Posts Tagged ‘Science’
09
Nov
Chaos Patch (#35)
(Open thread, plus links.)
Yuray the task-master. A sustained meditation on capital teleology. Another argument for teleology. Multicultural madness. Who the hell are these people? Brett Stevens lays it all out. Meta-round-up.
Elections can be confusing: “In Georgia, retiree Joyce Burns said Obama was risking a biblical apocalypse by criticizing Israel. The life-long Democrat said she voted Republican this time. ‘I believe we’re in the Latter Times,’ said Burns, 61. ‘When everyone goes against Israel, that’s when I believe Jesus will come back.'” Not that it matters: “… both Republicans and Democrats should face up to a much bigger truth: Neither party as currently constituted has a real future.” Dampier has a plan. Racing it up. Some additional sound coverage.
Best of the Schadenfreude (that last one is from Morford, the gift who keeps on giving). … and one more. There’s a superficial win, and a deep win.
Tentacular epic now hyper-epic.
SST re-visits motte-and-bailey doctrines (patching us through to the source).
26
Oct
Chaos Patch (#33)
(Open thread and links (this week, a lot of links (if not quite at Free Northener dimensions))
ClarkHat took the #Gamergate discussion to the next level (to massive and sustained applause). If we’re framing this as the long war, argues Ben Southwood, then there’s only one way to bet: “Like it has won almost every major political battle since the Glorious Revolution ([if slowly, sometimes]) the left is going to win this one because it controls the commanding heights of the media, allowing it to bring the mass public on side, and because its adherents follow their faith with a religious zeal. … Gamergate is one of the most interesting things to happen in years, but I don’t think it will win.” In any case, we shouldn’t get too excited about the players here, or believe much that is attributed to them. Best to focus on Gawker losing it completely. On the creation of nerds. Dissymmetry.
On the Ebola-Channel, it was New York, Mali, and bio-warfare rumor week. The highlight article was Richard Preston’s New Yorker piece, but there was plenty of additional quality commentary. Also, a variety of political responses, and policy review pieces. (other diseases are falling through the cracks.)
25
Oct
Flash Ecology
Himanshu Damle (@) shared the link to this paper, which definitely needs to be passed along here. Called ‘Abrupt rise of new machine ecology beyond human response time’ it is co-authored by Neil Johnson, Guannan Zhao, Eric Hunsader, Hong Qi, Nicholas Johnson, Jing Meng & Brian Tivnan. Abstract:
Society’s techno-social systems are becoming ever faster and more computer-orientated. However, far from simply generating faster versions of existing behaviour, we show that this speed-up can generate a new behavioural regime as humans lose the ability to intervene in real time. Analyzing millisecond-scale data for the world’s largest and most powerful techno-social system, the global financial market, we uncover an abrupt transition to a new all-machine phase characterized by large numbers of subsecond extreme events. The proliferation of these subsecond events shows an intriguing correlation with the onset of the system-wide financial collapse in 2008. Our findings are consistent with an emerging ecology of competitive machines featuring ‘crowds’ of predatory algorithms, and highlight the need for a new scientific theory of subsecond financial phenomena.
The techno-financial ecology is not evolving as fast as it is running, and scientific research has computers too, so pursuing a cognitive arms-race against this thing is not necessarily as futile as it might at first sound … but still. Operations in the “all-machine phase” is the strategic environment under emergence.
17
Oct
Vitually Insightful
The cognitive cream of the human species is just smart enough to get an inkling of how stupid it is. That’s a start.
ADDED: Remember this?
12
Oct
Chaos Patch (#31)
It’s going to be a challenge cranking-up the chaos level this week, but away you go. First, in accordance with the emerging ritual, a few miscellaneous links.
Moldbug mainstreaming watch. Also (quickly) from in and around the reactosphere: Triune critique. This post captures the quintessence of Anissimovite new reaction. An almost-equally characteristic overview from Nydwracu. Another IQ shredder? An 8chan podcast on NRx. “They woke up confused from fractured dreams, then groggily dug through memories to remember only a strange hooded figure, a brief pinch near the neck and then blackness …”
Over in the more traditional New Right, there’s some spectacular internecine conflict taking place. This is the best guide. Sample commentary from Counter-Currents and Alternative Right, who are both fully pitched in (on approximately the same side — here‘s the other). It seems to have been ignited by this preposterously entertaining series of events, embarrassments, apologies, and discombobulations. Simply noticing this has your brain curving back towards /pol/. … then there was the whole Budapest brouhaha, which seems to have driven the usually level-headed Jared Taylor into WN Utopian race nuttiness. (If you managed to save a little of that popcorn, you’ll be glad you did.)
As Ebola gets increasingly terrifying (*ahem*), it has begun to provoke an ever wider range of political commentary. (I like Gary North’s prediction: “An Ebola pandemic will create a ‘distrust in government’ pandemic.”)
On Jaynes and ancient mythology (from 2010)
IQ and autism (some facts).
Boltzmann Brains.
Galton’s awkward legacy. Also, Byron Roth on Immigration and Dysgenics.
Some critical guidance for qabbalists on the mind-traps of small numbers.
11
Sep
Spotless
HP Lovecraft ends the first section of his (utterly magnificent) ‘The Shadow out of Time’ with the words:
“. . . of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of . . .”
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time-scale it was still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on the platform. [Added internal link]
(Scientific correlation, as we know from the first line of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and elsewhere, can be terrifying.)
(Click image to hugely expand.)
The solar system, gauged by mass, consists almost entirely of the sun. Sol accounts for 99.86% of it. Quantity isn’t everything, but insofar as it’s anything, this has to matter — a lot. The sheer magnitude of our solar dependency is hard to even fractionally comprehend. What the sun does is what happens. The earth is its crumb. Our biosphere suckles it. Our civilizations are so far downstream of it, feeding second or third hand on its emissions, if not more distantly, that we easily lose all track of the real flow. As economies sophisticate, the relays proliferate. Perhaps this is why the messages of the sun are so inattentively received, despite rapid improvement in the technical and cultural tools required to make sense of them.
10
Sep
In Our Genes
That there is a genetic contribution to IQ ‘cognitive performance’ has been theoretically obvious for as long as these concepts have existed. Now it has been empirically confirmed. The basic argument should be over now (but I’m not holding my breath).
As this type of information becomes a flood, the dike of ideologically-motivated obscurantism has — eventually — to break. Watch for the smart rats to start jumping off first.
05
Sep
Abstract Horror (Note-2)
A very special jolt of bliss for Friday (Horror) Night — a whole new monster (the ‘Phantom’):
Most models of dark energy hold that the amount of it remains constant. But about 10 years ago, cosmologists realised that if the total density of dark energy is increasing, we could be headed for a nightmare scenario – the “big rip”. As space-time expands faster and faster, matter will be torn apart, starting with galaxy clusters and ending with atomic nuclei. Cosmologists called it “phantom” energy.
To find out if this could be true, Dragan Huterer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor turned to type Ia supernovae. These stellar explosions are all of the same brightness, so they act as cosmic yardsticks for measuring distances. The first evidence that the universe’s expansion is accelerating came from studies of type Ia supernovae in the late 1990s.
If supernovae accelerated away from each other more slowly in the past than they do now, then dark energy’s density may be increasing and we could be in trouble. “If you even move a millimetre off the ledge, you fall into the abyss,” Huterer says.
Huterer and colleague Daniel Shafer have compiled data from recent supernova surveys and found that, depending on which surveys you use, there could be slight evidence that the dark energy density has been increasing over the past 2 billion years, but it’s not statistically significant yet (Physical Review D, doi.org/vf9).
Phantom energy is an underdog theory, but the consequences are so dramatic that it’s worth testing, Huterer says. The weakness of the evidence is balanced by the fact that the implications are huge, he says. “We will have to completely revise even our current thinking of dark energy if phantom is really at work.”
(If I’d been making this stuff up, about the entirety of cosmic space being a concealed monster poised to rip every particle in the universe apart, I’d have named the hero ‘Dragan Huterer‘ too.)
