HR and advertising have assimilated functional, profitable companies into the left’s totalitarian borg. They demand racial hiring quotas, corporate censorship, and the propagation of sickening transgender propaganda.

Armstrong saw that a revolution like this was coming to his own company. According to Coindesk, “Armstrong began to plan for the company’s new position after several Coinbase engineers closed their laptops one day over the summer after Armstrong wouldn’t say ‘black lives matter’ externally amid social unrest over police killings of unarmed black men and women.”

Armstrong decided he wouldn’t be threatened. He’d heard the maxim “get woke, go broke” and bravely decided to quash the revolution before it happened. He didn’t pledge support for Donald Trump. He didn’t rename his company Coinbased. He merely said his company would abstain from politics, both publicly and in the workplace. But in 2020, even this is a revolutionary act, and Armstrong knows it. On Wednesday, he sent a follow-up letter to employees announcing that if any weren’t up for keeping politics and work separate, he’d pay them to go away. Six months of severance pay, it turns out, is a small price to purge far-left extremists from one’s company.

It is no wonder then that Armstrong’s defiant stand has the press and woke capital in a panic. It’s obvious that the vast majority of people, and in particular the vast majority of productive workers, prefer Armstrong’s corporate vision. They want to work at a business, not a gulag. If Armstrong can thrive while vocally rejecting the left’s political demands, then other corporate leaders will be emboldened to do the same.

While some people have theorized that Armstrong read Corporate Cancer, there is no reason to assume that’s the case. The connection between convergence and corporate losses is both obvious and undeniable – the NBA has lost 15.2 million viewers per Finals game, 77 percent of its TV audience, in the three years since 2017 – and Armstrong’s measures are very mild compared to those recommended in the book.

Imagine how terrified the reaction would be if corporations actually began eliminating their HR departments, hunting down their SJWs, and actively firing anyone who engaged in infracorporate activism in lieu of doing their jobs.

The importance of intelligence

Differences in intelligence matter. For members of the cognitive elite to maintain otherwise is like the rich arguing that money does not matter. Differences in g affect the lives of individuals and families. They help shape the social order and limit our ability to reshape it (Gottfredson, 1985, 1986b; Gottfredson & Sharf, 1988).

Much social policy has long been based on the false presumption that there exist no stubborn or consequential differences in mental capability. Worse than merely fruitless, such policy has produced one predictable failure and side effect after another, breeding widespread cynicism and recrimination. Educators routinely overpromise and schools, accordingly, consistently disappoint. Welfare reformers do not take seriously the possibility that today’s labor market cannot or will not utilize all low-IQ individuals, no matter how motivated they may be. Civil rights advocates resolutely ignore the possibility that a distressingly high proportion of poor Black youth may be more disadvantaged today by low IQ than by racial discrimination, and thus that they will realize few if any benefits (unlike their more able brethren) from ever-more aggressive affirmative action. Virtually everyone is capable of living productive, fulfilling lives in which they contribute to the general welfare of their communities. However, protecting and enhancing that potential requires us to appreciate its greater vulnerability to disruption among lower IQ individuals.

From a study entitled “Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life” by Linda Gottfredson. There are essentially three factors that determine what a society will be like. The first is average IQ. The second is the level of trust. And the third is religion.

Note that two of those factors are genetic and heritable.