Dark Enlightenment

[CoinCube]

- how about this one Coincube, if we are throwing googled quotations about :-

     "When men will not be reasoned out of a vanity, they must be ridiculed out of it." - L'estrange.

Roger L'Estrange huh... let's take a look at the source of your quote

As Licenser and Surveyor, L’Estrange was charged with the prevention of the publication of dissenting writings, and authorised to search the premises of printers and booksellers on the merest suspicion of dissension.[5] L’Estrange excelled at this, hunting down hidden presses and enlisting peace officers and soldiers to suppress their activities. He soon came to be known as the “Bloodhound of the Press.”[6] His careful monitoring and control of nonconformist ideas and opinions succeeded not only in checking seditious publications,[4] but also in limiting political controversy and reducing debate.[7]

Yep sounds like someone who would support ridicule to suppress knowledge. I will respond with a good old fashion American revolutionary.

"But resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us." -- Thomas Jefferson

http://books.google.com/books?id=zJchn31t7DgC&pg=PA288&dq=%22resort+is+had+to+ridicule%22,+%22Thomas+Jefferson%22&hl=en&ei=L4FqTdiPGYaCgAfSkenLCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=ridicule&f=false

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[CoinCube]

Contentionism doesn't appear to be falsifiable.

Agreed, Contentionism is a theory and as it currently stands is not falsifiable.

Its validity, like the validity of other non-falsifiable theories will have to be determined by its accuracy in in predicting future events.

Contentionism is new thus has no such track record. It is therefore up to individuals to determine if they agree with the premises and conclusions of the theory.

For Example, if you agree with Contentionism you should probably invest in both the dominant anonymous and non anonymous cryptocurrency as soon as said dominance establishes itself if not sooner. You should also stay far far away from any and all government bonds.

If you think Contentionism is false then these recommendations, at least for the reasons argued in the theory, can be ignored.


 

[AnonyMint]

D.E. will sneak up on at least 30% of the people because at least 30% people are too dumb. And as I explained upthread, the D.E. is a bottom-up, coinductive phenomenon which won't appear as the top-down, inductive consensus on TV that the masses are accustomed to.

As everyone plainly knows we live in a 4 dimensional universe

No I showed mathematically that can't be true and that we actually live in a universe where spacetime exists in the domain of unbounded frequencies and phases. This explains how to conceptualize that there is no edge to the universe in 4D. That is my blog.

practicaldreamer is apparently too dumb, obstinate, or lazy to understand the linked math.

[AnonyMint]

Before you read my response, note that I grew up in the inner cities slums of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. My sister and I were once the only white kids in the entire elementary school, and our hair was always oily from all the kids touching our fine hair from behind. It was irritating.

I tried to have many friends who are black.

When I tell you we are not usually the same (I'm French, Welsh, German, Cherokee), I speak from experience. Note the Cherokee's arrived in the first wave and thus originated from Europe, unlike the second wave of North American natives which are Asian.

So shove your politically correct bullshit up your arse. I am not a racist. I am a realist with real life experience.

As George Carlin says, "I'm tired of these rock stars dealing with their cocaine guilt by saving a forest somewhere", arrogant white people are dealing with their socialism debt and colonialism guilt by saving nature (of races). It is just more irrational bullshit. What they are really saving is their socialism system that enables them to have their cake and eat it too (but this is coming to end with $150 trillion global debt). The socialism is going away folks, and you are too. Reality check.

What I am saying is that it is fine-grained, bottom-up competition is an order in itself.

The underlined sentence above is what my entire argument is based on. There is no natural order to races because in the natural environment it was impossible for different races to even meet each other, let alone compete to form an order!

...

My emotions behind that concern are not irrational at all. As I argued above, races were never put into an order by nature. Every racial order to have ever existed have been synthetic and so will every racial order in the future be.

Blacks are different because they come from a different continental environment. It is actually a fact that certain sub-races within blacks have an average penis size which is larger than whites, and in fact whites have an average penis size which is larger than Asians. This is all about environment. For example much of East Asia was not as affected by Ice Ages.

A longer penis means the women were having sex with more men, as the longer penis would have a better chance of depositing the sperm deep and greater change of spreading the male's genetics.

Many sub-races of blacks have greater relative muscle mass to bone structure, and thus they are on average greater physical athletes. But where mental acumen and accuracy of physical repetition is required the greater average IQ of whites will allow whites to compete on average (i.e. the ratio of whites to blacks in a sport).

Have you ever been physically close with a black woman? There are distinctive differences such as very oily skin, which they needed to deal with the dry climate of the savanna and the greater sun exposure. Black women typically have much more defined muscles on their shoulders and biceps too.

Etc....

[AnonyMint]

D.E. thinks anthropogenic, man-made global warming (AGW) is junk science...

We are safe from Guacamolegeddon people! Back to Defcon 4

Hahaha

Stick a fork in that AGW turkey, all d'juice done oozed outta her...

Causes and implications of the pause

Dan's comments are always satirical:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5297&cpage=1#comment-426394

I would say “shadenfreude!” but what we’re witnessing isn’t really ‘misfortune’ as much as it is a predictable slo-mo head-on collision trainwreck full of drunk Irishmen boldly predicting that the other train will swerve first.

I guess the reason I am interested and post on this subject is that it is not a "complex" subject, but one in which chaotic behavior predominates, and in which people try to apply all their little rationalizations and prejudices to.

Yeah is akin to playing Whac-A-Mole when you are drunk and reaction speed has slowed.  

Well that was a nice TL;DR, summing up parts of the ideas discussed among the 25+ pages.

But he missed all the satire which laid (pun intended) out those ideas.  

[Meizirkki]

So shove your politically correct bullshit up your arse. I am not a racist. I am a realist with real life experience.

I may lack your real life experience, but I do acknownledge the statistical differences you're talking about (I never opposed them in the first place). Neither did I ever think you're a racist. I've probably used wrong terms in my posts if my opinion came out so unclearly, the word "race" itself might have much more negative tone in english than it does in finnish.

My position on the issue doesn't come out of political correctness, but from my concern that any order to be will be influenced more by political opinions than "natural factors" (what is natural and what is not is a whole another debate ). Because of that I feel it will be better, not only for individuals, but for the human species as well to collaborate instead of forming an order by (arguably unnatural) competition.

[Meizirkki]

D.E. thinks anthropogenic, man-made global warming (AGW) is junk science...

It only takes a bit of logical thinking to come to a conclusion that the actions of mankind are warming the globe.

[AnonyMint]

D.E. thinks anthropogenic, man-made global warming (AGW) is junk science...

It only takes a bit of logical thinking to come to a conclusion that the actions of mankind are warming the globe.

Spend some time in the AGW thread to correct your understanding.

All those who voted "Yes" have an IQ I would guess below 120, maybe even lower.

(I would have said 100 or below, but we have to account for smart people who are ignorant about the history of Satoshi's interaction on this forum and the technical capabilities of tracking someone via their IP address)

Those who vote "yes" are just dumb.

That's a lot of anger about a poll result O.o

You confused the definition of "anger" with that of "frank statement of reality".

Who is angry? Maybe those who are stupid are angry. They usually get angry about anything being stupid as they are. They especially believe that no one should ever speak Truth when it impacts someone's emotional delusion.

One of the reasons I started this thread, was to teach. To help others be smarter. That is empathy.

Is this an emotional test or an analytical poll?

I want to be analytical and rational. Emotions usually interfere with these goals. There is a role for empathy, but not when making an analysis.

Even Spock expressed empathy (about teaching) didn't he (because it was logical to do so)?

[practicaldreamer]

Before you read my response, note that I grew up in the inner cities slums of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. My sister and I were once the only white kids in the entire elementary school, and our hair was always oily from all the kids touching our fine hair from behind. It was irritating.

 Wow - sounds like you had it really rough - what with them black folk touching your hair and everything  

You sound to me like a borderline trustafarian - over here the PM's wife (aristocrat Samantha Cameron), used to make a big noise about when she used to hang around with Tricky - back in the day, when she'd slum it as a student in the wrong part of Bristol. Tricky has to this day never heard of the woman - let alone played pool with her  

I tried to have many friends who are black.

Yeah - and I tried to have some of my best friends as gay  

As George Carlin says, "I'm tired of these rock stars dealing with their cocaine guilt by saving a forest somewhere", arrogant white people are dealing with their socialism debt and colonialism guilt by saving nature (of races). It is just more irrational bullshit. What they are really saving is their socialism system that enables them to have their cake and eat it too (but this is coming to end with $150 trillion global debt). The socialism is going away folks, and you are too. Reality check.

You really need to educate yourself buddy. Have a look at Adorno/the Frankfurt School and the "culture industry" - you might then have some understanding of why the patronising ramblings of egotistical rock stars have absolutely fuck all to do with socialism - and indeed, if you are able to make the connections, why in turn socialism has absolutely fuck all to do with the US driven debt problem.

We recently had floods in the UK due to a shift in the jet stream and exceptional levels of precipitation. I suppose this had something to do with "socialism" as well, right ?

My Great Aunt Minnie just found a hair in her soup - them bloody socialists at it again I'd say  

A longer penis means the women were having sex with more men, as the longer penis would have a better chance of depositing the sperm deep and greater change of spreading the male's genetics.

Hold on a minute    Wouldn't this mean that the women would have had to have had sex with fewer men, not more.

practicaldreamer is apparently too dumb, obstinate, or lazy to understand the linked math.

You are asking me to play a game of your choosing, on your court, to rules of your design and which may change at your behest
- and you are surprised that I don't have the desire to engage/play the game ? I'd much prefer to let you play with yourself, so to speak  

FWIW I read the article - you were, as indeed I was, educated to first degree level (to a greater or lesser extent) in Mathematics - nothing more than that. So I understand the language, if you like. But all I can see is a disjointed rambling, without a clear or cited aim/intention - the majority merely describes what we already know, but attempts to link it altogether in a way that is clearly tenuous and over ambitious.
  



In short, I'm not sure there's many here has the slightest idea WTF you are going on about. It doesn't help that you bandy about terms such as "contentionism" - a term that yourself and Coincube only dreamt up together a couple of weeks ago (you aren't the same person are you ?) and yet today seem to think that everyone is au fait with the term. You can see the problem can't you - you are making utterances in what is essentially a private language  - it won't wash I'm afraid.

   Its all well and good all these types of threads - I mean, its quite a spectacle and everything - but I do worry that people new to this forum will view Anonymints voluminous postings and think Bitcoin is some kind of cult, its forum populated by whacko's.

   Still, I don't feel good about keep butting into his threads like this - if for no other reason than I'm merely feeding the troll.
Looks like the ignore button might be the only option left here I'm afraid. As William James said in the Unheresy link, “The essence of genius is to know what to overlook”.

[CoinCube]

   Still, I don't feel good about keep butting into his threads like this - if for no other reason that I'm merely feeding the troll.

But surely he's just misguided? We ought to lead him back to the light -- that would be the morally right thing to do

Sadly I have conversed extensively with AnonyMint and determined that he is beyond salvation. He will not be led back to the light despite being shown the way on several several occasions.

When dealing with dangerous fanatics such as this ignoring them messenger and public ridicule as our friend L'Estrange advised is best tried first. Sadly in tough cases such as this we must move on to more advanced L'Estrange tactics.

'Tis not necessity, but opinion, that makes men miserable; and when we come to be fancy-sick, there's no cure.

There is no opposing brutal force to the stratagems of reason.

That which the world miscalls a jail,
A private closet is to me.

The solution is quite apparent. We need to find a nice private closet for AnonyMint where his dangerous sickness can be contained.

[AnonyMint]

Before you read my response, note that I grew up in the inner cities slums of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. My sister and I were once the only white kids in the entire elementary school, and our hair was always oily from all the kids touching our fine hair from behind. It was irritating.

 Wow - sounds like you had it really rough - what with them black folk touching your hair and everything  

You have no idea how dangerous it was to grow up in inner city New Orleans.

You sound to me like a borderline trustafarian

My family was never rich until my father become West Coast Division Head attorney for Exxon during the 1980s (think Exxon Valdez since Prudhoe bay was under his sphere of responsibility).

I only experienced his wealth for a brief few years in my 20s, then I became destitute again, then I became middle class on my own when I released CoolPage in 1998. Since then my moderate wealth or lack thereof has vacillated.

- over here the PM's wife (aristocrat Samantha Cameron), used to make a big noise about when she used to hang around with Tricky - back in the day, when she'd slum it as a student in the wrong part of Bristol. Tricky has to this day never heard of the woman - let alone played pool with her  

I tried to have many friends who are black.

Yeah - and I tried to have some of my best friends as gay  

I had a very handsome friend in high school who drove a fast car and I thought he was cool until one day he tried to touch my leg, then I amicably stopped being his friend.

Where I live now the ladyboys are very attracted to me (even more universally so than the ladies), but I refuse to befriend them (after some aborted trials to see if there was any symbiosis there) because I find them annoying and the thought of man-on-man sex is repulsive to me.

Since per what I wrote upthread, I am entirely against the concept of a state enforced marriage contract, then I have no problem if gays do what ever they want, as long as they don't try to mess with me.

As George Carlin says, "I'm tired of these rock stars dealing with their cocaine guilt by saving a forest somewhere", arrogant white people are dealing with their socialism debt and colonialism guilt by saving nature (of races). It is just more irrational bullshit. What they are really saving is their socialism system that enables them to have their cake and eat it too (but this is coming to end with $150 trillion global debt). The socialism is going away folks, and you are too. Reality check.

You really need to educate yourself buddy. Have a look at Adorno/the Frankfurt School and the "culture industry" - you might then have some understanding of why the patronising ramblings of egotistical rock stars have absolutely fuck all to do with socialism

And massive debt doesn't enable massive collective misallocation of consumer expenditures much.  

Myopic, Dunning-Kruger, charlatans don't impress me, so be gone from me.

And you ARE going away and I am going to do my technological part to make it so.

- and indeed, if you are able to make the connections, why in turn socialism has absolutely fuck all to do with the US driven debt problem.

Socialists blame debt on the effects of the vested interests due to the power vacuum of democracy, then they try to put the blame on capitalism to deflect it away from its root cause which is democracy. You forgot the adjective "usury". I've explained in great detail which is discussed in the Economic Devastation thread, why large capital is inherently dumb (because smaller things grow faster and knowledge generation is not fungible) thus only can grow when that power vacuum in place.

We recently had floods in the UK due to a shift in the jet stream and exceptional levels of precipitation. I suppose this had something to do with "socialism" as well, right ?

You incorrect man-made global warming proponents try to claim socialism is responsible, because you claim only socialism can fix the problem. Kaplunk.

(and the entire hysteria is junk science which is another effect of socialism).

But no worries, you ARE going away soon.

And as I explained upthread, the D.E. will sneak up on you and it won't be announced on TV. By the time you realize what we have done to you, you will be swept away already.

I am not just a theorist, I am also a man of action.

A longer penis means the women were having sex with more men, as the longer penis would have a better chance of depositing the sperm deep and greater change of spreading the male's genetics.

Hold on a minute    Wouldn't this mean that the women would have had to have had sex with fewer men, not more.

Thanks for confirming for all to see how low your IQ is.

Impregnating a woman is normally a function of repetition, as in about 1 in 11 attempts will result in a pregnancy. Thus the woman's evolutionary strategy is maximized in one vector by accepting as many mates as possible. Other vectors include hypergamy and enough support to raise the children.

The more mates depositing sperm the more evolutionary strategy advantage each male needs to get his sperm into a slightly better swimming position to maximize the odds of fertilization.

You put the cart before the horse. One vector of a feral woman's evolutionary strategy is competing predatory males to maximize her gene pool, so the penis must get longer in societies where the man doesn't marry, guard the woman, and maximize the other vectors in her evolutionary strategy. East Asians have even smaller penises than whites because they control the women even more than we whites do, but this comes at the expense of creating a docile population with reduced willpower, independent thought and creative output. East Asian babies don't even fight when put in a position where they can't breathe. It seems the whites probably had the best balance when we weren't destroyed by the power vacuum of democracy, yet who is to say what is "best". The races adapted to what was best in their environs.

practicaldreamer is apparently too dumb, obstinate, or lazy to understand the linked math.

FWIW I read the article - you were, as indeed I was, educated to first degree level (to a greater or lesser extent) in Mathematics - nothing more than that. So I understand the language, if you like. But all I can see is a disjointed rambling, without a clear or cited aim/intention - the majority merely describes what we already know, but attempts to link it altogether in a way that is clearly tenuous and over ambitious.

Your low IQ explains why you are unable to comprehend why the logic is exclusionary of other possibilities.
  

In short, I'm not sure there's many here has the slightest idea WTF you are going on about.

Indeed at least 25% don't have the IQ to comprehend a very simple case of my reductionist ability, so certainly they can't understand the more complex cases of reductionist logic I employ.

As William James said in the Unheresy link, “The essence of genius is to know what to overlook”.

Good to see you are trying to learn from my blog (that quote he saw there), and the operative word there is "what".

[AnonyMint]

I dump this here for lack of a better place to quickly record this publicly in such an unpolished state.

Someday I want to blog in careful detail about Eric's insightful refutation of Schrödinger’s Cat (which parallels some of the ways I initially thought about it, yet he adds some details such as the decoherence aspect):

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=690

The quick, uncareful dump of my thoughts is to tie this into my existing articles on my blog. Eric S. Raymond is correct that observation doesn't have an absolute point (everything in our universe is relative), but he missed is the conclusion from his own point which that the classical physics objects are also superimposed. There is no absolute point where classical objects exist and are no longer superimposed. Every day the earth has billions of simultaneous realities going which do not connected to your life in any way that you could possibly measure scientifically unless the speed-of-light was not finite and you could measure forever to capture all the possible long-tail butterfly effects of zillions of interactions of events that are not observable to you now.

There are few times I have been able to see things that Eric didn't and corrected him.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4757&cpage=1#comment-393293

I posit that Eric is smart enough to recognize his mistake. Eric, you are conflating the mathematical duality of the inductive construction of the universe with the coinductive construction of infinity.

> First, give up one of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, or omniscience.
> Then we could talk contingent existence.

Indeed it would be impossible to construct an INSTANCE that is simultaneously all good, all powerful, and all knowing, because nothing imperfect could be constructed. Perfection would require infinite degrees-of-freedom, thus a dynamic, competitive world could not exist– the Second Law of Thermodynamics could not exist.

In type theory, top is the inductive bound and bottom is the coinductive bound. Top is the intersection of all types and bottom is the union of all types. Thus bottom can never be constructed as an instance, yet it exists as type bound.

Shift your frame-of-reference into the type of types domain of the universe to find the existence you claim is impossible.

Note that the operations (e.g. methods of a class) of an inductive type are a coinductive type and dually vice versa, e.g. the top class type contains the union of all methods of all types in the universe, thus can not be constructed. And dually, the bottom class type contains the intersection of all methods of all types, thus can be constructed.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4757&cpage=1#comment-393314

>Shift your frame-of-reference into the type of types domain of the universe to find the existence you claim is impossible.

You’re uttering nonsense. The relationship between mathematical theory and observed reality is not even nearly that simple.

I understood your tripartite impossibility claim to be that a good God would not be powerless to make good all that is in the universe.

The claim is illogical in several orthogonal ways.

1. Good does not exist without evil. Perception requires contrast.
2. Good is evil, and vice versa, from different perspectives.
3. Some cases of global or greater good require local or lesser evil.

Essentially by implication you claimed that infinity (infinite degrees-of-freedom to attain good at all possible perspectives) must be observable, else it is impossible. Or by implication you claimed that we can prove the universe is finite, thus the necessary degrees-of-freedom would be observed and achieved by such a God.

Some theories of the universe posit that infinity exists as an unreachable bound in some domain, e.g. entropy, space, time, or precision. True or not, we can not prove that infinity does not exist as unreachable bound. Your claim of impossibility is too strong. Such a God can not provably exist, because we can’t observe for infinite time, precision, etc..

A possible interpretation of your linked essay on math, is that an infinite universe can not be completely described by any finite set of theories or axioms.

Infinity can not constructed inductively from a starting point, because infinity (final unreachable bound) can not be observed.

Whether it exists or not, infinity or the finite bound is decomposed co-inductively as observations directed towards its final unreachable or finite bound that we can not prove is final.

How sad a finite universe would be, where the scientific method could be shelved and knowledge would cease to expand at some finite bound. The scientific method requires that we never trust a bound (e.g. Planck’s constant precision) as final and continue searching and testing forever.

There is another one where I corrected him about computer language theory, but I don't have time to dig it up right now.

Any one who doubts the depth of my computer science knowledge can start reading here.

[AnonyMint]

Btw, that entire thread is a great read of my (a.k.a. JustSaying's) logic on socialism, God, and the universe. I was clairvoyant at the time (unlike now my now foggy mind is in a slog from overworking,  not eating properly, not seeing the sun in weeks, etc).

Several tidbits...

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4757&cpage=1#comment-394266

@JAD
> Thus belief in equality and social justice reliably leads to persecution, mass murder,
> and genocide, because reality is that people and groups are not equal.

Agreed. Politics legislates that which can not be controlled top-down, magically promising the people what they think should be but either can not or not sustainably. Equality and social justice means plunder and the redistribution of wealth.

An insidious form of redistribution that enables many aspects of the political illusion is borrowing from the predicted future using debt to redistribute capital FROM necessary real-time demand, e.g. currently TO excess consumption (west) and excess fixed investment (china). Compared to binding to years of prediction, real-time feedback loops have orders-of-magnitude higher fitness (dynamic adaptability to dynamic opportunities) due the geometrically permuted network effects of real-time degrees-of-freedom. Unfitness manifests as inefficiency, laziness, ignorance, inability, corruption, brutality, etc..

If I am correctly interpreting esr’s summary of Olson, it implies the special interests groups are a minority, however they comprise the entire population playing the political game.

Why do you protest against politics, given it is a natural form of human competition? Anarchism would unrealistically require that everyone is a pure sigma (the sigma in PUA theory)– not libertarians who think we can legislate liberty.

Sigmas are successful when they reject political capital (and money as much as practical) and make innovations or insights in the free market. When they drift to relying on the monetary or political capital they’ve earned from those innovations or insights, they are falling away from their optimum efficacy.

@Patrick Maupin
> More to the point, why can’t we help the best individuals with their best learing modes?

When it is done in the private sector then it does not fall victim to the Olson failure, see khanacademy.org and codecademy.com (the future of education).

Compare the fitness of accomplishments in the competitive free market, versus the blindness of legislating with no market feedback what other people should do.

Non-sigmas don’t think they can get all their desired results without some politics. The alphas serve their demand to be deluded on the efficacy of political action.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4757&cpage=1#comment-394267

@JustSaying
> they are falling away from their optimum efficacy.

Well their efficacy in the role of sigma to maximize individual freedom and fitness. This is not to say that alphas, betas, etc are not effective in the complex game of evolution. I should not assert that some sprinkling of alpha mode could not be evolutionary advantageous for a sigma.

The unfitness of debt and political action is apparently evolutionary necessary or optimum, else it wouldn’t be natural and someone would devise a private sector solution.

For example, from the perspective of debt money as the antithesis of gold, they compete and balance the opposing disadvantages, e.g. gold encourages burying savings in hole and rewards non-production.

Even if the masses held physical gold (i.e. well distributed wealth), then the money supply could not expand fast enough for financed production to outpace the natural population growth rate. And with that inherent deflation, conservative savers are either motivated to hold the physical thus removing it from the circulating money supply, or to deposit it in return for an interest rate in which case mathematically the banks must do fractional reserve banking.

Debt is natural and required.

Infinite degrees-of-freedom (perfect fitness) could not be observable in any reality. There are no absolutes. Contrast requires imperfection. Existence requires perception. Perception requires contrast. Full circle to my early comment.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4757&cpage=1#comment-394401

@JAD there is an article on your blog claiming the US Treasury might not possess any unencumbered gold.

Ah the baiting of the soul with the “gold will save us” emotional trap.

History has shown that the stored value medium for money is always debased, regardless whether it is gold, paper, Tally sticks, electronic digits, etc..

An insoluble fact is that debasement is always assured with politics, because the costs of the voters’ desires is obfuscated in the debasement of all citizens, instead of applied individually w.r.t. individual performance.

Don’t confuse the desire to work and get paid, or to start a business and earn a profit, with the political promises made to voters. Don’t confuse “economic value” with “I saw jobs, prosperity being created”. Economic value is a network of feedback loops from investment followed by profit or bankruptcy. The more individually directed these investments are, the more chances of finding the profitable ones that fit the economic demand. The collective politics has an incentive (to earn votes) to invest in everything voters want, economic or not.

This insoluble power vacuum (that sucks in a leader who can make the political promises) can not be wished away just because it is repulses a person’s emotions. There is no possible mechanism to remove it.

For example, some claim that Hitler and Lincoln or recently Iceland and China, took the power from the banking establishment and gave it to the citizens, by handing the control over the creation of paper money to the national treasury. Hitler and Confederate notes both debased their society by spending on uneconomic projects. China is doing the same now. Hitler initially made the people happy with lavish public works spending (e.g. the road network and health care), promising the people more than the economic value of the projects could sustain. When he could not get enough oil to sustain it, he was forced to expropriate via war in order to fulfill the collective social promises. That summary probably misses some complexities, but the essential point remains valid.

Since the masses don’t hold most of the wealth, if the society enforces a strict gold standard, then the masses don’t get what they want. This is why gold standards are always subverted by politics.

A strict gold standard would over time concentrate relative wealth from the consuming middle class to the wealthy, who save say 99% and consume 1% of their income. Politics demands debasement, because the rich concentrate wealth (with or) without debasement.

Some refer to the Byzantine era as an example of a sustainable gold standard. I have not studied the period intensely. Apparently gold was being imported into the economy by their trade surplus, so perhaps political promises were less attractive to citizens who were finding sufficient opportunities to be busy and prosperous. Unlike China’s current situation, their trade surplus was not due to a mercantile policy of debasement of their currency, rather apparently due to some situational and technological advantages, e.g. their cannon spraying flaming oil on pirates. Further insight on this would be appreciated.

I posit the taxonomy of male social order types from PUA type theory applies to this power vacuum. I asserted that the alphas get their power from public politics and/or Theory of the Firm (corporate politics), with the lower order male types (betas, gammas, omegas) employing politics to fight back. They can band together with politics to fight the rich with political promises including Doublethink such as equality and social justice, which actually end up as debasement and plunder. The sigmas don’t play the class warfare delusion, instead create technology to empower individuals.

Stored wealth is ephemeral and depleting. It should be this way, otherwise people become unmotivated to continue producing. The rate of growth of relative wealth of the rich decelerates as they grow richer and less in tune with the markets invested in, i.e. smaller things grow faster because of the fitness. I don’t hate the bankers+politicians because I don’t want to hate most people (i.e. the symbiotic borrowers+voters). Why hate what can’t be changed? Why be bitter and perceive the glass as half-empty? The inspiring fact is that despite the booms and busts (and occasional resultant atrocities and wars) caused by the political promises, everyone gets wealthier over time. The cost of commodities is inexorably declining as a relative share of the global GDP. In 323 B.C. iron was a precious metal. Technology, innovation, and art (i.e. knowledge) is the savior of mankind.

Atrocities repulse all of us. Religion is not the only cause. To entirely prevent them, we would have to somehow eliminate political promises and the Doublethink they create. Unfortunately I don’t see how such a goal is possible or congruent with evolution.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4757&cpage=1#comment-394413

@Greg, we are both correct. Agreed stored wealth should not disappear too fast to discourage saving and planning. It should deplete fast enough so that we remain competitive. Planning too far into the future or managing too much capital, reduces degrees-of-freedom and fitness. For dynamic systems, the best strategy is often an incremental adaptive approach of plan, implement, re-evaluate and repeat. I suppose divergence could be an issue in some cases.

[Meizirkki]

I'm beginning to think Dark Enlightenment is a doomsday cult.

[AnonyMint]

    Many computational biologists would agree that (and I'm sure Anonymint would have to, albeit begrudgingly, concur) , had it not been for lambda calculus, the understanding of spreadsheets might never have occurred. An essential challenge in artificial intelligence is the understanding of probabilistic information.

     On a similar note, given the current status of optimal symmetries, hackers worldwide daringly desire the emulation of object-oriented languages. Nevertheless, context-free grammar alone is able to fulfill the need for the construction of context-free grammar especially with special reference to ECDSA and its existential threat to the farthing.

I'm sure I don't know what you mean, but I'll have a stab at interpreting your riddle.

Materialist TOEs (theories of everything) cannot account for -- among other things -- a "first cause". If a person writes a new OOP language using another OOP language, where does "object" come from?

And that is precisely the issue my TOE addresses.

[AnonyMint]

On the subject of a theory of contentionism:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/03/11/marxism-is-a-dead-idea-but-capitalism-freedom-has-never-truly-existed/

[AnonyMint]

Someone asked me to summarize my TOE.

Forces and thermodynamics are just entropy. Spacetime is just unbounded frequencies (and phases) in the frequency domain.

http://unheresy.com/The%20Universe.html#Matter_as_a_continuum

[AnonyMint]

Dark Ages...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5672089#msg5672089

P.S. John Williams (proprietor of ShadowStats.com) thinks we will have hyperinflation. He is entirely mistaken. We will have severe deflation.

You are both entirely mistaken. As soon as we have severe inflation or deflation, the game will be over and dark age begins. Japan and all other 400%-Debt/GDP economies are trying to maintain zero percent inflation until they can't.

Dark Age is severe deflation, but the difference is that almost nothing has value any more. Food becomes the unit of currency and becomes much more expensive, e.g. rice was money in Japan for about 600 years during its Dark Age. This means the maximization of the division-of-labor collapses back to barter money, which means productivity and new knowledge production collapses.

Agreed there exists now the threat of falling into a Dark Age. And that is why I am working so hard on a technological solution. I know you don't believe it is possible to avoid a Dark Age. You might be correct, but you also might not be. I told you upthread that my strategy is to make it so the hackers can avoid confiscation and control over their activities, so that we can create 1000X more productivity in the Knowledge Age space. I hope this can offset the collapse of 47% into technological unemployment along with a $223 trillion global debt morass with a $2000 trillion derivatives and unfunded future social liabilities.

Wait to see the outcome.

P.S. And I thought I was the pessimist in this forum, you are more pessimistic than me.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5672296#msg5672296

More technology means more complexity, which is not the solution. It is the problem.

Societies - as the opposite of humanity - have never been something different than 'problem solving societies' (Tainter). Societies are growing rampant, endlessly until the end. They are permanently investing in additional complexity/energy/debt to solve exponentially growing problems. The Game is over as soon as the ever shrinking marginal return of additional complexity/energy/debt reaches the tipping point.

Malthusian nonsense. I wrote about why Malthusians are always wrong:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#2nd_Law_of_Thermo

You conflate the failure of socialism with the success of technology.

Without technology you'd be freezing your ass off in a cave with no fire.

This is why I ignore you. I allowed for the possibility that socialism fucked everything up so much this time around, we may fall into the abyss of a Dark Age.

But I am not going to let that happen. And I have the power to stop it (where my work will be leveraged by all the hackers).

Now you watch and observe.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5672571#msg5672571

You entirely don't understand knowledge production. This causes you to conflate and confuse everything. I don't need debt to program the computer, generate knowledge and increase productivity. I don't need a constantly growing tangible capital with its debt base to perpetually increase knowledge. You are conflating the effects of tangible limitations and knowledge production. Welcome to the virtual reality of knowledge and the internet. Perhaps you've been asleep under a rock for the past 15 years.

Start your education here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.0 (Economic Devastation thread)

Don't post any more nonsense in this thread. Go refute in the thread linked above which is not moderated by me. Readers can go there to view more of your nonsense.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5673731#msg5673731

Now, whether or not what we have can rightly be called capitalism is another question entirely.

On that point, see this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg5656763#msg5656763

Zarathustra is conflating the ill effects of debt and tangible capital (which is actually inertia and liability, not assets) with the gains in prosperity that all arise from technology and human ingenuity.

His assertion (I deleted the nonsense post) that knowledge can't prosper in a decentralized society (a.k.a. anarchy) is unfathomably incorrect. It is so incorrect, that he should not be included in the discussion here, because it is just noise which buries the important discussion in this thread.

I've told him by private message that if he can make comments without making a long quotation of the prior post, then I will allow his comments if they don't just repeat the same nonsense without any sufficient citation or factual backup. I don't want to bury this thread in nonsense.

If he feels that is censorship, then fine he can create his own thread. I rarely have to delete posts, but he goes on and on and on with the same nonsense asserting there can be no sharing of knowledge and no network effects once we have decentralization.

His thinking is the antithesis of everything the internet has done and brought to us.

He is correct that the complexity of the power vacuum of socialism is collapsing. But his mistake is conflating that collapse with the rise of decentralization, which is actually a knowledge networking effects phenomenon.

If you get that wrong, you've got everything wrong. It is that important.

P.S. my personal apology to him for being forced to delete his nonsense posts. It is not personal. I am just keeping the thread signal-to-noise ratio high. I have allowed silly posts of others to remain, because they didn't go on and on and on post after post.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5674159#msg5674159

Btw, I have tried living like that here in the Philippines (where that photo was probably taken) and trust me, you don't want that "prosperity".

Gains in prosperity are not a zero-sum game. We can produce more energy. There is no limit. The Second Law of Thermodynamics assures us that entropy trends to maximum. Even Einstein said that law is fundamental.

Anarchy is not only people living in the jungle like rabbits. It is also the decentralized internet. You conflate poverty with decentralization. There is always a mix of top-down and bottom-up organization in society. It is when this balance skews too far to top-down that socialism is peaking in a big heap of debt and corruption.

I know you would really like a Dark Age, but sorry you won't get one inspite of the fact that the collectivism has f8cked everything up pretty severely this time around. The reason is because the internet is too powerful as a knowledge liberating tool. And I am particularly adept at seeing what needs to be done now.

The at-home 3D printing revolution will mean we can be self-sufficient and autonomous and void the 'aliens' leeches with their large capital and factories. The 3D printer can even print itself!

That is the last post I will allow from you that repeats the nonsense that all progress came from collectivism. In fact, all progress came from individual discoveries! You don't even understand the basic definition of knowledge:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg3829608#msg3829608

He defines knowledge here
Information is Alive

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg3804181#msg3804181
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg3831144#msg3831144
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg3804256#msg3804256

Take the time to read those link posts above otherwise don't bother to reply.

Communication and network effects are not collectivism. Collectivism is making promises to each other and binding each other in futures contracts. This is slavery, because nobody can predict every micro-event in the future. The futures contracts prevent the local annealing that optimizes the economy. I first learned this concept from Jason Hommel. Ignoring the Biblical points, you can still find the mathematical wisdom of his point:

http://silverstockreport.com/2009/greenspan-misapplied.html
http://www.silverstockreport.com/essays/Freedom_from_Usury.html

I expound on the fact that only maximization of degrees-of-freedom, thus optimal fitness, via local real-time annealing is what creates prosperity:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg4576810#msg4576810

collectivism = promises = futures contracts = slavery = boom&bust

You can find that theme throughout my archives. Whereas collectivism stomps on and tries to prevent fitness and prosperity.

Re-read my prior post, I added to it.

[Meizirkki]

Someone asked me to summarize my TOE.

Forces and thermodynamics are just entropy. Spacetime is just unbounded frequencies (and phases) in the frequency domain.

http://unheresy.com/The%20Universe.html#Matter_as_a_continuum

You're on the right track, keep going

There is no energy in matter other than that received from the environment.

[CoinCube]

Quoting myself as the post is relevant to this thread

Premises of the Dark Enlightenment
Posted on 2014-02-19 by esr   

Complaint the Third: Democracy is a failure. It has produced a race to the bottom in which politicians grow ever more venal, narrow interest groups ever more grasping, the function of government increasingly degenerates into subsidizing parasites at the expense of producers, and in general politics exhibits all the symptoms of what I have elsewhere called an accelerating Olsonian collapse (after Mancur Olson’s analysis in The Logic Of Collective Action).

Of all the the premises of the Dark Enlightenment this is the most most critical for this is the mechanism (described as the power vacuum up-thread) which allows collectivism to grow to the the point where it threatens systemic collapse.

The historical predecessor for our current system of government was Athenian democracy. Their system lasted for 178 years.

Plato (427 or 428 BC - 348 or 347 BC) lived during the Athenian democracy. Plato in his most well known work the Republic points out all of the problems and pitfalls regarding living in a democracy, including its injustice and the oppression of the individual under the weight of a democracy that dictates at the whim of the majority of citizen votes.

The most chilling praise of democracy that I have ever read is that of James Anthony Froude.  

Democracies are the blossoming of the aloe, the sudden squandering of the vital force which has accumulated in the long years when it was contented to be healthy and did not aspire after a vain display. The aloe is glorious for a single season. It progresses as it never progressed before. It admires its own excellence, looks back with pity on its earlier and humbler condition, which it attributes only to the unjust restraints in which it was held. It conceives that it has discovered the true secret of being 'beautiful for ever,' and in the midst of the discovery it dies.
...
A centralized democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts.

The founding fathers were well aware of the potential dangers.

At its birth, the United States was not a democratic nation—far from it. The very word "democracy" had pejorative overtones, summoning up images of disorder, government by the unfit, even mob rule. In practice, moreover, relatively few of the nation's inhabitants were able to participate in elections.

Specifically the founding fathers built a government with multiple safeguards against democracy. They built a government which

1) Lacked the ability to directly tax the population (no authority to tax income).
2) Had only one of its two legislative branches directly elected (The senate was appointed by state legislatures).
3) Did not have a fiat currency (gold and silver was money).
4) Did not have a central bank (no FED).
5) Did not allow direct election of the president (president was to be selected by the electoral collage).
6) Only gave the right to vote to landowners (called freeholders).
7) Gave most power to the states.

Gradually over time each of these safeguards has fallen. When Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the constitution of 1787 had created, he replied: "A republic, if you can keep it."
He reply has traditionally been read as a warning against monarchy, but it could just as easily be read as a warning against democracy. The Dark Enlightenment argues that we are failing to "keep it".

It argues that the republic is decaying into democracy and that democracy is a failure.