Below are the most recent 4 friends' journal entries.

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
fare	12:46a	La Muse, or left puritanism Left and Right isn't just the arbitrary polarization of a particular country's politics. It runs deeper, and there are such a things as "left" and "right" mindsets. The comic book La Muse offers us a very nice illustration of the rapture of the left. The heroin has god-like powers, and the whims she realized are extraordinarily revealing of what "liberals" fantasize: from annihilating right-wing baddies (who seem to be orchestrating all violence throughout the planet) to curing people's body and mind through casual sex, from solving war and feeding the hungry to saving the planet's environment and making everyone go green. The books' fantasies culminate with the implicit promise of eventually making every human a god, with the twist that godly powers on a cosmic scale are mixed with militant atheism (as well as pro-homosexual propaganda and multiculturalism). Of course, if there are no constraints of nature, if scarcity doesn't exist anymore, if danger and death can be averted at whim, then why in heaven should we eat organic, cultivate healthy habits, refrain from polluting, think in the way the lefties cherish, drive electric, etc.? When all wishes are fulfilled for free, why sacrifice to an old painful way of achieving goals? Or why bother about old goals at all? The real reason for those perverse wishes is that sacrifice itself, disconnected from any structure of causes and consequences, is what is desired by the leftist. Indeed, whereas La Muse can make smoking safe for herself, it wouldn't occur to her to make it and other behaviors safe for everyone else, too; no she has to make everyone forfeit the upsides of behavior she perceives as vicious, in favor of austerity; all the while violently promoting behavior the perceives as virtuous in blissful ignorance of any downsides others may identify about them (such as casual sex, cultural relativism, etc.). The left want to control your behavior just as much as the right does; and just as with the right, your behavior is controlled here in the name of your own personal salute using selfishness as a bait, there in the name of some greater good that is far beyond you, ultimately vowing you to be sacrificed to the cause of the controller. The left will differ from the right only in that it wants to replace old gods and old hierarchies with new gods and new hierarchies, attracting a new generation of power hungry bastards who want to become the prophets and priests of the new order. The old idol may have been dethroned, its name, "god", trampled upon, and its worshippers ridiculed; the "black magic" superstition is still there hiding in plain sight under new names. And so far, the left has been successful. Think of it: about each and every successive change of power is the then right getting taken over by the then left. So would I do if granted unlimited magic powers? You already know my answer. to this challenge. It isn't replacing one puritanism with another. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, December 21st, 2009
fare	4:25a	San Francisco Area, from Dec 24 to Dec 31 2009 I'll be in the San Francisco Area from Wednesday December 23rd 2009 to Thursday December 31st 2009. If you read me, I hope to meet you there! (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
fare	2:18p	Good reasons for irrational belief The other day, I had a dream, which I now realize was a premonition, in which I was blogging about the rationality of irrationality. Here are good reasons to be irrational: Information is not free. It's not usually worth paying the price for certainty, and moreover, by the time you're 100% sure of something, it's probably useless (except if you're a mathematician). We constantly have to act on uncertain information, at the risk of making either great mistakes or great discoveries — all men are irreducibly Entrepreneurs. Hesitation is costly. Any long term project requires commitment, trust in partners, faith in success, etc. which can only be based on imperfect information. Moreover, once the project is started, time spent worrying or hesitating, even due to good reasons, only decreases the chances of success of the project, while irrational faith in success is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most errors don't matter that much. When they matter, there's no need to eagerly chase them, because they'll come after you all by themselves, and then it's time to fix them. And in the rare cases where feedback is deadly and you can't fix an error after the fact, it is better to err a lot on the side of caution than to err only ever so much on the side of danger, so you shouldn't go looking to hard for the truth. It's important to agree with others on the outcome of otherwise arbitrary decisions. It doesn't matter all that much how one should pronounce the words that convey any given meaning; but if you don't use words in such way that the other party will make sense of it, you won't convey any meaning at all. And you really don't want to mispronounce shibboleth (though one man's pronounciation is another man's mis-). It's hard to unbundle good and bad ideas, yet good ideas often come in package-deals with bad ideas. Untangling ideas often requires costly domain-specific expertise and efforts that are not always worth the results. Of course, just because there are good reasons to follow strategies that have the adoption of bad ideas as a necessary consequence, it does not follow that any of those bad ideas is good in itself, or even that the strategy was successful in any particular instance. So having an allegedly good epistemic strategy is no excuse to any of your individual errors. However, the important point is that you should be understanding decision-making in terms of rules and strategies rather than individual decisions. This is also the main point of Henry Hazlitt's The Foundation of Morality, or of the new (dawkinsian) point of view on genetics and memetics. That's why you should welcome the identification of individual errors, not just as opportunities to fix mistakes (which is not always possible), but also as opportunities to improve your process itself. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
fare	5:05p	A killer app for the XO? MYCIN! Doctors are expensive. Yet most of what they do is follow a simple algorithm with lots of rules. A human aided by an expert system could do the very same thing, for cheaper! Of course, in rich countries, the established trade unions will never let such a thing be deployed, suing whoever tries to help others with it for unlicensed use of medecine, to protect their legal monopoly. The bastards will also (rightfully this time) argue that a trained physician will know the rules just as well, and be able to better interpret the rules and more importantly, to better interpret the many elements to use as input. And still, an untrained person with a machine could do all the easy things that a doctor would try, and redirect only the hard cases to a doctor. And in a poor country, that could save a lot of lives. And even in currently rich countries, a lot of money could be saved, and the effort of trained doctors could be redirected where they too would be able to save a lot of lives. Moreover, such an expert system is not fantasy, it has already been written, long ago: MYCIN. It could easily be updated, and then customized with regional data about which diseases are prevalent where, and what treatment is available at what price there. And of course, it could be taylored towards the non-expert in a way that flags situations where a human expert is needed vs situations where a simple treatment should be tried first. Let's give MYCIN on an XO to teachers, priests and social workers. A cheap way to save plenty of lives! Did I say XO? I meant cell phone — maybe equipped with an optical modification to diagnose malaria! (12 Comments |Comment on this)