In Vein...

...with a few other posts making their way [link] [link], with a ht to Marko, my own possible experience with a potential street robbery:

I and my brother were wandering the mean, mean streets of downtown New Haven (That's a half-joke; Yale was in sight where the incident occurred), when my brother and I noticed that a guy had been tailing us for about a city block.  He commented on it, I affirmed; just the fact that both of us noticed the guy suggested something.

I was unarmed, or as unarmed as a six foot, one-eighty pound guy who worked out regularly and jogged miles a day up and down hills can be.  My brother had a necktie knife.  So we watched cautiously for another block, and stepped into a convenience store for a few minutes.

And yep.  The guy, and now a buddy, were across the street when we came out, and started following us again as we started walking again.  We were definitely being tailed.

And so, thinking in sync, we started talking, very loudly, about a friend of ours who had been mugged; laughed that he had been unarmed, that he should have just shot the asshole.

The two peeled off and went in a different direction.

Your wits are your most effective weapon.  But when they fail, as they are prone to do, a gun makes a handy back-up.

Personally I'm inclined to have shot the fuckers, but that was before I owned a gun; I started the process for getting a concealed carry license in Connecticut shortly thereafter, and acquired a gun soon after that.  I dislike intensely that they simply moved on to less prepared targets.

I would have no compunctions about killing such creatures, in this I differ from most gun owners.  The paperwork and potential court costs would be an inconvenience, but preferential to an innocent individual dying in the stead of the mugger, for that is the alternative.

Transhumanism and the Technocratic Urge

Transhumanists deal with alien intelligence in their theory frequently; ask if they would support putting our economy in the hands of a powerful distributed AI, and they'll say yes.  Point out that capitalism represents the earliest, and thus far most powerful, artificial (and alien) intelligence yet encountered, and you'll leave them sputtering.  (See Less Wrong for transhumanist perspectives which aren't anti-capitalist; I presume the majority I have encountered here.)

Transhumanists, like most liberals, are big on intent (Hayek wrote about this, and Kevin from Smallest Minority has also written good material on the subject).  You can shut down arguments very quickly with a one-two-three punch; point out that capitalism achieves good ends.  An honest individual will admit to this, but will add a "But" to it; typically pointing out the externalities of the capitalism system.  Second, point out that externalities don't go away in another system; even a hyperintelligence can only account for the information it has, and has no power to predict information it doesn't; there will always be externalities to any decision-making process.

Here, the twin definitions of "externality" play in perfect cohesion - it is defined both as a price which is not reflected in cost, but also information which exists outside the perceived domain.  A strong understanding of capitalist theory holds that these are one and the same, of course.  Cost -is- information; information which isn't included in cost is an externality.

And third, and finally, while they're stumped on this second point, there's the simple fact that capitalism, as a hyperintelligence of distributed nodes, is tested and proven, and that their resistance to it stems from the fact (getting back to intent) that they dislike that the positive ends feel like externalities to the system; it has no sense of intent, and they fear this.  Their fears run in the face of all evidence; they are behaving like luddites.  Ask what kind of superintelligence they would put in charge, and why.  Ask whether the unintended consequences they may face are superior to a situation which chafes because it achieves an end without setting out towards it; why they demand their intelligence must possess intent to be effective.

I've played this argument out before.  It works, for a short while at least; people are good at rationalizing their positions, however, and rarely stray from hard-held beliefs.

The definition of light...

...according to my physics model:

Light is variance in gravity.  More particularly, it is a wave propagating through gravity representing a change in the origin of that gravitational force's position.

This strictly speaking doesn't depend upon my model of gravity, which I haven't elaborated greatly on yet; as far as I know it should work just as well in any model of gravity.  In a particulate gravity system, photons are just gravitons with different values than their predecessors.

It predicts some curious behavior for isolated particles, however.

Evolution of Infectious Agents...

[Figured I'd finish writing an older post.]

Historically, infectious agents are ultimately limited by their own success; a virus which is too successful kills its host and isolates itself from further propagation mechanisms.  A virus which isn't successful enough doesn't spread rapidly enough to propagate itself to begin with.  There's a fairly narrow window between these two failure modes wherein success lays.

Even if medicine were to make headway against infectious agents, it would only serve to move these windows over.  Medicine gets added to the arms race, rather than eliminating it.  The excesses of an infectious agent no longer lead to the destruction of its own viability; modern medicine helps maintain its hosts and return them to the pool it depends upon.

The campaign against infectious agents therefore must be all or nothing; the present strategy of amelioration is ultimately unsustainable.

Of course, it's possible we're merely delaying a "proper" solution until the day we're able to complete it.  The question that remains is whether our delays make a proper solution impossible, or at least delay its implementation as well; had we had the antibiotics a hundred years ago that we possess today, would broad-spectrum treatments have been survivable for any specimen?

Hiatus...

...the blog is dead right now because I don't have a lot to say.

I amend that, I don't have a lot to say that I'll say here.

One of the rules I try to follow in writing for this blog is that everything I write must matter as much ten months or years from now as today, and right now, most of my interests are either personal or topical.

The Decline of Originality?

I'm pretty firmly anti-elitism of any sort.  So the vague snobbery inherent in claims that movies are increasingly derivative grates at me.

I see it said with some frequency in a variety of ways that Hollywood has become decreasingly innovative.

Not every book written before the twentieth century became a classic.  Not every movie we produce today will be remembered a hundred years from now.  And most of the classics we know today are merely -better written- imitations of stories which were written before them; quite frequently entire stories were ripped wholesale from other authors.  Shakespeare is the best-known example of this, but was hardly the only one;

Comparing the best stories produced in the entire history of mankind to the best stories produced in the past century, we actually get a very flattering view of the past century.

The reason history looks better than today is that time and public opinion has swept away the original - and generally inferior - versions.  It has swept away all stories which could not stand up to the test of time.

But favoring those things which have long been favored isn't a risky operation - whereas to declare a thing good which has not yet been so measured is indeed quite risky.

The Smallest Nation on Earth...

...is the individual.

This is the summary rejection of political ideologies which favor smaller and more efficient - but more totalitarian - regional governments.  Smaller is more efficient because it has fewer philosophic/political externalities; there's no point where this ceases to be the case.

This is -not- a rejection of minarchism, which is a binding mutual defense pact with exit penalties and provisions for dealing with the aggressions of non-signatory nations.