Michael Alan Miller

“The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitive. In the long run basic results in influencing public opinion will be achieved only by the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form, despite the objections of the intellectuals.”

-Josef Goebbels (Nazi Propaganda Minister)

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Very occasionally — maybe once every few months — I’ll google something that I know was somewhat well-known at the time, and get no results at all.

That’s an odd idea, with how many pages and how much info there is on the internet, that I could have something in my head that not one person has written about in a place that Google crawls.

And there searches aren’t anything special, either. It’s not like I’m trying to search for the names of third-rate German philosophers from the 18th century, but instead I’m usually looking for some obscure TV show-related trivia or trying to find something out about some archaic technology that I once used.

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It is truly fucking hilarious that so many, oh, what shall I call them? Oh yes, I know — goddamned assclowns. That these assclowns are calling Obama a “socialist” while the biggest instance of socialism — real, true socialism — is occurring under a Republican administration.

Our entire banking system is effectively being nationalized — which is the modus operandi of socialism — while nothing Obama has proposed has anything at all to do with socialism.

If I were the types claiming that Obama is a socialist, the cognitive dissonance would be making my head spin.

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Credentials are an interesting idea. A flawed but useful one. They are both necessary and often useless or even counterproductive.

I don’t have any credentials in economics. I would not make a good economist, either, at least not a full-time paid one. Yet about several important things over the last three or four years, I’ve been right more often than 95% of economists in the public sphere. Perhaps far more than that. 95% is a conservative estimate.

How is this possible? I don’t know, but many people in 2005 remember me telling them that this housing thing was going to cause some major problems, at a time when most economists were denying that it was even an issue of any kind. Unfortunately, I did not have a blog then or I’d link back to the “proof.”

I don’t recount this to praise myself (there are many other posts doing that), but to ponder that my lack of credentials in economics absolutely assured that no one would listen to me. Credentials are a sorting mechanism, albeit a poor one. Sometimes they utterly fail, as it prevents incompetents from being vetted and automatically disallows those who are thinking more clearly the chance of being listened to.

Another example, going the opposite direction. I do have credentials in IT. I have certifications and years of experience. In other words, I know a lot of arcane shit in this arena. However, people often ask me what laptop they should buy, or what cell phone. This is assuming I will know something about them by my credentials only, even though those two areas — especially the cellphone — are far out of my usual bailiwick.

I am an expert neither on laptops nor on cellphones, and most of these people would be far better-served by asking their friends about their own experiences. My credentials in IT in this case give me a false air of expertise that I simply do not possess.

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It is true that humans are incredibly bad at weighting probability, but the same is true for many experts who are in the job of assessing risks.

For instance, even the best experts in the world two years ago (less than a year before this financial crisis began) would’ve rated the risk of such a calamity occurring as extremely low. And yet, here we are.

This is not to denigrate the value of trying to ascertain the probability of some event occurring. The problem is that, too often, the non-experts are dumb on the too-stupd side and the experts are dumb on the too-smart side.

Not to mention that the experts often have a vested interest — that they perhaps don’t even realize — in not telling you the truth.

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One of the more apropos headlines ever: “Struggling Lower-Class Still Unsure How Best To Fuck Selves With Vote”.

It’s an interesting phenomenon that a group of people for around 50 years has consistently and stubbornly voted against their own economic interests. In all of history, I don’t think that has occurred before. If it has, I haven’t found any examples of it.

Of course, some of the left votes for Nader, which is effectively the same thing — but not nearly as large a number.

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Interesting article about dichotomies between the two presidential campaigns’ rally attendees.

A lot of them seem to have real problems with Michelle Obama, too, though they cannot pinpoint why. And they do not much care for that Joe Biden, either, or whatever his name is — many cannot immediately summon it.

The Republicans remind me of what Robert Heinlein said about authoritarianism.

Oh wait, do I get kicked out of the American left for mentioning Robert Heinlein?

Ha, too late, I’m already kicked out.

Anyway, what is it with the Heinlein hatred on the left? He used to be a darling of that side of the political spectrum — from roughly 1965 to 1980 or so — and then something changed. Yes, his later books were not as good as his older ones, but is that enough reason to spurn someone? If so, Philp Roth would be persona non grata now, right? And he’s not.

Heinlein was one of the first sf authors to have strong, co-equal female characters in his works. This alone should give him some sort of kudos. And it often appears to me that much of the dyspepsia upon Heinlein’s mention is by those who’ve never bothered to even read a single Heinlein short story or novel, as they get his supposed “views” so completely, insanely wrong.

Note to many who need it: What an author expresses in his fiction works is not necessarily in concert with his real-life political or social opinions or ideals. For instance, I once wrote a short story about a killer virus that had learned to hide inside pollen which then decimated humanity. That does not mean I am a member of VHEMT. Ya dig?

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When my sister and I were kids, we’d ride, with my dad driving, in the back of a pickup truck on rural dirt back roads. It’s kind of like redneck hiking. The point was to see wildlife, to explore and just get out of the house. It’s not as unsafe as it sounds. I doubt we ever went over 15mph, and in the areas we drove, we’d be lucky to see even one other car in a couple of hours of driving. Usually, we saw none.

The one time it proved to be unsafe is the day that there were some low branches overhanging the road. In a rare moment of sibling altruism, I noticed these branches and called out to my sister in warning, “Duck!”

She immediately said, “Where?” and then stood up from the wheel well where she was sitting to see a little better.

Big mistake.

Luckily, the branches didn’t knock her out of the truck, but they did knock her down into the bed. She wasn’t badly injured, and with nothing that required a hospital trip. But she always interpreted “duck” correctly after that.

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Awesome response: DEC answers a customer’s complaint.

I wish I were allowed to lay the smack down so heartily in answering user complaints sometimes.

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The $700 billion bailout would have been enough to put solar panels on the roofs of every American home, which would meet about 1/3 of the nation’s domestic (non-industrial) energy needs.

If you prefer nuclear — as I do — it’d have been enough to build 140 new nuclear power plants, even assuming construction costs of $5 billion each. We wouldn’t have needed to build a new power plant. Ever. Not a single one.

If you prefer wind power, that $700 billion would have been enough to build a wind farm large enough to power every home in the country and quite a lot of industry, too.

If you prefer solar arrays (not rooftop-mounted solar panels), that $700 billion would have been enough to build a solar power farm in the desert Southwest large enough to provide power to nearly all of the households in the United States — about 65 million, to be exact.

Of course, we’re also wasting this much money in Iraq.

But I just wanted to give everyone an idea of what we could do with that much money other than giving it to rich people and bankers who will not use it as it is intended.

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Satellites approaching the Shannon limit.

The performance of DVB-S2 satellite systems is very close to the theoretical maximum, defined by the Shannon Limit. That efficiency could be pushed even further by network optimisation tools and equipment recently developed by European researchers.

If I were mathematically-minded, I’d study information theory. It is itself interesting, and intersects with so many other intriguing fields.

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In Greenspan’s defense, financial bubbles are nearly impossible to pop before they get somewhat destructive because telling people that you are going to take away their ability to make money while there’s a boom on is politically indefensible.

It’s not logical, but markets don’t primarily work on logic. Anyone who gets into the business of bubble-popping before the bubble pops itself will quickly find themselves out of a job.

However, creating new regulation and enforcing existing regulations can mitigate this — and as for enforcing existing regulations, Greenspan did a damn poor job of that.

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This will sound incredibly arrogant, but fuck it.

When you meet someone dumber than you, it’s easier to tell just how dumb they are (though sometimes, they surprise you on the downside — hello, Mike Henry), but when you meet someone significantly smarter than you, it’s impossible to tell how much — they are too far above your level to ascertain that information in any real sense.

This relates to the best sentence I’ve read today, by the Eliezer Yudkowsky mentioned below: “To a transhuman mind, for example, chess might appear as a pointless exercise because you can solve it by a simple Deep-Blue like program.”

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This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, as it’s one of those things that’s likely to follow my favorite trajectory:

1) People laugh at it and say it’s impossible.

2) It starts happening.

3) People grudgingly accept it, complaining the whole while.

4) It becomes inevitable and permeates society and the economy.

5) People said they knew it all along, and couldn’t imagine it any other way.

Other such examples of this trajectory are automobiles, airplanes, telephones and personal computers.

What I’m most interested in is that intelligent robots are a break with history. They’re not just ramping up human abilities, like all previous technologies. It is, as the piece I linked to points out, creating an entirely new species. Even ignoring (at our peril) the dangers Eliezer Yudkowsky frequently discusses at his blog, this is going to be something wholly new.

Assuming we can evade environmental collapse/climate change, I think the chance of surpassing human-level intelligence in non-human form in my lifetime is about 95%.

When robots begin to do formerly human jobs (which has been happening for 50+ years, by the way), there will be a large portion of humanity who can find no employment of any kind at all.

This is one of the reasons I’ve blogged cryptically before about why I think capitalism is at its end. In a society with intelligent robots doing most of the labor, prospects of 70% unemployment are not unlikely. If the rich continue to reap all of the profits, then that means 70%+ will be in poverty. Obviously, this is untenable. Something will have to change.

I’m interested in how we’re at capitalism’s end now, and what’s going to replace it. I’m also interested in how few people seem to realize this, though more are catching on.

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Yep, yep: Kerry was ahead in the Electroral College tally on November 1.

This election can still be lost, and I think it’ll be closer than anyone now believes.

There’s also likely to be far more outright Republican fraud in swing states, as they have nothing to lose. Combine that with poll fibbing, and I really doubt it’s going to be a landslide.

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