Category Archives: science

Global warming politics

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You can get away with anything by saying "the Word of God"

In the past, you could get away with just about anything by saying “The Word of God”. These days, you can get the same effect by saying “Climate Change”. People will focus on whether or not they believe, not on whether or not what you say makes sense.

American politics are unique, as far as I know, in that the very fact of man-made climate change is a political issue. Not whether it is a bad thing or what to do about it, but the actual temperature measurements, not to mention the models used to predict future changes.

In a way it is understandable that American conservatives flat out deny man-made climate change. After all, liberals believe in it. In the current poisonous political atmosphere (which is far more dangerous to the country that whatever happens in the physical atmosphere), if your opponent claims the moon is not made of cheese, it probably means they have secret plans to eat it.

There is also the unfortunate tendency for an unholy alliance of progressive politicians and mass media to hype current weather aberrations as proof of climate change. But the truth is that we have literally seen nothing yet: The world is slowly heating up, but from a record low in the 17th century. These things literally happen at a glacial speed, as glaciers are a big player in the process. So we are now back to around the Viking age in temperature, and the Bronze Age was warmer than that, and the late Stone Age warmer than that again. So we have literally not seen anything yet that hasn’t been there already.

In the past, singular weather events like a bad storm or a year of drought were hyped by religious groups as divine punishment. The current behavior is essentially the same, God being replaced by a more nebulous force. But it is still some higher force punishing us for our greed, and people react in much the same way: Not very much at all, since people generally like their greed.

Again, we have literally seen nothing new yet, but we are probably past the point of no return where we will see change on a whole new level – some day in the future when gas-driven cars seem as quaint as horse-driven carriages. And by then, it would probably have changed anyway, either becoming hotter or colder or wetter or drier.  So conservatives are perfectly right to redefine “climate change denier” as “someone who, despite overwhelming proof, refuses to believe that the climate has always been changing.”

A hot summer or cold winter or a particularly devastating tornado or three are weather, not climate. But these are the things that get attention, and the press is adding to the confusion. The press – and presumably TV, for those dumb enough to watch that – is trying to stir up intense emotions, because that’s what sells. Spring coming two, then three weeks earlier to Norway or Canada is not going to compete with the latest sex scandal or grotesque murder. You have to have cities swallowed by the ocean and stuff, so that’s the angle you get. But then you come to the beach and it is exactly where it was last year, and it is kind of hard not to dismiss the whole thing as a hoax.

It is not a hoax. Science has known for over 200 years that carbon dioxide retains heat, because it lets light through but scatters infrared (heat) radiation. Light comes down during the day, and is absorbed to some degree by any surface that is not pure white (or a mirror), more the darker the surface. Light that is absorbed does not disappear, but is radiated as heat. (This can take its sweet time if it is absorbed by plants, of course, since these must be eaten or burned or some such to release the heat. And a lot of the planet is covered in plants, but they actually store only a minor part of the energy that hits them. Nobody calls for more efficient plants though. There are actual differences even between existing species, without genetic engineering.)

So if we increase the carbon dioxide and methane content in the atmosphere, it will hold back more of the heat that would otherwise radiate into space. This is what these gases do and they can’t help it. You can see them in action on our sister planets Venus and Mars, and the atmosphere already keeps Earth 19 Kelvin warmer than it otherwise would be, which is very much a good thing. That’s why nobody complained during those 200 years that we already knew about the greenhouse effect. Even children could read about this in any serious book on astronomy, and it was in no way controversial. It shouldn’t be now.

What should be controversial is the notion that if the planet is getting hotter, we need more socialism, more taxes and more regulations of everything from banks to children’s books. Seriously? No, seriously? If we are facing a massive environmental challenge, don’t we need the most flexible economy we could possibly have? History has already shown us just how great socialism is to protect the environment: It left Eastern Europe an ugly, poisoned dystopia at a point where the forests were already beginning to spread again in North America. If your house is on fire, you don’t call for a pyromaniac. If your environment is in trouble, you don’t call for socialism.

Now, don’t get this wrong. Taxing carbon dioxide emissions is a perfectly reasonable approach, if you think your country will suffer from the global warming. (If you think it will profit from it, that’s a bit different. Scandinavia, Canada, and Siberia will probably all benefit greatly from an ice-free Arctic, for instance.) Taxing carbon emissions from the industry might cause the industry to move elsewhere, so is somewhat less efficient than taxing gas-driven cars or coal-driven power plants. But you can still tax goods on the border for the carbon dioxide emissions made during production. There is nothing controversial about this from a fiscal conservative point of view. Taxing negative externalities is a staple of conservative economic theory, believe it or not.  Laissez-faire does not actually extend to looking the other way when someone dumps their garbage in their neighbor’s backyard.

So yeah, most countries will probably want to tax carbon fuel in order to discourage its use, but should then pass this money back to the people by cutting other taxes or subsidizing positive externalities (like painting your house white, installing solar cells etc). There is no reason to use it to finance your weird culture wars.  Stop doing that, so people can take you seriously.

Humans as sims

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Grumpy child from Sims 3

Here to talk smack about us sims again? We’re just as good as other people, you know!

By now, a few expansions and patches into Sims 3, the little computer people are disturbingly lifelike in their behavior. Or rather, and this is my point, humans are disturbingly sims-like in their behavior.

I hold the view that ordinary humans are barely conscious most of the time. Instead, their behavior (including their thoughts) can largely be described by two “engines” that work together: HABIT  and IMPULSE.

The skeleton of a normal human life is the habit engine. It is itself not conscious: We don’t give any thought to whether we are going to get up in the morning – well, most of us don’t – or whether we are going to get dressed before going to work. We have large, overarching habits that gives us a structure for the day, and which again triggers smaller routines of habit to accomplish subgoals like buttoning shirts or tying shoelaces. In other words, we have a habit of stringing together habits in a certain sequence. This fills a good part of our day. As we get older, habits tend to grow stronger and fill ever more of the time.

The other engine is what I call the impulse engine. For fellow programmers, you may have thought of it as triggering an exception. One reason for such an impulse could be that a need has reached a trigger level: Hunger, thirst, excretion, attention. Usually a trigger event occurs well before critical levels are reached, although some needs have shorter fuses than others, so to speak. But in many (most?) cases the basic needs are already taken care of by our habits.

But the impulse engine is not triggered just by internal needs. It is also triggered by external objects. Seeing a bowl of snacks can trigger snacking, although I am not sure where the border goes to habit in that case. Seeing a sexy woman can definitely cause a trigger event in a man. Seeing a baby can trigger most women and many fathers, although most childless men consider babies part of the furniture unless the thing screams or stinks. And of course the whole business of advertising is based on triggering impulses. Of course, if you do that often enough and in the right context, it can eventually lead to a habit.

Both the habit and impulse engine are reasonably well modeled in The Sims 3. The little electronic people have a disturbingly human-like electronic mind. What they don’t have is a human soul (in the classical sense) or human spirit. This has to be provided by the player.

“Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes” says a famous Chinese proverb. In that light, sims are exceedingly feeble: Without the support of their player, they will achieve their goals purely by accident, and higher goals (like reaching the top of a career or maximizing several skills) not at all. They will however be able to stay alive, employed and reasonably satisfied about their needs, and even reproduce and raise (usually crazy, neurotic, grumpy or hot-headed) children.  From what I hear, they are not very different from Texans.

The purpose of religious ritual, like keeping the Sabbath or saying grace, is to interrupt the automatic working of the twin engines of habit and impulse, and give the soul a bit of “space” in which it has the chance to wake up for a moment and become aware. It tries, like this blog, to make people suddenly sit up and think: “I am right here, right now. This is it. I am alive!”

I may not have mentioned it on this blog, but I have noticed that the median weight of Norwegians has increased steadily after saying grace went completely out of fashion here during my childhood and youth. Of course, there are numerous other factors like the size of dinner plates and the widespread use of cars. But still… if you woke up each time you sat down to eat, and became acutely aware of who you were and what you were doing, would it change nothing?

Sims never say grace. But even if they did, it would just be another habit.

The inner world

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Concealing a universal wisdom

Are you perhaps concealing a universal wisdom? And if so, how would you know?

Recently I read in a book that is substantially holier than me, about seeking God within. It made a commentary that this was the opposite of introspection. I agree, although there are other opposites of introspection too.

Introspection, as I see it, is looking into your own personality, or “soul with a name”. This is the person we call “I”, and we feel responsible for what this person does and says and, if we are extra serious, even what it thinks. So when we look at the thoughts we have or have had, and how we feel etc, that is introspection. It is looking at our conscious self, although it may have been less conscious than it could have been – that is what we are trying to correct, perhaps.

But the inner world does not only consist of this person, the “I”. There is a lot of activity in there. The subconscious is far larger than the conscious, at least for most of us. Nearly all of us. There may theoretically be some amazing people who are so enlightened and so thoroughly conscious that they occupy their entire brain, but I doubt there is one in each millennium, if there ever were any.

The popular view of the subconscious is roughly identical to Freud’s “Id”: The unfinished basement of our psychological house, where we hide all the things we don’t want to have in the daylight. Mostly sex, if Freud is to be believed, which he certainly shouldn’t be. While Freud was picking apart his patients’ dreams looking for sex symbols (because putting an umbrella in a suitcase is totally a graphic depiction of coitus), C.G. Jung noticed to his surprise that some of the dreams were strikingly similar to well known myths in other cultures, myths that were completely unknown to all but a few researchers in Europe. (This was before the age of the Internet. Today, anyone may have picked up anything. This means we could never have had a discovery like that in our age.)

Sometimes, Jung noticed, people would come across persons in their dreams or daydreams that were far wiser than themselves, although their wisdom was often coached in symbols or poetry that the dreamer had to unpack through a conscious effort. It was, in other words, voluntary (and not easy) to absorb the insights that already existed inside them. It was as if ordinary people had limited themselves to a small part of what they could really have been. Inside them were skills and insights and knowledge that they were not even aware they had.

This, incidentally, is the case also with some patients with “multiple personality syndrome”. In actual life, there is an unknown number of people who have multiple personalities but don’t seek medical treatments, because they get along fine with themselves, and find their multiplicity a strength rather than a weakness. Naturally they soon find out that almost everyone else think it is insane, so they don’t disclose it.

But even among those who do have problems with their multiple personalities (for instance one personality may refuse to share information with the rest, leaving blank spots in their memory, or actively try to hurt their relationships or even their bodies) – even in such cases, it is amazing how much the personalities can vary. They can have completely different skills, and in some cases they even have separate allergies! That sounds like a miracle, or the opposite of a miracle perhaps, whatever that is. But in most cases, the sum of the “alters”  is more than one normal person. In some cases, each personality can be pretty close to normal, and yet they are different, so it really is like there are different people sharing the same brain.

I mention this because you probably think that you are using your brain pretty well, and your subconscious is just a dusty basement with trash you’ve kicked downstairs and shut the door. Chances are there are skills and knowledge and abilities down there which are quite a match for what you have achieved in your waking life, unless you are somewhat of an overachiever. It may even be that some of your energy is spent on denying abilities you actually have: There is at least one documented example of a person who could not draw or paint, but after a brain damage began painting beautiful paintings. Not started learning to paint after the brain damage, but suddenly could do so. They had already had the skill but locked it in the basement. OK, here is an article with a long list of such people and a theory of how.

I know that during my first epoch of deep “emptiness” meditation, in my 20es, I began to be able to think in music. To this day it is pretty common that the “voices in my head” sing songs I have never heard before, either without words or with words in a known or unknown language. I don’t have the skill to write down the music, and I don’t plan to specialize that way, so it disappears after a while. It is no big deal: There will be new music later, probably. So far there has. But I think I would rather be me than to have a stroke or a crushing blow and become able to compose!

But as you can see, the subconscious is not really a corner of your mind. It is like a door that opens to some vastly larger place than your mind. At first it may seem like a mansion, then as a landscape, a planet, finally an expanding universe. There is no reason why the inner world should not be much larger than the visible universe: The possible connections in the human brain exceed the number of molecules in the known universe, or at least so I read when I was young. The thing is, perhaps it is not created by our brain at all? When we look out the window, there is frantic activity in the back of our brain, in the visual cortex. But we don’t usually assume that the brain actually creates the world we see outside our window. Why exactly do we assume that the brain creates all our subconscious content?

Well, what do I know. But it is a topic that would baffle you if you took it seriously. It is a bit like discovering that your wardrobe is a doorway to another world, isn’t it? ^_^ Of course, some of us like it here in the safe zone.

 

Regulation vs transparency

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Your number one friend is yourself! This is pretty much also the basic tenet of “the dismal science”, economics.

I am mildly surprised to hear demands for “more” regulation of the financial sector, as if that would make things better instead of worse. Some regulation is necessary, but we also have to consider the problem of corruption. As you increase the power of government over business decisions, you increase the benefit of corruption.

Let us take the polar opposite situations. In one scenario, the government has no particular influence on a sector of business. In this scenario, corruption is a waste of money. The various businesses involved could not care less what the government agencies think, and would not spend a dime to influence them.

Now look at the opposite situation, where government has total control over day to day operations. This government sets quota for all kinds of activities, and have nebulous powers to Just Say No to any activity they may find suspicious or not promoting the wellbeing of society, as they see it. In this case, the best investment anyone could do in that branch of business would be to influence the government agencies in any way possible, whether by targeted information campaigns, generous gifts, or good old blackmail. Creativity abounds. But the motivation is certainly there.

By estimating how much influence government has on business operations, we can estimate how strong the pressure toward corruption is. But will this necessarily lead to actual corruption?

The answer to this is that human nature remains human even with the best possible intentions. In other words, corruption WILL happen unless there is a system for watching the watchmen, and then watching the watchers of the watchmen and so on. For each level of overseers it becomes more expensive to corrupt them all. (We must assure that the watchers don’t have the power to actually instruct the executive level, or it would be enough to bribe the watchers.) Of course, adding levels of overseers will cost money which drains society of other resources. Still, it is probably better than corruption.

In other words, what we don’t need is generic “more” regulation. That is worse than nothing. We need more transparency. That is to say, we need to organize things so that correct information is available to as many people as possible.

One way of doing this is to have the participants watch each other. In many countries, sales tax is organized as VAT, Value Added Tax. This means that the final seller collects the sales tax, yes, but also pays sales tax to the previous link in the chain. So a customer may pay sales tax to the retail store, but the retail store pays sales tax to the wholesale business, which again pays sales tax to the factory, and so on. If one of these chains have a completely different set of numbers, something is off. Say the factory and the retailer both sell a lot, but the middleman has much less business. That should ring bells pretty quickly. Same with the other way around, of course.

In contrast, look at the recent financial crisis, the so-called “subprime crisis”. This was caused by packaged loans. What happened was that a few dubious loans were mixed into a batch of pretty solid loans. There was no outright lying about it – probably – but since most of the loans were solid, the total package was considered solid as well. Then such packages were sold again, and each time more rotten loans were added to a package that was deemed “solid”. You can see where this ends. It’s like letting an alcoholic add just a little brandy to the punch. He’ll add a little so often that in the end it is all indistinguishable from brandy.

If one had rules of transparency, so that the content of subprime loans could have been identified at a glance, the crisis could have been averted. But if so, we would also not have had the heady boom years before, when cheap credit was everywhere. Because rotten loans are not cheap. If there is a big risk involved, investors require a “risk premium” to lend you money. This is why, for instance, credit cards have higher interest than mortgages, normally. So the interest rates on loans would have been climbing steadily, and the wild rush into property speculation would not have been possible. People simply would not have been willing to pay that much interest, or conversely, not been willing to lend at that risk.

In this high-transparency scenario, we would not have had the boom of the early 2000s. There would not have been cheap credit to use for consumers, and they would have noticed that their standard of living was not rising (because wages and salaries weren’t). But the thing is, people LIKED to have cheap credit. The banks liked it, but also the government that oversaw the banks liked it, because the voters liked it. Even if the government had been given absolute powers to do whatever they wanted with the financial sector in the year 2000, chances are the result would have been WORSE, since the government not only had the exact same goal (economic growth) but less insight in what was actually going on.

So, not “more regulation”. More transparency. More truth, to put it bluntly.

Subjective wealth

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Let them eat cake!

Still sick, still trying to be short, still trying to not roleplay a holy apostle on the Internet.

Let us talk about money. It is a definitely this-worldly thing, I hope we agree. There may be those who worship it, but hardly in a literal, religious sense. Apart from that, admittedly, all bets are off. People can get really excited about it. Probably more than it warrants.

I have looked at these protest movements in the USA and elsewhere, where people want a change to the current distribution of wealth, where a small minority has most of the money. I do not agree with them. Here is why.

As I see it, there is not a big difference between the rich and the middle class. Not even between the super-rich and the lower middle class. Sure, in absolute numbers the difference is staggering. A single oligarch can have more money than a whole town. But it is still just different levels of luxury. The real difference is down to the actual poor: Those who don’t know where their next meal will come from, or where they will sleep tonight, or when they will find a pair of shoes without holes.

You may have read about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.We often refer to this as a “pyramid of needs”, but I have a revelation for y’all: In terms of money, it is actually an upside-down pyramid. It takes little money to eat, it takes a lot of money to gain social status, and in between there are things like living in a good neighborhood, getting high-quality medical treatment and so on.

But it gets even more convoluted than that. For the highest levels of the traditional pyramid barely need any money at all. To actualize yourself certainly may require some free time (“slack”), but you can also gain that through having a menial job you can do with half your brain. You don’t need to travel the world to grow as a human. But it probably helps to not be so hungry that you don’t know or care where you are and what you are doing.

I think of money as following a Briggsian logarithm, or base 10. That is to say, someone who has 100 dollars is twice as rich as one who has 10. One who has a million dollar is twice as rich as one who has 100 000. Actually I am not sure, it may be fading at higher levels, but it seems to hold pretty well at low levels. If you don’t have money at all, having money to buy a bread makes a huge difference. A bread can provide food for a person for a week. But for a middle-class person, finding extra money of that order is basically worthless. It is barely worth stopping to pick up. For Bill Gates in his prime, it was said that picking up a $1000 bill would cause him a net loss, because his time was so much more worth.

Does this make sense to you?

Exercise and heart rhythm

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If you want your heart to flutter, there are probably other things you would do than elite endurance sports. Surprisingly, however…

Generally exercise is good for your heart, except in some cases of acute heart trouble. But things are not quite as simple as they sound, Scandinavian scientists have found out.

Studies of runners over 40 in the Norwegian “Birkebeiner” race and the Swedish “Vasalopp” race show that the top runners were far more likely to experience disturbances in their heart rhythm than the less “elite” participants. Both those who ran the fastest and those who ran most frequently had dramatically more cases of arrhythmia. In the Vasalopp, those who had participated at least 7 times had 29% more risk compared to those who had participated only once. And those who had run at less than 1.6 times the winning time had 37% more than those who ran at more than 2.4 times the winning time.

The most common disturbance is extra beats, which are considered harmless but tend to be disturbing. However, these people are also more at risk for oscillations, which can be life threatening. This risk is far lower, but even those who survive will usually have to step down from elite competition.

There is as of yet no official explanation for the findings, but the hypothesis that has been mentioned is a larger heart in top-trained individuals.

Source: Dagens Næringliv (in Norwegian), specifically “Vasalopp-toppene mest utsatt for hjertetrøbbel” and “Trener knallhardt – sliter med hjerterytmen“.

***

Regular readers will guess why I noticed these articles: Both this year and in 2005, I developed heart rhythm disturbances after a few months of regular exercise. Not exactly a great incentive to continue exercising, although the doctors and available literature assure me it is not life threatening at the current level.

There is a big difference however between me and the elite runners: I don’t run at all, I just walk (although in some cases I walk up long hills, which is an equivalent load to running on flat terrain, but uses the muscles differently.) There is nothing elite about my physical exertions at all. There are two other similarities, though.

Most notably, I have a remarkably low heart rate. Usually my resting pulse is in the interval 55-60, which is on the low end of normal. But late this summer it fell to 50, which is only normal for those who are active in endurance sports: Runners, bikers, swimmers etc on at least local competition level.

In addition, I am not visibly fat. It is kind of weird to even have to mention this, but these days it is normal to be fat if you are not an athlete.

I am pretty sure it is the first of these that is the key here. I believe the extra beats arise as a result of the slow heart rate. In the pause between beats, the heart is probably in some way more susceptible to false clues to start another beat. For most people, that pause is simply too short to trigger extra beats often (without the help of caffeine or romance, at least). As the beat gets slower, the opportunity for false starts increases. That is how I imagine it. I don’t have any medical education whatsoever, but it seems logical and it fits the fact.

So basically I consider myself a control group. If it was just the exercise that caused the change, then it would not affect me, since I exercise much less. But if the exercise causes this by lowering the heart rate below a certain threshold, then it would work for both of us.

Of course, there are (as implied from the start) many other things that can cause the heart rhythm to get unstable. But those are not things that change with the amount of exercise. If anything, exercising more means less time to drink coffee, and surprisingly also less nervousness. Whether it also causes less romance, I won’t have an opinion on. ^_^

***

Note that for most people these days, their pulse is on the high side rather than the low. This has its own problems. If your pulse is above 80, you should have a talk with your doctor about finding ways to exercise in a gradual way so as to build up your heart, and get the heart rate down. Obviously most people in the western world face very different health challenges from what I and the top athletes do! How did I end up in the wrong bin anyway?

 

Speaking or being spoken

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“The road to refinement is difficult.” But you’ve made a great start just by shutting your mouths! Congrats!

In the first chapter of Meditations on the Tarot, our Unknown Friend mentions speech almost in passing (when talking about concentration or yoga as stilling the oscillations of the mental substance, or willed silence of the automatism of the intellect and imagination). His point is that to most people, speaking is automatic. Not in the positive sense that you don’t need to think of how to move your tongue or your vocal cords, but in the negative sense that words just jump out of your mouth without a conscious decision to speak, much less exactly what to speak.

He says that the Pythagorean school prescribed five years of silence for beginners, or “hearers”. Only once they had learned fully how to be silent, could they be allowed to speak. At this time, it was judged that they were no longer just speaking automatically.

By default, there is an inner pressure to speak. The restless activity of the mind seeks an outlet. It is not so much that one has something to share with others, or even that one asks others for a favor.  Rather, there is speaking inside the head and it comes out. In the really bad cases, this is similar to how a baby excretes bodily wastes – it just happens, and the best one can do is clean up the mess afterwards. This is generally how children speak for many years after they have learned continence on the other end. Some people remain in this sad position throughout their lives.

Others – probably most, now that service is such a main source of employment – learn to “potty train” their mouth, so that they can hold back the words that bubble up inside. It may require them to ball their fists in their pockets or behind their back where the customer cannot see it, but then as soon as the source of their agitation is out of earshot, it all comes out.

This kind of verbal excretion is mentioned by Jesus Christ, who says that it is not what goes in through the mouth that makes a human unclean, but what comes out through the mouth: Evil thoughts that come from the heart and pass through the mouth; these make a human unclean. We Christians call this Jesus Christ “our Lord”, but it actually does not come easy to us to obey him in this. Of course it does not, for as long as the evil thoughts (or at least “thoughtless words, which cut like swords”) bubble up inside, the pressure will just keep rising if we close our mouth. Silence of the mouth is a terrible fate if one has no way to achieve at least a modest degree of stillness of the heart.

Stillness of the heart, then, is required in order to truly speak, rather than being spoken by the pressure of words that bubble up from inside. Stillness of the heart is hard to achieve without some degree of solitude. In fact, it takes a lot of solitude for a long time, for most of us. It is not impossible to arrive at this stillness in a noisy, busy, crowded life; but it takes an inordinate amount of dedication and grace put together. To expect that God’s grace (or some other karmic benefit) will make up for the lack of outward quiet – when one has a choice of such quiet – is rather similar to jumping from the top of the temple spire, relying on God’s grace to not get hurt.

Of course, not everyone can live alone or should live alone, or in a monastery of silent monks or nuns. Sometimes you just have half an hour now and then, or perhaps Divine providence makes it so that you cannot sleep for a period at night, so that you then get a chance to still the waves of your mind and commune with the Light in the depths of your heart.

But first and foremost we need to become aware of the words we speak (or type, for those of us so inclined!) We need to choose self-reflection: What did I just say? Where came these words from, did I really mean to say this? We need to reflect on our spoken words for sure if we shall ever hope to reflect on our thoughts.

To the religious, self-reflection saves from Hell; for it is written: “Pay attention to yourself and the teaching,  keep doing this; for when you do so, you shall save yourself and those who hear you.” (The phrasing in your particular religion will vary, but not the fact, surely.) But even if you are not religious in the traditional sense, surely you have a higher aspiration, or you would not be here reading this. You are not like cats or dogs, who make sounds merely to scare enemies, attract mates, evoke sympathy and obtain food.

I have had the opportunity for transformation in this regard that only a tiny, tiny fraction of humanity has ever had in all of history. If I have achieved some degree of awareness and choice of speech, it is no more than is required under such circumstances. In truth, almost certainly less. So I am not here as a teacher to instruct you, but as a fellow aspirant to encourage you in our shared hope and aspiration. May my words have been acceptable.

 

Paid friends

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Hey, how about paying people to become your friends?

I have only so much free time, so after I picked up City of Heroes again, I have barely watched anime. Also, there have been slim pickings of late, at least that could even vaguely interest me. This past weekend, however, I took the time to watch a couple first episodes. One of them stood out.

The one that intrigued me was Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, (“I don’t have many friends”) where episode 1 was about a high school boy and girl who realized that they were both completely lacking friends. In fact, none of them even had any idea how people made friends in the first place. The girl had an “air friend” (like in air guitar), the boy had thought he had some friends in the school he went to before, but he hadn’t heard anything from them since, so perhaps it had all been one-sided. Says the girl: “You could pay people to be your friends. Like 1000 Yen [$10] to be your friend in school for a week.” The boy rejected this out of hand, comparing it to paid love.

I think she had a great idea there, although the story did not follow that thread. In these times where more and more jobs disappear because we find better technologies, many people go without work. At the same time, there are needs not so easily met by machines. I have noticed that much of emotional advertising plays on people’s want to be accepted and surrounded by friends. So why not pay people to be friends? It should not be so well paid as to keep the skilled workers out of the workforce, but it must be better than just paying people to sit at home and drink beer. Instead, they could drink beer at some gathering place, being social with lonely people.

The most realistic alternative, however (at least in the beginning) is online friends. I mean, you have all kinds of online services, so it is not a big jump. You could have professional chat room hosts, for instance. Professional guild officers in online games. In fact, you could perhaps make a new type of online games that were more social and less violent, and that came with such hosts from the start. How about “home party online”?

Would people pay for this? I think so, if they were not shamed about it. I mean, people pay for porn and phone sex, which is much more shameful. It is not very demeaning to log on to a web site that hosts imaginary home parties, where you mingle with other online guests and professional hosts. Obviously there would need to be ways to deal with troublemakers, but it being a paid service would already go some way toward that.

Actually, it probably already exists, even if I can’t remember having heart about it. If you can think of something, it exists on the Internet – if nowhere else, it exists in Korea. But I don’t know Korea, and probably never will. But given that they have the world’s largest Internet gaming company (NCSoft), and the world’s greatest broadband density, they probably have thought of it. Now it is our turn. Not that I particularly volunteer or anything. As Adam Warlock once said when he was roleplaying Christ: “My friendship is free and must be freely accepted.” But your friendship may vary.

Preparing for the inconceivable

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This, gentle reader, is how you are likely to feel at the end of today’s entry.

I was browsing the latest issue of The Economist, where they commented on the plans for a new high-speed railroad in the UK. They did not much like it, thinking it was bad economy. But what struck me was reading that a certain stretch of railroad was supposed to be finished in 2043, and I thought: “Humans will use railroads in 2043??” and then, “Will there even be humans as we know them in 2043?”

I personally assume that there will indeed be humans similar to us in 2043, unless some global disaster befalls us (like genetically engineered viruses, man-made black holes, or the unexpected wayward asteroid). Looking up, it seems that Ray Kurzweil agrees, the Singularity is not until 2045. Close call though. I am pretty sure it was 2040 a while ago, and even earlier some years ago. I guess programming artificial intelligence is harder than expected, especially when Kurzweil is no longer doing it himself. (He is the guy behind the product that eventually became Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the speech recognition software that is better than a professional human at transcribing speech. Some training required.)

The Singularity, strictly speaking, is when artificial intelligence (or artificially augmented human intelligence) starts a runaway process of self-improvement at an exponential rate. Whether this ever happens is still hotly debated. But there is something else that is not: The knowledge explosion.

You may have heard of Moore’s Law, about the progress of information technology. It has taken on its own life — in its older form it said that the density of integrated circuits doubled every two years, now it is widely cited as “the performance of computer hardware doubles every 18 months”, which is roughly what we have experienced for the last couple decades. But others have expanded this law into the past (the rate of technological progress has increased for thousands of years, although in fits and starts) and even into biological evolution, which also seems to have happened faster and faster: Life remained single-celled for some 3 billion years if not more before it started getting more complex.

Anyway, the sum of all this: The accelerating acceleration of change is accelerating. Change is not just happening faster and faster, the pace at which it happens faster and faster is itself getting faster. The knowledge we have allows us to create new tools that let us gather more knowledge faster, and this new knowledge lets us gather more knowledge faster again. We are quietly approaching the point (if we aren’t there already) where the sum of gathered data at the beginning of the year is less than what is discovered at the end of the year. Of course, most of these data are just more details about things we already know in outline, but it is still a pretty mind-boggling thought.

At some point in the lifetime of today’s middle-aged people, this process is expected to reach the level where knowledge doubles each DAY. Ah, thank you Google: “Currently, Kurtzweil estimates that knowledge doubles every 5 years. By the year 2040 it will be doubling every day.” If life expectation continues to increase by 5 hours a day as it has done lately, a good number of my classmates should be around to see it. I would not mind being there too, but of course it is no certainty.

Now, give this a brief thought. What you do today, the way your life is heading into the future – how relevant will that be in 2040 – plus minus a couple years – when human knowledge doubles Every Day? Mind you, that is the human knowledge of 2040 that doubles every day, which is in itself thousands of times the knowledge we have today. Because it has doubled every week, month and year for some time. In fact, if it miraculously only doubled every year for these 29 years, it would still be 2^29= 536 870 912 times more than now.

In reality, this speed is expected to be surpassed in a few years. And this wealth of information, hundreds of millions of times more than today (more realistically billions of times more) is what will double every day, or perhaps it is down to every hour or two in 2043, at the time when this railroad is supposed to be finished.

Will we still take trains from London to Leeds when we know a billion times more than we do today? And will learn a billion times more than we know today over the duration of the train trip?

Mansplaining mansplained

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The man knows the reason, and he is not afraid to tell you, using words that even your small brain can understand.

If you wander into the oddly colored outskirts of the Internet, you may come across weird words like “mansplaining”. This is at its core the need we men have to explain things in detail to women who know those things better than we do. The word is slowly catching on and getting a wider definition – men can now mansplain to men and even some women can mansplain. This is probably because we do not have a good word that means the exact opposite of “shut up, listen, and learn”.

Actually we don’t have a word for “shut up, listen and learn” either, I think. If we could verb “meekness”, it would at least be in the same neighborhood. It is no big surprise then that meekness is not seen as a great manly virtue among the worldly. Even though arguably, as the ancients said, the greatest victory is over oneself.

I don’t think mansplaining is a secret weapon of the patriarchy, or even that men are too stupid to realize we are stupid. Rather, I suspect that it has to do with reproduction. I think it serves a similar purpose as the peacock’s tail, to impress the chicks. And even when it fails to impress – as it often does these days when women have longer education than men – at least it leaves them in no doubt as to your gender.

Likewise there is a tendency among women who like a man, to play along with his self-styled omniscience. This again encourages the man and puffs him up in his self-importance. And due to the roots in reproduction, this process can be particularly pleasurable. This is something that I remember the elders of the Christian Church warned against. Those men who had come to a life in which they were qualified to teach others and give advice, should take particular care to not needlessly spend their time advising women in matters where they might as well ask another woman, and in particular not alone.  Stories from other denominations have borne this out; it is a slippery slope.

But even apart from that, the ego has a tendency to eat and grow strong from such activity. It requires an effort – or at best lifelong vigilance – to shut up, listen and learn.