...
If you want Core to be in control, because you think Core can be the best control, then fine; however, don't dress it up in a pretty pink tutu and blow smoke up my ass about it.  

please be honest in your claims and not use the false guise of "decentralization" as your reason for centralization.  

The amount of irony in that sentence is enough to choke a woolly mammoth.  

Most of us are simple bitcoin holders and just want the issue to be resolved.

Most of us do not want the Chinese miners to take over the bitcoin code and trust Core to manage upgrades far more then we trust other groups that do not prioritize decentralization.

For those of us who have educated ourselves on the issue it is clear that a 2MB hardfork is not needed as some kind of emergency solution but it is equally clear that it is needed to maintain overall good will in the community especially the mining community.

Since everyone seems to agree that a blocksize increase will eventually be required as bitcoin grows and most people including core developers feel that the dangers of a single one time increase are manageable I am of the strong opinion that a 2MB hardfork rolled out and deployed by Core using their usual slow and complete vetting process would be far less damaging than telling the miners to go take a hike after SegWit is activated.

I continue to wonder why there are so many folks who continue to assert that 2mb is needed and a kind of must and a kind of emergency, without even verifying how segwit plays out.  Causes me to tentatively conclude that there is likely some hidden agenda in regards to such a desire to implement something that really seems to be unnecessary - and whether the implementation of unnecessary is for governance reasons or just some kind of big business reasons seems to escape me.

Do you understand the concept of a compound question?

Do you understand the concept of contingencies?

You keep trying to suggest that the situation is cut and dry, and it is not.  There is both a compound subject matter and there are contingencies that are connected with the second part of the implementation that have not been worked out and are subject to mustering support for the testing and for the outcome of the testing leading to the implementation of the second part.

As I've said before, most of core has said they'd support a block size increase but at a less frantic pace. I suspect the miners will maintain their pressure of their own hard fork claiming that core will backpedal on their agreement if they don't (as you said they claimed about the HK agreement - none of which actually happened.)

It's a package deal SegWit first followed by 2MB later. Those signalling are agreeing to activate SegWit and also support a later hard fork to increase the block size.

Now it is true that major players could lie and later retract their support for 2MB sort of a "ha ha I got mine" approach to negotiation but this would be utterly destructive to trust and kill any chance for future upgrades to the protocol for the foreseeable future.

You can't build a consensus on falsehood. Once commitments are made they should be honored. Otherwise it is very bad news for all of us as the consensus system will become nonfunctional.

so we already got a lot of folks out there screaming that segwit2x is a kind of package, when the first part of segwit seems to be agreed upon; however, the second part of the deal (the 2mb aspect) seems to have contingencies.  So, if it ends up that the second part does not go through, then then a large number of folks will be whining that Core broke the agreement, blah blah blah.. and the 2mb aspect was supposed to be "guaranteed", just like (and maybe even worse) they were mischaracterizing and whining about the Hong Kong agreement. 

Where am I going wrong in my thinking, here?

Since nothing is random or uncaused, and God is our loving Father; and since this modern world is a spiritual desert - then why are we here-and-now?

Why were we placed here, why - perhaps - did we choose to be placed here and at this most unspiritual and antireligious of times?

What possible spiritual benefit can a modern life bring us?

The answer, in a nutshell is: Living here and now compels us to reach inward to our true, divine self; because other (past) sources of Christian guidance are (for nearly all of the people in the world) either absent or corrupted.

We must become active agents, we must become spiritually - Christianly - autonomous to a degree not seen before.

*

Our faith tells us that God would not allow any of his beloved children to be placed in this era and situation unless there was a very good reason: something of which we, personally, have great need.

Yet this situation is one in which the Christian religion is absent (from many parts of the world), or essentially abandoned and corrupted (in the developed nations). All the usual sources of guidance are tainted - tradition, scripture, hierarchical authority, philosophy... all are much more likely to do us harm than good if we go to what is most available and accept it uncritically.

We can get nowhere without discernment. 

Therefore spiritual passivity is - for us, here and now - ruled-out.

When the human aspects are all tainted or unobvious, then a policy of subordination and obedience are much more likely to do us harm than good; because we would probably be serving the Enemy rather than God.

*

In modernity we are brought to a state of utter isolation of our selves, and a loss of confidence in the reality of the world and of that self which is all we can experience. And our self and the world is dead, inert, passive and perceived as unliving - an accident, merely an illusion or delusion of our own limitations. We cannot perceive God, Jesus, angels; and even other people are merely shadowy entities justified only be the comfort or pleasures they provide.

We have so decisively lost the ability to know the external environment, that we regard it as a product of our minds; yet our minds are (in mainstream understanding) merely temporary, contingent, arbitrary collections of brain circuits - unreliable, prone to malfunction and doomed to extinction.

This is the state of nihilism when nothing is really-real and despair is inevitable and ineradicable.

*

So why are we here and now?

When there is no reliable external guidance, we must look within: and must means must, because there is no alternative.

Our Loving Father, the Creator would not have placed us here unless we had the resources to attain salvation and to make steps towards theosis (becoming more divine).

Since these resources are not to be found outside us, then everything we need must be found within -  and by invisible, spiritual means of communication.

Specificially, what we need to begin is found within, and everything else follows as consequnces.

*

We must look within to find and feel our internal spiritual compass - that which is divine and eternal within each of us; that in us which is a child of God (still merely a child, but certainly that!).

Once we have located that inner reality; then - and only then - we can look outside; look (that is) not by our senses but directly to the world of spirit: open our real selves to to direct knowing and personal revelation from God, and the personal friendship of Jesus Christ.

*

That is why you and I are here and now; because what we personally most need, is to learn to find God within us.

Modernity is, indeed, a harsh spiritual lesson - but presumably that was the only kind of lesson that you and I were capable of learning.

(Earlier people in earlier generations, or people in different parts of the world, have other things that they need to learn . I am here talking about a reason why living in The West, the developed nations - is the best realistically-possible thing for some people; people such as you and me.) 

And of course this is a lesson each and every one of us absolutely needs to learn if we are ever to develop from the passive state of being immature, externally-driven, dependent-children of God into what he hope for us to become: active, agent, autonomous grown-up 'friends' of God (and ultimately perhaps spiritual parents in our own right); at a level where we can fully participate - Son or Daughter of God - in the great and endless divine work of love and creation.

A reader asks: I wish someone could explain to me the antipathy towards Evolution that is so common in religious circles, mostly among Evangelicals, but also some Catholics.
There are only three questions that no man escapes answering. For most people, the answer is shown rather than spoken, demonstrated in the way he lives his life. For most people, the answer is implicit rather than expressed.

The questions are whence, whither, and who?
From where do you come? Where are you going? Who are you?
I submit that the antipathy is not directed at the Darwinian model as it applies to biology. It is directed at the Secular Progressivism cult which claims (falsely) that Darwinism provides answers to these questions.

No one is livid over the idea that raccoons and bears may have had a common ancestors, or that the remote ancestors of whales may have been land mammals. The theory may be true or false as applied to biology, and there are philosophical difficulties with a theory that cannot be falsified, but that is not what causes the antipathy.
Nor is the antipathy necessary. The account of the origin of Man in Genesis disagrees with Darwin if and only if you makes assumptions not found in the wording either of Genesis nor in Darwin’s writings.

Genesis say man comes from dust by the will of the Creator. Darwin says man come from apes, who come from simper organisms, who come from simpler yet. Darwin says nothing about how life arose in the first place.
So if man arose from apes who arose from simpler organisms, who arose from dust by the will of the Creator, both are correct. One account says who created man. The other speculates as to a mechanism regarding how it was done.
Neither one contradicts the other. Neither one enforces the other.

Nor does Darwin say anything one way or the other as to the ultimate final cause of evolution. That is a question outside the realm of science. While it is true that most secular progressives and many religious folk read Darwin to say that evolution is blind and purposeless, his writings do not support this conclusion. Darwin is writing an empirical theory. Talk of blindness and purposefulness is a teleological matter, that is, a metaphysical assumption.
If you find a pack of cards and all the cards are in order by number and suit, empiricism only tells you the arrangements of the cards. It does not tell you whether a hand deliberately put those cards in sequence, or random shuffles by happenstance arranged the sequence.

(It is a very remote happenstance indeed, but not technically impossible. In a multiverse of infinite parallel timelines, we happen to be occupying the one where random chance laid out the deck in perfect numerical order. If you find this kind of reasoning palatable — I confess I do not.)

Be that as it may, the question of whether something was done on purpose is a question of final causes, that is, a metaphysical question. The cards are in the same order either way.
So what causes the antipathy?

It is not an argument over the origin of species, nor even an argument over the origin of man. It is an argument over whether or not life is worth living, thought worth thinking, man worth being man.
Or, in other words, whence, whither, and who?

The Christian answers these question by saying Man is the creation of an omnipotent and omniscient father; due to our rebellion, we are headed for hell, but due to the creator’s incomprehensible benevolence, we have hope of paradise; we are the beloved children of God, the most wretched of animals, and the crown and glory of creation, set here on Earth to learn to love, serve, and glorify the Lord. Human nature is built to find lasting joy in no other service. We were made for love.

Whether true or not, whether flattering to human pride or not, these answers are certainly dramatic. Every tiny act of love or sin has eternal consequences.  No aspect of human existence, no matter how tiny, lacks a deeper, spiritual meaning. No one’s life is meaningless.

Indeed, by the Christian answer of who we are, the universe itself is less meaningful than the smallest human life history forgets, because that soul will outlast the universe by an infinite proportion.
 
Darwin himself, if you read ORIGIN OF SPECIES, makes no pretense of answering any such question. That book does not address these issues.
However, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and an countless number of our modern version of Gnostics, the Secular Progressives, place a strained and unjustified interpretation Darwinism, and from it deduce philosophical, moral and political conclusions.

What Darwin does not say is that simpler, more primitive, and worse things always turn, by means of their own innate power, directed by the directionless outcome of endless conflict, into better and more complex things.
Hegel is the one who said the clash of opposite philosophical ideas leads to an ever increasing approach to the absolute truth.

Nietzsche is the one who said the superman, the next stage of human evolution, would overthrow Christian moral thought and erect an amoral suprehuman to whom categories of good and evil no longer applied.
Marx is the one who said that the clash of class conflict between economic roles (he conflated the two) would produce ever more efficient economic systems, culminating in socialism.
Darwin never said any of this nonsense.

It is nonsense because it is self refuting: if Hegel is true, anti-Hegelianism is also true, and a new truth will leap out of a synthesis of Hegelianism and Anti-Hegelianism, ergo Hegel by his own terms is not true; if Nietzsche is good, the progress from man to superman is not a good thing, nor evil, but pointless ergo Nietzsche by his own terms is pointless, that is, not good; and if the political theory of Marx is correct, political evolution is controlled by nonhuman factors of history beyond human control, ergo theorizing about it is in vain, ergo by his own terms, Marx is not correct.

Darwin never even said natural selection is a noticeable factor, or a factor at all, among intelligent toolusers.  There is certainly no obvious reason why it should be: instead of growing hair, the Eskimos hunt and trap seals for fur. Instead of letting the bookish people with poor eyesight dies out before mating, the European invents eyeglasses.
If natural selection were a noticeable factor among human reproduction, the Catholics, who forbid contraception, divorce, abortion, sodomy, feminism, and fornication (all of which hinder fertility and childrearing), should significantly outbreed other sects, and pass along the “religious objection to contraception” gene, assuming there is such a gene.
But even if natural selection were a noticeable factor among human reproduction, there is no reason to assume that the secular progressive notion that the past is always worse and the future always better would hold true.

Why Mother Nature would select for intelligence or artistic talent or beauty or any other quality we humans find desirable in mates is unanswered: the robust and fertile Morlocks or the docile and fecund Eloi are just as likely to be the inheritors of the human legacy, going simply by Darwinian natural selection, than the godlike superman of Nietzsche or DC comics.

So, Darwin himself is silent on the matter. Darwinism, however, the misreading provided by Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and Progressivism does answer the questions, and has, with remarkable success, won the war of ideas and forced all other answers into silence.
 
 
According to Progressivism, we come in the long run from the unintentional by product of mindless chemical and atomic forces operating inside the mechanism of an animate but dead and mindless and indifferent universe. Blind chance blew us into being by mere happenstance, and not for any reason, nor to serve any purpose.
We come in the short run from beastlike ancestors, and through the heroic operation of genetic and social evolution, passed from cannibal savagery, to hunter-gatherer bands, to nomadic herdsmen, to farmers, to city-dwellers, domesticating the dog and horse, and learning the arts and sciences along the way.

We passed from primitive animism through polytheism, encountered a centuries long fever of monotheism, from which we have happily broken free, allowing us to create rigorous science, which in turn gives us the philosophical, moral and political doctrines of Hegelianism, Nietzscheanism, Marxism.

According to Progressivism, in the short run, the future holds a Green Energy world of solar powered rocketships to the moon, eugenics to wipe out all Jews, Catholics, and lesser races, diversity in all things but ideas, endless abortions to make sure there will be fewer persons to burden the planet, and those few will share all property in common. The laws of economic will vanish softly and suddenly away like the Boojam, and, without specialization of labor, there will suddenly and for no imaginable reason be no more original sin. An infinitely powerful Big Brother style government will bring us all into a walled garden of total thought conformity, and wipe all tears from our eyes, and there will be no pain, war, or sorrow in Utopia.

According to Progressivism, in the long run, we are heading for entropy and the heat death of the universe, the death of all we know, love and cherish, and nothing and no one will mourn, or even note, our passing. The atoms of which we are currently composed will enter other combinations as the winds of blind chance blow, and then also will decay.
According to Progressivism, you are nothing, your life is meaningless, there are no laws of morality, no truths for the mind to discover, nothing worth doing except that your willpower makes you will to do it. You are a meat robot.

Again, all these answers are nonsense, and refute themselves. Even a schoolboy can see the error in the statement, “the truth is that there is no truth.” If the Progressive account of the past is correct, then all of the contents of our brains, including the Progressive account of the past, is a mechanical by product of atomic and chemical forces, or of historical accident. If the Progressive account of the future is correct, then all human activity is vain, including the making of accounts of the future, Progressive or otherwise.

The Christian answer and the Progressive answer are diametrically at odds with each other in terms of the Three Questions. Darwin himself does not give the Progressive answer to the riddle of Human life, but the Progressive answer falls to nothing if Darwinism hence Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx fall to nothing.

Under the Darwinian answer to the Three Questions, you may live for physical pleasures until those pleasures pall.
After pleasure-chasing fails, the sad reality sinks in that nothing is worth doing because nothing has meaning. Even love, superlative love, has no meaning if there is no spiritual component to it, for them it is just a by product of chemicals in the brain affixing emotional responses to arbitrary objects.

Trying to reproduce or improve the species via polygamy and eugenics and genocide of inferiors might seem a fun goal, but, ultimately, it too is vain, and will go the way of the dinosaurs. Saving the environment is pointless. It is destined to go the way of the Archean Eon atmosphere.

Whether true or not, whether flattering to human pride or not, these answers are certainly undramatic to an ultimate degree. Every act of love or sin, howsoever gigantic, has no lasting consequences.  Every aspect of human existence, no matter how tiny, lacks any meaning of any kind, deep or shallow. No one’s life is meaningful.
Which means the answers to the questions are not meaningful either.

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About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.

I will take example with turing machin and OO programing, maybe it will be clearer what i'm talking about =) As the concept of entropy is quasi inexistant with turing machine, and like this we know we are not talking about something mystical

And i think it can interest also shelby because he is into this sort of problematics with language design lol

The problem is this conceptions from metaphysics to organize the world based on fundemental 'objects' with properties, and 'entelechy' , which is abtracted with the OO semantic of having class of objects with properties and 'entelechy' through the alteration of its state by its methods.

So far good, but then the problem is when you want to program interaction between all the different type of object that can be present in the world, with OO programming generally it become quickly a design problem.

...

Either you do a visitor class for each pair of objects, and then each time you add a new type of object, you need to add visitor class for all the combination that the new object can interact with, but it's still bogus from metaphysical point of view because it mean the interaction between the object are not contained in the object themselves, but applied from the exterior through a visitor class that visit the two object in questions.

...

This whole design of hard typed object make emergent property very hard to program and conceptualize.

...

In his 1948 essay, "Intelligent Machinery", Turing wrote that his machine consisted of:

...an unlimited memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol, and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behavior of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings. (Turing 1948, p. 3[18]

How ridiculous the face saving code has become is nicely summarised by Samson Mow.

Instead of just signalling BIP141... One day history will look back upon our blockchain and facepalm. Heck I think it already is.

Meanwhile support just hit 64% over the last 24 hours.

But for me need to distinguish between chaotic function, predictibility and entropy...

In a way this whole distinction between self organisation and entropy is very subjective, and mostly in the eye of the beholder Maybe the whole universe is in a process of self organisation and there is not one particule or quanta in the whole thing that is not participating in this auto organisation.

...

Chaos theory are also different from entropy, in the sense with chaotic functions, the functions is already supposed to be unpredictible to begin with, so there is not really a concept of entropy as how the function result will deviate from expected outcome.

...

Even if most of the time i guess what engineers will measure as entropy in a system will mostly be emergent properties, quantum stuff, etc it's mostly a concept that apply to linear system because linear system are never accurate in physics, which can make one wonder why it's even called science to begin with, it's interest is mostly for industrial economy.

After you can see a tree or a child as just noise (actually children are often just this ), compared to the beautifully dystopia the megalomaniac in goldman sachs are trying to concoct A parking is certainly 'less entropic' than a forest

Well the concept of entropy is mostly relevant in the context of engineering, where one build a system, and has to consider that what matter in term of right or wrong is that the machine work as planned / wanted by the designer, and in this perspective, the entropy is always something unwanted, or defined negatively as a divergeance from the expected /wanted result.

...what is to be considered as good in environment is things that works as planned by a designer, and 'chaos' is seen by definition as something to be avoided / deconsidered, or as some kind of waste of energy that make the system not as efficient as it should be to full fill its purpose.

AlphaGo uses a Monte Carlo Tree Search. Monte Carlo Tree Search is an alternative approach to searching the game tree. The idea is to run many game simulations. Each simulation starts at the current game state and stops when the game is won by one of the two players. At first, the simulations are completely random: actions are chosen randomly at each state, for both players. At each simulation, some values are stored, such as how often each node has been visited, and how often this has led to a win. These numbers guide the later simulations in selecting actions (simulations thus become less and less random). The more simulations are executed, the more accurate these numbers become at selecting winning moves. It can be shown that as the number of simulations grows, MCTS indeed converges to optimal play.

Source: http://www.coolpage.com/

stopped reading there.

In the same time i completely get what he mean, it's just the term of entropy is not necessarily the best to employ to describe what he talks about lol It's seeing the issue from the wrong side IMO lol You can't get a positive definition of the process of individuation if you only see it as entropy as how it deviate from socially expected behavior

Emergent properties can be predicted, sometime they are not entropic

But entropy is only mesurable against expected behavior from a constructed system to measure how the data fit the theory behind the design of the system.

This connection between emergent property & entropy works for properties emerging from a designed/constructed system, not for measuring "natural" behavior out of the context of a fabricated system. It's only entropy if it's measured as a difference with predicted outcome.

We present a set of Matlab/Octave functions to compute measures of emergence, self-organization, and complexity applied to discrete and continuous data. These measures are based on Shannon’s information and differential entropy. Examples from different datasets and probability distributions are provided to show how to use our proposed code.

...

Complexity has generated interest in recent years (Bar-Yam, 1997; Mitchell, 2009; Haken and Portugali, 2017). A complex system can be understood as one composed by many elements, which acquire functional/spatial/temporal structures without a priori speci cations (Haken and Portugali, 2017). It has been studied in several disciplines, as one can try to measure the complexity of almost any phenomenon (Lopez-Ruiz et al., 1995; Bandt and Pompe, 2002; Prokopenko et al., 2009; Lizier, 2014; Soler-Toscano et al., 2014; Haken and Portugali, 2017). us, there exist a broad variety of measures of complexity where Shannon’s entropy and its generalizations have played a crucial role (Haken and Portugali, 2017).

Abstract: What is information? What role does information entropy play in this information exploding age, especially in understanding emergent behaviors of complex systems? To answer these questions, we discuss the origin of information entropy, the difference between information entropy and thermodynamic entropy, the role of information entropy in complexity theories, including chaos theory and fractal theory, and speculate new fields in which information entropy may play important roles.

The above post seem to be confusing this concept of emerging properties and entropy =)

In the context of thermodynamics, the level of entropy is measured as defect from the expected output.

IMO if you are waiting on other people to build a structure you agree to be free, you are never really free at all  Society, tradition, religion, all about volontary bondage