Positive Liberty

The giant linkdump I’ve been working on all week.

Braver Than I Am, Part I: Trey makes his own sauerkraut. And he’s contemplating kimchi. I love ‘em both. And yet… Well… I like cheese, too, but you won’t see me making that at home, either.

Braver Than I Am, Part II: I have no idea whether this will work. But if it does, will it take over the world? Meet RepRap — a self-replicating robot that designers tout as the beginning of the end of capitalism. But they’re no Marxists either:

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that, “By proletariat is meant the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.” This diagnosis is essentially correct; it is a commonplace that people with resources can quite easily use them to acquire more, but people without have to try exceptionally hard to get anywhere, and most of them never do. Marxism then goes on to say that the way to fix this problem is for the proletariat to seize the means of production by revolution, which is a good candidate for the all-time worst-idea in human history. Whenever it is applied the main things produced are corpses, and in the last hundred years the body count from this idea’s application was even worse than that from Nazism. So the Marxist prescription, unlike its diagnosis, is plain wrong. Its prognosis also turns out to be wrong - it predicted that the revolution would happen first in the most industrially-advanced nation (Britain at the time), whereas in practice Marxist revolutions tend to happen in countries making the transformation from an agrarian economy to an industrial one.

So Marx’s marks were 33% - not very good. But keep his correct diagnosis in mind, and read on.

In the mid twentieth century John von Neumann proposed a Universal Constructor - a machine that could copy itself. Since then a number of people have realised his idea, both in simulation, and physically. However, in the case of physical implementations, all current systems require a supply of very complicated and intricate building blocks. The purpose of this short web-page is to persuade you that there is one development in direct writing and rapid prototyping technology that is not only the most important, but that is more important than all the others put together. That development would be a direct writing or rapid prototyping machine that can make a copy of itself. I contend that this is the first useful version of von Neumann’s Universal Constructor that we can have.

…It would also be useful (though not initially essential) if the machine could grow itself by making appropriate components to extend its own movement axes, and could self-calibrate (possibly using an accurate reference object or a pattern of standard size) so that child machines would make products as accurately as their parent machine.

The three most important aspects of such a self-copying rapid-prototyping machine are that:

* 1. The number of them in existence and the wealth they produce can grow exponentially,

* 2. The machine becomes subject to evolution by artificial selection, and

* 3. The machine creates wealth with a minimal need for industrial manufacturing.

Interesting, I think, but economically not quite right. Sure, it would be great if the means of production simply manufactured itself. But while the number of self-replicating machines in existence may very well grow exponentially, the wealth that they represent will not. After all, how many self-replicating machines do you need — even if they do make useful products on the side? Would a self-replicating widget factory end up covering the planet with nothing but itself and widgets (managing in the process to spawn a catastrophe even greater than Marxism)? Even if it didn’t, there is no clear reason why a robot of this type would respond to economic stimuli to stop production. We may move very quickly from a situation of too little production to one of too much.

Braver Than I Am, Part III: Maryland Libertarian Bruce Godfrey changes his party affiliation and joins the Democrats:

In the end, I would rather be in the Democratic tent shouting “freedom” in a crowd than shouting it in the wilderness. So I now say, with a tear in one eye, but with a smile, “Hello, fellow Democrats.”

The problem is that it’s easy to shout “freedom” in a crowd of Democrats. It’s much harder to shout “capitalism.” Though I sure hope someone does.

AI and Ethics: A quick thought from one of the commenters at Terra Nova, the blog dedicated to virtual worlds:

Back in the 1980s, I was inspired by the rapid progression of Moore’s law and the heady predictions for the future of AI. I chose a career in Computer Science on the basis that it would be a privilege to be working with the promised Ultra Intelligent Machines in 20 years time. Well 20 years on we have machines with undreamed of speed and fantastic graphics but they are still incredibly stupid.

What went wrong? I think AI was never properly defined. If we want robots capable of interacting with human society, it would be quicker to start with humans and genetically engineer a slave race with diminished emotions and no ambitions of their own. Clearly unethical but it shows just how silly the whole idea is. What WE define as intelligence includes the ability to empathise with human beings, and to do this you need to be at least as sophisticated as a human being to begin with!

Southern Fried Fundamentalism: This chicken is a symbol of the oppression of the Muslims.

On Leaves of Gold The University of Chicago Press has responded to me (and to P Z Myers):

Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty took us to task, opining that “university presses … have certain responsibilities, including above all scientific rigor.” (Gosh, thanks for the reminder.) To his credit, though, he engaged with his critics and has perhaps gained a more complete sense of what rigor requires.

One of those critics was Michael Prescott, who posted a defense of the book on his self-named blog. Taking the other side of the issue is biologist P.Z. Myers, blogging on Pharyngula, who for some reason mixes in a discussion of bottled water with his shoot-from-the-hip criticism.

“Isn’t that sweet?” (Pats the skeptic on the head.) “Maybe youve learned something!”

Give me a break.

Really, I don’t feel that I’ve learned much at all. I knew what scientific rigor was before I went into this discussion. The only thing I may have learned is how quickly some people will throw it all aside in favor of oohing and aahing at the unexplained.

How the oohing and aahing is intellectually preferable to testing and explanation is beyond me, but apparently some people do prefer it. To me these people are nothing but pompous intellectual frauds. It always takes more brains and more courage to do genuine science than it does to gesture, vaguely and vacuously, at the limits of human knowledge.

If I still have the attention of the publishers, I have to say I remain disappointed that you would publish the excerpt that appeared on your site. It is still possible that something else in the book redeems it all, but I don’t think it’s likely. Katie the so-called gold leaf lady is nothing more than two-bit huckster, and one of your authors fell for her routine. This much is just bleedingly obvious, even going on the author’s own account of the situation.

Although he was physically present for many of Katie’s supposedly paranormal manifestations, a physical presence doesn’t count for much when you’ve turned off your brains and just started accepting that no known explanation could possibly fit the data. Braude’s marked disinterest in more rigorous testing shows that he is employing a shoddy scientific method. The presence of someone whose research standards are this low makes me less inclined to accept the given account, not more.

Sorry folks, but I still think you blew it bigtime on this one.

This is not to say… …that I never stand back and wonder, or that I think I have all of the answers in life. I have no idea, for instance, what this astrology-laden website is all about. Any suggestions?

Here’s one of the site’s bizarre word lists, and here is another. Oddly, the latter repeatedly references Charles Stross’s magnificent sci-fi epic Accelerando. The former wordlist turned up in a google search I did relating to philosophy (I was looking for Martin Heidigger’s “ontological suit,” referenced here).

There’s also a LiveJournal with similar material. Take a look around. It’s vast. And profoundly weird.

I also wonder if there isn’t some foul play involved:

The first mansion is for destruction and depopulation [of places], and is called Alnath. When the Moon has passed into this Mansion, fashion an image of a black man with his hair wrapped and bound in black cloth , standing upright on his feet and holding in his right hand a lance in the fashion of a fighter. You should make this image in a ring of iron, and cense it with liquid storax. And [make] with this a seal in black wax, and say: “Thou, O Geriz, put to death NN, son of NN, swiftly and soon; and destroy him.” And if you observe this [method], then it shall be as you wish. And know also that Geriz is the name of the lord of this Mansion

Some of it looks like cryptography, at least to my untrained eye (here and here). Could this be the web equivalent of a numbers station with the trappings of astrology? Or is it just an astrologer with the itch to post, but without much motivation to explain himself?

What on earth is this?

Trackback URI |