Week 32

[On ISIS] “This is about America’s national security,” said Ryan Crocker, who was ambassador to Iraq under Mr. Bush and to Afghanistan under Mr. Obama. “We don’t understand real evil, organized evil, very well. This is evil incarnate.

That they are

Question

Why is ISIS different from the theocracy in Iran?

Different waves

Iran is a second wave nation state, whereas ISIS follows peasant Islam. IOW with Iran you are watching 1984, with ISIS you are watching Game of Thrones (not sure if members of ISIS practice incest, but I wouldnt put it past them). We do support Iran's opening up to the world, its recent talks with the West, obviously.

Anonymous

Is US following a Shite-first policy now?

Maybe

Some make this argument; that after 9/11 US Integrators developed an anti-Sunni strategy, that's why the political capital gained during 9/11 (which would boost any President's numbers, and could have been used to invade any country) was used to invade Iraq. It was Saddam who was toppled -- a Sunni in a Shite majority country. Now there is rapprochement to Shite Iran whereas Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is gone, in Libya Kaddafi, another Sunni, is gone as well. On the other hand, Assad in Syria, an Alewite (a branch of Shite Islam) is still in place. Is there a pattern?

But looking at it on a case by case basis, the argument becomes weaker. Morsi was not opposed by any Western government really, it was Egyptian people who kicked him to the curb. In Syria, IMO US genuinely wanted Assad gone, the problem was US admin and other "neighboring" states in the region were too inept to execute on their wish, they could not support the right people in the right way, at the right time.

Anyway, the theory is interesting nevertheless, and we keep it in the back of our minds, so to speak.

Travis Kalanick (Uber CEO)

We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an asshole named Taxi.

Brrrrr

Aggressive.. Fine.. But what's up with this?

Question

If this new Quantum Mechanics explanation is proved right, does that mean ppl who followed it were idiots?

Certainly not

Feynman, von Neumann, hell no. They saw a representation that explained things, was easy to compute and went with it. They acted very utilitarian (most MBTI Rationals are). The only downside was the larger explanation became odd which would tick off an INTP like Einstein.

And it was odd. Instead of each electron going through one slit or the other depending on the main wave, they say "it goes through both, and makes up its mind later, about where it is, when measured". Huh? Nature likes conserving energy, and it likes simple.

Question

Why are Southerners in US are streotyped as slow?

Because farming is slow

An ice-hockey player friend once told me "You know what? Baseball is like watching grass grow". It was so true. Farming is similar, measured in weeks, months, not in minutes or seconds as our post-industrial world is measured in. This pace effects the rhythm of everything; starting from people who grow this stuff, to the communities that are built around them. So farmers aren't inherently slow. Their life is. Since US South had an agrarian culture, ppl are streotyped that way. The US Civil War between North and South took place between agrarian south and industrial north. Waves opposed eachother as they always do and the newer one came out on top.

Today, much of the US blue state / red state divide is along the same lines, big cities voted Democrat in 2012 election, rurals went Rep. Now Reps want to connect with the big cities.. etc. Not that Democrats have figured it all out, they still carry the baggage of the industrial left, statism, but culturally managed to say some stuff that resonated with these people. Tea Party in GOP carries some 3W elements.

Maybe someone will put it all together one day.

News

People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts.

Define "people"

What is the psychological make-up of the sample in MBTI terms? How many introverts, extroverts were in the sample, how many Ti, Fi, Si heavy types were in there? Such people would not have any problem thinking when alone (or feeling, remembering). This is bunch of mumbo jumbo.

Granted I'd be doing what I am doing now, w/ or wout basic income, but for all the society, with the prospect of machines displacing workers, and for increasing the quality of life (which will pay for itself in increased number of innovations IMO) a more iron-clad security net is needed. That can only be through cold hard cash.

"Google [CEO] Larry Page thinks we should all work fewer hours, and -- like most people -- I love the prospect.

"The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people's needs is just not true," Page said at a recent event organized by the venture-capital firm Khosla Ventures LLC. He was joining his voice to that of another business icon, Richard Branson, who has long championed part-time employment. What they propose, however, would require a complete overhaul of the way governments redistribute wealth: Having people work less would mean instituting some form of universal basic income [..].

Page believes in "giving people things to do" because they tend to be unhappy otherwise, but he is convinced that satisfying humanity's basic needs doesn't require everyone to work all the time [..].

A state-guaranteed universal basic income has been tried before, in experiments during the 1970s. They worked surprisingly well, although back then, neither robots nor China were much of a threat to jobs. Derek Hum and Wayne Simpson revisited the data from these experiments in 1993. They found that receiving a minimum income from the state only made American men reduce their working hours by 6 percent a year, compared with 19 percent for their wives and 15 percent for unmarried women. In Canada, reductions were even smaller: 1 percent, 3 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

At the same time, quality-of-life measures improved significantly. Evelyn Forget showed in 2008 that while a universal basic income experiment, called Mincome, ran in the Canadian town of Dauphin in 1975-1978, high school enrollment rates increased [doesnt really mean getting "an education" today, but it is a sign ppl had more bandwidth for the betterment of their children - at that point in time], accident and hospitalization rates dropped, and women started giving birth later in life because they could afford more schooling [..].

The idea is worth exploring, however, if only because it may prove more beneficial and possibly no costlier than current, cumbersome, fragmented, badly administered and nontransparent social security systems"

[Gaza] tragedy results from the deliberate obstruction of a promising move toward peace in the region, when a reconciliation agreement among the Palestinian factions was announced in April. This was a major concession by Hamas, in opening Gaza to joint control under a technocratic government that did not include any Hamas members. The new government also pledged to adopt the three basic principles demanded by the Middle East Quartet comprised of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia: nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and adherence to past agreements. Tragically, Israel rejected this opportunity for peace and has succeeded in preventing the new government's deployment in Gaza [..].

The international community's initial goal should be the full restoration of the free movement of people and goods to and from Gaza through Israel, Egypt, and the sea. Concurrently, the United States and EU should recognize that Hamas is not just a military but also a political force. Hamas cannot be wished away, nor will it cooperate in its own demise. Only by recognizing its legitimacy as a political actor -- one that represents a substantial portion of the Palestinian people -- can the West begin to provide the right incentives for Hamas to lay down its weapons. Ever since the internationally monitored 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power in Palestine, the West's approach has manifestly contributed to the opposite result.

#PatentoftheMonth

Electronic Frontier Foundation's newest patent campaign: the group will be announcing a "Stupid Patent of the Month." For August, the group has nominated US Patent No. 8,762,173, titled “Method and Apparatus for Indirect Medical Consultation.”

The patent issued in June, and it dates back to an original filing in 2007. A blog post by EFF lawyer Vera Ranieri, supplies a legalese-free description of just what the now-monopolized method is:

take a telephone call from patient
record patient info in a patient file
send patient information to a doctor, ask the doctor if she wants to talk to the patient
call the patient back and transfer the call to the doctor
record the call
add the recorded call to the patient file and send to doctor
do steps 1–6 with a computer

The original patent actually just had steps 1-6, and it was appropriately rejected. Then, step G was added, and the rejection went away.

Example: Let's imagine 100 doors, and for person X the odds of going from door to the next door is known. A to B=0.1, B to C=0.4, etc.. X keeps switching according to these probabilities (he has a 100 sided dice!). While at door B, he rolls the dice, and most likely he will get C because 0.4 is high, but it can be any of the other doors. So 100 doors, lots of possibilities. Wonderous! Dude! Where is my car???!!!

So let's say guy goes from door to door, and does this.. 10 times. Or 100.

What the hell: how about a billion times? Well, believe it or not, at infinity, dude's transitions stabilize to a certain set states [geek] a property of Markov matrices [/geek]. These can be calculated. Then, another person Y can stand next to the door with highest probability and at right at the time, when person X would come out, swings really hard, chances are high that he'll connect with X's nose and knock him out. [Geek] replace doors with Internet pages, this applied math calculation is PageRank, the stability point can be calculated by a simple eigenvector computation. This fact has been a big boon to Linear Algebra teachers all around the world, now during class they simply say 'what good are eigenvalues? Google uses them for search!' (and the sleeping kid in the back of the room shakes and wakes up and starts to listen) [/geek]. It is fascinating however with so many choices at each step (100 but that could be millions as well) and inifite many steps you get stability.

Dude!

C. Anderson, Free: "A few weekends ago it was time for my kids to choose how to spend the two hours of "screen time" they‘re allowed on Saturdays and Sundays. I suggested that it was a great day for Star Wars and gave them a choice. They could watch any of the six movies on magnificent DVD, on a huge hi-def projection screen with surround sound audio and popcorn. Or they could go on YouTube and watch Lego stop-motion animations of Star Wars scenes created by nine-year- olds. It was no contest—they raced for the computer. It turns out that my kids, and many like them, aren‘t really that interested in Star Wars as created by George Lucas. They‘re more interested in Star Wars as created by their peers, never mind the shaky cameras and fingers in the frame"

"Machine predicts heart attacks 4 hours before doctors... The researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm on data from 133,000 patients who visited the NorthShore University HealthSystem, a partnership of four Chicago hospitals, between 2006 and 2011. Doctors called a Code Blue 815 times. By looking at 72 parameters in patients' medical history including vital signs, age, blood glucose and platelet counts, the system was able to tell, sometimes from data from 4 hours before an event, whether a patient would have gone into arrest. It guessed correctly about two-thirds of the time, while a scorecard flagged just 30 per cent of events"

"Many people have lamented the unpredictability in the media environment occasioned by the arrival of digital devices and networks, but the slow implosion of newspapers has been widely and correctly predicted for some time now. Print ad revenues have fallen 65% in a decade, 2013 saw the lowest ever recorded, and 2014 will be worse [..] The next wave of consolidation is already upon us; big media firms like Tribune and Gannett are abandoning their newspapers (“spinning them off”, in bloodless business parlance.) [..]Journalists have been infantilized throughout the last decade, kept in a state of relative ignorance about the firms that employ them. A friend tells a story of reporters being asked the paid print circulation of their own publication. Their guesses ranged from 150,000 to 300,000; the actual figure was 35,000 [..]

This cluelessness is not by accident; the people who understand the state of the business often hide that knowledge from the workers. My friend Jay Rosen writes about the media’s “production of innocence” — when covering a contentious issue, they must signal to the readers “We have no idea who’s right.” Among the small pool of journalists reporting on their own industry, there is a related task, the production of ignorance. When the press writes about the current dislocations, they must insist that no one knows what will happen. This pattern shows up whenever the media covers itself. When the Tribune Company recently got rid of their newspapers, the New York Times ran the story under a headline “The Tribune Company’s publishing unit is being spun off, as the future of print remains unclear.”The future of print remains what? Try to imagine a world where the future of print is unclear: Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide “Click to buy” is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.Meanwhile, back in the treasurer’s office, have a look at this chart. Do you see anything unclear about the trend line?"

It is

Isis represents peasant Islam, they are squarely in 1st the Wave. Peasant Islam, just like peasant Christianity or peasant Buddism is nothing to brag at home about. Agrarian societies have a large number of population living off the land, and also have another group who make their living by taxing or plundering food and other items from them. Entire countries, empires were built around these principles - Rome, Ottoman Empire being one of the noteable barbaric examples. They are parasites living off the produce of others.

Farming communities themselves have a slow way of life, in proximity to few other people, closed off from the much of the world, hence they are bigoted, averse to change and are backward as phuck.

Isis belongs to that world. And looking their recent behaviour they are also an organization who need to be .. dealt with. It is unfathomable to me how after their taking of Musul neighboring countries and regional governments sat on their ass and did nothing.

"Isis is an archaic organization"

He was simply an industrial worker

.. who are by definition banal. In that sense Eichmann, even though a bureucrat, was no different from any industrial worker on an assembly line in United States, Russia or Britain. On an assembly line a part comes in, the worker screws in that one screw at the same spot with the same tool, over and over again. The job has been simplified, made "banal" to take all forms of thinking out of it. Work, education, health were all organized around the same principles. The step you can take from mass production, mass consumption to mass destruction is simply a change of focus, not a change of character. One-size-fits all approach can bring society standardized paper cups, but it also brings state nationalism. That is the system the man lived in. If he didnt do what he did, others who could would be found.

Author: "After people saw what a normal person Eichmann was "the banality of evil" concept was formed"

Because they are 3rd Wave minded technologists who must think

.. and as a side effect of that thinking, you develop a conscience, and these people, in greater numbers are pushed into action. High levels of strategy is not too different from morality -- even though a lot of MBTI Idealists have an hard time accepting this. Doing the optimal "smart thing" in the long run is also the nice and "correct" thing to do.

Nowadays 3rd Wave workers, product managers, programmers, marketers, investors constantly use their head, process information, strategize in numbers previously unseen in the world. Information, by its very nature, is egalitarian, and processing, using, utilizing it requires people who arent banal or idiots. These people will not tolerate things that are out-of-place, unfair - opposite of a good strategy

Anonymous: "Why are whistle-blowers like Snowden are increasing in numbers?"

He finally did it!

Aha. Aha. Aha. Aha.

We blogged about GDELT before. This is awesome news. Hats off to Google.

Another post about more details of technology. Anyone with Google Cloud account can try this out (free to sign-up). I just did and ran this query:

SELECT count(1) FROM [gdelt-bq:full.events]

Received result

266301241

Cool.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "I'm amazed at just how much objection genetically modified foods are receiving.

It smacks of the fear factor that exists at every new emergent science, where people don't fully understand it or don't fully know or embrace its consequences and are therefore rejecting it. What most people don't know, but should, is that practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified food.

There are no wild seedless watermelons; there's no wild cows…You list all the fruit, and all the vegetables, and ask yourself: “Is there a wild counterpart to this?” If there is, it's not as large, it's not as sweet, it's not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it. [..]

We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It's called artificial selection. That's how we genetically modify them. So now that we can do it in a lab, all of a sudden you're going to complain?

We are creating and modifying the biology of the world to serve our needs. I don't have a problem with that, because we've been doing that for tens of thousands of years. So chill out,’ he said"

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