Tag: philosophy

The strength of an argument

In a recent article, well-known strength guru Mark Rippetoe quoted my recent comments about the known unreliability of science in light of the recent series of scandals concerning fraudulent peer review. This generated a modicum of, if not hilarity, at least hysteria.

The blogger Vox Day in his recent column makes an excellent point about published “science” and the peer-review process that generates it. In the field of the “exercise sciences” in particular we find an astonishing paucity of truly useful information with which to improve human performance. Instead, we rely on what is essentially an “engineering” approach – the application of physiology (the general-kind, not the exercise-kind), arithmetic, logic, analysis, and experience tempered by observation and constant adjustment for process optimization to the problem of how to improve human performance. The application of these engineering principles to the problem of human performance has yielded the Starting Strength Method, which is testable, reliable science.

One thing that many people, both scientists and uncredentialed laymen fail to understand is that science is not, fundamentally, about knowledge. It primarily concerns understanding. What Rippetoe is saying here is that in the field of exercise science, men like him know what works and what doesn’t. The paucity of “truly useful information” to which he refers is the deeper scientific understanding required to further improve upon what is already known.

The primary utility of science is not being able to say that something works, much less to make something work, but rather, to explain why it works. Or, conversely, to explain why something should work if the theory is put into application. This, of course, is why it is so easy for non-scientists to detect scientific fraud; when the theory is put into application and it fails, this is fairly strong evidence that the theory, i.e. the science, is incorrect.

Engineering is the acid test of science.

However, as I said, many people don’t understand what science is, or comprehend its limits. To them, it is simply a form of secular magic that must be completely trusted or it will stop working. Which, one presumes, might explain the hysterical reaction from several of Rippetoe’s readers to the mention of my name like a vampire unexpectedly encountering garlic.

Vox Day? Who is this clown and how does he have an opinion about the peer review process for publishing scientific articles? Many journals publish reviewer comments as well as the author response. If you want to understand peer review without actually doing science and going through the publishing process, look at the reviews for an article in an open source journal. Here is an example: https://elifesciences.org/content/5/e20797 (scroll down to ‘Decision letter’ and ‘Author response’). Vox Day wouldn’t understand a single sentence of this correspondence, so his criticism of the peer-review process as well as his interpretation of the distinction between science and engineering is useless. Science is not about ‘credentials’; it is about experimental DATA! The real currency of science is data—a Nobel Laureate’s theory can be proven wrong by a first-year grad student with data. 

That all sounds very nice in theory, but like every other human endeavor, science is given to corruption and fraud. Nor does his handwaving refute anything that I said, or anything that the article to which I linked – and which he obviously did not read – said. Furthermore, his statement that science is about DATA, not credentials, is precisely why my terms for the different aspects of science are necessary. Scientody may concern data, but one won’t get very far in scientistry without credentials these days.

It’s also telling that while he feigns not knowing who I am, he seems to have a surprisingly strong opinion on the limits of my understanding. Of course, we all know what the real issue is for the science fetishists. As always, they prove my point about the intrinsic unreliability of any human endeavor:

Vox Day is a really really bad example (or good, in the sense that he is extremely informative). Look at his stance on evolutionary biology — something I know a little about (not my field of science, I am a mathematician and computer scientist, but I’ve dabbled around). Because some people make errors in peer review, he sees this as *evidence* that the world was created 6000 years ago or so. (I may be misrepresenting and overstating his stance; this is for the purpose of illustrating his logic). Quoting a person who — by my humble opinion — is in dire need of psychiatric intervention is a bit of a disappointment to me.

The problem with his “logic” is that not only is that not my stance on evolutionary biology, but I don’t believe there is any evidence that the world was created 6,000 years ago. I am not a Young Earth Creationist, I have never subscribed to Bishop Ussher’s estimate for the age of the Earth, and the so-called “logic” being illustrated has literally nothing to do with me or my simple observation that professional science is riddled with fraud and corruption. It’s really rather remarkable how these fetishists can work the Scopes Trial into anything that so much as tangentially references any aspect of science.

It’s even more remarkable that, on the mere basis of “dabbling around”, this gentlemen feels capable of assuming his own expertise in the very different fields of both evolutionary biology and psychiatry. But then, just as laymen seldom understand the limits of science, scientists seldom understand how foolish they look when they venture forth from the boundaries of their little specialties. No more so than when they unwisely, and apparently without even realizing it, wander into the realm of philosophy.

Vox Day’s comment makes it clear that he forms and expresses strong opinions about topics on which he has very limited, superficial knowledge—a quick ‘google scholar’ search shows that he has never published a scientific article. He didn’t even provide evidence or examples for any of his claims. He is the pretty much the exact opposite of the type of person I respect.

The science fetishist always values evidence, valid or not, over mere truth. Which is ironic, given that the very metric upon which he relies, is, as was pointed out in the original post, not just intrinsically flawed, but known to be susceptible to fraud. What value is it to have published a scientific article when they are, statistically speaking, about as likely to be credible as a coin toss?

In any event, Rippetoe was having none of it, and indeed, seemed to be amused by the weird and feeble protests being offered.

I have huge admiration for Rip and was crushed to seem him propagate an anti-science message.

Here is the quote from the evil arch-nemesis of science Vox Day I used to introduce the piece:

All of the arguments about the presumed reliability of science are ridiculous and easily shown to be false. Science is no more “self-correcting” than accounting. Peer review is more commonly known as “proofreading” by the rest of the publishing industry and is not even theoretically a means of ensuring accuracy or correctness. And scientists are observably less trustworthy than nearly anyone except lawyers, politicians, and used car salesmen; at least prostitutes are honest about their pursuit of “grants” and “funding.” These days, the scientific process is mainly honored in the breach by professional, credentialed scientists. And we have a word for testable, reliable science. That word is “engineering.”

What is it about this entirely accurate summary of the situation within the vast majority of the academic/governmental science establishment that leads you to be “crushed” by my use of this as analogy to what we’re doing in contrast to the ExFizz people?

I don’t need to read a peer-reviewed scientific article to know that Mark Rippetoe knows whereof he speaks. Nor do I need to publish a peer-reviewed scientific article to speak the truth. These science fetishists are committing an all-too-common philosophical error when they try to substitute the measure of a thing for the thing itself.

Of course, those who have read SJWAL know perfectly well what was actually being communicated beneath all the rhetoric as well as the purpose for it. This was merely an impromptu divide-and-discredit campaign meant to prevent the more dangerous party from being “qualified” by the more popular party.

Marketing matters

Nice to see three of the four other Kami members show up for Ohmura’s solo show.

There is an important lesson here. Same four guys that took the stage together with Su, Moa, and Yui two months before at the Tokyo Dome. Same mind-blowing talent… and in fact, Boh’s bass solo is a little more relaxed, but is longer and even more impressive than the one he plays for Twilight of the Metal Gods on Red Night.

And there are about 54,000 fewer people in attendance.

This should dismiss the notion, once and for all, that mere talent ever suffices.

Binary thinkers

Even Daniel Dennett, whose grasp of basic logic can best be described as “questionable”, finds himself struggling with binary thinkers:

Dennett waited until the group talked itself into a muddle, then broke in. He speaks slowly, melodiously, in the confident tones of a man with answers. When he uses philosophical lingo, his voice goes deeper, as if he were distancing himself from it. “The big mistake we’re making,” he said, “is taking our congenial, shared understanding of what it’s like to be us, which we learn from novels and plays and talking to each other, and then applying it back down the animal kingdom. Wittgenstein”—he deepened his voice—“famously wrote, ‘If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him.’ But no! If a lion could talk, we’d understand him just fine. He just wouldn’t help us understand anything about lions.”

“Because he wouldn’t be a lion,” another researcher said.

“Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” He concluded, “The notorious zombie problem is just a philosopher’s fantasy. It’s not anything that we have to take seriously.”

“Dan, I honestly get stuck on this,” a primate psychologist said. “If you say, well, rocks don’t have consciousness, I want to agree with you”—but he found it difficult to get an imaginative grip on the idea of a monkey with a “sort of” mind.

If philosophy were a sport, its ball would be human intuition. Philosophers compete to shift our intuitions from one end of the field to the other. Some intuitions, however, resist being shifted. Among these is our conviction that there are only two states of being: awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious, alive or dead, soulful or material. Dennett believes that there is a spectrum, and that we can train ourselves to find the idea of that spectrum intuitive.

“If you think there’s a fixed meaning of the word ‘consciousness,’ and we’re searching for that, then you’re already making a mistake,” Dennett said.

I think Dennett is essentially correct; his spectrum approach is not dissimilar to my own probability perspective. The fact that we don’t have enough information to correctly calculate those probabilities and identify them doesn’t mean that it is not a more useful heuristic than reducing everything to Abelardian binary.

The exchange with the primate psychologist reminds me a little of my mostly failed attempt to explain the IQ delta between very high intelligence and ultra high intelligence to people who are essentially limited to the smart-normal-dumb spectrum. The talking lion can’t speak meaningfully about the experience of dumb lions. The UHIQ can’t speak any more meaningfully about the experience of midwits than the midwit can describe what it is like to have an IQ of 50.

It shouldn’t be hard to grasp the concept that different minds process information differently, and yet, the guy who firmly believes he’s wicked smart because he had a 105 IQ in a classroom full of sub-95 IQs quite often assumes the guy with a 140 IQ must be stupid because he can’t understand him.

To quote my old sensei, mind the gap.

Also, I’m with Chalmers. I suspect if Dennett spent more time with technology in general, and AI in particular, he’d better grasp the fundamental weakness of his position.

On vulgarity

I am getting more than a little tired of the unending stream of vulgarity pouring out of a) some of the newer commenters and b) the usual suspects. First, my occasional use of the same does not constitute permission for you. Second, it is particularly unacceptable when directed at fellow commenters. Third, it makes me want to stop paying attention to the blog, so I can only imagine how it affects the casual readers. There is a reason I and many of the long-time commenters have increasingly disengaged from the comments; I have no interest in attempting to communicate with people who emote rather than think before they speak.

Seriously, get a grip. “TRUMP HAS CUCKED AND BETRAYED US ALL, THE END IS NIGH AND REICHSFUHRER KRISTOL REIGSN UBER ALLES!” doesn’t make you look clever, or smart, or even sane. There is not only no need for you to announce your opinion of every zig and zag of foreign policy, but the unpredictability of the God-Emperor all but guarantees that you’re going to look like a complete buffooon within days, if not hours, regardless of what you say.

On a tangential note, I note that, as I anticipated, virtually no one has acknowledged that I correctly observed, from the very start, the way in which the Syrian cruise missile attack was primarily about China and North Korea. So, next time, don’t ask me to make my predictions on this sort of thing public if I have chosen to withhold them for one reason or another. There is literally no reason for me to do so. When I get it wrong like everyone else, I hear about it for years. And when I am very nearly the only one to get it more or less right, everyone either ignores it or simply pretends it was obvious in retrospect.  Now, I’m not annoyed, I expected this, and I’m simply taking the opportunity to remind those of you who asked me to share my interpretation on the day of the missile attacks that I will not pay any heed to such requests in the future.

Anyhow, the moderators and I are going to start deleting comments containing vulgarity on sight and spamming those who refuse to moderate their language. Nor am I interested in any discussion of what words are acceptable and what are not. If you’re going to play the childish game of “let’s see how close to the line I can dance”, I’m just going to delete your comment for being tedious and immature. If your comment is nothing but an insult directed at me or someone else, it’s instant spam. And remember, these are Google comments and any spamming will affect your account across all Google products.

I don’t blog for the comments. I don’t get a rush out of seeing lots of comments. I’d much rather have five intelligent comments than 400 comments when most of them consist of idiots escalating rhetorical hostilities and talking past each other. While it’s fine to criticize, disagree, and utilize rhetoric, you’re going to have to learn how to do so without resorting to the insults and vulgarities that many of you have been using in the recent past.

There is no point in asking for clarification or trying to argue for the benefits of free speech here. The comments exist as a courtesy I extended in response to requests from my readers. If they annoy me sufficiently, I will simply turn them off and continue to blog as before. So, if you happen to want to have this particular microphone available to you, please treat it with more care and respect.

And for God’s sake, stop touching the poop! It’s not that hard. You’re not the poop police. And you’re not helping. Unless you have deletion powers, you are not part of the cleanup process, you’re part of the problem.

UPDATE: From a longtime reader:

I appreciate the vulgarity crackdown.  I had indeed been spending less
time on your site, and, especially, less time reading the comments,
because of the language used.

I had sensed as much. I probably should have done it right after the election, but better late than never.

Mailvox: but what about [fill-in-the-blank]s

Huggums asks about the likely fate of US Africans in the coming period of ethnic strife:

VD, in your ideal world, what would become of American black people in the coming years? I think you already told me what you think will happen: black people will be forcibly moved or killed at some point in the future based on the “diversity + proximity = war” principle. I’m asking because I want to continue offering my support to your cause because I believe it is actually based in truth, but I no longer see how I can. Where could a black person possibly fit in to this?

My cause is a) the truth, b) Christianity, and c) Western civilization. If anyone can’t support those things, well, I can’t honestly say that have any more concern for their opinion or support than I do for anyone else who is devoted to a) falsehood, b) Satan, or c) barbarism. I don’t have an “ideal world”. I have never constructed my version of utopia. I don’t even believe in the concept of an “ideal world”, and as my novels tend to demonstrate I do not spend any time whatsoever dreaming up a flawless version of the real world. I have certainly never once given any thought to where American black people might fit in such a Panglossian conception.

In fairness, I have likewise never given any thought to the ideal fate of Venezuelans, Esquimaux, kangaroos, dandelions, or praying mantises either. I simply don’t think about such things. I never have. They are not of interest to me.

Huggums is, in my opinion, making two very common mistakes. First is to view everything from the “what about me?” perspective. This is a literal category error; one cannot meaningfully consider macrosocietal trends and issues from an individual perspective. It is ridiculous to say “X would be wrong because it would have negative consequences for me” and it is even worse to say “X is impossible because I wouldn’t want that to happen.”

History doesn’t care about you or your kind. The great waves of social mood don’t care about you or your nation. Even the great men of history, the Gaius Juliuses and the Wellingtons, were caught up and tossed about by the uncaring tides of events. The arrogance of the globalists who think they control the direction of history is entirely misplaced; they are no less utopian dreamers than the communists with their inevitable worker’s paradise or the Christian rapturists who recalculate the date of Christ’s return every other decade.

His second mistake is to confuse what I expect to happen on the basis of past historical patterns with what I want. I cannot stress this enough: what I want is totally irrelevant. What all of us want is irrelevant. What is going to happen is going to happen according to the usual patterns of history.  Yes, blacks will be forcibly moved and killed. As will whites, Koreans, Chinese, Mexicans, mixed-race people, and pretty much everyone else. How does anyone imagine homogeneous nations are created in the first place? They don’t spring ex nihilo out of the rocks.


That being said, my preference is for all association to be voluntary, since it is one of the basic Rights of Englishmen secured for the Posterity of the Founders by the U.S. Constitution. If white people don’t want to live around black people, they should not be forced to do so. Each community should have the right to decide who is, and who is not, permitted to reside in it.

Some communities would prefer to be entirely homogenous. Others would value diversity. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with either preference. I suggest that Huggums try considering the question from the other perspective: how can blacks NOT support the Alt-Right cause when Mexicans are displacing them from historically black communities in the United States and the Chinese are beginning to move into Africa in increasing numbers?

It’s one thing to worry that white people might not want you around. It’s another to realize that your people are liable to be entirely deprived of anywhere they can call home. But if white people don’t have a basic right to their own inviolate homelands, neither does anyone else. In this age of genetic testing, I cannot be certain that I would be welcome in a white community, but that does not lead me to conclude that, therefore, the people of that community should be deprived of their right of free association.

Because neither I, nor Huggums, nor anyone else, possess the intrinsic right to impose ourselves, wanted or not, on literally the entire human race as we happen to see fit at the moment.

The Alt-Lite’s fatal flaw

The Z-man explains the fundamental weakness of the Alt-Lite: their firewall is to the Right:

The defect with the Alt-Lite is the same problem the Buckley Conservatives had a generation ago. They have no antibodies to resist entryism, because they lack a timeless definition of what it means to be Alt-Lite. Western Civilization, after all, includes Karl Marx and Hitler. Nazism is just as much a part of the West as John Locke. In fact, Hitler currently casts a longer shadow than any of the men of the Enlightenment. On what grounds can the Alt-Lite reject Hitler, but embrace the slave owning Jefferson?

The same is true of anti-racism and egalitarianism. How can these be rejected when they are inventions of the West? Of course, the Alt-Lite makes no attempt to reject these as that would get them in trouble with the Left. That’s what opens the door to, and requires them to accept, the defining feature of the dominant orthodoxy. That feature is the blank slate. As McInness goes to pains to point out, if a hotep brotha is on the Trump Train, he has a place at the table of the Alt-Lite, a cherished place.

That’s the fatal flaw that was the undoing of the Buckley Right. The Alt-Lite has no affirmative argument. Instead, it is a list of things it is not and most of those things are to their Right. That firewall they are building to their Right, just as Buckley did with Kirk and with the paleocons, comes at the expense of any defensible line of demarcation between themselves and the Left. That leaves them open to entryism, corruption and subversion, which is why the leading opponents of Trump are all Buckley Conservatives.

That brings us back to the beginning. O’Sullivan was mostly correct, but he left out the most important part of the rule. That’s the definition of Right Wing. What is it that forever separates the Right from the Left? What is the thing about which there can be no meeting in the middle, between Left and Right? The great divide that can never be crossed, is biology.The Left embraces the blank slate and rejects biological reality. The Right accepts biology, human diversity and all the truths about the human animal that arise from it.

And biology is precisely where the Alt-Lite flirts with the delusional approach to reality of the Left, because it finds reality too painful and too dismissive of their egalitarianism as well as their various utopian notions.

Spacebunny helpfully sums up the intrinsic incoherency of the Left:

  1. Celebrate Diversity!
  2. We are all the same!
  3. Cultural appropriation is wrong!
It doesn’t bode well for the Alt-Lite that they attempt to cling to so many of the same equalitarian myths that have rendered the Left an incoherent intellectual joke. I’ve yet to see the civic nationalist who can even begin to defend himself against the growing quantity of conclusive nationalist arguments, and yet, many of them cling to their civic nationalism all the same. For now.

That being said, I wholly support the Alt-Lite. Because it is from them that the Alt-Right will grow, as experience and observation gradually clarifies their thinking.

Camping with refugees

Fun for the whole family. Thanks, Mutti Merkel!

A refugee from Ghana has been arrested for dragging a young woman from her tent and raping her while she was on a camping holiday with her boyfriend. The young couple were on a camping trip in the Siegaue Nature Reserve, north of the former German capital of Bonn, when they were approached by a machete-wielding man at about 12.30am on Sunday last week. The boyfriend was forced to watch as the attacker violated his 23-year-old lover.

Was this act evil? Or was it morally neutral, as Peter Singer would argue given the balance of interests involved? And if it is evil, then what level of force is permissible to stop it? Which then leads to the question, at precisely what point can that force be utilized?

Is anyone actually surprised

The individual behind a series of “anti-Semitic bomb threats” turns out to be an Israeli-American Jew:

Israeli police have arrested a 19-year-old Jewish Israeli American from Ashkelon for his suspected role behind a slew of bomb threats made against Jewish community centers across the globe.

The arrest comes after bomb threats were made against dozens of community centers in Australia, the U.S., Europe and New Zealand over the last six months. Israeli investigators found that many of the threats led back to Israel, though the suspect is not believed to be responsible for all of the threats, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Israeli officials withheld the suspect’s name and offered few details on their background. Here’s what we do know: The person is a dual Israeli-American citizen, he is not a member of the Israeli Defense Forces, he is not ultra-Orthodox and at some point he made aliya (immigration to Israel by Jews in the diaspora) to Israel.

This Marxian dialectical summary was amusing, particularly in light of the philosemitic rhetoric one sees from Christian Zionist Americans from time to time.

thesis: The Jews did it!
antithesis: The Jooos did it!
synthesis: Seriously, though, the Jews did it.

Of course, it’s not just Jews. It’s all minorities. Any time there is a “hate crime” against any minority, particularly the sort of crime in which the perpetrator is able to remain hidden, one can be relatively confident that the perpetrator is a member of that minority group and that the crime is a hoax. I assumed these threats were being made by an American Jew; the SPLC has constructed a $300 million business on hoax crimes and Muslims tend to be more inclined to simply bomb things than idly threaten to do so.

It’s the same reason that you can be certain that a noose or a spray-painted KKK on a college campus will spark outrage up until the inevitable moment it is discovered that a black student is responsible.

The reason minorities do this, and not majorities, is that minorities are ultimately dependent upon maintaining the good will of the majority populations, and one way to achieve that is through instilling guilt in the majority population through obtaining and maintaining victim status. That’s why it is significant that the perpetrator here was an Israeli-American; American Jews consider themselves to be a minority, whereas Israeli Jews do not. Homeland matters.

The importance of morale

And why I don’t tolerate defeatism or defeatists. Last night’s Darkstream was well-received. As I mention, morale is the primary difference in the fighting effectiveness between the Waffen SS and the Regio Esercito, between the US Marines and the French Army circa 1940.

Those who reliably work to lower the morale of our side rather than the morale of the enemy should not be tolerated, even if their pessimism and despair happen to be honest. Everyone is prone to moments of doubt, and sometimes doubt is merited, but it is both foolish and counterproductive to tolerate those who pride themselves in wallowing in the expectation of failure and defeat.

Group-thinking is not smarter

Researchers debunk the idea that diversity makes groups more intelligent or more effective:

What allows groups to behave intelligently? One suggestion is that groups exhibit a collective intelligence accounted for by number of women in the group, turn-taking and emotional empathizing, with group-IQ being only weakly-linked to individual IQ (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). Here we report tests of this model across three studies with 312 people. Contrary to prediction, individual IQ accounted for around 80% of group-IQ differences. Hypotheses that group-IQ increases with number of women in the group and with turn-taking were not supported. Reading the mind in the eyes (RME) performance was associated with individual IQ, and, in one study, with group-IQ factor scores. However, a well-fitting structural model combining data from studies 2 and 3 indicated that RME exerted no influence on the group-IQ latent factor (instead having a modest impact on a single group test). The experiments instead showed that higher individual IQ enhances group performance such that individual IQ determined 100% of latent group-IQ. Implications for future work on group-based achievement are examined.

This falls into the category of science confirming common sense. Women and gamma males, both of whom tend to be obsessed with rules and process, almost invariably get in the way of the smart individuals who drive accomplishment. Sounding boards are useful, but they are vastly overrated, particularly by the kind of people who are incapable of fulfilling a proactive role themselves.

Anyone can critique an idea or offer a nonsensical spin on it. In most cases, it is not “helping” to do so, but distracting, if not demoralizing. That is one reason why I crack down hard on those whose immediate reaction to any announcement is to try to come up with an alternative or an improvement.

My rule of thumb is this: if someone doesn’t explicitly ask me what I think about something, I try to avoid telling them what I think about it. “Congratulations” or “I hope it goes well” is by far the most useful thing you can tell anyone who tells you about a new idea or a new product.