What I believe

 


 I am not a natively good person. I am a manufactured good person, a Thing brought back from 800 years ago to expiate some great unknown sin. The Witch of Yellow Springs said this about me many years ago, and I believe her.

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The Coming AI-mageddon

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Exhibit 1. The Myth of Scientific Omniscience Where to start. There are so many places to start, all with consistently alarming intimations of one deep problem. The inference is seditious of rationality as we have deified it in science. I’m going to show you some of the more accessibly evocative starting points, not to drag you into the weeds of higher mathematics, but to stress some elements of simplicity that overthrow the fallacy called Artificial Intelligence. Bear with me. Just look for now. I’ll make connections as we proceed after viewing the items below. Exhibit 2. Turing Test Fallacy Exhibit 3. The Proof of Digital Inferiority (It works. Click where indicated on screen.) Exhibit 4. The Implementation Overreach Exhibit 5. The Implicatuons of “Sensitive Dependence” Exhibit 6. The Measurement Problem Exhibit 7. The Illusion of Control Exhibit 8. The Hammer/Nail Delusion Exhibit 9. The Impossibility of Artificial Intelligence Exhibit 10. The Oversimplification Problem Exhibit 11. ...
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Sick of the Fascist<>Commie Circular Firing Squad

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The only objective of the current Deep State Democrat Party is just a hellish fetish. It was probably rude of me to interrupt the umpty-umpteenth nitpicking of the fascist/commie definitional argle-bargle that’s gripped American political partisans since the McCarthy era. (Explained here for all the trouble it’s caused). Not my concern anymore. There’s a bigger problem this kind of empty back and forth helps conceal. So I described the real problem in a comment I thought I’d share here with people who might actually read it: The UniParty State No Longer Has Any Ideology Historical antecedents are useful, but they can also be counterproductive diversions. Parsing the differences and similarities between communism and fascism/Nazism is no longer useful because we are looking at a new paradigm. Both fascism and communism had an ideological base on which activist organizations and ultimately states were built. But once they had shown the power and elitist protections of the state there wa...
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Profile in Courage on the Epstein Fiasco

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  Representative Clay Higgins (R, LA) Is everyone ready for this? Getting what you wanted? There’s an old saying, “Be careful what you wish for… you might get it.” We’re about to have the most highly publicized rape trial media coverage in history for a rape trial that will never result in any convictions. A more tactless way of putting it is to say we are about to have the public pissing contest to end all public pissing contests. Trump called for this bill to pass. Democrats are smacking their lips. Republicans are afraid that MAGA constituencies obsessed with a sense of injustice about the victims are melting away in Christian-sounding dudgeon. Now it’s going to happen. Sometime today probably. Passage of the bill, I mean. Actual distribution of the documents will still be a burdensome process because everyone agrees redactions will be needed to protect the innocent. But, but, but… we will get to see the Democrat Party’s idea of “Democracy” in action. No wonder every member of t...
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We can learn from useful archetypes of the liberal elites

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  This was going to be a Facebook joke, playing on the contrast between the haughty New Yorker grand dame and the plainspoken Trump 2.0 disdain for reflexive mass media TDS. When I looked Jane Mayer up in Wikipedia I discovered the need to write this post. The woman is an archetype of the particular kind of box highly influential lefties in the nation’s press come from. They are by no means representative of the nation they purport to understand and cover objectively in their reporting and opinionating. Back in April of this year, I wrote a post called “ TDS is a coalition not a monolith .” It described criteria that define various ways in which Trump haters are limited in their knowledge of American life despite  levels of education, power, and prosperity that might seem guaranteed to give them broad insight into their countrymen as a whole. Limiting factors include the isolating effects of being among the overpaid and over-indulged, the vertical siloing effects of geography...
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I wouldn’t be surprised…

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  Yeah. He’s old. What of it? He can do it. But does he have to? …if Trump was thinking about resigning at some point. This could all be projection on my part. Probably is. But I’m old enough to have experienced the gradual loss of patience that comes with a life full of intense contending in a lot of different arenas. You get tired of seeing the same patterns of weakness and distraction even in people you have good reason to trust. He’s getting more irascible. I know what that’s all about. The usual army of enemies want to read this as a sign of burgeoning dementia. That’s not what it is. It’s rather the beginning of the question, “How much more of this shit is worth taking day after day? When have I done enough? When might it be appropriate to trust other younger ones to carry on, to come along from the ranks, to learn and practice the key lessons I have shown them?” Old age is about standing back to some extent. To see things from outside the fray, patterns indicating subtler ...
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About that feller Norm Chompski…

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  A long time ago I decided to build a little time capsule depicting the world as we were experiencing it at the very end of the 20th Century. It was called Shuteye Town 1999 and is still hanging on for dear life here . Like the rest of 1999 it had a lot of public transportation, a lot of entertainment media, and a big mall with the usual stores, including one that sold the books of the day. The way it worked, you could use your mouse or touch screen to go where you wanted and get what you wanted with your handy-dandy credit card. The bookstore had been the scene of a recent shooting, but you could get past the crime scene tape and shop for all kinds of publications, even the intellectual crap from the Shuteye Times bestseller list. One of the books in the intellectual category was Norm Chompski’s Global Politics . He was one of about 50 authors whose book was featured not just with a front and back cover display, but also a selection of the text.  I’m telling you all this be...
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My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 12:30 PM, Wednesday, November 19.  Latest entries are “Profile in Courage on the Epstein Fiasco,” “Sick of Fascist-Commie Circular Firing Squad,” and “Our Idiot Judiciary.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses! [ NOV 19 STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated November 19. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in th...
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TDS is not a monolith but a coalition

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  It’s Eastertide and I am moved to look for whatever bridges there might be to the people who suffer from TDS but are not necessarily evil at heart. The compound fracture in the soul of this nation needs to be healed, at least enough that we can begin to work together in sensible ways to repair years of decline in so many institutions and belief systems. This post is an attempt in that direction, a search for some different ways of describing and understanding the rifts that imperil us all. I’ll begin with a proposition: Susceptibility to irrational hatred of Donald Trump is not primarily a function of political convictions. It’s deeper than that, which is why it’s so hard to understand. The haters are so fond of labels that it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. Or forest s to be more precise. There’s more than one forest of TDS sufferers. This post is not about establishing more labels. It’s about describing several different mentalities that lead inadvertently to the Occa...
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Our Idiot Judiciary

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Yeah, I did that. Am I fair? I’m principally a thinker and writer, which often but not always go together. As a thinker I use writing as a tool for thinking, because writing forces you to deal with matters of order, precision, logic, and moral context in testing your thinking. If you can’t write a thought down and agree with what you’ve written, you haven’t thought it through. I tend to be, try to be, fair in that process. But being a writer also offers the opportunity to go the next step beyond documentation. Because much of what I think is not popular, generally accepted in its positions, or understood by undisciplined minds, I also tend to create a kind of commentary called satire. Satire is inherently UN fair, in that it is meant to provoke readers to do their own thinking when they are angered or offended by a satirical provocation. For those who are inclined to agree with the unfairness, there is the collateral benefit of laughter. Funny requires no justification. It  just is...
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