Michael Alan Miller

The return of the Amazons: the Asgarda movement in the Ukraine.

No Comments »

I’ve got to stay away from pseudo-intellectuals, like the two noted below. It does my blood pressure no good.

Here’s an alternative.

No Comments »

Wow, is Echidne of the Snakes just getting full of mental deficients lately?

This is even dumber than Anthony’s post. I don’t like BDSM, have nothing to do with it, don’t care to practice it or look at it, but damn, Suzie knows and understands nothing at all about that community.

I’d be embarrassed to be so fucking clueless.

1 Comment »

If you want to see why I accuse the left of being nearly as anti-science as the right, go read this horrible bit of sophistry. (And if you think you know something about my political leanings from that statement, then you are almost certainly wrong.)

And no, I am not referring to what he believes. People can believe whatever dumb shit they want, as long as it doesn’t directly impact me.

You can start with the skeptical assertions about the limits of “empirical”* knowledge. Very, very little of what the most exigent of thinkers know is held within limits allowing it to go into the category of “empirical knowledge”, as that phrase has developed in recent times. Most of what we know is “known” within tolerances of reliability. Quite frequently, of undefinable tolerances of reliability. Some of it is sound, some of it is unsound. A lot of what was taken to be sound at one time, turns out to have been mistaken. Quite frequently that determination isn’t solely a matter of personal appraisal but depends on what other’s are willing to accept as being sound. Science, the asserted touchstone of my correspondent, clearly depends on that fact or peer review would be a superfluous requirement.

Said as someone who obviously has no clue — none at all — how the process of scientific investigation works. Probably a liberal arts eduction behind there somewhere, without anything more than a single “Rocks for Jocks” class to fill out some general requirements.

Science is different than religion (and better, in my opinion) in that it produces results in the real world. It’s like magic except that it, you know, works.

I understand the layers of unknowability he discusses. I feel those, too. Those are, however, completely irrelevant to science, not some insane refutation of its bailick and its obvious efficacy.

That computer he’s using, the one that has less than one error for every few hundred trillion data operations? That internet he connected to? That web page he posted on, with the HTML undergirding it all? All of it, every last bit (literally) came from the scientific process. The doctor he visits, the car he drives, the phone he uses? Science.

No, it doesn’t tell you how to live your life. But pretending it’s another faith-based phantasm is casuistry in the extreme.

Try it with gravity sometime. I’ll show you the cliff — you do the rest.

No Comments »

The great firewall of China is coming to America.

That the internet has lasted so long as a bastion of comparative freedom is surprising, but all that is coming to an end — which’ll be yet another nail in the coffin of capitalism as we know it today.

Soon, we’ll need the government to protect us from corporations, as they’ll have far more power than any government. In some ways, they already do.

No Comments »

I know society tells me I am supposed to be full of joy and all that crap when a baby is born, but I can’t help but be depressed.

The children born now are going to be a part of the overpopulation problem that was once thought to be banished — but, oops! turns out we have about 6 billion too many people! — so their lives are likely to be worse than their parents’, and perhaps worse than any generation for a very long time.

People blithely, blindly, breeding is one of the major contributors to this mess, so I just can’t support that.

And it also sickens me that so many parents seem to use their kids as substitute pets or perhaps experiments in vicariousness.

What we need is a moratorium on births for about 20 years.

No Comments »

Good piece about Nasim Nicholas Taleb. Below is my favorite sentence from the piece.

Restaurants tinker, they work by trial and error and watch real results in the real world. Taleb believes in tinkering – it was to be the title of his next book. Trial and error will save us from ourselves because they capture benign black swans. Look at the three big inventions of our time: lasers, computers and the internet. They were all produced by tinkering and none of them ended up doing what their inventors intended them to do. All were black swans. The big hope for the world is that, as we tinker, we have a capacity for choosing the best outcomes.

We live under the illusion — almost every one of us, even most who claim not to — that everything can be planned. As the article discusses, the world works almost exactly contra this supposition, though.

I am not a climate change skeptic, but I am skeptical of all models that purport to vaticinate on the exact effects, duration and consequences of climate change. Now, that’ll have many people raging — because I do agree with the skeptics that climate change mania is becoming a religion. My apostasy will be decried despite the fact that I believe that the unpredictability — and the inapplicability of all models — actually requires even more urgent action. We don’t know what the fuck is going to happen, but it almost certainly won’t be nothing, and it’s likely to be well off the curve.

Back to that sentence, though.

I know a lot about the history of lasers. I’ve read a couple of books about that alone. And when they were invented, the reaction was, “Why did you waste all that money to invent something totally useless? We’re going to cut your funding. And oh yeah, you’re a tard.”

Now lasers are ubiquitous. Whether you know it or not, you probably personally own several if you are a westerner.

The world is more contingent than we like to admit. It appears inevitable going the wrong way down the arrow of time, but that ain’t the way time flows, is it?

No Comments »

A brief prediction: Human-level AI will not be created by anyone in academia.

Most likely, it’ll be created by some Wozniak-style obsessive in his or her garage, on the cheap, and it’ll be widely derided by academia for 10 years until it takes over the world — perhaps literally.

No Comments »

Agreed: America’s economy will never bounce back to where it was in 2007.

That’s not to say that one day, it won’t be larger. It probably will. But it’ll never look — with all the insane waste and misallocated resources — like it did in 2007, the height (in so many ways) of our stupidity and ignominy.

No Comments »

Frequently, I get lampooned for talking about things such as that in the future, there may not be many jobs for humans to do as society becomes increasingly automated. I’m not really interested in that, per se, but I am interested in the consequences of that. What happens to society, capitalism, welfare, and the very idea of being “employed” then?

But there’s plenty of evidence, despite the din of my critics’ dismissals, that I am on the right track.

Does anyone really think things like this — barring the untimely end of technological society are going to get less common? And if so, what kind of grade A crack rock are they smoking?

These are the steps leading up to a crisis in capitalism and society that will irrevocably change the social contract, and we are present at its rough birth — it’s like being there at the start of agricultural revoution, but with much cooler toys.

No Comments »

This is a sterling example of something I wrote about a few months ago, about how feminism — like most mass movements — will inevitably come back to enforcing the very strictures it once railed against.

Amanda basically says (though she partially repudiates it in the comments, but not wholly) that women should not approach men to ask them out because men have more social power. While the part about having more social power is obviously true, what does this advice sound suspiciously like?

Oh yeah, remember this? Women who ask men who out are bad, probably sluts, and anyway they aren’t “normal” women, so there must be something wrong with them — advice that’s been offered to women since anyone knew what the word “bodkin” meant.

It’s exactly that sort of thinking that feminism — especially second wave feminism — vociferously vituperated against.

Interesting how movements circle around like that.

I’m not singling out feminism as anything particularly unique. It’s not. This happens to all mass movements. Feminism is just something I happen to be interested in and read a lot about, so it gets more of my attention.

But I do like finding examples in the wild.

No Comments »

I don’t understand the eagerness people have to move to laptops and ditch their desktops.

Perhaps because they’ve never used a really tweaked-out, ridiculously fast desktop. And I value screen real estate so much that using the tiny screens of even the largest laptop is just completely unworkable for me. Once you use a Cinema Display, there ain’t no going back. And once you use dual monitors, same thing.

There’s not a laptop in the world that’s even half as fast as my desktop machine, and that speed is noticeable and matters to me. My computer is overclocked, tweaked and maxed out in every way. You can’t do that on a laptop, and you can’t have large amounts of screen real estate.

It’s puzzling how much flexibility and power most people are willing to give up for some portability.

Better strategy: Buy a desktop one step below what you were planning before, and use the leftover cash to buy a laptop.

Done and done.

No Comments »

One of the most loathsome people of 2008 is…you. Yep, you.

Charges: You think it’s your patriotic duty to spend money you don’t have on crap you don’t need. You think Hillary lost because of sexism, when it’s actually because she’s just a bad liar. You think Iraq is better off now than before we invaded, and don’t understand why they’re so ungrateful. You think Tim Russert was a great journalist. You’re hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of piss compared to a Wall Street heist of galactic dimensions, due to a housing crash you somehow have blamed on minorities. It took you six years to figure out what a tool Bush is, but you think Obama will make it all better. You deem it hunky dory that we conduct national policy debates via 8-second clips from “The View.” You think God zapped humans into existence a few thousand years ago, although your appendix and wisdom teeth disagree. You like watching vicious assholes insult each other on TV. You support gun rights, because firing one gives you a chubby. You cuddle falsehoods and resent enlightenment. You think the fact that 43% of whites could stomach voting for an incredibly charismatic and eloquent light-skinned black guy who was raised by white people means racism is over. You think progressive taxation is socialism. 1 in 100 of you are in jail, and you think it should be more. You are shallow, inconsiderate, afraid, brand-conscious, sedentary, and totally self-obsessed. You are American.

Exhibit A: You’re more upset by Miley Cyrus’s glamour shots than the fact that you are a grown adult who is upset about Miley Cyrus.

Sentence: Invaded and occupied by Canada; all military units busy overseas without enough fuel to get back.

Yeah, fuck you, you.

No Comments »

It has been and still is in most quarters a commonly-held belief that human evolution halted 40,0000-50,000 years ago. I had always doubted this, but had no real evidence to back it up.

Well, now there is evidence turning up.

The book is a discussion of the last 10,000 years of human evolution. Cochran and Harpending’s contention is that humans have continued to evolve — and in significant ways — over this period of time. This makes for quite a contrast to the story many of us were raised on, namely that human evolution essentially stopped around 40-50,000 years ago, and that any changes that have taken place since are so superficial as to be insignificant.

Largely, I think the idea that evolution just somehow magically stopped 50,000 years ago was due to the left’s problems with evolution and the more widespread aversion to the biological origin of human beings.

(The right’s problem is that, of course, they don’t believe that evolution occurred at all, while the left wishes somehow to pretend that somehow, even though humans are a product of evolution, that it does not influence our proclivities, behaviors, etc.)

Anyway, sounds like an interesting book. I’ll add it to my already-too-long list.

No Comments »

Steve Jobs unveils the Macintosh in 1984. Hard to believe now, but this computer at the time of its release was a decade ahead of the competition:

It’s fun and funny watching the crowd get so excited at the end about a computer.

No Comments »