Notes by Retraice

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Re43: The Midterms -- Part 1

Retraice^1

On Tuesday, players will be chosen for a game.

Air date: Monday, 7th Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

Current history

There's a good chance the history books will mention tomorrow's midterm elections, which would make it `current history', or `What's going on out there'.

Several hypotheses are relevant, but the most pressing is:

H5. Civil War: `The U.S. seems vulnerable to a civil war this decade.'

We must yet define `seems', `vulnerable', `civil war', `this decade'.

Tuesday's midterms

The turnout for midterms is not as big as for presidential election years. The argument for non-mandatory voting would be: You want your voters to be the people who really care about voting. There is a similar saying about taxes: The U.S. tax code is perfect because those who really don't want to pay taxes don't have to. There are contrary views to these.

Primary elections (wherein parties choose their candidates) have the lowest turnout; midterms are higher; presidential years are highest.

These midterm elections are the last stop on a train line that ends in 2024. Very bad things might very well happen in the United Stated over the next two years. And they might not!

Issues old, new, explicit, implicit

What are the issues this election cycle?

Explicit, old: o the economy (jobs, inflation), a mostly `is' (not `ought') question; o abortion, mostly an `ought' question; o environment, both an `is' and `ought' question; o guns, an `is' and `ought' question.

Those who have hard-to-predict views on the issues are hard to sway. It is similar to the logic of AI in social media: the easiest way to predict a user's behavior is to change the user to make him or her more predictable, usually by steering them toward one extreme or another.^2

Explicit, new: * Trump's character vs. consequences (mostly a question of `fit' goodness, not `moral' or `truth' goodness); "In any modern, complex democracy, the question is not whether elites shall rule, but which elites shall, so the perennial political problem is to get popular consent to worthy elites."^3 Trump is an elite; he is the Republican voters' elite. * culture: gender (How many are there?), race (How much should we think about it?); * the 2020 election. (Was it stolen? Should we bother voting if we believe it was? This is the nuclear bomb in a democracy.)

Implicit: * rich, poor (coasts vs. heartland, cities vs `country');^4 * suffering: men, women, based on changed environments, internal and external; * resentment: you can be a winner and not deserve it, and vise versa; * meanness disguised as comedy (Bill Maher, and many comedians on the left); * contempt disguised as sarcasm and caricature (anything after 7 PM on Fox News Channel).

The unlikely upshot:

Both sides think that fascism is coming from the other side.

Players will be chosen

U.S. Senators, House Reps; state same; governors. These are the people to whom we delegate the work of government.

Do we vote for their policies or them? Them.

And they're not the only players, of course.

A game

It's a game in the sense of von Neumann & Morgenstern (2004).

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online):

"Game theory is the study of the ways in which interacting choices of economic agents produce outcomes with respect to the preferences (or utilities) of those agents."^5

Prisoner's dilemma:

"[W]hat is optimal for each individual need not coincide with what is optimal for the group. Individual rationality sometimes comes into conflict with group rationality."^6

It's about agents, preferences, choices and outcomes. Most if not all of the issues above can be interpreted as prisoner's dilemmas.

But what about... * Beliefs, `What's GOOT', news; * Feelings, especially desire and disgust (Are these really under preferences?); * Care, `volitional necessity'^7 (Are these really under preferences?); * Interests (known or unknown), incentives.^8

The list: agents, [feelings, cares, beliefs, interests, incentives = preferences], choices, outcomes.

And then there's the (John F.) Banzhaf power index:

The "power index of [an entity] is ...the number of ways in which that [entity] can change a losing coalition into a winning coalition or vise versa."^9

From Wikipedia: "To calculate the power of a voter using the Banzhaf index, list all the winning coalitions, then count the critical voters. A critical voter is a voter who, if he changed his vote from yes to no, would cause the measure to fail. A voter's power is measured as the fraction of all swing votes that he could cast. There are some algorithms for calculating the power index, e.g., dynamic programming techniques, enumeration methods and Monte Carlo methods."^10

If you are not a `critical' voter, you're a dummy (that's the term they use, probably rightly).

Gerrymandering, `cracking and packing', and the like, are similarly mathematical ways of evaluating (and affecting) elections:

"Mayer and the plaintiffs base their argument [against Gerrymandering in their July 2015 suit in Wisconsin] on a new standard called the efficiency gap, developed by University of Chicago law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. They posit that that [sic] between `cracking' and `packing' districts--dividing voters of one party across a number of districts, or cramming them into a small handful--you can measure the number of wasted votes. The efficiency gap is the difference between the parties' wasted votes divided by the total votes cast. Gerrymandering, then, becomes the art of wasting more votes for the other side. This measurement shows what they call the `undeserved' seat share--the proportion of seats that one party would not have received if lines were drawn in such a way that both sides had an equal number of wasted votes."^11

So it has become mathematical. And now that it's mathematical, it can become machine-controlled, which is H12.^12

Side note: Super Tuesday: "the United States presidential primary election day in February or March when the greatest number of U.S. states hold primary elections and caucuses."^13

Tomorrow is not a `Super Tuesday'.

_

References

Daley, D. (2016). Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count. Liveright, Kindle ed. ISBN: 978-1631491634. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781631491634 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781631491634 https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018111

Frankfurt, H. G. (1988). The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge. ISBN: 978-0521336116. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0521336116 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0521336116 https://lccn.loc.gov/87026941

Paulos, J. A. (1995). A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper. Basic Books. ISBN: 0465043623. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0465043623 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0465043623 https://lccn.loc.gov/94048206

Peterson, M. (2017). An Introduction to Decision Theory. Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. ISBN: 9781316606209. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781316606209 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781316606209 https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057387

Retraice (2022/10/19). Re22: Computer Control. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re22 Retrieved 19th Oct. 2022.

Russell, S. (2019). Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking. ISBN: 978-0525558613. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0525558613 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0525558613 https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029688

von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (2004). Theory of Games and Economic Behavior: 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition. Princeton University Press, 60th anniversary ed. ISBN: 978-0691119939. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780691119939 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780691119939 https://lccn.loc.gov/2004100346

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 "Like any rational entity, the algorithm learns how to modify the state of its environment--in this case, the user's mind--in order to maximize its own reward." Russell (2019) pp. 8-9.

^3 People are fine with elites as long as they aren't politicians, George F. Will, washingtonpost.com, Nov. 20th, 2019.

^4 On the parties' misperception of each other, see Democrats are gay, Republicans are rich: Our stereotypes of political parties are amazingly wrong, John Sides, washingtonpost.com, May 23rd, 2016, citing The Parties in our Heads: Misperceptions About Party Composition and Their Consequences, Ahler and Sood, Sep. 15th, 2016. From the Post: "On average, Americans thought that 32 percent of Democrats are gay, lesbian or bisexual. The correct answer is 6 percent. And they thought that 38 percent of Republicans made more than $250,000 a year. The correct answer is 2 percent."

^5 Game Theory, Don Ross, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2021 Edition.

^6 Peterson (2017) p. 237. Cf. 266 on the risk connection.

^7 Frankfurt (1988) p. 86.

^8 Paulos (1995) p. 10.

^9 Paulos (1995) p. 10.

^10 Banzhaf power index, wikipedia.org The idea was first published 20 years earlier by Lionel Penrose.

^11 Daley (2016) p. 140.

^12 Retraice (2022/10/19).

^13 Super Tuesday, wikipedia.org, retrieved Nov. 8th, 2022.

(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)

Re42: News -- Wealth, Wildcards, Computers

Retraice^1

We're all getting richer, but education is dividing us, and the machines are watching.

Air date: Sunday, 6th Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

The rich and richer

H10. Wealth: `The current trend toward concentration of wealth is making human life worse.'

So many definitions and concepts to decide: `human [quality of] life', `better/worse',^2 `wealth',^3 `concentration'.... And does the serious evidence even lean toward this hypothesis being true?

It's interesting to note that there are objective `better's (less death, disease) and subjective `better's (less unhappiness, suffering). These two could, conceivably, move in opposite directions! Imagine a population of suffering people having their lives extended by medicine. Didn't the Nazi doctors keep people alive in order to continue experiments on them? Probably.^4

One task is to distinguish between disposable income and asset wealth, i.e. `income inequality' (income or profit-and-loss statements) and `wealth inequality' (the balance sheet).^5

The Credit Suisse report on 2021 wealth growth:

"[W]ealth growth proved resilient in 2020 when COVID-19 caused major economic disruption, and the recovery during 2021 produced even more favorable conditions.... Setting aside exchange rate movements, aggregate global wealth grew by 12.7% in 2021, which is the fastest annual rate ever recorded."^6

On 2021 distribution:

"The wealth share of the global top 1% rose for a second year running to reach 45.6% in 2021, up from 43.9% in 2019. The rise in inequality is probably due to the surge in the value of financial assets^7 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the longer term, global wealth inequality has fallen this century due to the faster growth achieved in emerging markets."^8

An IMF journal on inequality:

"As the late Dutch economist (and first winner of the Nobel Prize in economics) Jan Tinbergen put it, inequality is the result of a race between technology and education."^9

Cancer, protein folding, black holes

H11. Wildcards: `New technologies, discoveries and deception regularly cause historic changes.'

Putin cancer: The New York Post is reporting on an article by The Sun, who claim to have reviewed the leaked emails. There's no way to be sure about this story right now.^10

From The Sun: "Game theory specialist Georgy Egorov warned a nuclear strike `makes sense' for Putin if he only has a few months to live."^11

Protein folding: Reading the various commentaries written since the AlphaFold breakthrough: this seems like a big deal in that chatter.^12 And what if it significantly affects lifespan? Congenital disease? Cognitive enhancement? Designer babies?

Black hole in our backyard: But it's "dormant".^13

Machines watching

H12. Computers: `Some humans now control others better, but machinery could take control.'

AI may help authorities track `ghost' fishing boats, Erik Stokstad, science.org, Nov. 2nd, 2022.

"Machine learning identifies suspicious activity when vessels turn off their identification beacons."

Billions of automatic ID system locations are in public databases. Cases that were "clearly" deliberate, and others that "seemed" technical, were used to train a machine learning system to detect suspicious activity.

So we have technical people building a system that classifies behavior automatically. The chain reaction starts when the beacon goes off, proceeds through classification of patterns of `behavior', and ends either with enforcement action or something else.

What used to go undetected, both nefarious and benign, could now be always watched by machinery. Boats with AIS beacons, whether or not they go off, are watched. What else is similarly watched? Everything. Consider:

The Panopticon is Already Here, Ross Andersen, theatlantic.com, Sep. 2020.

See also Strittmatter (2018), Schneier (2015), Zuboff (2019).

We're vacuuming up all the data from various sensors, including and especially cameras, and then computing machinery is detecting patterns in that data. The controllers^14 decide what patterns to seek out. The builders are not the controllers; the builders' power is only in building and publicizing.^15 The controllers end up with the power created by the builders.^16

_

References

Ferguson, N. (2017). The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. Penguin. ISBN: 978-0735222915. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0735222915 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0735222915 https://lccn.loc.gov/2018418429

Foroohar, R. (2021). The oldest asset class of all still dominates modern wealth. Financial Times. 15th Nov. 2021. https://www.ft.com/content/99a3cf9b-0ab8-45b9-bbc5-7e88c08f9ea5 Retrieved 7th Mar. 2022.

Jacobsen, A. (2011). Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. Back Bay Books. ISBN: 978-0316202305. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780316202305 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780316202305 https://lccn.loc.gov/2011925205

Kiyosaki, R. T. (2017). Rich Dad Poor Dad. Plata Publishing, 20th anniv. ed. ISBN: 978-1612680170. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781612680170 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781612680170 https://lccn.loc.gov/2016941928

Retraice (2022/10/19). Re22: Computer Control. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re22 Retrieved 19th Oct. 2022.

Retraice (2022/10/24). Re28: What's Good? RTFM. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re28 Retrieved 25th Oct. 2022.

Schneier, B. (2015). Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. W. W. Norton. ISBN: 9780393244816. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780393244816 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780393244816 https://lccn.loc.gov/2014048365

Shorrocks, A., Davies, J., & Lluberas, R. (2022). Global Wealth Report 2022. Credit Suisse Research Institute. https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html

Strittmatter, K. (2018). We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State. Custom House, revised, updated ed. ISBN: 978-0063027305. Published in Germany, 2018. This paperback edition 2021. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780063027305 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780063027305 https://lccn.loc.gov/2020288922

Tinbergen, J. (1974). Substitution of graduate by other labour. Kyklos, 27(2), 217-226. Jan. 1974. https://repub.eur.nl/pub/8084 Retrieved 8th Nov. 2022. Paywalled source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1974.tb01903.x

Woetzel, J., Mischke, J., Madgavkar, A., Windhagen, E., Smit, S., Birshan, M., Kemeny, S., & Anderson, R. J. (2021). The rise and rise of the global balance sheet. McKinsey Global Institute Report. Nov. 2021 https://mck.co/3ovj5eB Retrieved 6th Nov. 2022.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, Kindle ed. ISBN: 9781610395700. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781610395700 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781610395700 https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039998

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 We're not lost here. See Retraice (2022/10/24).

^3 The best definition we've found is: "Wealth is a person's ability to survive so many number of days forward--or, if I stopped working today, how long could I survive?" Kiyosaki (2017) p. 91, quoting R. Buckminster Fuller.

^4 FIXME TODO: Find citation to support this.

^5 Compare Wikipedia on Gini and Shorrocks et al. (2022), pp. 25, 31.

^6 Shorrocks et al. (2022) p. 7.

^7 Think stocks, bonds, cash deposits, i.e. generally liquid assets, as opposed to non-financial assets such as real estate, jewelry, soy beans, i.e. generally illiquid assets. See Nonfinancial Asset, James Chen, investopedia.com, Dec 31st, 2020.

^8 Shorrocks et al. (2022) p. 21. On the rise in non-financial asset values, see Foroohar (2021), "[F]or all the talk of blockchain, cryptocurrency and big data, it's rather amazing that most 21st-century wealth still lives in the oldest asset class of all: bricks and mortar"; and Woetzel et al. (2021), "Net worth has tripled since 2000, but the increase mainly reflects valuation gains in real assets, especially real estate, rather than investment in productive assets that drive our economies," (from the webpage summary), "Two-thirds of global net worth is stored in real estate and only about 20 percent in other fixed assets, raising questions about whether societies store their wealth productively," (p. vi).

^9 More or Less, Branko Milanovic, Finance & Development, September 2011, Vol. 48, No. 3. Tinbergen's paper is very technical, and his language is more reserved: "My approach suggests that [income inequality] depends on the `race' between demand for third-level manpower due to technological development and supply of it due to increased schooling.... [i.e. a] `race' between technical progress and extension of third-level education." Tinbergen (1974) p. 224.

^10 Putin battling cancer and Parkinsons disease, leaked emails claim: report, Yaron Steinbuch, nypost.com, Nov. 2nd, 2022; Bombshell leaked spy docs suggest Putin DOES have Parkinson's and cancer... and is `stuffed full of steroids', Imogen Braddick, thesun.co.uk, Nov. 1st, 2022.

^11 See also: Putin, Nuclear War, and Game Theory, Maxim Mironov, ie.edu, Oct. 31st, 2022.

^12 More Protein Folding Progress -- What's It Mean?, Derek Lowe, science.org, Jul. 23rd, 2021 ("Well, for one thing, it means that a lot of people in academia are going to have to rewrite their research grants. If you have been working on computational protein folding yourself, odds are that you have had your doors blown off by these recent developments and will need to rethink."); What are the implications of solving the `protein folding problem' for genomics?, Shannon Gunn, frontlinegenomics.com, Feb. 3rd, 2021.

^13 Astronomers Find a Black Hole in Our Cosmic Back Yard, Dennis Overbye, nytimes.com, Nov. 5th, 2022.

^14 They're humans and machines now, and possibly solely machines later. Retraice (2022/10/19).

^15 Of course, there is power to be had in building and not publicizing something. This is common in the intelligence agencies. See Jacobsen (2011) on the U2 and A-12 Oxcart planes, for example.

^16 Not like Niall Ferguson, who has no power, by his own estimate. (Ferguson (2017) pp. xx-xxiii.) He explains that, in a flat network, one's position determines one's power, as compared to one's rank or `altitude' (our word) in a hierarchy, p. xx.

(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)

Re41: News -- Betterment, Intelligence, Darkness

Retraice^1

Some humans can now play with proteins like Legos, and this is good for them, maybe us, and any AI that wants to takeover the Earth.

Air date: Saturday, 5th Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

The spectrum of intelligence

Bertrand Russell, 1921: "[F]rom the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide gap either in structure or in behaviour. From this fact it is a highly probable inference that there is also nowhere a very wide mental gap."^2

Sam Harris, 2016: "It seems overwhelmingly likely, however, that the spectrum of intelligence extends much further than we currently conceive, and if we build machines that are more intelligent than we are, they will very likely explore this spectrum in ways that we can't imagine, and exceed us in ways that we can't imagine."^3

The Lego blocks of life

H7. Betterment: `Some things make the future better than the past.'

AlphaFold's new rival? Meta AI predicts shape of 600 million proteins, Ewen Callaway, nature.com, Nov. 1st, 2022.

"Microbial molecules from soil, seawater and human bodies are among the planet's least understood."

2020 Nature: "Proteins are the building blocks of life, responsible for most of what happens inside cells. How a protein works and what it does is determined by its 3D shape -- `structure is function' is an axiom of molecular biology. Proteins tend to adopt their shape without help, guided only by the laws of physics."^4

Wikipedia: "Each protein exists first as an unfolded polypeptide or random coil after being translated from a sequence of mRNA to a linear chain of amino acids.... As the polypeptide chain is being synthesized by a ribosome, the linear chain begins to fold into its three-dimensional structure."^5

MIT Tech. Rev., July: "DeepMind has predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science"^6

So, is this better? I.e., is solving the protein-folding problem a good thing? Well, the medical possibilities are endless and good. But: o Betterment is vague.^7 o There are definitely mutually exclusive `better's: consider Boko Haram (Wikipedia), who forbid books other than the Quran. o Generally, knowing more is better, unless it enables humans or machines to do terrible things before we can stop them.^8

Smart and dumb are things

H8. Intelligence: `There are intelligence differences.'

A trivial (though sensitive) point is to be made here: Some people (and machines?) are smarter than others. Intelligence is a spectrum (see above), and all but two of us are between the extremes.

Compare: * predicting protein folding by creating deep learning code (Deepmind); * copying the published methods (Meta).

A lot more goes into who claims `first' at an intellectual prize, but if all other things are equal, the first is necessarily smarter. Does this bode well for our machine future?

Put on your evil hat

H9. Darkness: `There is a pervasive darkness in humans, even amongst the good guys.'

The mail-ordered DNA AI-takeover^9 scenario:

"[Step] 1: Crack the protein folding problem to the extent of being able to generate DNA strings whose folded peptide sequences fill specific functional roles in a complex chemical interaction."^10

We can also imagine humans using protein folding technology to make others sick, kill them, control them, etc. And those who invent the technology have no power over what is done with it.

_

References

Bostrom, N. (2011). Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms from Knowledge. Review of Contemporary Philosophy, 10, 44-79. Citations are from Bostrom's website copy: https://www.nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf Retrieved 9th Sep. 2020.

Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford. First published in 2014. Citations are from the pbk. edition, 2016. ISBN: 978-0198739838. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0198739838 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0198739838 https://lccn.loc.gov/2015956648

Bostrom, N. (2019). The vulnerable world hypothesis. Global Policy, 10(4), 455-476. Nov. 2019. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf Retrieved 24th Mar. 2020.

Bostrom, N., & Cirkovic, M. M. (Eds.) (2008). Global Catastrophic Risks. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0199606504. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0199606504 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0199606504 https://lccn.loc.gov/2008006539

Collison, P., & Cowen, T. (2019). We need a new science of progress. The Atlantic. 30th Jul. 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/ Retrieved 5th Nov. 2022.

Kissinger, H. A., Schmidt, E., & Huttenlocher, D. (2021). The Age of AI. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN: 978-0316273800. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780316273800 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780316273800 https://lccn.loc.gov/2021943914

Retraice (2020/09/07). Re1: Three Kinds of Intelligence. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re1 Retrieved 22nd Sep. 2020.

Retraice (2022/10/23). Re27: Now That's a World Model - WM4. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re27 Retrieved 24th Oct. 2022.

Russell, B. (1921). The Analysis of Mind. Macmillan. No ISBN. https://books.google.com/books?id=4dYLAAAAIAAJ Retrieved 6th May. 2019.

Yudkowsky, E. (2008). Artificial intelligence as a positive and negative factor in global risk. (pp. 308-345). In Bostrom & Cirkovic (2008).

Yudkowsky, E. (2013). Intelligence explosion microeconomics. Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Technical report 2013-1. https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf Retrieved ca. 9th Dec. 2018.

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 Russell (1921) p. 41. See also Retraice (2020/09/07) p. 1.

^3 Can we build AI without losing control over it?, Sam Harris, TED talk, Sep 29, 2016, from 6 min. ff.

^4 `It will change everything': DeepMind's AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures, Ewen Callaway, nature.com, Nov. 30th, 2020.

^5 Protein folding, Wikipedia.org, retrieved Nov. 5th, 2022.

^6 DeepMind has predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science, Melissa Heikkilä, technologyreview.com July 28, 2022.

^7 It is easy to adopt a definition but hard to be sure it's the right one. For example: Collison & Cowen (2019).

^8 Bostrom (2011) pp. 1, 27; Bostrom (2019).

^9 AI is: classical code (steps yield precise results) plus AI code (steps improve imprecise results). Kissinger et al. (2021) p. 58. See also Retraice (2022/10/23).

^10 Bostrom (2014) p. 119 quoting Yudkowsky (2008) p. 331 ff. See also Yudkowsky (2013) p. 6.

(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)

Re40: News -- China, Civil War, Environments

Retraice^1

Republicans don't trust the FBI, neither of them trust the Chinese, but Brazil wants products, not a rainforest.

Air date: Friday, 4th Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

China, the U.S. and Apple

H4. China: `The U.S. is no longer the only superpower; war is likely.'

China and the US remain locked in mutually assured co-operation John Thornhill, ft.com, Nov. 3rd, 2022.

"The two nations are compelled by their consumers to collaborate as well as compete."

More (bipartisan) U.S. trade restrictions on China will make tensions worse, says Thornhill. They already affect semiconductors, supercomputing and artificial intelligence. But the two countries are so interdependent, though China has a "stranglehold" on rare earth metals and the US is "critically dependent" on Taiwan for advanced microchips.

Apple, though, is too big to be bossed around by either country. If the economic rationale for peace gives way to nationalistic calls for war, Apple will be affected early.

Republicans, whistleblowers and the FBI

H5. Civil War: `The U.S. seems vulnerable to a civil war this decade.'

House Republicans release 1,000-page report alleging politicization in the FBI, DOJ, Chris Pandolfo, foxnews.com, Nov. 4th, 2022.

"Whistleblowers say FBI is `rotted at its core' in Republican report on alleged misconduct."

Gist of the Republican Judiciary Committee Staff Report:^2 The FBI (the "politicized bureaucracy", not the front-line people) is inflating domestic terror numbers, abusing power to investigate school-board cases (a mom who said "we are coming for you" and a dad who the FBI thought "has a lot of guns"), spying on U.S. citizens, purging the FBI of "woke" people, and generally doing "political meddling".

Fox again: "One whistleblower alleged he was `told that child sexual abuse material investigations were no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.' "

The rainforest and its alternative uses

H6. Environments: `Humans can change environments faster than they can adapt.'

Lula faces struggle to reverse Brazil's environmental destruction, Michael Stott and Michael Pooler, ft.com, Nov. 3rd, 2022.

"Former minister says climate change will be a top priority after increase in deforestation under Bolsonaro." But Marina Silva, in Lula's election coalition, is a good sign, as is the fact that Lula says he'll attend COP27 in Egypt this year, (Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, the UN climate conference).

Why the deforestation? "[I]llegal loggers, miners and land grabbers" ..."Every day an area of rainforest as big as 2,000 football pitches is razed." [graphic: it was worst in the mid-90s and mid-2000s, source: Brazil's National Institute for Space Research]

Why the re-election of politicians who don't care about the rainforest? "`Brazilian society is divided between progress and backwardness, between democracy and authoritarianism, between racism and respect for diversity, between machismo and respect for women,' Silva said of the election result."

The connections

Republicans don't trust the FBI: In general, you can't have a `United States' where one half of the country doesn't trust the FBI, though in the '60s it was the other side, the Left, that didn't trust them.^3

Neither of them trust the Chinese:

Both parties, though, have shifted from (self-interested) openness and optimism about China to leeriness and pessimism.

But Brazil wants products, not a rainforest:

Why are they deforesting? To capture the value of natural resources, i.e. to make money to buy and have things. Who takes the resources and makes things out of them? China is the world's factory (or has been for 20 years, while competitors have been catching up).

_

References

(none)

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 FBI Whistleblowers: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the Politicization of the FBI and Justice Department, Republican Staff Report, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, Nov. 4th, 2022, pp 2-3.

^3 Chomsky called the FBI "the political police of the national government". Domestic Terrorism: Notes on the State System of Oppression, Noam Chomsky, chomsky.info. Also published in New Political Science, Volume 21, Number 3 (September, 1999), pp. 303-324 (citation per chomsky.info).

(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)

Re39: News -- Space, Technology, Death

Retraice^1

Live longer, in space, with Big Brother.

Air date: Thursday, 3rd Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

News matters

It's only news if it matters. It only makes sense if it's connected.

What matters? "What we care about amongst what is happening amongst what is."^2

What we care about: What's `good' (RTFM), survival and experiences (fun and doom, hence threat modeling and the decisions, two of life and one of death).^3

It's ok if you don't understand all that. Leave it to us, the professionals.

H1 Space: caves on Mars

H1. Space: `Humans are now technologically capable of living in space.'

House-Hunting on Mars Has Already Started, Katherine Kornei, nytimes.com Oct. 29th, 2022.

"Researchers identified nine caves on the red planet that might make suitable shelters for future astronauts."

The caves seem sizable, and are near rover landing sites. We used to live in caves (`cave men'). And what is a house, or an apartment, but a cave or system of caves?

H2 Technology: the robo-minister

H2. Technology: `Human technology risks are growing faster than their mitigation.'

The robo-minister tasked with helping Japan go digital, Leo Lewis, ft.com, Nov. 2nd, 2022.

"The Japanese people are reluctant to share their personal data with the government in the form of ID cards. Can a robot help?"

The robot is, among other things, promoting a government digital ID system "that, in effect, needs 100 per cent national participation to function." It's easy to imagine such a system being abused, but becoming very hard to get rid of. And who controls it?

Cf. Retraice (2022/10/27b), "New European Political Party Is Led by an Artificial Intelligence, futurism.com".

H3 Death: making cells young again

H3. Death: `Human lifespan is being prolonged by new technologies.'

How scientists want to make you young again, Antonio Regalado, MIT technologyreview.com, Oct. 25, 2022.

"Research labs are pursuing technology to `reprogram' aging bodies back to youth."

The technology is based on the discovery "that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent"^4 made in 2006 by Shinya Yamanaka, who won a Nobel Prize for it in 2012.

There is big Silicon Valley and Persian Gulf oil money ($3 billion) behind Altos Labs, a company trying to commercialize the technology. But there are signs that Altos is as much hype as hope.

H12 Computers: Who controls those machines?

We're going to be living longer^5 , in space, but because we have to use machines and digitization to scale our civilization to more lifespan and more humans, we have to ask: Who controls those machines?^6

_

References

Johnson, S. (2021). Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer. Riverhead. ISBN: 978-0525538851. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780525538851 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780525538851 https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033229

Retraice (2022/10/19). Re22: Computer Control. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re22 Retrieved 19th Oct. 2022.

Retraice (2022/10/24). Re28: What's Good? RTFM. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re28 Retrieved 25th Oct. 2022.

Retraice (2022/10/27a). Re31: What's Happening That Matters - WM5. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re31 Retrieved 28th Oct. 2022.

Retraice (2022/10/27b). Re32: AI News. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re32 Retrieved 31st Oct. 2022.

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 Retraice (2022/10/27a).

^3 Retraice (2022/10/27a), Retraice (2022/10/24).

^4 Shinya Yamanaka, nobelprize.org.

^5 Johnson (2021).

^6 Retraice (2022/10/19).

(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)

Re38: Follow up to `Re33: Outsiders, Power and Waste'

Retraice^1

The Rhodes-Milner group, psychos, and power-attention microeconomics.

Air date: Wednesday, 2nd Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

There's more to say about `outsiders, power and waste', so now we're going to say it.

Quigley and Ferguson on the Rhodes-Milner group

Quigley^2 says Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner and others in the Rhodes-Milner group were "satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power."^3

Ferguson says "[t]he reality was less thrilling.... [T]he group resembeled nothing more sinister than the junior fellows of an Oxford college on an extended reading holiday."^4

When historians disagree, we must decide which claims to believe, and perhaps which historian to trust. It would be so convenient to be able to `green light' everything an author has ever said (by trusting him/her). And how exciting would it be (declaring our biases) if the more sensational claims were true! Alas, reality doesn't care what excites us.

Evaluating two historians: o historian: Who's better? o scholar: Who's better? o thinker: Who's better?^5 o judgment: Whose is better?^6 o access: Who had more? o rebuttal: Who could and couldn't? o plausibility: Who's claim has more?^7 o evidence: Are both authors equally likely to have written what's attributed to them?^8

And the Rhodes-Milner group were power-only creatures, but not psychos, per Quigley.^9

Psychos: `1 in 25' was wrong

I said, off-the-cuff, that perhaps 1 in 25 of us are psychos. The number is more like 1 in 100, though it may be that high for CEOs.^10

Power-only and power-attention microeconomics: a better explanation

For a better explanation, see the notes at Retraice (2022/10/28), sections `If you want power and attention' and `If you want only power'.

Though I didn't put it this way in the notes, what I'm describing is microeconomics:

"Microeconomics [is] the study of individual choice under scarcity and its implications for the behavior of prices and quantities in individual markets."

"Macroeconomics [is] the study of the performance of national economies and the policies that governments use to try to improve that performance."^11

Other useful concepts are `marginal benefit' and `opportunity cost'.^12

_

References

Barlow, H. B. (2004). Guessing and intelligence. (pp. 382-384). In Gregory (2004).

Ferguson, N. (2017). The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. Penguin. ISBN: 978-0735222915. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0735222915 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0735222915 https://lccn.loc.gov/2018418429

Frank, R., & Bernanke, B. (2001). Principles of Economics. Mcgraw-Hill. ISBN: 0072289627. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0072289627 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0072289627 https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=0072289627

Gregory, R. L. (Ed.) (2004). The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. ISBN: 0198662246. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0198662246 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0198662246 https://lccn.loc.gov/2004275127

Quigley, C. (1961). The Evolution of Civilizations. Macmillan (reprinted by Liberty Fund 1979). ISBN: 0913966576. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0913966576 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0913966576 https://lccn.loc.gov/79004091

Quigley, C. (1981). The Anglo-American Establishment. GSG and Associates. ISBN: 0945001010. Publisher's note in Books in Focus 1981 edition (PDF, below) says the manuscript was completed in 1949 but Quigley couldn't find a publisher. This edition 1981, with different publisher's note that doesn't mention 1949, though Quigley's preface is dated 1949. http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/The_Anglo-American_Establishment.pdf Retrieved 1st Nov. 2022. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0945001010 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0945001010 https://lccn.loc.gov/80070620

Retraice (2020/11/02). Re10: Living to Guess Another Day. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re10 Retrieved 2nd Nov. 2020.

Retraice (2022/10/28). Re33: Outsiders, Power and Waste. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re33 Retrieved 2nd Nov. 2022.

Sacks, O. (2013). Speak, memory. New York Review of Books. 21st Feb. 2013 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/02/21/speak-memory Retrieved 8th Mar. 2019.

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 For Quigley's bona fides as an historian, see his Quigley (1961), an excellent book. Perhaps Quigley was the `Noam Chomsky' of historians: respected for his day job, but then doubted for his work on conspiracies.

^3 Quigley (1981) pp. 3-5; Ferguson (2017) p. 157; Retraice (2022/10/28) section "Perception, power and deception".

^4 Ferguson (2017) p. 181, citing (pp. 458, 513) an entry in the 2005 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

^5 Even memories can't be trusted completely (Sacks (2013)). Does your historian appreciate this?

^6 If judgment is about guessing correctly, see Barlow (2004). See also Retraice (2020/11/02).

^7 In our case, Ferguson is more plausible because his claims are less unlikely. `Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.' (Carl Sagan paraphrasing Laplace.)

^8 Quigley (1981) was published after Quigley died, and the publisher's note on the first edition doesn't explain how the manuscript was found and prepared.

^9 Retraice (2022/10/28) version November 2nd, 2022, n8.

^10 Retraice (2022/10/28). See section `Perception, power and deception' and footnotes 6, 7.

^11 Frank & Bernanke (2001) p. 13.

^12 Frank & Bernanke (2001) pp. 12, 50-51.

(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)

Re37: Notes on Solutions to Conspiracy

Retraice^1

What it would take to secure our shared world and world model.

Air date: Tuesday, 1st Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

Targets and attacks

The solutions to the problems of conspiracy (attacks on our shared world) and conspiracy theory (attacks on our shared world model) are obvious.

Gold and silver: incentives and tests

Two general rules:

1. Align the incentives (or only look where they're aligned). "The gold and silver of science is original discovery."^2 2. Focus on what is knowable (by a standard of evidence^3); measure belief in degrees;^4 never completely trust a single source, and avoid situations where you might have no choice.

What's your gold and silver? (We can assume that ulterior, hidden^5 motives are always lurking in the background, no matter who you are.) Here are some obvious ones, and some guesses: * scientists: making original discoveries; * journalists: making original discoveries; * law enforcement officers: catching the bad guys; * lawyers: winning legal arguments; * politicians: winning elections, controlling laws and policies; * bureaucrats, government agents: doing right, important work.

Lead bullets: people, standards, tools

Silver bullets are a myth. We need lead bullets:^6 * People: a lot of eyes on this stuff. How many are there now? What eyes could be shifted to it? * Standards: + an absolute top-notch standard of evidence (including custody of evidence);^7 + an absolute top-notch standard of reasoning.^8 + answers to the questions: What do you think you know? Why do you think you know it?^9 * Trustable tools:

Computer scientist and voting machine expert Alex Halderman (interviewed by Sue Halpern):

"We don't have to just blindly trust that technology, and I think this is what the Stop the Steal movement misses, that we can make use of technology in elections without just having to have faith that it's operating correctly, and the people who are operating it are doing everything right. The most important part of that is auditing the results of the election in a statistically rigorous way, what's known as a risk-limiting audit. What a risk-limiting audit does is it has people go and look at the original, hopefully, hand-marked paper ballots, and you look at enough of them to rule out with high probability the possibility that the computer outcome is wrong. In an election that's a landslide, you only have to look at a few ballots to do that. If the elections are a tie, well, you want to go in and recount them all by hand the same way we might traditionally do a recount of a very, very close race. A risk-limiting audit lets you use technology to count quickly without having to blindly trust that technology to get the right answer."^10

Cf. Ken Thompson's talk `On trusting trust':

"You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself."

"Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software."^11

The hard thing: anything goes

`The hard thing about hard things' is that "there is no formula for dealing with them."^12 Compare the conclusion `against method': "The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes"^13

_

References

Brockman, J. (Ed.) (2016). Life: The Leading Edge of Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Anthropology, and Environmental Science. Harper Perennial. ISBN: 978-0062296054. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780062296054 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780062296054 https://lccn.loc.gov/2016499276

Feyerabend, P. (1975). Against Method. Verso, 3rd ed. ISBN: 978-0860916468. First ed. 1975; this third ed. 1993. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780860916468 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780860916468 https://lccn.loc.gov/76352961

Feynman, R. (1974). Cargo cult science. Engineering and Science, 7(37), 10-13. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf Retrieved 20th Mar. 2019.

Heuer, R. J. (1999). Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Martino Fine Books. ISBN: 978-1684224128. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781684224128 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781684224128 https://lccn.loc.gov/99489116

Horowitz, B. (2014). The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. Harper Business. ISBN: 978-0062273208. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0062273208 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0062273208 https://lccn.loc.gov/2017448298

Horwich, P. (1982). Probability and Evidence. Cambridge. First published 1982; first paperback 2011; this Cambridge Philosophy Classics edition 2016. ISBN: 978-1316507018. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-1316507018 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-1316507018 https://lccn.loc.gov/2015049717

Okasha, S. (2002). Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 0192802836. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0192802836 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0192802836 https://lccn.loc.gov/2002510456

Polya, G. (1954). Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning [Two Volumes in One]. Martino Fine Books. ISBN: 978-1614275572. Originally published 1954. This ed. 2014. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781614275572 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781614275572 https://lccn.loc.gov/53006388

Simler, K., & Hanson, R. (2018). The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780190495992. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780190495992 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780190495992 https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004296

Thompson, K. (1984). Reflections on trusting trust. Communications of the ACM, 27(8), 761-763. Aug. 1984. https://doi.org/10.1145/358198.358210 Also available at: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf Retrieved 4th Dec. 2020.

Weston, A. (2000). A Rulebook for Arguments. Hackett, 3rd ed. ISBN: 0872205525. Also available at: https://archive.org/details/rulebookforargum00west_3 Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0872205525 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0872205525 https://lccn.loc.gov/00058121

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 E. O. Wilson in Brockman (2016) p. 72.

^3 E.g. Horwich (1982) pp. 3-10.

^4 Horwich (1982) p. 1.

^5 Simler & Hanson (2018).

^6 Horowitz (2014) p. 88 ff.

^7 Cf. science's `Photoshop problem'. Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem, nytimes.com Oct. 29th, 2022. Retrieved 1st Nov. 2022. See also The ongoing replication crisis in science, wikipedia.org.

^8 Weston (2000); Feynman (1974); Heuer (1999); Okasha (2002); Polya (1954).

^9 The Fundamental Question of Rationality, Eliezer Yudkowsky, lesswrong.com. Retrieved 4th Nov. 2022.

^10 The Vulnerabilities of our Voting Machines, and How to Secure Them, New Yorker Radio Hour, wnycstudios.org, Oct. 21st, 2022. Retrieved 4th Nov. 2022.

^11 Thompson (1984) pp. 763, 761.

^12 Horowitz (2014) p. x.

^13 Feyerabend (1975) p. 5.

(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)

Re36: Notes on Conspiracy

Retraice^1

To secure our shared world model against devastating attack is going to take some doing.

Air date: Monday, 31st Oct. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

Conspiracy and conspiracy theory

Conspiracies are things that happen in the world. Conspiracy theories, we generally assume, are false convictions about things that didn't happen in the world.

Securing our shared world against devastating attack by conspiracy is the job of leadership (politicians), law enforcement (police, law courts) and journalism.

To secure our shared world model against devastating attack (i.e. conspiracy) or devastating error (i.e. conspiracy theory) is going to take some doing. The main task is calibration: tests for conspiracy and conspiracy theory.

Problem 1: Consistency in conspiracy theory

To the outsider, who only has access to public information, the evidence in conspiracy theories^2 is consistent with: o A: conspiracy (attack on world); o B: conspiracy to disinform (attack on world model); o C: incompetence (error on the part of the observers or messengers).

This problem applies to outsiders. Insiders (those with access to private information) have less cause for doubt since their knowledge is more direct and their world models are more accurate in the relevant parts.

Problem 2: Don't forget the obvious

* Science is not up to the challenge of counterintelligence, especially denial and deception.^3 * Trusting institutions is a vulnerability. * Deception is profound: Intelligence analyst Cynthia Grabo on deception:

"Confidence [in our] judgment of the adversary's intentions fades as one contemplates the chilling prospect of deception. There is no single facet of the warning problem so unpredictable, and yet so potentially damaging in its effect, as deception.... [T]he most brilliant analysis may founder in the face of deception and ... the most expert and experienced among us on occasion may be as vulnerable as the novice."^4

Problem 3: If there is neglect, why?

If others who should or would be focused on a given conspiracy (assuming it's actually happening) aren't focused on it, why? Why are they neglecting it?

1. lack of plausibility (they're guessing that it's nothing, or something benign);

2. reasons of conformity (since no one is doing it, they won't either);

3. fear;

4. complicity;

5. the price of information.^5

These considerations remind me of John Gatto's research,^6 and to some extent Chomsky's.^7 Both authors had a difficult case to make with respect to the general neglect of their target conspiracies.

Amendment: Re32 -- `BIM'

"Building Information Modeling (BIM) is the holistic process of creating and managing information for a built asset. Based on an intelligent model and enabled by a cloud platform, BIM integrates structured, multi-disciplinary data to produce a digital representation of an asset across its lifecycle, from planning and design to construction and operations."^8

_

References

Gatto, J. T. (2006). The Underground History of American Education. Oxford Village Press. ISBN: 0945700040. https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_643 Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0945700040 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0945700040

Grabo, C. M. (2002). Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning. Center for Strategic Intelligence Research. ISBN: 0965619567 https://www.ni-u.edu/ni_press/pdf/Anticipating_Surprise_Analysis.pdf Retrieved 7th Sep. 2020.

Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon. ISBN: 0679720340. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0679720340 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0679720340 https://lccn.loc.gov/88042614

Lowenthal, M. M. (2020). Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy. CQ Press / SAGE Publications, 8th ed. ISBN: 978-1544358345. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-1544358345 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-1544358345 https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027254 Other editions available at: https://archive.org/search.php?query=Intelligence%3A%20From%20Secrets%20to%20Policy

Retraice (2020/09/07). Re1: Three Kinds of Intelligence. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re1 Retrieved 22nd Sep. 2020.

Retraice (2022/10/27). Re32: AI News. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re32 Retrieved 31st Oct. 2022.

Vallee, J. (1979). Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults. And/Or Press. ISBN: 0915904381. Different edition and searches: https://archive.org/details/MessengersOfDeceptionUFOContactsAndCultsJacquesValle1979/mode/2up https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0915904381 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0915904381 https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=0915904381

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 Cf. Retraice (2020/09/07) on `Secrets--Likely and Unlikely'.

^3 Vallee (1979) p. 66 ff.; Lowenthal (2020) p. 95, and chpt. 7, especially pp. 212-213.

^4 Grabo (2002) p. 119.

^5 Vallee (1979), `Major Murphy' p. 66 ff. And see Retraice (2020/09/07): "The question, then, is whether there's a difference between information that is expensive by accident (being on Mars) and information that is expensive on purpose (being camouflaged)."

^6 Gatto (2006).

^7 Most of his non-linguistic work suffers this problem; Herman & Chomsky (1988) is an example.

^8 Autodesk on BIM. See also Retraice (2022/10/27) notes.

(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)

Re35: Follow-ups to Re17, Re18, Re33

Retraice^1

Cool stuff that didn't make it into those segments.

Air date: Sunday, 30th Oct. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

Sources and depth added to `Re17: Hypotheses to Eleven'

We gathered sources and added to the descriptions of all the hypotheses, H1-H11. See the notes at Retraice (2022/03/07a).

The next step here is probably to do one hypothesis at a time. But we also have to consider what work needs doing.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with packthread, do. Else, if you would be a man, speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood. Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."^2

Getting high-minded about it here.

Betterment, simplified

We also added the promised simplification of `betterment': * reduction of violence, cruelty, suffering; * increase in control of environment; * increasing transmission of culture (education); * Now, cf. the `good model' from Re28, Retraice (2022/10/24).

All of these are fully sourced in the Re17 PDF notes.

`Objective observables' added to `Re18: Plan of Attack'

In trying to convert our vague, English-language hypotheses into forms more tractable, specific and objective, we define a term. We realize no one is asking for this.

Objective observables: things observable to the five senses, but not the sixth (the mind's eye, i.e. our thoughts and internal experience not observable to others, i.e. `subjective observables'). See Retraice (2022/03/07b) section `Definitions'.

`An area that you can do absolutely nothing about' (Re33)

Talking about `Outsiders, Power and Waste', I vaguely remembered^3 a relevant phrase I'd read, something like `there's nothing you can do'. It was this, from a difficult-to-trust UFO book:

Walker: Yes, I know of MJ-12. I have known of them for 40 years. I believe that you're chasing after and fighting with windmills!!

Steinman: Why do you say that?

Walker: You are delving into an area that you can do absolutely nothing about. So, why get involved with it or all concerned about it? Why don't you just leave it alone and drop it? Forget about it!!^4

This is also discussed in Retraice (2022/11/02).

_

References

Cameron, G., & Crain Jr., T. S. (2020). UFOs, Area 51, and Government Informants: A Report on Government Involvement in UFO Crash Retrievals. Independently published, Kindle, revised ed. ISBN: 9798556079717. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9798556079717 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9798556079717

Dolan, R. M. (2014). UFOs for the 21st Century Mind: A Fresh Guide to an Ancient Mystery. Richard Dolan Press. ISBN: 978-1495291609. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781495291609 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781495291609

Emerson, R. W. (1841). The Essay on Self-Reliance. Roycrofters, reprint 1908 ed. No ISBN. https://archive.org/details/selfrelianceessay00emerrich/page/n9/mode/2up Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=emerson+self+reliance https://www.google.com/search?q=emerson+self+reliance https://lccn.loc.gov/09000125

Retraice (2022/03/07a). Re17: Hypotheses to Eleven. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re17 Retrieved 17th Mar. 2022.

Retraice (2022/03/07b). Re18: Plan of Attack. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re18 Retrieved 25th Mar. 2022.

Retraice (2022/10/24). Re28: What's Good? RTFM. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re28 Retrieved 25th Oct. 2022.

Retraice (2022/11/02). Re38: Follow up to `Re33: Outsiders, Power and Waste'. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re38 Retrieval pending.

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 Emerson (1841) p. 23.

^3 The Jennifer Aniston neuron, aka grandmother cell.

^4 Cameron & Crain Jr. (2020) p. 30. Also quoted in Dolan (2014), pp. 185-186.

(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)

Re34: Opinions

Retraice^1

We involuntarily model hyperobjects and then yap about them.

Air date: Saturday, 29th Oct. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

We are not our opinions

And our opinions are not about what we say they're about. They're about glimpses of `somethings', and we make models of those somethings based on our glimpses. And those somethings are almost always hyperobjects. Our opinions are about hyperobjects. And our opinions keep changing, involuntarily, automatically, and we keep saying them out loud. But we are not our opinions.

The guy at the sandwich shop

The following happened today at a sandwich shop.

1. Customer A asks a server if he usually works alone. Yes, they only have two `real' employees. 2. Customer B, a manager himself, tells of his difficulties getting machinists, and how different that is nowadays, and how the CHIPS & Science^2 money is distorting the B2B market.

We can interpret this as a B&R (blue and red) politics issue, either politics is the cause, or politics is the effect. 3. Customer B seems to be expecting me to challenge his opinion.

Note: We shouldn't identify ourselves with our opinions, given that our opinions are so fluid and changing and perhaps involuntary, because it leads to defensiveness and over-reaction.^3 4. I ask `What about TSMC, China invading Taiwan?' 5. We talk past each other cordially, the end.

Opinions are about hyperobjects

Timothy Morton, professor of English at Rice University in Texas and writer on philosophy and ecology, defines hyperobjects as:

"products such as Styrofoam [sic] and plutonium that exist on almost unthinkable timescales. Like the strange stranger, these materials confound our limited, fixated, self-oriented frameworks."^4

And, alternatively:

"things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans."^5

There is a probably-related school of thought in philosophy called `object-oriented' ontology.

By a certain reading of these definitions, almost everything is a hyperobject. But certainly complex things such as economies, federal legislation and its unintended consequences, etc., can be seen as hyperobjects. Even atoms and molecules can be interpreted this way.

If more or less everything is a hyperobject, then we should be humbled by the various things about which we have opinions.

Munger's razor

What is an opinion? Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's lawyer and partner at Berkshire Hathaway, says they're an indirect check on `intense ideology' because we shouldn't have (or speak) an intense opinion until we've done some serious homework:

"I have what I call an `iron prescription' that helps me keep sane when I drift toward preferring one intense ideology over another. I feel that I'm not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I've reached that state. This sounds almost as extreme as the `iron prescription' Dean Acheson was fond of attributing to William the Silent of Orange, who roughly said, `It's not necessary to hope in order to persevere.' That probably is too tough for most people, although I hope it won't ever become too tough for me. My way of avoiding over-intensity in ideology is easier than Acheson's injunction and worth learning. This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is very, very important in life. If you want to end up wise, heavy ideology is very likely to prevent that outcome."^6

The world about which we're supposed to have opinions

Consider Walter Lippmann's assessment--in 1920!

The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding. What he knows of events that matter enormously to him, the purposes of governments, the aspirations of peoples, the struggle of classes, he knows at second, third, or fourth hand. He cannot go and see for himself. Even the things that are near to him have become too involved for his judgment. I know of no man, even among those who devote all of their time to watching public affairs, who can even pretend to keep track, at the same time, of his city government, his state government, Congress, the departments, the industrial situation, and the rest of the world. What men who make the study of politics a vocation cannot do, the man who has an hour a day for newspapers and talk cannot possibly hope to do. He must seize catchwords and headlines or nothing.

This vast elaboration of the subject-matter of politics is the root of the whole problem. News comes from a distance; it comes helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who must take what is given to them. Any lawyer with a sense of evidence knows how unreliable such information must necessarily be.^7

We are in touch^8 with too many hyperobjects, and our opinions have become garbage. Or perhaps we're aware of too many hyperobjects--too many for our current methods of thinking about them to handle. Does anyone even attempt, in B&R (blue and red) politics, to steel-man (as opposed to straw-man) the other side's position?

We're going to need a bigger boat.^9

_

References

Kaufman, P. D. (Ed.) (2008). Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. Donning, expanded third ed. ISBN: 978-1578645015. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781578645015 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781578645015 https://lccn.loc.gov/2021288404

Lippmann, W. (1920). Liberty and the News. Harcourt, Brace and Howe (Leopold Reprint). No ISBN. eBook and searches: https://books.google.com/books?id=Df-SzcLRcAIC Retrieved 24th Feb. 2022. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Liberty+and+the+News+Lippmann https://www.google.com/search?q=liberty+and+the+news+lippmann https://lccn.loc.gov/20004814

Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 978-0674049208. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780674049208 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780674049208 https://lccn.loc.gov/2009038804

Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Univ Of Minnesota Press. ISBN: 978-0816689231. https://archive.org/details/hyperobjects-philosophy-and-ecology/page/n7/mode/2up Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780816689231 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780816689231 https://lccn.loc.gov/2013028374

Retraice (2022/10/27). Re32: AI News. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re32 Retrieved 31st Oct. 2022.

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 Chips and Science Act, wikipedia.org.

^3 Who made this point? FIXME TODO FOLLOWUP

^4 Morton (2010) p. 19.

^5 Morton (2013) p. 8 (PDF).

^6 Kaufman (2008) p. 430.

^7 Lippmann (1920) pp. 37-38.

^8 See Retraice (2022/10/27) on information, especially Stuart Russell's explanation from Waking Up With Sam Harris #53 The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence. Nov. 23, 2016, from 0:07:06: " So there are many, many ways the world could be and information is just something that tells you a little bit more about what the world is, which way is the real world out of all the possibilities that it could be. And as you get more and more information about the world--typically we get it through our eyes and ears and increasingly we're getting it through the internet--then that information helps to narrow down the ways that the real world could be."

^9 Jaws allusion.