Michael Alan Miller

Bailing out the banks and other failed companies now has about as much point as bailing out all the failed dotcom companies would have in 2000.

The difference? The dotcoms didn’t have much political pull, while the banks have enough to ruin the entire world’s economy for the next 30 years.

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In many ways, the Right and the Left are far more similar than different in their aversion to science that makes them uncomfortable. They express their very similar pathologies differently, but the basic human insecurities at the heart of them are germinated from the same seed.

One area that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the Left’s and the Right’s obstinacy in the face of the evolutionary origin of human beings and their behaviors. While the Right is certainly a worse offender than most of the Left, the blind spots on both sides in certain communities are the size of suns.

The Left and the Right both deeply wish to deny their consanguinity with the animal kingdom, but they express this urge in very different ways. For the Left, it is for the most part to completely deny that there is any evolutionary or genetic influence at all on how modern humans behave, think, perceive or understand.

Now, I have no idea — and neither does anyone else — how much of our prehistoric past influenced our genes and our current behaviors, and thus I have no idea how much of current evolutionary psychological theory is correct. (My guess is not a whole lot, maybe 2%.) However, there has to be an evolutionary psychology of some kind, because our brains are products of evolution — quod erat demonstrandum. There is no other process, in fact, other than evolution that can produce such a complex biological entity as a brain, so unless the left wishes to join with the right and declare our brains gifts from god (or, perhaps, aliens) then their evolutionary origin is the only rational answer.

And evolutionary psychology certainly isn’t helped that it is often the den of pseudoscientists who are sexist, misogynistic or just plain stupid. However, this doesn’t invalidate the science, just as the fact that genetics wasn’t invalidated by the co-opting of it by radical eugenicists during the early 20th century.

The Right, of course, disbelieves in any form of evolution at all and denies that humans had any part in evolving — a slightly different claim than the left makes, but nevertheless asinine in kind if not to quite the same degree.

Both claims spring from the desire to strongly differentiate the domain of humans from that of animals — to express an innate, pure humanness that shares in none of the carnal or instinctive qualities of our animal ancestors and coevals.

The Right, at its dumbest, says things like, “My grandpa weren’t no monkey.” (That’s a direct quote I’ve heard more than once, by the way.)

The Left, at its dumbest, says things like, “The human brain is not influenced or shaped by genetics, biology, the past environment, or evolution.” (Raising the question again of what precisely, then, shaped the human brain?)

Both beliefs emerge from the fervent wish that humans share nothing with animals, that no part of their atavism resides in us, that we are completely the captains of our own desires, behaviors, proclivities and passions — a very human urge, to be sure, but also one that is completely at odds with the evidence and a simple thought experiment or two.

In the end, the Right’s disavowal of evolution and the Left’s disbelief that evolution has any influence on human behavior are two facets of the same hopeful jewel, one that glitters with the promise of helping the believers in these equally ridiculous claims feel better about themselves and their place in the universe.

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I’d just like to give another hearty fuck-you to all the tards who believe the TARP bailout would somehow help the stock market magically recover. It’s been a few months since I’ve done that, and it’s about time again.

Is it a sign that I’m getting softer in my old age that I actually feel some sort of sympathy for people who were pulling for a bailout in the ridiculous belief that it’d Narnia-style make the stock market soar?

Maybe so.

Or maybe it’s that I had a dream last night where I disarmed someone pointing a .44 at me, only to later be eaten by werewolves.

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The problem in this country isn’t that people disagree. It’s that they disagree even when presented with incontrovertible evidence that they are wrong. This describes about 80-90% of people, I think.

When there is evidence presented to me that I am wrong, I change my mind. It has to be good evidence, of course, and the more extraordinary the claim the better the evidence needs to be.* But I’ve noted the opposite tendency in many people; when presented with overwhelming evidence, they cling to their mistaken beliefs and ideas all that much more tenaciously.

Very odd.

*For instance, for me to believe the so-called 9/11 Truthers, I’d have to have first-source HDTV video of all the actions in their claims, as well as confessions from at least 90% of the thousands of people that would have had to have a part in that particular conspiracy. For something slightly less insane, such as the idea that cell phones cause brain cancer, I’d need at least three fully peer-reviewed and more importantly, properly-controlled, studies of 30-year duration that showed significantly elevated brain cancer incidences in several different countries, as well as a plausible method of how low-dose low-intensity non-ionizing microwave-band radiation can possibly have any effect on the body at all.

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At this point a good investment strategy might be to find the most well-regulated markets and invest there. These will in the future tend to be the best-performing as now no one at all trusts the crooks here in the US and the UK.

Where are these, I wonder? And would this work? That’s a topic for some research.

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For all those who are concerned with safety above all — an increasing portion of American society, it seems — the easiest and fastest way to make yourself vastly safer is to never drive or ride in a car again.

This decreases your mortality risks by, depending on how much you ride/drive, several hundred percent.

It’s funny that many of those who won’t get their kids vaccinated will still toss them into a rollover-prone SUV and drive like a fucking maniac.

I don’t follow this admonition because I am not terribly concerned with safety, as even a cursory glance at my past life would make perfectly clear.

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There should be some measure of personal liability for directors and other executives in corporations. Other countries have this, and it seems to work fairly well.

No, I don’t mean if a firm has a few bad quarters, the CEO should go to jail. This would be idiotic.

What I mean is if there is any obvious, evidentially-based malfeasance, up to and including the CEO’s typical defense of, “Oh, I didn’t know all the horrible things my direct employees were doing under my watch,” then that CEO or executive should spend some time in the slammer.

The “I didn’t know” defense is just not a good one. Neither is, “Oh, all the other kids were doing it” defense. Up until Bush and Abu Ghraib, at least, these defenses just didn’t work in the military. A commander who didn’t know what his troops or charges were doing would be very, very quickly tossed out of his job and probably out of the military altogether. (I know; I’ve seen it happen in person.)

The “I didn’t know what everyone was doing to make these impossible profits!” defense should be one that comes with a mandatory five-year jail term. That would largely eliminate that outright.

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In some ways, it might’ve been better if McCain won.

No, no, hear me out here.

It’s clear that Obama is choosing industry shills for cabinet positions — just like any Republican — and that things are not going to be that much different under his administration. After all, with people like Rubin, Shapiro and Summers, of course they won’t be different. Those are some of the crooks who got us into this mess.

So why would it have been better if McCain had won?

Well, for a while, it wouldn’t. For a while, it would’ve been unspeakably bad. But my guess is things would’ve gotten unhinged enough that the country would’ve been forced to (perhaps violent) change at the end of his term.

But Obama is in a position where he obviously feels that conditions haven’t worsened enough where he can do something truly revolutionary. He could, of course, but either out of fear or misguided desire to placate right-wing interests, he will not do those things.

So we’ll get four years of grinding sameness, while the crooks steal some more, all in the name of comity and accommodation.

If McCain would’ve won, though, things would’ve gotten so fucked up that in four years there’s no way anything but sane progressive policies would’ve flown.

In other words, people, believe it or not, didn’t have enough of a chance to gag on rank Republicanism, even with as much as it’s been shoved down their throats.

Four years of McCain would’ve solved that.

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This is organized theft on a scale the world has never seen before.

GOP lawmakers are pushing to privatize the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and the state lottery. Both steps require a higher authority — federal legislation in the case of the airport, a voter-approved constitutional amendment for the lottery. But one lawmaker estimated an airport deal could bring in at least $2.5 billion, and the lottery $500 million.

Once these private companies own everything of value, there will be nothing stopping them from charging whatever they wish, or otherwise performing whatever action they desire. Also, they will then have much greater influence over government decisions — as if they do not already have enough.

Privatizing public infrastructure is an ongoing legacy of Republican economic policies, and should be stopped immediately. It is a harm to the taxpayers, to the states themselves, and even to private enterprise.

But a few people get to steal a lot of money, so in the Republican mind it’s an unqualified success.

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The great Please Don’t Divorce Us slideshow on Flickr.

I’m in favor of less “please” and more knee-capping, but I recognize how that could get out of hand (or knee).

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We’re unlikely to see any more truly transformational products out of Google because their hiring process, while rigorous, seems to stress conformity and rigid thinking styles rather than anything that’d lead to true innovation.

In other words, Google has become Microsoft much more quickly than anyone would’ve predicted three years ago.

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This is sad, but anyone who invests all their money in any one firm or organization is almost guaranteed to get burned over a long enough time frame.

No one should ever — ever ever ever — have any more than 10% of their long-term savings in any one place at a time.

You see what can result from not following that simple credo.

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Geek note: If you compile the brand-new 2.6.28 Linux kernel — as I just did — and you use an Audigy sound card, you will probably have no sound, despite all the correct modules being present.

It isn’t a module or kernel problem, per se. It’s a mixer problem.

If you don’t have it, install alsamixer. There’ll be a radio button or similar in there that allows you to switch between analog and digital jacks. Click this. Your sound will magically return.

I am not sure if this problem is a bug or the repair of a bug, but that’s how you fix it.

Don’t ask me how I figured this out. I just did. True geekhood is compiling kernels on Christmas day, innit?

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A good explanation of why I am unlikely to ever use Twitter or other similar services.

I need fewer — not more — things in my life that require continuous attention. To paraphrase a great computer scientist, I want to get to the bottom of things, not stay on top of things all the time.

I’ll probably be required to use Facebook one day if I want to still participate in civil society, as it is becoming so ubiquitous. But I don’t look forward to it and I hope I can avoid it.

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One reason for the lack of intersection of humanity with alien intelligences is that they may’ve gone dark — at least from our perspective.

My guess is that civilizations don’t last long without evolving, and unless we happened to be in the window when civilizations were much interested in interaction with the outside world, we’d never know they were there, even if they’re only a few parsecs away.

Any civilization that didn’t continue to evolve would probably die out. Given evolution appears to be to greater complexity, my further guess is that any civilization would create their own world in which to dwell, and stop interacting much with the universe at large — thus, no electronic emissions, no attempts at communication and no way of even knowing they are there.

If they did destroy us, it’d probably be inadvertently, like I might step on an ant by accident.

The real danger, the one that Elizier Yudkowksy discusses, is that we may create these aliens ourselves in the form of AI, and then be unable to control the results. People laugh at this danger because it hasn’t happened yet (just as many laughed at the idea of nuclear weapons working), but that not-yet-extant threat is even greater than that posed by nuclear weapons, in my opinion.

Inspired, and in part a summary, of this post.

This is an area in which science fiction, for all its vaunted imagination, is traditionally quite conservative.

Wrong. This just shows though, that the writer hasn’t read a lot of science fiction, or at least only watches it on tv. There are plenty of stories — in fact, it is almost a cliche of sf — where the aliens are so overwhelmingly powerful and advanced that they aren’t even comprehensible to human beings. (Some such tales have been penned by Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge, Iain Banks, and even E.E. Smith way back in the 1920s. I could go on.)

Anyway, the article is worth a read, despite that quibble.

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