In-Sight Publishing

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 537 – Hydroxychloroquine

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/17

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is Hydroxychloroquine?

Rick Rosner: Hydroxychloroquine and another drug, which is just chloroquine, are two different drugs. Hyodroxy has some Oxygen and Hydrogen molecule attached to it or something. These drugs have promoted in combination as potential miracle cures for coronavirus by people who don’t know a lot about science, including Trump.

If you catch a grasshopper or a skunk or any number of animals, they will spit out a noxious substance to try to get away from you. That’s pretty much Trump. To avoid being found culpable in fucking up the coronavirus response, he throws out all sorts of shit to distract, including this chloroquine thing as a miracle cure to make it better for everybody.

First off, it is much harder to have a miracle cure for a virus than for a bacterium. Because viruses are pretty much not alive. They are little mechanisms that shoot snippets or strips of genetic material into cells.

The genetic material tells cells to make more of the virus. The viruses don’t live. They don’t breathe. They don’t shit. Most of the things that living things do, viruses don’t. Bacteria are alive. There are more ways to fuck up a bacterium to kill it fucking dead.

When a bacterium is dead, I don’t think it is able to reproduce and infect. You’re too young for this. When I was a kid, when you got strep throat, you go to the doctor. The doctor would fill a syringe with penicillin and shoot this in your butt. The strep would be dead in 12 hours, the bacteria.

With viruses, since they are not alive, you can’t kill them. It is harder to make them non-infectious. The chloroquine helps block the immune response. Because the coronavirus, in the many ways in it kills you, is it makes you drown. It is partly an immune response or immune over-response.

So, there’s no miracle cure. At best, you might have a spectrum of anti-virals that, maybe, decrease the fatality rate by half. Nobody knows what the fatality rate is for coronavirus anyway because it is so new and so many different circumstances and demographics.

But it is most likely that the chloroquine or the hydroxychloroquine and some other stuff in combination will reduce the fatality rate. The idea of a miracle cure is bullshitty. It is easy to declare that it is a miracle cure if you work with a small sample set of patients.

Because the fatality rate for coronavirus is anywhere from 1% to 5%, which idiots on conservative TV have been arguing: A fatality of 2% makes it worth it to open up the country because you’re only going to lose 2% of the infected population, and you’re going to save the economy.

It is a terrible argument. Because if 10% of America gets infected, and that’s 33,000,000, then 2% dying is as many dying as our deadliest event in the Civil War, which was over a 4 year period. This was over a 6-, 8- or 10-month period.

The devastation from 2,000,000 dead would be equal to the economic devastation of keeping th country locked down. So, it’s a bad argument. But if you’re testing 10 people on some ‘miracle’ cure, the expected death rate is 2% of 10 people, which is 0.2 people.

4 times out of 5 with a 2% death rate; your ‘miracle’ cure will result in zero people dead, even if your drug doesn’t do anything. It is stupid math. It will probably turn out to be somewhat helpful like a dozen other drugs being deployed against coronavirus.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 536 – Is Trump Trying?

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If the President of the United States was trying, would he still be in over his head?

Rick Rosner: Yes, he is bad at learning things. The best thing he could do is throw up his hands and say, “Look, I am not going to have anything to with this thing anymore. Even that is not doable, because he doesn’t have a bunch of competent people around him,” Fauci is competent.

If he said to Fauci, “I am appointing you as czar of all this shit. You have authority over anybody else in the nation when it comes to this stuff.” Then, maybe. But that’s not what is happening.

Jacobsen: Do you think America has the resolve to build something like a Manhattan Project for bacteria and viruses that are currently known lethal to human beings like Covid-19 or potentially on 2,000 years of recorded history and medical history done?

Rosner: Not now, not with the current leadership, I think with this disease and its killing and its affect on the stock market and economy. If all of that means Trump doesn’t get re-elected and the Republicans don’t control the Senate, I think there’ll be some national resolve to do something to make sure something like this won’t happen again.

How long that resolve lasts and if it is enough to overcome Republican obstruction? I don’t know. Because if you look at 2009 with Obama coming in with a mandate to fix the country in the middle of a recession, even then, there was only a short period of time where democrats had enough control to get anything done.

Where democrats for a lot of stuff in the Senate, you need a supermajority to get stuff passed. It took nearly a year to get Al Franken seated because there were counts and recounts with the vote so close.

It was only from when Franken was seated until the elections two years later that democrats had an effective supermajority. They spent most of that time on getting healthcare passed. We won’t get a supermajority in the Senate this time. The numbers aren’t good. We will be lucky to get a majority in the Senate, and the presidency.

Then there will be a will to do a Manhattan Project type thing to get things moving on it. I was reading an article on how the CDC used to have 47 people working in China to monitor what was happening there to be helpful if shit happens because a lot of stuff happens with diseases because of their wet market.

Trump fired 70% of those people bringing the CDC down from 47 to 14. China tried to sit on it for a few weeks. Had we had more people in China, we may have found out about it and done something about it sooner if we had willing politicians.

All of that personnel and staff infrastructure will have to be reconstituted after Trump if we’re lucky enough to have 2021 to be after Trump. Plus, by the time the next presidential administration begins, we may not be done with it.

We were not done with Swine Flu. Even though, it wasn’t very killy, for a year and a half.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 535 – Denialistic Shit

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What could happen? There may be half of a million deaths between mid-June and mid-September.

Rick Rosner: It may happen. We may get lucky. The disease may get less virulent and less easily spread in the Summer. Some viruses aren’t as effective as spreading in warm weather. We may get a little miracle there.

Or a number of competent leaders below the national level may arise and educate each other and share resources, even in the absence of competent national leadership or national leadership may just somehow go around Trump and start doing what needs to be done and ignore him.

Some news stations – CNN, NBC – already decided not to carry most of his daily brief conferences because what he says is dangerous, not accurate, or both.

Jacobsen: How is the Christian Right taking advantage of this? Their mass radio shows and followings, etc.

Rosner: People like Jim Bakker have been taking advantage of it. For the last 40 years(!) has been selling bullshit products, he has been told by some agency. It is against the law to sell the shit he is selling and saying that stuff about that he is selling.

Others say to give them money and they will pray you to safety. Jerry Falwell, Jr.’s Liberty University said people can go back to class. So, there might be some temporary political advantage, but it’s reasonable to think that they’ll get their asses kicked eventually as people get sick from the shit in numbers that are too big for people to ignore them for political reasons.

I don’t know what those numbers have to be because the numbers aren’t big enough, yet. Conservatives rightwing lunatics are still saying all sorts of denialistic shit. Everybody should go back to work. It’s better for a few people to die than for the economy to die.

They spread conspiracy theories about where the virus comes from and who it is targeted at. Eventually, if it gets bad enough, people will listen to regular news, even those who do not listen to the news and trust it – out of desperation to save themselves and their families.

I don’t know how bad it’ll have to get.

Jacobsen: I think New York will be the first test case.

Rosner: Yes, but New York is a fairly big state. By acreage, most of New York is conservative, but still it’s not southern conservative. Florida is going to be your test case where the infections are going to go crazy and the governor is shitty.

We will see what it is like with a failed state shitty response.

Jacobsen: How many countries could become failed states because of this?

Rosner: You already have failed states before this like Libya. I don’t know how many failed states there are in the world now, e.g., Eritrea, Somalia, parts of Congo, etc. I don’t know. There are parts of Africa where we are not getting any information because there aren’t any agencies to share any information.

So, I don’t know. You probably have at least 8 states or nation that are already failed states already. Figure that some of the failed states border states that are nearly failed states. Some whole regions are just a complete mess.

For every failed state that we have now, an adjacent state will be tipped into somewhat failedness, maybe 12, 15, 16, failed states by the time this is over. I don’t know that a state that fails because of this is as dangerous to the rest of the world as a failed state where there is genocide, or whether a state that is rife with the virus is more dangerous than one that is genocidal.

I think there will be failed states. The national guard may have to go in there. Although, I don’t know exactly that will work because we have a very incompetent national government, where Trump is interested in covering his ass and Trump may not send.

He has already implied threats or is threatening that he will not give you the shit you need in your state to address the virus if doesn’t like you. We are already seeing underreporting. There continues to be a shortage of tests. It is getting better.

We still have less than one quarter the number of tests per capita as South Korea. Even testing at the same proportion as South Korea won’t do it, they tested like crazy and contained it. Even people who die, they aren’t necessarily being added to the death rolls because even in death they don’t get tested.

Then their deaths are attributed to pneumonia. Nobody has the time or the resources to test them.

Jacobsen: There could be an easy solution there. People could tally the average trendline before this and then subtract between 2020 and 2021.

Rosner: Right, Trump is not going to embrace them. He wants them to be as low as possible.

Jacobsen: Do you think he’s in over his head?

Rosner: Even before his presidency, nobody made any money investing in Trump. He’s never really made money from competence. He’s always been a huckster and a bullshit artist and somebody who skips out on debts via lawsuits, defaulting on loans, and getting new loans to pay for the loans he defaulted on.

He’s never been good at anything legitimate. He’s always been a blowhardy dipshit with only a certain craven interestingness that got him the TV gig. So, he’s been in over his head, as a businessman, as an entrepreneur, and then as president. He’s never been president. He’s uncurious.

He’s got a short attention span. He’s unwilling to learn. He goes with his gut. He goes for things that bring him money or status at the expense of other people. He has none of the qualities that he would need to address the current situation.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 534 – Obviously, Fatally Stupid

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How many people will die? Is it possible for 100,000,000 people to cease living based on current numbers?

Rick Rosner: 100,000,000 people aren’t going to die. It is still early enough in the history of the disease. We don’t know the mortality of the disease. 2% is a reasonable guess. For 100,000,000 to die, it would mean 5,000,000,000 would need to get it.

I think even the most pessimistic views of the virus don’t have 60% of the world getting it. Looking back on the 20^th century, the unit measurement of all the really bad shit that happened is 10,000,000. WWI killed 20,000,000. Spanish Flu 20,000,000 to 30,000,00; WWII at 30,000,000 to 40,000,000. Mao killed 50,000,000 Chinese. Stalin killed 40,000,000 of his own people.

If this gets reasonably out of control, then it could take out those kinds of numbers, which would mean 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 death. It could become a catastrophe on the scale of the huge catastrophes of the 20^th century.

We don’t know what happens in countries where they don’t get an immediate handle on it, e.g., the US. Where, we have 65,000 cases so far. We’re in the realm of 13,000 to 15,000 cases a day with it double every six or seven days.

So, it is hard to know whether we’ll get a handle on it before it affects a significant percent of the population. If it hits 10% of the US population, it gives you 33,000,000 cases times 2%, which gives you 600,000 dead.

That’s probably a little pessimistic. We may be able to get out of this with 200,000 dead. It is hard to know what fraction of the world’s population belongs to… we know that 1.5 billion people roughly live in countries that can get a handle on it.

China has 1.4 billion and they can apparently get a handle on it, plus some incidental countries, which can get a handle on it. The remaining 6 billion on Earth. We don’t know how many can get a handle on it before complete capitulation and herd immunity after a shitload of people already having it.

Let’s say 3,000,000,000 people in countries that will get a handle on it, and 10% of everybody get it, so 300,000,000 people get it times 2%, gives you 6,000,000 dead in those countries. Then you’ve got another 3,000,000,000 living in countries that will completely botch it.

Where 1/3^rd of everybody will get it, it means 1,000,000,000 people getting it, means 20,000,000 dead, which, added to people from other countries that half stopped it, gives you around 25,000,000 dead.

So, I guess, that’s my estimate, but it can be off by a factor of 3 on the high side and 10 on the low side. We might get lucky and only a couple of million people die worldwide, which seems unlikely.

In that, I think the Swine Flu killed roughly 570,000 people worldwide. And it was a very unkilly flu killing only like 1/40^th of 1% of everybody who got it. So, a reasonable estimate will be that when this thing finally subsides/has a vaccine a year to 15 months from now; it’s not unreasonable to think 10,000,000 people, at least, will be killed by it, putting it on the scale of the middling mass killer diseases of history.

Jacobsen: If we look at the United States case, it’ll start with big cities, metropolitan centers like New York. What do you think will be the case when the coastlines are infused and then it enters the center of America?

Rosner: California is fairly good shape because the governor and mayor of Los Angeles, and the mayors of the other big cities, have asked everybody to shelter in place. So, the number of cases coming out California right now is not a terrible number. So, California may get away with 1% of the population getting it.

That’s probably overly optimistic. California has only 40,000,000 people. Let’s say a little less than 1% of the population gets it before a vaccination comes along because we manage to avoid infecting people at a huge rate, say 900,000 in California plus 2% mortality or less.

It would be 1.5% times 900,000 or 13,500 people, which is still a lot of people. New York City is not necessarily the size of the cities in the various states. The very biggest cities will get hit the worst. It might be the dumbness of the leaders like Florida governor Ron DeSantis still doesn’t want people to shelter in place.

Even though, Florida might be the most infected state besides New York, except for early spikes in temperature. There are a lot of people in Florida running fevers now. New Orleans is a fucking mess generating cases per capita at the highest rate, maybe in the world or in America, because Mardi Gras meant mass infection.

The Civil War starts – Alabama, Missouri, Mississippi – have these redneck dumbshit governors who don’t think bad things will happen to them. Ditto with Texas. One of the governors, was Mississippi, some local city councils ordered their populations to shelter in place like Tupelo, Mississippi.

Not a huge town, maybe 200,000, I don’t know, but the fucking governor passed an edict or issued an edict that says, ‘Individuals cities aren’t allowed to tell their citizens to shelter in place, stay at home.’

So, people in Tupelo, where the governor overruled, are forcing people to go back to work. It is obviously, fatally stupid. Places like that may have outbreaks in middling population cities and smaller towns because their leaders have convinced them deep in Trump land that a) they arenot going to get it and b) the economy is more important than a few cases, and c) it won’t be so bad if they get it.

The US with its population of 330,000,000 in 50 states is like a bunch of little countries in the way that people are approaching the disease. So, it’s hard to say how it is going to play out. It could be that states where it goes wild, e.g., Florida, may have people fleeing to nearby states just to get a hospital bed because beds are going to overflow.

According to some estimates, by June, up to 15 people who need a bed for every bed available, people will hop in cars and make sweaty, barely able to breathe, drives up to Georgia and up to Alabama.

Anyway, people will flee centers of infection and invade states that have lesser levels of infection. It is going to be grim in many places. You’re lucky enough to live pretty far inland and, maybe, enough North of America that you won’t get too badly invaded. I live on the California coast, which gives us a 200 mile, 300 mile, buffer between us and, maybe, some stupider states.

Nevada may close down all the casinos. I don’t know what they do. Maybe, they are being reasonable, maybe Arizona. Their government is Republican. I don’t know how stupid they’re being. North of us is Oregon, which is, I think, democratic governance.

So, they probably have somewhat of a handle on it. I’m hoping that we won’t get invaded by states that have been sloppier with their handling of this. But there will be states in the South where shit gets ugly.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 533 – “Eh”

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/02/07

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, there’s a phenomenon of Sōshoku(-kei) danshi in Japan, bamboccioni in Italy. These are basically shut-ins…

Rick Rosner: You mentioned a place up near you, which is a retirement community. I do not consider myself a retired person. I am considering starting to take my pensions. A place with a lot of people my age and older doesn’t matter because I don’t really need young women to stare at.

Jacobsen: Also, a) you have a daughter to set an example for, b) Carole would not like that, and c), you’re a decent person.

Rosner: My daughter is 6,000 miles away.

Jacobsen: You are semi-famous and talk about these things.

Rosner: Yes, also, when I’m out at the gym, Carole doesn’t see what butts I look at. In general, I don’t look at butts. Unless, they are just ridiculous because it is creepy. I can go home and look at butts on the internet.

Jacobsen: That’s more of a guys’ problem than a women’s problem.

Rosner: Yes, guys are more visual and also more sexually harass-y. I would also make the claim…

Jacobsen: …It may be down to socio-emotional deficits in men…

Rosner: …Guys consider themselves hornier than women. There may be some biological substantiation for that. But guys are more likely to engage in sexually stimulating behaviour, including looking at butts, in their daily lives than women.

Jacobsen: Even if the women do, in my observations, they tend to be more subtle about it.

Rosner: In my experience, not beating off to the internet, it is not an older guy thing. It is old school. All of the famous MeToo rapists, or almost all of the most famous ones, e.g., Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump – not all rapists but sexual assaulter/abuser. Louis CK can be there too.

Not a lot of young guys there, a lot of reasonable young guys – and it won’t ever go away entirely, obviously – and women have more social pressure. There’ll be more self-policing and people calling it out.

But I think reasonable horny younger men will decide to take care of it by looking at porno on the internet. There’s some indication, though not entirely clear, that sex in general or between people is in decline in a demographic compared to decades ago, say teenagers.

I think that reasonable people have a cornucopia of porn to use. Adam Carolla comments on this being a new thing. He said his grandpa had to just lie on his back and wait for sexy shaped clouds to drop by.

So, anyway, I can move to a place where people are in their 60s and 70s.

Jacobsen: And say, “Eh.”

Rosner: I will gladly embrace a place where people say, “Eh.” I will love all of that. Even if I have to double up on my statin drugs, I will become an eager eater of poutine.

Jacobsen: There’s a colleague of mine from the UK. We discovered the stereotype of British people is a cockney English, “Ello Govna.” For Canada, we found it is a little like New Foundland or a Newfie accent.

It is kind of like Iceland to Europe. Many Europeans see them as out there, autonomous, and weird.

Rosner: We had a clip when I worked on a clipped show. It was a clip of a beached whale that you tried to blow it up to render it into smaller chunks to deal with it. Then there was this only whaler who grizzled and said, “We’re going to blow up the whale.”

Another was Pepperidge Farms old guy with a raspy voice, “Pepperidge Farm remembers.” It is a kind of older, raspy-voiced guy. Maybe, a cranberry farmer meeting a lobster farmer.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 532 – State of the World: Husband of Sexy Borg Lady

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/31

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why do we get to live in such a good time? Ironically, there’s climate change, nuclear catastrophe, etc. Non-ironically, technology, science, knowledge of the world, health, wealth, and happiness at good rates.

Rick Rosner: There’s a form of demographic inference. It’s a very weak form of inference. That says, “You’re most likely living at the most populace time in human history.” That is, if you’re going to roll the dice or throw or dart, or whatever, you’re a human and up in heaven and about to be sent down into a human body.

Probabilistically, where would you end up? You’d end up, probably, at the most populace time in human history because that’s where more people are. There are more people alive today. You can infer there would be fewer people alive in the future. It is a dumb, weak ass argument.

To put it in more reasonable terms, we’re living at the end of the world. We got so lucky because humans’ dominion over technology and the planet has led to a huge population explosion. So, it’s very likely that among all the times that we can live; we are living in a time that there are 8 billion humans than 20,000 years ago when there ere 50,000 humans.

So, we’re lucky and unlucky enough to be living in a time when technological domination has made it possible for there to be so many humans. In fact, the number of humans in a century or two will decline not quite precipitously, but steadily as the beings of the future decide to make themselves into beings that aren’t really quite human anymore.

They’ll be augmented. The people of the future will live in ways… we’ve been living the same way for thousands of years. We come together in agriculture, in communities. We form pair bonds for economic benefit and to raise children.

We live human lives. The people of the future will live lives that are radically difference than the lives we’re living. This is one of the last times on Earth when all humans are living human lives. As opposed to 100 years from now, hundreds of millions and billions will be living in what are now being called post-human lives.

Post-human comes from the same lexicon as Singularity – post-human, trans-human. If you wanted a less high-falootin’ term, then you could go with “augmented human.” Because all technology, by the time it trickles down to people, has been commercialized.

It has lost its purity. So, post-human, transhuman is a little too grandiose, but augmented human. I am writing a novel of the near future right now. Not to give too much away, but a product of the near future is little cellphone like things that ride you instead of having it in hand; the thing takes responsibility for being attached to you.

It is able to crawl. There’s another version of Star Trek that comes out soon. The Borg is back. Without ever having watched whatever version of Star Trek had the Borg, they were evil augmented humans who took over human beings.

There’s one sexy Borg in one of them. We’re going to start looking like that. The Borg in Star Trek have circuit boards glued to their foreheads. We don’t look exactly like that. Sexy Borg lady helped make Obama president.

It was an actress named Jerry Ryan. She was married to a scumbag Republican politician in the state of Illinois. They got divorced for, among other reason, wanting to have sex in public with his wife. He had this hot wife and wanted to engage in pervy shit with her.

He wanted to go to night clubs and fuck her right there in the middle of the night clubs. He was running for senator or some shit, or something. He was running in an election where one of the candidates would eventually be Obama. I don’t now if it was for state office or for a national office.

This shit came out. Why he got divorced, he wanted to have sex in public with sexy Borg actress. This came out right before the election. He had to dropout. Obama won the election because pervy husband of Borg lady.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 531 – Idealism and Not-So Idealism: Mobilize and Manipulate

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/31

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the political situation today?

Rick Rosner: We used to think we were fighting wars to make the world safe for democracy, WWI. WWII was fought to fight against fascism. We had the Greatest Generation. Now, you have conservative organizations led by Fox News who are telling people for many hours every day that being a good brave American means being kind of a motherfucker.

Jacobsen: When does this switch from idealistic stuff to not-so idealistic stuff?

Rosner: In the 70s and 80s, conservative thinktanks, one that comes to mind is the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, supported by super-rich ultra-conservatives, like the Koch brothers, came to realize based on research that dumb people are an exploitable and mobilizable and manipulatable demographic.

One offshoot of this was the creation of Fox News. I don’t know if Rupert Murdoch saw the studies or it happens to coincide with his political beliefs. But Fox News probably celebrated its 30^th anniversary or so recently.

Reagan appalled people, non-conservatives at the time. But he was the charming less scary wedge of the new style of conservatism that distrusts government and wants to break government and wants to get people to vote out of anger for people who will further fuck up government.

It is hard to say whether the country can be salvaged and how long it will take the country to be salvaged from the current crop of awful Republican politicians. People have been predicting that the Republicans for decades. They have been predicting it.

Right now, Republicans are only about 28% of the voting population, so are democrats and independents are in the 40s. But there are trends against the Republicans. They are an aging population. The older you are, the more likely you are Republican.

There should be a Republican die-off. They tend to be white. As the Republicans become less white, all this should shrink the party. Also, there should be increasing number of Republicans who are more brutal in their attacks with voter suppression.

Back in 2016, they denied the democratic president, not even allowing him to nominate or hold hearings into voting on the Supreme Court. So, they stole a Supreme Court justice. It is hard to know whether American will get increasingly – the easier term for it is – fascist.

Everybody continues to live lives that are similar to the lives they lived under Obama. We don’t have to fear being arrested for our tweets. But there are whiffs of this all over the place. And there are aspects of life not necessarily unassociated with and not necessarily associated with current terrible politics like the opioid crisis.

Pharmaceutical companies have been allowed to overprescribe opioids for a decade. We have more people dying of opioid overdoses at any time before in history. For three years, the average life expectancy in America dropped for the first time in history.

That was due in great part to the opioid crisis and also to the obesity epidemic. You can’t blame Republicans for all of that. At the same time, it is part of the zeitgeist. You’ve got angry and scared – economic uncertainty is the phrase. It is the phrase used by pundits who want to excuse the behaviour.

They’re afraid that they’ll have enough money to retire. Uncertainty is a euphemism for not wanting immigrants to come in and other stuff.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 530 – The Political Contexts of Impeachment

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/12/20

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the political situation today?

Rick Rosner: What is going on in America, it is weird to me; that you don’t know everything going on in America since you touch America along a 3,000-mile border. The deal with impeachment is it is being conducted gingerly.

The democrats’ idea, what they’re trying to do, is to make everybody aware of how criminal and his associates are without making people who’ve liked Trump even more committed to Trump. The model that they want to follow is the Nixon model.

As more and more information came out about Nixon’s badness, Nixon lost followers. What they don’t want is the Clinton model, where Clinton was impeached for lying about blowjobs from his intern, people who liked Clinton or people who were democrats thought the process was such bullshit that a guy would be impeached for saying that he didn’t have sex when he got a few BJs.

They though the Republicans were over-reaching themselves. They probably felt a lot of sympathy for Monica Lewinsky who was fucked by who she thought was her friend, Linda Tripp, who seemed gross and vindictive, ugly inside and out.

Linda Tripp is the one who found the dress with the jizz on it and was the one to rat to Ken Starr who’d been after the Clintons for years. The thing he finally found was the blowjobs and the lying about the blowjobs.

The whole thing seemed so unfair to more than half the country that Clinton was even more popular after he was impeached. They voted him not guilty in the Senate. The democrats don’t want Trump to become more popular because people feel like he is being persecuted.

It is tricky. Because the Republicans now have a tame news media. In Nixon’s time and even somewhat in Clinton’s time, there was Fox New just being born while Clinton was president. It wasn’t as big or as insidious as it is now.

The conservative news media now continually pump out misinformation. So if you only listen o conservative news media, you can get a fairly consistent narrative that is not true but hangs together. It says everyone but this brave crusader, this shaker-upper, this swamp-drainer, Trump is corrupt.

Trump is the hero of all this and is being unfairly persecuted. What everybody agree will happen is even given the huge criminality of what Trump did, which is trying to extort stuff from the Ukrainians to fuck over Joe Biden, Trump thinks is likely to be his opponent in the election.

It is entirely criminal and worse than what Nixon did. But that doesn’t matter. Once the House votes to impeach Trump and there is a trial in the Senate, the Senate with a Republican majority will vote to not find Trump guilty.

Also, you need a 2/3rds vote for impeachment. You need 67 senators out of 100 to vote Trump guilty on at least one article of impeachment. People think it will be, at least, 2 or 3. But that there are 47 democratic senators, which means they’ll need 20 Republican senators voting to impeach Trump.

People think that is an impossibility. The fear is: everybody agrees on both sides; Trump will survive an impeachment vote. But what people don’t know or people disagree about and what can’t be anticipated, whether the impeachment trial will Trump more popular or less popular, although, my guess would be that his approval ratings will probably stay where they have been for the entire three years of his presidency, except for the very first week.

The very first week, we almost reached 50% approval. For the past almost 3 years, he’s been in the high 30s or low 30s. His approval rating has been the steadiest among presidents since they starting polling for approval.

His approval at the beginning of the impeachment process dropped by roughly 1% from 42% to 41%. Since then, they’ve had two weeks of hearings. It has crept back up to 41.9%. While approval for impeachment, a majority of Americans disapproved for the past year.

In the past three months, approval of impeachment climbed over 50%. In the past 2 weeks, it dropped to about 47%. It is less than a percent ahead of people who disapprove of impeachment. So, that’s what is going on.

Everybody on the left says Trump approval is a cult because people love him. The people who love him, love him regardless of what he does. It seems to be increasingly true as his people are increasingly desperate and shitty. It doesn’t matter.

My hope is, to wrap this up, that even if his approval stays steady; that it won’t be enough for him to get re-elected. That the 47% or 48% of people who are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in the first week of his presidency, and then the percentage dropped to 41%.

I am hoping that losing the 7% of the people and the 15% of Trump voters who are now disgusted with him are now enough to make it so he doesn’t get re-elected. Even if that is so, the Republicans will fuck with the mechanics of our voting, even more than they did in 2016.

Everybody, our intelligence agencies know it, but the Republicans control the Senate. They have refused to do anything to protect us against Russian election interference. So, the fighting of the interference has to go on at the state level.

Then there are some states that welcome it. I believe that if votes were counted fairly; that Trump will not be re-elected, but votes may not be counted fairly.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 529 – Time for Bid: Bidding, Betting

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/11/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you’re trying to buy stuff other people want, how can you do it? What should you expect?

Rick Rosner: I think it is crazy, if you don’t know what to expect, to not come up with the highest amount that you’re willing to pay while punching that price in with 4 seconds to go before bidding ends.

The way eBay and other auction site works: If nobody gets close to the amount you’re willing to pay, then you only pay a little more than the price anybody else is willing to pay. Let’s say you’re willing to pay 60 bucks for something.

So, you punch 60 bucks 4 minutes before the auction ends. The strategy being that you don’t want people to have time to get in there and enter new bids to drive the price up. You want to come up with your highest possible price and hope people don’t come in.

Say the highest bid with 4 seconds to go is someone bidding 24 bucks, you enter 70 bucks. The minimum bid increment is a buck. If nobody else punches in a bid, you’re not paying 70 bucks. You’re paying 24 bucks plus the increment or the buck increase, so much less than you were willing to pay for it.

I think it’s called swooping in. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t do that. Because if you enter your price earlier, and most things are on eBay for a week, why would you give somebody a day or an hour to think about it and make the decision to spend more than they decided previously?

So, I am a swooper. If it is a thing in demand, a reasonable expectation, though not a good expectation – in that, they are wide variations in what happens. The price is likely to triple in the half-hour before the end of bidding.

It won’t always triple. It depends on the kind of bidding behaviour other people have and how many other people are interested in the thing. I had a thing. I lost out on a thing for three days until the last minute; the price was sitting at 22 British pounds.

Then in the last four seconds, I bid 64 pounds. Somebody else bid 62 pounds, and someone bid something else. But the winning bid was 66 pounds, so anywhere between 66 pounds and higher. But because I was the only higher bidder. They beat my bid by 2 pounds.

So, I bid 64. They got it at 66, which is exactly three times the price that it was sitting up to the days leading up to the last few seconds. It often goes something like that. Although, another thing I lost out on was sitting at 5 dollars for four days and then 7.50 for three days.

Then in the last few seconds, it topped out at 39 bucks. I put in a bid of 38 bucks, which was the highest bid I’d be willing to pay. Somebody else put in some bid that was higher than that. They had to pay my 38 plus a buck and got it for 39 bucks.

So, that price went up more than 5-fold in the last few seconds. If it’s something in demand or something with a few bids for it, or seems to be a neat item, or had a bunch of watchers, because often eBay will tell you how many people are watching it, then the price will jump up.

It will more than double within the last few seconds, which might be a way to tell you to not waste your time. The thing that I lost out on that was 7.50 for a long time. I had a reasonable chance of getting it for 20 bucks, 25 bucks.

Because it was sitting at 7.50 and didn’t have that many bids. Turns out, I didn’t get it because many people were swooping in, but I had a good chance to get it. But if the highest price I was willing to pay 38 bucks, and it was sitting at 32 bucks the day before, then I may have decided to not get so excited and would not have paid that much attention.

Because if a few bids made it to 32 bucks, then it would go beyond 38 bucks at the last minute, which was beyond the highest I was willing to pay. There are two ways to be lucky. The shitty way to be lucky is that thing I was looking at goes to 40 bucks with 5 days to go.

I was only willing to pay 38 bucks. Because I would have spent 5 days tracking it. The luckiest way to go is put in this bid for 38 and is at 7.50 and then I get it for 9 bucks. Because the highest the other person was willing to go was 8.50 and there were no other bidders.

The slightly less lucky way to go is to bid 38 and then I get it at 37.80 because the highest any other bidder to go was right under my highest bid. So, there you go. That’s, at least, I think bidding works.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 528 – Religion and Community: Mutual Experience

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What religion and community in America?

Rick Rosner: Okay, so, you were mentioning other aspects of religion that might be important in a world dominated by scientism. I mentioned my weekly argument with Lance. Bullshit conservatives are trying to argue mass slaughters on people not going to church anymore.

More than 40% of Americans go to church, which is a lot more than dozens and dozens of countries where people are godless and do not go to church at all or very little. They don’t have mass slaughters.

But what they might have in places in Finland is a sense of community, say in the 1950s in America, which was reinforced by patriotism, the Boy Scouts, and everybody going to church. So, one thing that religion can provide or that is important about religion is a sense of community, and a sense of framework, of people fitting in, and a framework of values.

But you can get those same frameworks even in godless societies. If you figure out ways of structuring your society that put people into communities, I suspect that there will be, if we are lucky, the emergence of more communal structures in America and the rest of the world, even as religion dwindles.

Jacobsen: So, you were mentioning spirituality a few sessions ago. What about the social ethics that are tied to those more fundamental ethics or emergent processes like persistence and order? What are some of the derivatives there?

Rosner: We are more connected informationally than ever before. A lot of the information that we share seems stupid and our behaviour with regard to this information seems stupid. LA is full of zombie cars now or cars that are stopped on the street for no reason, except the person driving the car has decided to stop and use their phone.

It is crazy how many people are stopped at a light or on a side street where they won’t create a hazard. They are just looking at their shit.

Jacobsen: That is crazily rude by Canadian standards.

Rosner: It is super nuts. I honked at like 4, 5, 6 people driving 3 miles from my house to the gym today. They were all people who were only half-driving.

Jacobsen: For those who don’t know, you suffer from road rage, real road rage.

Rosner: Yes, I’m a pissy driver. But if you don’t have a pissy driver, traffic drives to a halt. Most people assume people stopped are stopped because there is a traffic reason. But if you actually look at the cars that are stopped, often, incredibly often in LA, they stopped at a stop sign or whatever because a person decided it was okay for them to take a minute or two to take a look at their screen. It’s fucking crazy! It’s insane.

It may be only cured 5, 10, 15 years from now as more cars become automatically driven. So, people are free to look at their shit all the time. We look at our shit all the time. Optimistically, you can predict that people might form effective communities out of being so connected informationally.

This constant sharing of information among people may build communities. Let me give a very optimistic example, America is in the middle of a homelessness crisis. LA has, at least, 30,000 homeless people.

Most other big cities have a bunch of homeless people. I’m sure there were homeless people in smaller communities across the US too. At least, some of this is caused by automation, reducing the number of hours that people need to work.

If automation is not a serious cause of this, and I think it is, people would rather accuse other things like Mexicans of causing underemployment or whatever. It will be increasingly in the future.

When people don’t have enough work, they can’t support themselves and get in bad situations, but the possible future good is that the less work people have, then the more time they have to support each other.

I’ve been learning about homelessness because it is a big deal in our community and because I am on the Studio City Council now. It is probably the biggest concern among the Studio City Council people.

One of things about homelessness is if you are going to get people off the street or get them into better situations at all. You have to approach them at the concierge level, whether cops or somebody else and ask, “What’s your deal? What do you need?”

You have to get them involved in wanting to improve their situation and then hook them up with ways to improve their situation. One way to get some people off the streets is to reconnect them with their families, and get them to want to embrace their families and their families to embrace them.

That is an incredible manpower, person-power consuming process. This concierge stuff, when you’re talking about the mentally ill, who might be 1/3^rd of those who are homeless. You have to take them to a place where can be diagnosed and put on meds. You have to keep them on meds long enough for them to work.

Then you have to keep them on meds, even after they feel sane again. What happens to people who feel sane again, they think they don’t need the meds anymore and then they stop taking them, and then the mental illness comes back.

This takes a lot of human hours, human contact. One could optimistically hope that as the future unfolds and the need for human labour in the world to produce stuff dwindle. That humans can devote the resulting spare time to each other, which also implies a need to pay people for doing less work.

If there is less work for people in general, then you still need a functioning economy based on people having money to spend. Conservatives call anything that involves paying people for anything but work socialism.

But it’s obvious that the world of the future is going to have solutions that have people caring for each other in ways that today’s super shitty American conservatives are loathe.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 527 – No Governor for the Self-Consistency of the Universe

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, there’s no governor anywhere. There are principles guiding things.

Rick Rosner: The principles are emergent, whatever does not contradict itself can exist, but all these principles are not necessarily pre-existing. They’re embodied in the worlds that incorporate them.

It was a circular statement. I’m not sure if there is a metaphysical ground. I’m not even sure you could say anything pre-exists anything. In that, worlds that can exist in this hypothetical set of worlds that can exist come with their own histories, having a history is part of existing.

Having a worldline is part of being a thing that can exist, so pre-existing is something that needs to be defined or hemmed in.

Jacobsen: If you take any point of time in a worldline, and if you say, “Existing apart from that,” any object with dimensions and none of the dimensions are time.

Rosner: A moment, and you don’t really have a moment; what you have, a manifestation or a perception of a world that can exist. We have an incomplete perception of the entire universe. But our perception of the universe indicates that the universe is self-consistent to a fantastically high degree.

Within that self-consistency is an implied deep, deep history, and deep extent in space, all this stuff is implied. Like, I am sitting here in my TV room. The farthest that I can really see if like 30 feet into another room towards the other end of the house.

So, I can’t see into the universe across 14 billion light years. But everything I have learned and know implies that the universe is at least that old and that wide. All that stuff. It implies vast time and vast space, and a bunch of principles of self-consistency and related principles.

But these principles somehow have an existence independent of the world. It is something that needs to be chased down and pinned down.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 526 – Heatwaves Won’t Cooldown

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/26

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we’ve had massive heatwaves. Places like Greenland and elsewhere are set for records.

Rick Rosner: It has been apparent that anybody who is denying it is either a paid shill or is an idiot. What we’ll have is a slow-rolling apocalypse, in that, if you go on Twitter where I spend most of my time, you have people saying, “It is the end of the world, end of the planet.”

It’s not. It is going to be a touch century with surplus deaths and some small wars and the loss of some species, and the loss of ecosystems. But it will play out across many, many decades; and there won’t be catastrophes that wipe out more than 100,000 people at once.

Instead, it’ll be slow stuff where the aggregate displacements and deaths, and such, can be tallied up, but, on a daily basis, won’t feel like an apocalypse. It won’t wipe out a billion people, even over the aggregate of over a century.

Stuff will happen and will be addressed with varying degrees of efficacy. Sea walls will go up along the coast of Florida. Something will have to be done about New Orleans and Houston, probably more sea walls, also along Lower Manhattan.

Companies that build sea walls will make billions of dollars. There will be lots of devastation, but at sufficiently slow rate. That it won’t change the complexion of daily human life any more than any of the other technological displacements that are coming.

So, it’s always the end of the world for somebody. This will be the 21^st century’s end of the world. The 20^th century was good for genocide. You had Hitler killing roughly 30 million people and Stalin killing 40 million people, and Mao killing roughly 50 million people.

We can hope that we’ll avoid that in the 21^st century. We can hope that Ebola won’t kill millions of people at once. But there is an Ebola vaccine. Even if Ebola gets nasty, we may be able to hold it off.

But the wholesale horror movie devastation of climate change won’t look like that. It will look like a whole bunch of what we’re already seeing with powerful storms that wipe out, temporarily, whole cities or islands disappearing.

But the rate at which all this happens while disturbing won’t be catastrophic for the human species. It won’t feel like a disaster is presented in 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow where you lose half or all of America overnight.

The devastation of climate change will take out hundreds, maybe thousands, of people during various mini-disasters.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 525 – Moral Erosion Through Social Media

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If we’re looking at social media saturation, how does this erode moral standards?

Rick Rosner: Instead of starting from there, I will start from where I started from. I, and other people, will occasionally look at porn. Carole went out of town. I looked at more porn than I usually look at. I noticed the base level of porn; if you could catalogue porn, I would say there is an increasing perversity.

There is an increasing average level of perversity in porn. Certainly, now, compared to the Playboy Magazine of the 1960s that didn’t even show pubic hair when people had pubic hair. You’re too young to know about the war between Playboy and Penthouse.

Playboy ran the show forever. Then Penthouse comes in and said, “We’re going to be dirtier than Playboy.” Then Hustler comes in early to mid 70s, they say, “We’re going to show pubes, labia, and open labia.”

So, I would say porn gets on average more perverse. I was connecting this to an idea. Americans right now are on average scummier than they have been in the past. Americans are more comfortable being douchebags than Americans of the Greatest Generation, which indicaes, to me, there’s more stuff in the environment, the information environment, telling Americans that they’re douchebags and not telling Americans that they’re noble, say during the Greatest Generation.

Being a war, or a nation at war, or being a war at least considered being good against evil like World War II probably convinced an entire generation or two, that they were brave, decent, and self-sacrificing, and good. Then there were institutions that helped reinforced it.

Unsullied patriotism, the Church, Boy Scouts, the YMCA, the comprehensive high school everyone went to, wholesome entertainment, TV was wholesome to the point of being fucking awful for its first 2 or 3 decades.

Now, we live in an environment. We look at perverse porn. We play videos where we are engaging in bullshit. Not only do we feel like assholes for wasting many hours on bullshit, but within the games; we’re doing things that doesn’t convince us of our bravery. How could they?

A video game, nothing is at stake. The institutions that have told Americans that they are not scumbags have become suspected of being corrupt or obsolete. There is reality show culture where the media figures in the past; fame seemed to be more of a meritocracy than now.

Once reality show kicked in, any old scumbag could become famous if they were outrageous enough in their douchebaggery. That seems to erase the stories of who we tell ourselves we are. I was suing a quiz show one time.

In the late 1950s cheating scandal in quiz shows, some people were being given the answers. People who were more photogenic. Games shows wee huge in the 1950s. Everybody who had a television watched one of these shows.

It was found out that they were fixed. There was huge outrage up to President Eisenhower who spoke out about how disappointed he was. Imagine a president today. Although, Trump weighs in on all sorts of stupid shit.

Imagine people expecting fairness of TV competitions, there is some legitimacy in shows expected like Jeopardy. Imagine a reality television show where you’re expected to solve tasks to form alliances and manipulate people.

When I was suing Millionaire, a contestant was suing – back in 2000 – Survivor saying they cooked the competition and manipulated the contestants, saying she got kicked off. Her suit didn’t go far. Neither did mine.

But the idea 19 years later of someone suing a TV competition is laughable because the fairness expected on most of these competitions now seems ridiculous. Our expectations of ourselves have declined and aren’t being reinforced by what we see around us, expect on a daily basis from information and entertainment, and from the events of the world.

In another session, I could talk briefly. I haven’t talked about how Evangelicals are so comfortable being scumbags now. But that is probably worth a session.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 524 – Einstein’s Great Misfortune

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was Einstein’s great misfortune?

Rick Rosner: He got the U.S. going on the atomic bomb and wrote the letter to F.D.R. Leo Szilard. “We have to beat them to the bomb.” Now, we, and a bunch of other people, have the bombs. It has been dropped twice. 200,000 or more people died.

Now, it is sad that his theory leads to this. People prompted to think, “Hey, we can make a bomb out of that.” Einstein was not a violent man, not an asshole. Although, he did like to bang, but he did not do that much extracurricular banging.

He, at least, went out of his not trying to not be perceived as being a prick, but he got associated with one of the nastiest weapons ever to exist.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 523 – Personal Limitations of Einstein

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What were the personal limitations of Einstein?

Rick Rosner: Einstein spent the second half of his life trying to come up with the Unified Field Theory to bring all the forces of nature into one simple theory. He might have done better at it if he lived 50 years later. He didn’t know all the particles, which we’ve found. There are more powerful mathematical techniques, e.g., Membrane Theory, String Theory, Group Theory, and so on.

On the other hand, String Theory has been 30 years of wheel spinning. Einstein who was born in 1949 instead of 1879 would have been just as fucked in trying to come up with a Unified Field Theory. Maybe not, he may have looked at the decades of additional observations and would have been able to make something out of them.

But after his General Relativity, he may have been able to focus on less grand theories, to use his mind attacking more limited problems than the entire structure of space-time. Still, he was looking for one more huge hit, one more theory. The pursuit of his theory cost him decades of fruitless labour.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 522 – Worst Leaders in History

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/21

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who do you think is the worst leader in history?

Rick Rosner: The 20th century had three of the worst leaders in history based on raw body count. Mao may have been responsible for 50 million deaths of his own citizens. Stalin responsible for 40 million deaths of his own citizens. Hitler for 30 million deaths overall with the wars, the camps where people were slaughtered. People talk about the 6 million Jews, but the 5 million other people Hitler didn’t like.

Of course, when you’re killing this many people, it is hard to get an accurate number in the middle of the carnage. There are those who didn’t get the chance to kill more like Pol Pot. There have been leaders who killed. Hitler is the one who comes to mind. But when you look at Germany now, a progressive, successful country and one of the best economies in Europe.

The stain he left on Germany is still there. But Germany rose with the help of America and the Marshall Plan and our realizing after World War Two; that you don’t fuck over the countries that you fought. You help them recover because at the end of World War One; the Allies, the victors, fucking hammered Germany for its role in World War One and for being the loser in the war.

The strife and the anger that arose from that lead directly to World War Two. Anyway, Germany is a great country now. You could argue Stalin was, maybe, the worst because Russia is a super fucked up country, even 70 years after the end of Stalin. He killed everybody competent in the country. He purged them. More people died in Russia from World War Two in battle and associated causes than in any other country. Russia lost 25 million people.

I assume a competent historian could argue that they would have done better in World War Two if Stalin hadn’t killed all the competent military people before World War Two started. I don’t know for sure. But he killed everybody competent in his country. Russia, not just because of him remains one of the most fucked up semi-developed countries in the world.

Putin is currently winning international politics because he developed sophisticated techniques to fuck over the politics of other countries. That doesn’t make Russia any less fucked up. I guess I would go, “Stalin number one as shittiest leader in history.”

One caveat, the countries lead by these people – Germany, Russia, not the Soviet Union, and China – still exist. So, as leaders, they weren’t so disastrous for their countries that their countries ceased to exist. You can probably find other leaders who were so shitty as leaders that their countries no longer exist. An argument can be made for Gaddafi.

You can’t say he was the worst leader in history because his crimes were comparatively small potatoes. You could argue he was shitty. In that, Libya doesn’t exist or is a failed state now. I don’t know what the other failed states are currently. That’s got to count heavily against a leader: Their country is no longer a country.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 521 – Asshole Leaders Are Bugs, Not Features

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/21

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How can you apply the Sunk Cost Fallacy to the political landscape of the United States now?

Rick Rosner: Trump’s base gets more and more entrenched. The more he shows himself to be an incompetent leader and a terrible person, and a racist; the bigger a hole he digs for himself. The more his base invests in him. The more he costs in terms of integrity and dignity among his base, then the more he costs them. He keeps violating norms.

You have to work harder and harder to rationalize his bullshit to yourself. It is a huge investment. Paradoxically, it brings his base closer. To anyone looking at Trump objectively, in terms of the most objective evidence about him, he generates more and more fairly objective evidence. He is what he seems to be, which is a megalomaniacal scumbag who is 73-years-old in not good shape.

He used to be a not stupid man because his hardware is slowly decaying. He’s the worst president in American history, by far, and the question to ask and the question I am going to ask Lance tomorrow, “Has a leader like in history ever proven himself to be of benefit to his nation by being this way?”

I can think of a bunch of bad examples off the top of my head, e.g., the terrible, super corrupt emperors of Rome. The previous most corrupt U.S. president, Harding, or Hitler, Mussolini, Berlusconi. There have been plenty of corrupt, arrogant, and asshole leaders throughout history. But I can’t think of an example in which an asshole leader has been of clear benefit to his country.

Lance knows more history than me. Maybe, he can think of somebody who was a benefit or was a secondary import to the good things that they did for their country. This is all I have on this. I would hard-pressed to see where a crazy asshole has ever saved his country.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 520 – Profits Over Ethics

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/14

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If we’re taking changes in ethical norms, what ones are in flux now?

Rick Rosner: The deal is, 40% of the adult population of America supports Trump to some extent. Much of that base is Evangelical Christians. People who don’t support Trump find that cruel and racist. What has happened is that the conservative news industry has found it profitable as an industry to erode America’s ethical norms, rich people, apart from Fox News and the other conservative outlets make money off appealing to the Trump base, support this stuff because tax relief for rich people helps them immensely.

The richest guy behind Trump’s election is a guy named Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer. They are the ones who gave money to Cambridge Analytica, which figured out how to target and spread propaganda via social media. I read an article last night saying Robert Mercer – Mercer’s company – defrauded the federal government out of $7 billion dollars (USD). His hedge fund was using a tax write-off or a tax scheme ruled illegitimate.

His company was the only company to ever try this scheme. The IRS ruled that he failed to pay $7 billion dollars in taxes on a company with a net worth of $97 billion. So, this guy and other rich guys who don’t want to pay taxes have been meeting with Trump to see if they can get around it. Some rich people are just libertarians. But they mostly don’t care about getting rid of immigrants or any of the “America First” semi-racist stuff.

But that is what it takes to support the base. Then they’ll support whatever garbage it takes if they end up getting tax relief. The question becomes, “Can this breach of ethical norms, this rupture of Americans’ idea of what we stand for as Americans – can this spackled over or repaired?” I would say, “Yes.” Because people believe the stories they are told about themselves and their country.

We have a long tradition of America standing for fairness, for the melting pot, for being a country of immigrants, for all the stuff that the liberals try to bring up. So, if most of the stories that people hear support the ethical views that America has generally held, then the contrary views – the racist views, the xenophobic views have always been a minority view in America and restrained (e.g., anti-German sentiment around the world wars, anti-Italian/anti-swarthy southern European sentiment around the same time) – flared up during the first half of the 20th century.

It usually gets tamped down. But it is at its strongest now since World War Two. The two with tamping it down is that now; there is a lot of money in telling racist xenophobic stories and expressing those points of view to Americans. Fox News is the most successful 24-hour news channel, which is slightly deceptive. The other news channels have, at least, as many viewers combined. But since Fox is the one major conservative channel, and MSNBC and CNN get the liberal viewers and the middle of the road viewers.

Fox News has been around since 1996. I don’t see how you can make it go away. It has been forced to not call itself “news” in some countries. But that’s not going to happen in America. The only way to get rid of Fox News would be for some rich liberals to get together and then to buy the whole company to change its direction. But that just means another conservative organization will pop up.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 519 – The American Experiment Waning or Waxing

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/13

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is the American experiment waning?

Rick Rosner: By “American experiment,” you mean the democratic experiment for the last 23 years.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: It is not entirely the right question to ask because the human experiment or human life, in general, about to just go haywire. The texture of daily life is going to be completely revised over the next 50 years. I assume it will continue to shift, and shift, and shift.

What results after all of these shifts will not be human-based anymore, it will be based on augmented humanity and AI. I call the Trump Administration the little end of the world before the big end of the world because a lot of the disruptions that will completely revise our lives are in their early forms largely responsible for Trump getting elected.

Job losses to automation. People not being resistant to information or bullshit they receive over the internet. Active psychological warfare by Russia and other bad actors using social media. This was the first AI election (2016). So, it is messier than asking whether Trump and his apparent impunity, the difficulty with which he and other anti-democratic/semi-fascist corruptocrats, can be expelled from politics.

I think they can. I am hopeful, slightly more than slightly hopeful; that the democrats can back control of government in 2020, in the election of 2020. But this won’t stop the corruption or the erosion of government because we won’t be able to get rid of the corruptocrats entirely. There will still be close to half of the Senate. Even if the democrats do really well, they will still be more than 40% of the House.

The larger technologically based disruption will be ongoing. So, democracy, as we knew it, as late as the turn of the century, is gone. But what might happen after the election of 2020, it might be the restoration of some democratic norms and standard, and filtered through a world becoming increasingly weird.

My guess is that politics will find it hard, in general, to keep up with technological change. Among the things that we can hope for is that national governments lose power and with the power going to mostly benign new forms of human and post-human aggregation. We’ve got a new census in 2020, which means that congressional maps will be redrawn in all the states in America except the few states with such small populations; that they only get one representative in Congress.

Gerrymandering is one of the main causes of political polarization because people running in safe districts – districts safe for one party – produce winning candidates who are extremist, whether to the left or mostly to the right, because the person who wins the primary is guaranteed to win the district. The new census and the redrawing of maps might reduce gerrymandering, which might reduce political polarization.

Although, the polarization is fed by politics as entertainment as presented by the profit for news. Any reduction in political polarization will be helpful in restoring politics, where you don’t have to watch and worry about every single day. It won’t be completely eradicated. To wrap up, we will have to look for alliances among large groups of people that aren’t based on state or national boundaries.

To see models of that, you can see Cory Doctorow who has written a lot about what some of the new alliances might be in his fiction, The Rapture of the Nerds. The books are a couple decades old. He has a new series, Radicalized, which is fun to read. But it is not that helpful in that it doesn’t portray new large-scale alliances. His previous book really went into a near future with rejiggered alliances.

Although, it’s not an overly happy book. In that, there’s so much disruption. Some characters win victories for themselves or their side, but there’s so much devastation. The optimism in the book only barely wins out over the pessimism They are worth reading to get a sense of what people might be thinking in terms of new alliances.

I am sure there are other authors poking in that direction.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 518 – The Current Trump Deal

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/20

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the current Trump deal?

Rick Rosner: During the campaign trail, he said that his people – his base – is so solidly behind him. That he could shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue and no one would drop him.

Then, in fact, he did indirectly kill somebody on 5th Avenue. They did not drop him. He was too cheap to put sprinklers in Trump Tower. There was a fire in one of the units. Somebody died. No one cared in particular.

People on Twitter who hate Trump said, “That a-hole,” but nothing happened. His popularity has remained remarkably steady. He probably has the flattest approval curve of any president since they started taking approval polls.

Jacobsen: Why?

Rosner: Maybe, his analysis is correct that his base is his base and they love him regardless of what he does. There is an industry that makes it their job to justify and rationalize anything that he does.

That his actions often seem like some overall plan. According to the Washington Post, he is at thousands of lies and representations of fact in hundreds of days in office. His lies are often not systematic. He often contradicts himself from hour to hour.

His actions and statements are – his sentiments and prejudices are somewhat consistent – are inconsistent. They tend not to be part of some overreaching grand plan. He hates China messing with America.

He tries to mess back. He thinks the tariffs are helpful. Even though, he doesn’t understand how they really work. He hates immigrants. So, some of his stuff has an overarching set of sentiments behind them.

But the actions and statements that he makes in service to those sentiments are spur of the moment. Anyway, he is kind of random. The conservative media try to take what he does and have it make sense, and try to present him as a guy who actually knows what he is doing.

Even though, it is obvious that he is incurious. He cannot be bothered to read the briefings that people prepare for him. He is a mess. He is all over the place. But the conservative media, depending on who you go to for news, will probably not expose the audience to exactly how messed up he is.

That helps stabilize his approval. But his fans are getting their news from sources that present him as a more consistent leader than he actually is. Some non-conservative commentators have a theory that a lot of his people like him because he hates the same people they do.

They care less about whether what he does is in their interest. So, Trump’s approval is remarkably steady. It has been between 37 and 4 percent for all but the first week of his presidency.

For the past six months, it has been oscillating back and forth between 41 and 42 percent on the aggregate of all polls. Individual polls, they’re remarkably consistent too. But they, obviously, can vary more than the aggregate polls.

It looks like Trump’s behaviour gets more and more concerning to people who do not like Trump. He said last week that he would accept information about candidates running against him from a foreign government. It doesn’t seem to bug his people.

The camps are established. The people who hate him. Their approval is remarkably steady too. People decided. It is harder to get people to change their minds about this president than any other president since FDR in the late 1930s.

We are talking 80 years of presidential approval surveys.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 517 – Death Penalty for Abortion

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/19

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Abortion is an ongoing topic in the United States and around the world.

Rick Rosner: There is a bunch of legislation happening in the United States that is crazy. It tries to give women the death penalty for getting abortions after 6 weeks. Not that this passed or will pass. Several passed these “heartbeat” laws that make it illegal for women to get abortions after they even know that they are pregnant.

At 6 weeks, you are only late for your period for 2 or 3 weeks. A lot of women will not realize that they are pregnant until after that. Basically, they are abortion bans. Ohio, Georgia, a couple of other states.

In the past, it has made me sad that we haven’t come to a consensus about abortion. But now, I kind of think that we’re going to face in the next century so many new controversies around AI and around extended lifespans – thanks to vastly improved medicine.

There will be controversies about who counts as human. If somebody has gradually replaced his or her failing brain with new stuff, does that mean the heirs will challenge that person saying, “That person is not a person anymore”? Because the person has been replaced by biomechanical circuitry.

It may not happen for a while. It may not happen entirely. There will be all sorts of issues around new technology and new medicine. We haven’t resolved some of the most basic old ethical issues.

It makes me sad. Because none of these issues will be cleaned up. They will all continue to be used for political leverage. At various times, abortion has been a thing that people have done for thousands of years.

Across those thousands of years, there have been times when it has been more or less politicized – and depending on the country. Over the past 50 years, it has been increasingly politicized in America partially because of legitimate religious concerns, but mostly the conservatives who are better than liberals at branding and mobilizing their base.

They have learned that it is a really good crowbar to pry or whatever metaphor to motivate people like a carrot and stick to get people upset to vote for candidates, conservative candidates, on the basis of outrage with among th recent attempts to increasingly politicize abortion.

It is the idea that Democrats want to offer people the option to abort babies even after they are delivered alive. Legislation has been suggested by Republicans and then rejected by Democrats that would prohibit all but the most heroic measures in saving babies who are born alive.

Medical professionals and Democrats consider this a legislative trap designed mainly to make Democrats look like baby killers. The deal is, tragically, some babies who are born alive will die.

Less than 1% of babies are born without brains. They are born with just a brainstem. With minus a brain, they can only survive 72, 96, or so, hours. Doctors and nurses want to retain the right to treat those babies reasonably and humanely, and the families of those babies.

The baby is examined to see if it has a brain and can live, and, if not, then the baby is not put to death, but it is not put on a respirator where it can survive for months or years minus a brain. But the baby is not given heroic care.

But it is taken care of and is brought to the parents. If the parents want to hold the baby, they can pose for photos to remember the baby, which will not survive. After a couple days without a brain, the baby dies from not breathing.

The doctors do not want to be found guilty of not keeping that baby alive for the many months that it could be kept alive. So, things are goofy and sad on the abortion front in America, which makes me wonder why other issues haven’t been as politicized.

For instance, inter-racial relationships, a black guy going out with an Asian woman, a Hispanic woman going out with a white woman. That’s two issues. It doesn’t seem to bother people anymore.

Although, it seems to both people in the past. It is not only in real life but in TV, movies, and advertising. If a company wants an easy shortcut to seem hip, they can throw in an inter-racial couple.

That means that the company is not afraid of backlash from anyone who may find that offensive. America has decided that isn’t that offensive. There may be more people offended in the past like 50 years ago by inter-racial relationships as abortion.

Why is abortion still a thing and inter-racial relationships not? For one, babies ar really cute. If you convince people that babies are babies even 6 weeks after conception, all over Twitter, there have been images of what a fetus looks like 6 weeks.

The anti-abortion people have a pretty cleaned up abortion look. It looks like a fetus but not monstrous either. Pro-choice people have put up actual pictures of what an actual 6 week old fetus looks like through scanning electron photography.

It doesn’t look as nice as the anti-abortion people’s fetuses. Anyway, babies are cute. You can mobilize people around babies. Also, murder is scary. So if you call killing a fetus murder, then that seems super dire.

There is no leverage around inter-racial couples. Inter-racial couples are cute, at least the ones shown in TV ads. Inter-racial couples are also consumers. So if you pull those people in, you can sell more of your product. Also, people like to become couples.

By people learning to consider people of other races as potential partners, they have expanded their potential relationship pool. I guess, there is no hook or easy way in getting people worked up, to get non-lunatic people worked up, about inter-racial couples.

You can get white supremacists worked up about it. That the race is being diluted by white people not dating white people and not having purely white babies. But those people are by far in the minority.

The increased utility of being able to date anyone of any race and the increased utility of being able to sell your products to people of any race; those are bigger hooks in favour of calming down about inter-racial relationships.

The hooks that only work on white supremacists. That was semi-coherent.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 516 – Affirmative Action for the Rich (7)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/18

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Another factor is that we’re babies. We are more influenced by the deliciousness of social media, perhaps, than striver countries like India and China, where we have the luxury of being academically lazy and not buckling down and just giving into the indulgences of personal technology.

But there are China and India with a combined population of America’s population. There are in the middle of big technological pushes. There have 8 times as many people as we do, which means they have at least 8 times as many strivers who are able to buckle down and strive academically.

The ratio is probably much greater than 8 to 1 because Americans are basically pampered and lazy. We like our lives of relative ease. The striver countries, you can throw in South Korea, probably a lot of the Asian sphere countries.

They produce more strivers than American currently might be producing. Right now, America has a government and a culture that is anti-science, and skeptical of learning and skeptical about information.

We’re in the middle of getting our asses kicked. Liberals like to talk about that we have 12 years left to figure out some decent solutions for climate change before the planet faces catastrophic consequences.

But I would argue that we have roughly that amount of time or less to turn around America’s anti-knowledge, anti-science skepticism about information before we become catastrophically unable to compete with the technologically striving mega-countries of the world.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 515 – Affirmative Action for the Rich (6)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/17

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How will this stratify America in the 2020s?

Rick Rosner: America is already the most stratified that it has been and the most divided it has been politically, and stratified it has been economically, in 100 years. It is at Depression levels.

The economic inequality is probably at Depression levels and probably at higher levels, comparable to the Guilded Age in the 80s and 90s. The college thing is one more thing on top of the economic stratification.

Then there is the coming technological stratification. But I feel access to technology is, maybe, less stratified than access to elite education and less stratified than income and wealth.

You don’t have to be rich to good at technology. It probably helps some. But I feel the technological stratification is less than other areas of stratification. Tech can help reduce economic stratification.

In that, there is a little democratization via online learning. You can online. You can take thousands of classes from your choice of any decent university. You can pay money and then take them for credit in some cases.

But most of these online classes; you’re basically auditing the class. You take it for free or close to free. You work through the material. You listen to the lectures on YouTube or how ever they set it up.

Sometimes, you get a certificate. We are in the baby days of online learning. But that may eventually serve to democratize education somewhat. Education, in general, is in trouble because old models of education are just based on sitting and listening to somebody tell you stuff.

Then you work through assignments based on what you have been told and your textbook. That used to be the best way to learn. 100 years ago, it was the system. It was good. It was better than learning via staying on the farm.

The school was the most interesting part of the day. It was where your friends were. It was where the fun stuff was. It was where people became boyfriends and girlfriends. It was where you could compete in sports if that was your thing.

Now, most of your stuff and access to friends is in the palm of your hand. Many of the social and educational functions made school exciting, though miserable, for people. These have been supplanted by the awesomeness of being in constant contact with your group via your phone.

Now, school is where you go to be told to turn off your phone and to get not very personalized information at a single very slow rate to groups of people. So, school is no longer the most information rich and most interesting, and most emotionally compelling, part of a school-aged kid’s life.

So, that is going to have to change.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 514 – Affirmative Action for the Rich (5)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: I would use Carole and myself, and our kid, as an example.

I mean, we had one kid, which meant our focus was one. I don’t think we wee helicopter parents. We weren’t Tiger Parents. We didn’t force her or push her to do things she didn’t want to do. But we were extremely available and helpful with whatever she wanted to do with preparing for college.

She wanted to get national merit. That’s an award – largely meaningless but still something nice to have based on performance on the PSAT, which is the qualification for the SAT. California having a bunch of people and a bunch of good students has a pretty high score.

My kid says, “I want to make national merit.” I say, “It is going to be brutal.” Before she fired me, I had her take 80 practice tests. I dug up 80 tests by buying old books of tests on eBay and online and so on. I went into semi-dark webby places, where people trade old tests.

I made her take more than 6 dozen practice tests and then she said, ‘Alright, that’s enough.” The kid with a single mom who is working two jobs. That kid and that mom have no freaking idea that people are being this psycho out in affluent white people land.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 513 – Affirmative Action for the Rich (4)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Thing three is, even without cheating as many do, huge advantages for rich people. For one thing, there is no good guide to applying to college. Every family, every kid, has to kind of learn anew the principles of putting together a good application and putting together a good academic record.

It is not clear. There are a gazillion steps in the whole process. If you do it right, it is the culmination of 12 years of school. But it is the culmination of 4 or 5 years to apply in the case of the most prepared applicants.

The less prepared applicants don’t even know this. It is the difference between the chances for a kid with two parents with a family income of $300,000 who goes to a private school versus a kid with a single parent going to a public school in an inner city.

The inner city school may have one school counsellor for the graduating class of 500 or 600 or even zero counsellors. That counsellor may or may not give a shit, or may or may not have clues.

The counsellors at private schools cultivate relationships with the admissions people at certain colleges. They cannot be friends with every admissions person at every college. But they can be friends with admissions people at a few pretty selective colleges.

A week before calls go out. They can say, “So-and-so, my student, is the most gifted and talented kid I have seen in the last 5 years.” Often, that will make a difference. A counsellor at a city school does not have any of these connections or has very little idea.

They may be able to point kids at appropriate colleges. Or a vague idea in their ideas of all the crazy crap that all the most qualified and most prepared kids are doing to get into colleges.

So, you don’t have to cheat to have a huge advantage if you’re a kid whose parents are still married, if they have a decent job, read, are good at researching stuff online.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 512 – Affirmative Action for the Rich (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/14

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Big problem two is that kids apply – the gunners, the elite kids trying to get into the elite colleges. Back when I was applying, a kid might apply to 4 colleges, like a psycho kid trying really hard.

Now, those same kids average, at least, 12 applications to 12 colleges because it is easier to do since you’re doing it via computer and because everyone else is doing it. So, when I was applying to college, in 1978 or failing to apply as I had a nervous breakdown, 20% of applicants were admitted to Harvard.

Now, it is less than 5%. Back when I was applying, you pretty much knew if you would get in or not, a pretty good idea if you were going to get in or not. That 20% was pretty differentiated between the highly qualified and the less qualified.

But now, at 5%, you might still have 15-20% of those applicants being perfectly qualified for Harvard, but, now, you’re only taking 5% of elite applicants. Now, the applicants don’t know if they get in.

They apply to Stanford, and Northwestern, and Harvard, and MIT, and Yale, and Washington as a safety school. The level of panic increases every year among people who know what they’re doing.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 511 – Affirmative Action for the Rich (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/13

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Let me say a few things about college admissions in America, which are a mess.

Thing one is, there are many more highly qualified students who want to go to highly selective schools than there are openings in highly selective schools. Most Ivies only admit roughly 1,800 kids a year.

Even though, they have $40 billion endowments and could afford to slowly expand the class size by 2% a year. I do not think the expansion does 2% per year. The total number of people and the spots at the Ivies plus Stanford might be roughly 22,000 spots.

There are 50,000 highly qualified kids who are aiming for those spots. So, no matter how you set your admission criteria at these schools. Somebody is going to get fucked over. Right now, the people getting fucked over are Asians.

Because if you did unbiased admissions, that is, if you did not look at the kid’s name and just looked at the kid’s grades, scores, recommendations, without regard to ethnicity or background, 40% of the classes at highly selective schools would be Asian.

Schools want diversity, which means various things to various schools. But in practice, it means that Asians have to perform much better than everybody else to get into a lot of these schools.

It is similarly in the interest of fairness and diversity with people from a variety of backgrounds and statuses do not have to perform as well on the raw measures, on the raw qualifications.

But the bottom line is that somebody is always going to get fucked over because there are twice as many students going for these spots with 12 AP classes, parents hiring consultants, getting well-rounded extras, writing 7 drafts of their essays, and so on, to try to get into the universities.

That is the major problem: not enough spots. To argue about whether those spots are really worth it, to get into one of these highly selective schools, because if you work hard, you can get a good education at any of the decent schools.

I think there are roughly 6,000 colleges in the US. Although, that number may be off by a few thousand. That means that there are couple thousand colleges in America that don’t entirely suck at the very least.

If you work hard at any of these schools, you can get a good education. However, what you do get at the elite colleges are connections, you’re going to school with the best and the brightest.

People who have a much better chance of succeeding post-college. If you’re among them, you’re going to be connected to them, and that will be wildly helpful later on in life for them.

If you go on LinkedIn, and if you look at the people who are highly successful in your field, odds are that you will see a lot of people who went to Columbia and the other Ivies. It is part of a successful trajectory.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 510 – Affirmative Action for the Rich (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/12

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There is affirmative action for the rich in America. What happened in some of these cases?

Rick Rosner: There was a guy who was clearing tens of millions of dollars through the side door into college. The back door is giving the college that you want your kid to get into a shit ton of money.

Jared Kushner’s dad gave Harvard $2.5 million dollars. Trump’s dad gave Wharton $4 million, not in one lump thing. His kids got in. Even though, they’re kind of dopes. That’s the back door according to this scammer who is being prosecuted now along with a bunch of parents. He said that he had a side door that would cost a lot but not as a much as the back door.

The side door involved either bribing college officials and/or paying people to take standardized tests or the ACT/SAT for students. A lot of the time, the students didn’t even know that somebody was taking the test for them.

One way to do that would be the kid would take the test one on one. You can get special testing conditions if you can prove your kid as a disability that requires special conditions, which requires spending about a grand to send the kid to a consultant – a psychologist to diagnoses the kid with a learning difficulty.

Then you send a letter to the testing companies saying, “This is the problem.” Then there are several ways a test can be individualized – 6, 7, 8 ways. Most require the kid sitting in the room with a proctor in a room.

Then you hire a proctor to give the kid a test, and then the kid leaves. The proctor before turning the test in goes over the answers and then corrects them. All this would run between $15 and $15,000 bucks.

It would be cheaper than the amount to get Jared Kushner into Harvard.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 509 – Legally Binding (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/11

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about investigations?

Rick Rosner: There are many investigations ongoing now. You have the district of New York investigation. Every investigation is important.

You have I don’t know how many investigations ongoing now. This one is important because if Trump and his people are indicted on state charges then they aren’t pardonable. A president can only be indicted on federal charges.

There was a big story that came out in the New Yorker about big-time malfeasance about Fox News. A Fox News reporter uncovered the Stormy Daniels story during the 2016 election, but Fox News squelched it because they wanted Rupert Murdoch to win.

Now, the DNC is saying that Fox News given its huge bias will not be allowed to host any democratic presidential debates. It is hard to tell if any of this matters. Because Fox News continues to be Fox News and people continue to buy conservative, if you want to call it conservative, bias in Fox News.

Trump is in a mess. As a liberal, I can hope that it makes him act more and more unhinged, so that it eventually becomes apparent to all but the most fanatical of his followers that he shouldn’t be president.

But that is really wishful thinking. Partially because his supporters really support him; also, because, there is a big correlation between how dumb someone is and how much they support Trump.

Not all dumb people support Trump. But Trump supporters are dumber than average; the ones who peel off tend to be the smarter among the supporters. The less dumb will peel off leaving a core of supporters who have a lower level of intelligence.

They will be resistant to any kind of reality. That’s all I have.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 508 – Legally Binding (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/10

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What else?

Rick Rosner: Everything is up in the air. There was a story about how Trump’s failures include the federal deficit exploding because of the tax cut for rich people. Many people are paying more for taxes, including those who voted for Trump.

One report said 11 million Americans will lose $323 billion in tax deductions this tax season, which is almost $33,000 per taxpayer. The tariffs are messing with the economy. They failed to get concessions from North Korea, which is beginning to build its ICBM facility.

Nothing happening with the wall. Nothing happening with infrastructure. Trump has done little in real terms for all Americans, except for the super rich, including those who voted for him.

Some things are doing well. The stock market is hanging in there. Unemployment has been low. But these things continue trends that ran for 6 years at least under Obama.

Trump has pretty successful against ISIS, but not as successful as he claims by relaxing the rules of engagement that has led to more civilian deaths and deaths among ISIS fighters.

Mostly, his record has been pretty dismal. But he is a better president than he is a human being.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 507 – Legally Binding (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is this showing that the legal system isn’t working in the United States with Manafort getting sentenced and a whole stream of people coming through from the Trump Administration?

Rick Rosner: Off-tape, you asked what’s up with Trump. I said, “It depends,” because it has gone from a timeline to being stuck in chocolate pudding or quicksand. It is a big ball of mess.

Whether the legal system is working, it is yet to be seen, as Trump has added two conservative judges. One more hacky than the other. Gorsuch may have some integrity. Kavanaugh, we have yet to tell.

He has been a political hack his entire career He was very angry about the way that he was treated. He may turn out to be a Clarence Thomas, who has spent the last 25 years pissed off by the way he was treated during hearings.

We do not know if the court will act with integrity or shield Trump. In terms of individual cases, Manafort, who is a very bad guy, will possibly go to jail for the rest of his life, prison.

The country wasn’t galvanized. Some were galvanized the entire time. But even half the Republicans supported him as he left the White House, but 88% of Republicans currently support Trump; even though, a bunch of historians confirms the corruption.

They say Trump’s corruption is indisputably the highest in the history of the country, more than Nixon or Harding. Even though, he is supported by most Republicans. How things will go, if the support drops to 60%, then, maybe, some of the Republicans in the House and the Senate start to decide that he is not the horse that they want to bet on.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 506 – Bad Faith, or Blood (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/07

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What will this mean the 2020 election?

Rick Rosner: The Democrats can’t go too fast. They have to either build the evidence with hearings or the hearings have to look somewhat reasonable, or hyper-reasonable, because Fox will paint them as unreasonable regardless.

They have to time it. So, the damage done to Trump is reflected in his performance in the presidential primaries beginning next year. I think the presidential primaries run from late February into June.

The primaries are more than 10 months away. Ideally, the damage done to Trump will be so considerable that the Republicans will attempt to primary him. Usually, an incumbent first-term president runs unopposed for his parties nomination.

But occasionally not, Jimmy Carter was primaried. I think Ford was primaried. I think both of them were sufficiently damaged by the primarying. In Carter’s case, a single term president; in Ford’s case, a partial term president.

So, if Trump looks damaged enough, somebody like Kasich may decide to run against him (the Ohio governor). It is probable that Trump will be found not guilty but culpable for at least being able to be put on trial.

The deal is, when you can’t charge a sitting president, you can impeach him. We talked about how impeachment has two parts. In the House, a majority of the House can vote to impeach the president. That is step one.

Step two is if they vote to impeach him, then he goes on trial in the Senate. The House is controlled by Democrats. So, it is likely, if Trump seems guilty of enough stuff, then the House will vote to impeach him.

But the Senate has a majority of Republicans. So, it is highly unlikely. No president has been voted out of the office by the Senate, where you need a 2/3rds vote. It is likely that Trump is guilty of a bunch of impeachable offenses.

If they want to try to get him impeached, it depends on if it will help or hurt his election chances in the 2020 election. Because if they impeach him for what appears to be insufficient cause for the conservative half of the country, it may help him get re-elected.

That is the whole deal. He is probably guilty of a bunch of stuff. He is probably not re-electable. But the Democrats have to play things strategically to avoid giving Trump and Fox News, and the Republicans political leverage to generate sympathy and electability.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 505 – Bad Faith, or Blood (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/06

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Will he be charged with anything?

Rick Rosner: He can’t be charged with a lot of stuff. According to the Department of Justice policy, a sitting president can not be charged with most things, even anything. Including Nixon, he can be listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.

But there is no explicit evidence of anything. From a probabilistic point of view, Trump, if he weren’t president, would be indictable for a dozen of things. Most notably, he would be because of the obstruction of justice.

He has shown no subtlety or cleverness in covering his tracks. He has done stuff and said stuff. The report from Manafort was 800 pages long. It is a strong indication that Mueller’s report will be over 1,000 pages, maybe even over 2,000 pages.

Most will relate to crimes of his associates and his family. That is speaking from a probabilistic sense. All things leading to the Mueller report point in the direction of Trump being indictable if he weren’t president.

In dozens and dozens and possibly more defenses, now, the Democrats have to play a game as to how much to go after him and when to go after him. Because they have to make the case to go after him.

They can’t impeach him until the Mueller report comes out. It is only to be read by certain people. I don’t even think if it goes to the entire Congress. Then there may be a limit on how much can be given or leaked to the public.

So, the Democrats in Congress, in the House, cannot get ahead of convincing charges against Trump. Because the Republicans and Trump, in particular, are painting this as “presidential harassment.”

If Trump’s base, or, at least, if no more than 20% of the Republicans can be convinced that Trump has done a bunch of bad stuff, then the momentum for calling it presidential harassment; Trump will be able to keep maintaining that and perhaps hold the support of most of the Republicans in the House and the Senate.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 504 – Bad Faith, or Blood (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/05

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is up now?

Rick Rosner: Everything is up informationally with Trump. Based on Trump’s history and the amount of stuff swirling around Trump, and how bad he is at doing things cleverly, he is only cleverness is at self-promotion.

Everything else he does blatantly and gets away with it because he’s found niches in which he can consistently act in bad faith and get away with it.

Jacobsen: Is this a form of brilliance in salesmanship but only in the sense of being an idiot-savant?

Rosner: You could argue it. But he only ended up in the real estate business because he has a talent for self-promotion, and has a talent for licensing his name. There were 17 buildings in Manhattan at one point with his name on them.

He only owned 3 of them. The other 14, he made millions for simply having his name on them. Because it said, “This is a classy joint,” to a lot of people. He has revealed himself to be terrible to a lot of people.

I do not think he is electable for a second term. Unless, Democrats do some weird self-immolation or self-destruction. The deal is that he was elected with under 40% or 48% of the vote. He still has 88% approval among Republicans.

But he got elected with fairly strong approval from independents. He has probably lost 20% of the people who voted for him. A lot of people took a flyer on Trump thinking he may be different from other politicians or a good tactician. But he turned out to be like many of the rest of Republicans.

He may only get 52 million or 54 million votes. That is not enough to be elected a second term. We do not know anything yet, for sure.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 503 – An Arena of Art: Decay of Culture, Pretty Killy, and Kinda Corrupt (5)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/13

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Right now, what has happened in the last couple of years, since the rise of Trump, is the corruption of American Evangelicals, 10 years ago, 70% of Evangelicals said that politicians’ personal morality mattered.

Now, it is down to 20% of American Evangelicals. 80% saying that somebody as corrupt as Trump is okay as a leader because he is scoring wins for the Evangelical side. To me, this indicates a complete moral surrender and corruption of the Evangelicals, and an erosion of American political standards.

I think we’re at a moment of national political peril. You can circle back to the question of whether the increased decadence and filthiness of entertainment is related or not. The increased scope of American entertainment that has given us Mad Men and Breaking Bad and The Sopranos are considered by many, including me, great art. It rises to that level.

There is a lot of television and entertainment that is great. Is the greatness that includes presenting really jaded views helping undermine our culture and leading to our downfall?

Let me give one more example, a Netflix show called Ozark, where every single character is corrupt and evil to some extent. It is a lazier, lousier, more derivative telling of Breaking Bad, where what looks like a typical American family becomes entirely corrupt.

With money laundering for drug cartels, murder, nobody is good. Even the youngest boy in the family at 14, he becomes a money launderer. It is not art. It is a kind of a default thing; it is one more show where everybody is terrible.

The end. That’s enough.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 502 – An Arena of Art: Decay of Culture, Pretty Killy, and Kinda Corrupt (4)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/12

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: I believe that there is a principle that is often overlooked. It is still overlooked. It was overlooked in science fiction of the 50s and 60s, in movies and books. The writing about the future during the 30s and through the 60s often presented rational futures.

They had the idea that as technology becomes more powerful and people essentially become smarter with the help of technology; that people and civilization become more rational and life becomes cleaner & nicer.

It is the kind of world that you see in Star Trek, where it is not having a lot of foolishness. The public spaces that you occasionally see when the crew of the Enterprise with the open plaza. There is not a lot of foolishness.

It is not grubby. There is no advertisement. It is a clean and well-ordered world. It is not until Blade Runner that you see a grubby future. Now, the grubby future is a kind of a default science fiction future, where a lot of unimaginative crap science fiction has taken that model instead of the clean model.

A well thought out but not accurate picture is Minority Report from the 90s or the early 2000s. It has a world that is plenty of grubbiness, but has some nice parts. It has some public spaces flooded with advertising.

That kind of floats in the air personally directed through individuals’ information gathering equipment: contact lenses, and so on – whatever their eyeballs are engineered to pick up.

When you look at actual culture in the 70s, things were pretty clean or bowdlerized, censored. One of the chief examples being the Brady Bunch, which was a completely sanitized version of life.

It was a completely harmless and sickeningly sweet sitcom that didn’t address any prurient interests whatsoever. Now, you have shows that are filthy. You have a lot of filthy shows on television.

The question is whether filth or being able to talk about anything in popular culture. Like, I have been shocked to hear jokes about anal sex, blow jobs, and so on, showing up on Prime Time NBC sitcoms.

It just seems crazy to me. That we have come this far in a relatively show time, since the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when things were plain and censored. The question is whether this serves a wider artistic purpose that is part of a better discussion than the crappy, lazy, and censored 70s, or if this is a part of the degradation of the culture that will lead to our downfall similar to the late Roman Empire.

The Imperial Romans being depraved, corrupt, and weakening their civilization to the point where the Roman Empire fell.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 501 – Death on Home Turf (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/11

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: We’re getting away from that as we live longer and longer until people who want to a century from now in developed parts of the world should be able to circumvent death altogether.

So, it is a different tragedy to die now. We’re so close to the era where you don’t have to die. Yet, we’re like Moses who can’t cross over into the Promised Land because people my age are just probably just a little too old to ride the technology indefinitely into the future.

But in the future, there’s going to be a different loss that will go along with our increasing technological proficiency. Now, every human; every conscious being or every being we acknowledge as conscious seems like a unique self-enclosed thinking entity.

In the future as we learn how to replicate the brain and replicate the conscious information processing; the uniqueness, the isolated-ness of individual consciousness will be eroded and we will be able to, the extent we want to, merge with other consciousnesses and then it will be the gold standard of existence, which is individual human consciousness, will be increasingly devalued as different ways of being conscious and of sharing consciousness and then of severing.

You’ll be able to merge with people and enter other entities and then unmerge with them and everything will be much more fluid say 200 years from now. The individual consciousness will be looked at much less wonderful than we’ve looked at humans as today.

And so we’ll gain control over being able to preserve and create consciousness and replicate it. The whole deal where to get in a train wreck you will have downloaded your consciousness that morning. So, you will be able to be brought back into existence minus only the three hours that you last downloaded your consciousness.

That’ll be a doable thing a 150 years from now or possibly a little less. But at the same time that our command over consciousness arises, it means that it won’t be mysterious and individual existence – the preciousness of it – will be lost.

We will look for persistence and immortality in other ways by sending our thoughts out into the world via technology and not just thoughts as expressed in words, but our actual thought thoughts via the replication of conscious thoughts and of being able to replicate the aspects of consciousness.

We’ll see a lessened threat by the loss of the self because our selves will constantly be transferable and merge-able; people who fully embrace the cultural life of 150-200 years from now may not fear death because they will feel that they will have immortality by merging their experience, their thoughts, and their memories into larger collective thought and storage structures.

More than two-three hundred years from now. There may be ways of existing that we can’t even imagine, but those ways are likely to value individual existences less than we do now because existence will be less individual because our skulls will be cracked open and will be free to share our thinking directly with other people and merge our information processing capabilities or consciousnesses.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 500 – Death on Home Turf (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/10

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, what did loss mean centuries ago? What does it mean now and how will this compare to the future?

Rick Rosner: I have never read anything on the strength of belief of say, people in 14^th century Europe. Today, if you’re a religious person; your religion, your belief is riddled with doubt because science has made such inroads into explaining things and in insisting on evidence and in some cases contradicting religion.

So, even if you’re a good Catholic, you’re going to have serious doubts or if you’re a Muslim in a modern country, you’re going to have serious doubts about your beliefs. Now, I don’t know if those people in the 14th century were sincerer in their beliefs.

I would have guessed that they were because they didn’t have science fighting with those beliefs at the same time; even though, they didn’t have science. There was still no evidence, no earthly evidence of say reincarnation or an afterlife.

So, I would guess that while religious beliefs in the 14^th century were stronger. I would say, that the most faithful doubted to some extent the things that religion was offering them from time to time. I don’t think everybody fanatically 100% believed in the religions that they belonged to.

I think you’re asking about a loss because my brother died unexpectedly a couple weeks ago. Obviously, I’m feeling a loss and we’ve talked about this before but the nature of loss is changing and will be changing further.

People who were say early adaptors of a view of the future; people who are up-to-date on what the future is going to bring and not reasonable expectations for the future realize that death the way we experience it now will be increasingly lessened in the future and then people will live longer and longer and within a century people will be reasonably able to expect to live indefinitely thanks to improvements in medical technology and replicating the brain.

We already live at a time that is less death filled than say the 14th century. People live in the most developed countries and if you’re less than say 50 years old now; you have a pretty good shot at living to 90 or more compared to people of a century ago if they survived childhood.

They had a pretty good shot of living to 60 or 70, or people of two centuries ago if they survived childhood had a shot at living beyond 60 roughly. Our lifespans are already 50% longer than they were a couple of centuries ago, not including child mortality.

If you include child mortality, our lifespans have pretty much doubled. The whole Victorian era was death oriented in the Western or at least in the English-speaking world because Queen Victoria was sad about her husband who left her a widow when she was like 42 and then she reigned as Queen for another 40 some years and wore black every day and there was a fashion of black jewelry in England; mourning jewelry, sometimes with a memento mori; a lock of the dead person’s hair included in a lock and stuff. There was a focus on death in the 19^th century that wasn’t that justified.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 499 – An Arena of Art: Decay of Culture, Pretty Killy, and Kinda Corrupt (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Trump is a more pure version of the science fiction vision of a vacuous idiot who is completely at the mercy of corrupt interests. He is kind of close to President Camacho in Idiocracy.

So, plenty of people or quite a few people have predicted a vacuous national leadership. For the first time, we have a completely vacuous amoral, corrupt, and stupid president. The question: is this a crazy, one-time disaster? Or are we going to have idiot presidents 1/2 of the time or 2/3 of the time until America falls apart?

Science fiction writers also like to present future or near-future scenarios in which American can’t keep itself together and falls into different parts, which, you could argue, is the end of America.

If America falls apart, it is the end of the American experiment and the end of the nation. You could argue America turns into some crazy dictatorship where people’s rights are continually violated because we are immersed in entertainment.

It could be argued as a kind of end for America. There could be a third and more likely end of America. That, as AI and augmented post-human humanity rises, forces become more powerful relative to the forces of national unity, so the power of national government becomes increasingly irrelevant over the next century.

Then the new political and social structures arise that supplant the American government. There is still an American government. But that there are other forces that become much more important relative to an increasingly irrelevant U.S. government.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 498 – An Arena of Art: Decay of Culture, Pretty Killy, and Kinda Corrupt (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Bush 43 and Obama were overly killy. Perhaps, to the point, they could be considered war criminals. This may be more from outside the US in terms of perspective, as you’re outside the US, Scott.

Domestically, Obama stands for a return to political morality. We can hope that he still has enough influence over much of America. Gerrymandering of states is still an advantage of giving Republicans an unfair advantage.

I remember in the early 60s and 70s reading a couple science fiction novels: in particular, Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. It presents near futures, about 20 years from then, where you had a president who is just an idiot figurehead. A good-looking man who stood for nothing and did dumb stuff.

There is actually historical precedent. Warren Harding was elected because he was a good-looking guy and among our worst presidents. In the 1920s, super corrupt, super incompetent, died two and a half years into office, it is limiting the damage. But he did damage.

He was elected on the premise of being handsome. In the 80s, whether you agree with him or not, he had substance. He had a political philosophy. You could argue that he wasn’t super smart. But he tried to appoint competent people.

They fit his Republican philosophy. They were competent and experienced people. Even if, you did not like the philosophy. He got in plenty of trouble. His professionals got him into the Iran-Contra scandal, which had a lot of illegality.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 497 – An Arena of Art: Decay of Culture, Pretty Killy, and Kinda Corrupt (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/07

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s go with mysteries, problems, or simply anomalies.

Rick Rosner: I am going to ask questions that I do not necessarily have the answer to. Is Trump an anomaly or is Trump simply how politicians are going to be into the future? Another question: is salacious culture just an expanded arena of art or decadence that indicates the decay of our culture?

Before you started taping, you and I were discussing the relative war criminality of Bush 43, the younger one, and then Obama. Bush 43 lied us into the Iraq War, which led to the deaths between roughly 300,000 and even a 1,000,000 Iraqis and other people across the Middle East.

You argued and I was persuaded that Obama was pretty killy over there, to the point of committing a lot of war crimes in a destabilized Middle East with the drone policy and screwing up in Libya with Qaddafi.

Neither of them compares in terms of horribleness to Trump, at least horribleness potential. He has been in office for 2 years, so hasn’t had the full 8 years. But he has the potential to get us in a lot of trouble.

He has loosened the rules of engagement for taking on ISIS, which led to increased civilian deaths. Although, the two previous presidents were responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

Our discussion began with Obama giving a speech, where Obama came out against Trump and the Republicans. He was saying that they were completely corrupt and interested in the perpetuation of power at the expense of traditional American values.

Him being that explicit is a new thing.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 496 – Just Throw Common Sense and Math at the Problem

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/06

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: From what you’re saying, I am seeing a nice primer between folk psychology and psychology, and intuitive physics and physics. Folk psychology as a primer to psychology and intuitive physics as a primer to physics. They can make mistakes. But they can lead to some right directions.

Rick Rosner: I guess so. I am not too familiar with folk psychology, except I can imagine what it is. I am more intrigued by folk etymology, where people jump to conclusions about the origins of words based on what they sound like.

The suppositions or the stories that people come up with or find out from others aren’t true at all. They are built out of coincidence. That some words sound like other words. I don’t know.

I would assume that the best physicists are poets of physics. They have a sense. You hear Feynman, Einstein, and Hawking – at least Hawking and Einstein – talked about the beauty of theories.

They became sufficiently experienced from having thought about this stuff for decades. More correct intuitions about physics bubble up. Some potential analyses seem more beautiful and more right than other ones.

Often, it takes the form of equivalences. Newton sees the equivalence of a falling apple in a falling and orbiting body. Darwin sees the equivalence between the crazy proliferation of species and the apparent age of the world.

He sees geological structures that he doesn’t think were created by a catastrophe like a lot of people of the time. He saw structures that he thought took tens and maybe hundreds of millions of years to form. He saw the variety and proliferation of animals and the amount, like across the Galapagos Islands, where each island may have its own assortment of finches depending on what the finches are doing on each island.

They become specialized. He sees this speciation; and this deep time seen in geological structures as being equivalent. They are both from the principle of shit taking a super long time to happen.

Then Einstein sees the equivalences between – in General Relativity – that you can’t tell if you’re in an enclosed space whether you’re in accelerating frame; that is, whether you are standing in a gravitational field because you’re on the surface of a gravitating body, or whether you’re standing in the surface of something accelerated under you, then he sees an equivalence in Special Relativity that everyone sees the speed of light traveling at the same speed regardless of how fast they’re traveling relative to beams of light and relative to each other.

These deep equivalences seem right. The universe is complicated but only as complicated as it needs to be, which is a quote from someone. A lot of the theories that we have developed: simplicity and common sense get you quite a ways towards where you’re going, based on the information available at the time.

We didn’t have the Big Bang theory until Hubble in the 20s and the human computers at Harvard who gave Hubble the data. There are other galaxies. The fainter a galaxy is relative to us, then the more redshifted it is, which gives a framework for the Big Bang.

That those faint and more distant galaxies appear to move faster away from us. That information was not available to us until the nineteen-teens and 20s. So, you couldn’t come to common sense conclusion of the Big Bang until the 20th century.

There wasn’t the information available.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 495 – Newton: Observer and Thinker-Abouter

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/05

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about Newton? What about intuitive physics?

Rick Rosner: He was a good observer and a good thinker-abouter about things. You would have to be a genius to figure out things that he figured out. For Big Bang theory, it is a good commonsensical theory, especially with all that we know about the world and what is going on in terms of information.

But that commonsensical picture will probably be replaced. A commonsensical, at least in our minds, notion that the universe is made out of information. That information is held in a self-consistent information processing entity in a way similar to us.

The common sense conclusion – though this seems like a reach at this point – is that the laws of information within consciousness or something that approximates consciousness have deep analogies or equivalences with physics.

Jacobsen: In a sense, we are not saying the universe is at root information. It is made out of it. But it emerges.

Rosner: It is information held in some structure. The tacitness of the hardware may be so far divided from the universe’s information that we may simply be unable to tell what the information is.

Information held in a self-consistent system has laws. These laws are the laws of physics. They manifest themselves in interrelated ways. The information is perceived in the information-processing system. Then the information as perceived by the material world that is made out of information, which could be a commonsensical thing.

But we haven’t gone far enough to really make the case that this is the most reasonable thing given that this is what we imagine at this point.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 494 – Ontological Lower Limits and Upper Limits

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/04

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the limit of the knowledge from physics?

Rick Rosner: You were talking to a cosmologist who is working towards a theory of multiverses. You were saying that our knowledge is limited in terms of a global view because we’re in the system and not the system.

I have been thinking about how advances in physics are a combination of reasonable suppositions in terms of common sense deduction and then throwing mathematics at what we don’t know.

For instance, Newton sees the apple fall. He sees something fall. He gets the idea that the falling of the small object to the Earth is related to a large orbiting object that has orbital momentum and is constantly orbiting the Earth that pulls its path into a circle or an ellipse.

It is a manifestation of matter being attracted to all other matter. It is one of the simplest suppositions you can make given those equivalences. It turns out to be true as he applied his mathematical instincts to invent the idea of matter being attracted to all other matter.

A couple hundred years later, I forget who; they invented the raisin pie theory of atoms. It is the idea of the raisins being stuck in a pie, as a ball. It is not quite it. But it is a good first pass as to what an atom might be like.

People came up with the idea of electrons orbiting the nucleus. It is a good second pass and a good conclusion someone could draw from the evidence at the time. Then more information comes out, the Quantum Theory is developed.

It is replaced somewhat. People think in terms of orbits. It is still quantized probability clouds. An electron with different quantized amounts of kinetic energy will be found in different shaped clouds in orbit, but it does not quite orbit. It will be in different places within a probability cloud.

Mathematical tools along with conceptions of what the world is like that in retrospect that seems sensible. People like to say that quantum physics is inherently weird and absurd and doesn’t make sense compared to the macro world.

That was mostly said by the first, second, and third generations of quantum physicists. Now, I feel they simply accept this, as quantum systems inherently lack complete knowledge about themselves.

I bet you there are plenty of people who have a mostly intuitive feel of quantum phenomena.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 493 – Anything Goes Sports

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/03

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Currently, we may want to invert the system in place. Biological male identifying as trans-women and biological female identifying as trans-men.

Where, males as men and trans-women and females as women and trans-men compete with one another, it is biologically fair, even though it may seem sociologically unfair on the surface.

Rick Rosner: There’s no fair place anymore, at least in the future. Things will be getting weirder. Sports will begin to get weird. You already have – it’s not talked about and rare – parents who are buying blackmarket growth hormones for kids.

There are steroids for kids. They mostly don’t test for it. Some chess player got dinged for steroids.

Jacobsen: Why use steroids for chess?

Rosner: I don’t know. It helps. I might be wrong. I might be misremembering the article. Steroids don’t just make you muscle-y. There are many drugs out there that are used and abused. A bunch of steroids are illegal.

But if you pick up aa bodybuilding magazine, the whole back of the magazine is for bio-similar steroids. Steroids that aren’t illegal because they change one molecule but have the same effects.

In the coming years, we will see rich parents or psycho parents, or both, this will become an issue. It’s like a couple of years ago. It was when a bunch of families were caught bribing admissions.

You will see this in sports. Parents with the resource will genetically tweak their kids to make them more competitive. Stuff will get weird. My brother and I were pitching this science fiction show set 15 years from now.

There will be natural sports leagues and anything goes sports leagues. It is already the case in bodybuilding. You are tested thoroughly and swear to have never used steroids in the last couple of years.

Then there is anything goes competitions. There may be a little bit of testing. People are freakishly large. They have been doing all sorts of chemicals. We have trans issues entering into it.

There is a documentary on Netflix. You can see the pictures of the woman who used to be a guy and used to be a huge competitive bodybuilder to promote this documentary. Now, they are a ridiculously ripped woman who can probably bench press on the basis of the pictures easily bench press 300 lbs.

That woman will compete in some sports and will dominate, having previously been a man. You probably lose more than you gain by making trans people compete as representatives of their former gender, because they’re going to win if they are allowed to compete in their new gender.

If they compete as their former gender, it will work against the acceptance of transgender people; it is my personal opinion.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 492 – What? (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/12/02

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Does this play into personal dynamics for you?

Rick Rosner: I am a little aware of it. Because I am conversationally awkward. Perhaps, it is more conscious than other people in other situations. I worked in bars for 25 years. I worked in a very loud environment.

I was constantly on my toes, because I was getting incomplete information. What is something that I can say based on me not being able to hear this drunk guy that will be innocuous, my responses were head nodding or “Yeah, for sure.”

And I was hoping that what I didn’t hear the guy saying, “You think I am a real dick, don’t you?” But that was a low probability. Most people don’t go around saying, “You think I am a real dick.”

But I was aware of the pitfalls of agreeing. In conversation, we are doing the same process. We are predicting and setting up different responses on a different basis. It pops into our head. But what pops up is preconscious and non-verbal processing, it sets the brain.

Also, I have been on a couple of cheesy talk shows. I have been on Geraldo once. I have been in situations, where I have been on a panel. The deal is that there are three or four people talking.

In that deal, you have to be very conscious of the next point that you want to make, and then be willing to move on from making a point if the topic has changed. I am pretty interrupty.

Obviously, I am not great at conversation, but I am aware of, at least, some situations in which I am conscious or doing conscious monitoring of the flow of conversation. A lot of the time, we are not conscious of the flow of the conversation.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 491 – What? (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You were mentioning holographic information processing. It has a sort of analog. I do not want to draw a direct connection. In a live conversation, we have a sort of easy communication. That distribution all-around may produce a sort of priming everywhere.

Rick Rosner: I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But I am old and don’t give a shit. I don’t know if Gmail is doing this. Hotmail, when you want to reply, gives different kinds of replies. Somebody says “Hey, I sent these attachments.”

Then you click reply, it says, “Hey! I sent you these three attachments.” It can give a bunch more. The first instance everyone had of this was when the robot has a heads up display within the eyeball. It gives possible responses based on what is being said to him.

Someone says something to him. One response is “fuck off.” It was the 80s when that Terminator movie came out. We are seeing this in our emails now. In conversation, we are able to respond super fast because the brain is predicting what is needed based on the context.

That we’re constantly like a lineman in football before the play begins. They are constantly poised and ready to leap forward into what it thinks is going to happen. We are not usually aware of it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 490 – Wind Not in My Hair, Sun in My Eyes and Can’t See

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/31

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about in-built biases and also in-built accuracies?

Rick Rosner: The in-built accuracies in perception and thought are a result of us evolving perceptual and computational systems that look for and act on the near certainties that are based on gathering a lot of information from the external world and from our memory. I do not know how many photons are perceived by our eyes every single second.

But it is a lot. It has to be in the millions, at least. Enough photons hit our eyes that they give us a near-certain indication of things in the environment. The standard example that people always use is a red light.

When we see a red light and decide whether or not to cross the street, our decision is based on seeing many thousands of red photons from that red light. It might be more. But it is a shitload. There is basically a zero probability that we have made a mistake about the status of the light.

In fact, when people make errors in perception, it is often that they are basing their perception based on suddenly getting less information than they are used to, like Albuquerque in 1986. The Sun was in my eyes.

I did not even see a traffic light. I blew through it. I bounced off one car and hit another one, because the Sun was in my eyes and I didn’t get any information about a traffic light. I assumed in the absence of information about a traffic light that there wasn’t.

We have a shitload of information. We have macro information. That the probability that we’re wrong about those aspects – that we’re focusing on because they’re important – is near zero.

Because when you add them all up, we make millions of judgments a day. You add those up. It depends on the definition of judgment. It could be billions. We may make an error once every million or so times.

The error rate will be so low that it doesn’t kill us.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 489 – An Apple is Not an Orange or a Puppy, From This Angle

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/30

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You gave an example several weeks ago about an apple. If Newton had the apple hit his head, if it is not apocryphal and, in fact, true, then he saw an apple and not something else. If he saw it from space, it would not even be an apple, be seen.

Rick Rosner: A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about the consistency of the universe. The apple doesn’t disappear based on what angle you’re viewing it from, if you’re in the apple’s world.

But if you go far, far away from the apple, you can’t tell what the situation for the specific apples is on Earth from direct observation. You’re too far away. If you’re an astronaut on Mars, you can assume a bunch of stuff happening on Earth with apples because it is a common fruit. It is being grown, transported, and eaten.

But you cannot tell anything directly about specific apples. Unless, you have a specific feed on an apple being eaten back on Earth.

Jacobsen: Two assumptions floating there: one is the prior knowledge of appleness and another is a conscious entity to know of something.

Rosner: Yes, within the sphere of everything within the universe, it is all consistent. You may not know the specific apple from a million miles away. But if you’re within the visual contact of an apple on Earth, the status of that apple will not depend on where you’re viewing it from. Unless, you’re directly viewing it.

The status of the apple does not change as long as you’re within the world of that apple. It doesn’t become an orange or a puppy if you’re standing one foot to the left of that apple. There is a consistency up to the limit of where you can track stuff.

The universe is set up to keep track of itself. It is overall consistent within its macro and micro places.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 488 – Decoupling (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/29

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What does this imply for material events in relation to information and information processing?

Rick Rosner: Material events can happen without much affecting the information processing or the way the information processing is perceived in the information processing entity; unless, the material events in our universe are of sufficient scale.

That all the little things happening on planets and the individual nuclear reactions within stars are not each notable information events within the information processing entity.

That the same way – not the same way as I am still looking for a good metaphor – or in the metaphor of a captain of a ship not caring or perceiving what is happening in the individual planks of the ship.

Unless, something macro happens with those planks. But any kind of cellular events in the wood or even if the wood has worms or barnacles stuck to it. The general motion of the ship through the water in the operation of the ship does not get affected by what is going on in the planks.

Similarly, the graininess of the material world, which is necessary for us to exist because we are made of trillions of cells and the cells each have their own mechanisms and everything is important for our existence down to the atomic level.

But in terms of how the atomic events that we depend on… when you’re talking on the beach, you perceive sand approximately. You do not perceive what happens under the sand. All your perceptions.

A lot of stuff goes unperceived. Even though, the sand is supporting you. There is possibly a large decoupling between material events in our universe – the stories of our lives – and the information processing that is going on and manifested in the matter that we’re composed of.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 487 – Decoupling (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/28

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What else follows from structure and information?

Rick Rosner: Some information is encoded non-locally, not the same way exactly. In holograms, information is not entirely locally distributed. You get information from the whole of the hologram.

If you cut a hologram in 2, you do not have half of a photograph. You have a whole photograph but just more blurry. If the information is not fixed and localized in the structure that we live in, then there is a chance that material events that we experience do not correspond to the changes in the information structure of the universe.

That there is a decoupling. We have always assumed that the information-processing entity isn’t necessarily, and probably isn’t, aware of what is happening to the material manifestations of its information.

In other words, it doesn’t know. This entity doesn’t have any awareness, except the supposition of what is going on with the matter that is the material manifestation of the information in its, say, awareness.

But we had assumed that the material events that happened in the universe – all the way down to the micro level – reflect micro changes in the information processing changes in the thought – to think sloppily – of the information processing structure.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 486 – Consciousness and Its Registry, and Register-ers (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/27

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would this imply for the world informationally? How does a registering set of things give an indication of the universe?

Rick Rosner: The world is only full of entities that register and detect things, and exchange information, which gives us a sense of everything being information.

It might not always be the case. Because if you cannot tell what is happening 4o light years away or in a galaxy on an uninhabited planet, what you have is an indeterminate set or an indeterminate picture of what is happening elsewhere, if events occur in the material universe that don’t really affect other events, then it might be an open question as to whether or not those events really happen.

That’s all I have. The big deal is if something, whether conscious or not, registers the event. That applies to a wider framework across space and time. If a series of events happen and there are clues of recognizing something happening, and if all the registrants are wiped out, a megalith lands on a planet that has three aliens left and then wipes out all of the aliens, and then there is no further interaction or registration of the events on the planet, then it is as if that didn’t happen.

Because no unobliterated record of it exists, which leads to the nihilistic idea. If our universe ever collapses back into nothingness, it is as if it never happened, which probably is the case in a cosmological and quantum mechanical sense.

But information is only information when it is registered, when it causes other events to happen. If those events themselves are registered and if you break the chain, then it is as if those events didn’t happen or as if those events are among a multiplicity of events that may have happened.

But you don’t know. It is like putting Schrodinger’s cat back into the box.

Jacoben: If you were to excise part of a brain out, it is as if the event never existed.

Rosner: If somebody’s brain is the only thing that registered events, and if you mess with the brain to obliterate the information of the event, then, yes, the event didn’t happen. All the thoughts that anyone has ever had become probabilities within thoughts that could have happened in someone’s head, once the brain shuts down, rather than being actual thoughts.

Information only exists to the extent that it can be recognized and recorded and the recording or the registering continues to be or at least at some point causing further action.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 485 – Consciousness and Its Registry, and Register-ers (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/26

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What distinguishes information in the universe that constructs it, and information in individual consciousness, such as evolved organisms like human beings?

Rick Rosner: I do not think information is information unless it is registered and produces action in the world around it. The register-er does not have to be conscious. A security system can be triggered and take preventative measures without being conscious.

Somebody steps on a foot pad. Or if it is a dumb movie, somebody breaks a laser beam and all sorts of stuff happen. A system has been set up to register information. Somebody is stepping into the path of a laser beam and the system reacts to it.

Conscious beings, we can register and react to a whole bunch of different information. We are not specially built to register information; we’ve evolved to react to a wide range of sensory inputs as well as internal inputs.

If a tree falls in a forest without someone around, it might not have fallen. It is a terrible philosophical question because it forces the question. Because there is no tree falling in any forest that is not registered by some external system, like a frog being squashed.

A tree is a macro object in an area freely accessible over a long period of time to all sorts of entities that can register the tree. Nobody may care that the tree falls. But two years later, someone will see the fallen tree and know that the tree has fallen.

A better setup may be that if a tree falls or if a megalith falls on an uninhabited planet 25 light years away. Did it really happen?

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 484 – Information and Context

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There are different forms of information. One in a highly organized system but spread out. Another tightly knit and appears to make information, too.

Rick Rosner: Information probably isn’t information without context and the ability to interpret it as information. The information to the universe is only information to the universe. It is matter, space, and energy to us, not information.

We can pull information out of it. The universe isnt’ an information map to us. The universe is the material universe. That’s not to say that we can at some point become sufficiently technologically advanced to figure out to some extent the information of which the universe is made from.

But if it is holographic, then good luck with that. It probably is given the lack of specificity. The universe is basically a bunch of solar systems. It is not like one means asparagus and another means orange.

The information is probably not that localized. Which means, it is some kind of holographic or distributive deal. In any case, when people think of information, I have not thought about what people think about when they think of “information.”

I think people think information is there for the seeing. You see a stop sign that says, “Stop.” Okay, it is information. All information has a conveyance of what it is via a visual aspect.

I am looking at a vanilla folder, a box from Target, a plant. I suspect the information is conveyed visually. But I suspect the information is only available if you have evolved to interpret the information, as we have done.

Those former examples are bits of information. They are conveyed. But they are only available through my sensory and thought apparatus. This probably applies to all information. The easy information that we see.

There is the big data information is on the way, once we’re half computers in 40 years. We will all sorts of new information in the universe. Because we will have all these new sensory and processing capacities.

All information in the universe may be this way. It may be opaque and unreadable unless you have the right apparatus to read it properly. It doesn’t mean that you need a conscious entity to gather information and to act on information.

Information may only exist to the extent that it is registered by the rest of the universe.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 483 – Everything Falls Into the Paradox Vortex

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/24

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When we are talking about the media and the proliferation of media in different forms connecting to social media, there is also a breaking apart of, not entirely, the state propaganda. That is not just Trump. It can be Xi Jinping. It can be Putin. It can be others. Paradoxically, it is changing the discourse of the public.

In that before, they would probably more readily take in state propaganda.

Rick Rosner: I am going to be slightly more pessimistic than you in the short term, but not in the long term. Was it Archimedes who said to give him a level and a place to stand and he could move the world? Everyone has a lever or a megaphone. Nobody really knows what kind of leverage they have.

The proliferation and weaponization of social media have created issues in conjunction with the amplification of horrible movements and horrible people. Nobody knows what is happening and nobody knows who is winning. If you go through the sheer number of people who think he is a jackass and a monster, there are at least 4 billion across the Earth who would rate him negatively.

So, it is easy on Twitter, almost everybody I follow is anti-Trump and anti the rest of his ridiculous family. Although, Don, Jr., usually tweets stupid tweets. But he came to the defense of Chelsea Clinton who was under attack on the streets of New York for saying that Ilham Omar is antisemitic.

It is a little blip in the first thousand points of light for the first George Bush has turned into the Trump thousand crazy shits happening in a single day. Nobody knows who is going to prevail. Really, it is an inability to contextualize the social media technology. It is as if. You are too young to remember how cell phones were when they came out and only 1% of the population had them.

We just celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the smartphone. Imagine if instead of a gradual thing from the 80s to the 90s with the gradual penetration of the cell phones and smartphones into the population, everyone went from cell phones to everyone has a smartphone.

It would be chaos. Nobody would know how to deal with them. It is a little bit like chaos now. Because we have not been able to judge and incorporate social media and technology into our lives and our worldviews. The added accelerant is Trump adding a fire every 42 seconds.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 482 – Heating Up: Climate Change, Mathematicizing Consciousness, and Denzel Washington in Black Trenchcoat

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/23

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are some other possible futures?

Rick Rosner: Oh! The deal is that there are a bunch of different possible futures but most reasonable possible futures now encompass us riding this accelerating wave of increasing technological expertise with a few possible futures having the world entirely falling apart.

You can still go to the movies. There are three zillion dystopian books that have climate change in destroying the world. But if you look at possible futures, the more probable futures rendering climate change destroying the world of the future is almost super unlikely.

Instead, climate change futures, which are all reasonable futures, will be reasonable to an extent but will simply fuck a lot of things up. Then there will be technological solutions coming along to soften blows.

We’ll eventually engineer ourselves around most of the worst effects of climate change. We have some tough decades for the next 40 to 60 to 100 years from now, but technology eventually gets a handle on it.

Even if it is slightly the default technology of now, we may solve the problem of consciousness. Which means that more and more humans will live in the future equivalent to cyberspace, they do not live fully fleshy existences of the human population.

Eventually, the population starts dropping around a hundred years from now. By 200 years from now, the human population is maybe five or six billion down from a peak of 15 billion and the 5 billion humans will have a much smaller aggregate footprint because there are fewer of us.

Also, technology’s carbon footprint minimizing aspects will exist more than ever before. So, climate change will be solved after reaching a certain amount of havoc along the coastal areas of the world.

Also, the non-coastal areas of that stuff get to solve, like the gun problem in America. Even if we never get a handle on guns, and guns continue to proliferate, eventually, people become bulletproof because consciousness becomes storable and downloadable.

So even if you are shot by some maniac in the year 2147, you are able to be reconstituted because you’ve been frequently downloading your consciousness. You are able to be reconstructed. Having only lost a few minutes up to between the last time, you were downloaded and when the active shooter obliterated the consciousness.

There will be one in the future. There will be other means of liberation. There may be cyber wars that result in the obliteration of the backups of hundreds of millions of people. But that is almost a level beyond regular humans’ problem.

Where the technology exists, everybody can be practically immortal and indestructible, except for these political wars. You get to live forever, except there is a small chance that you get a race to the cyber war.

But everything points to our current problem and our current questions, scientific questions, besides the biggest being answered solved: consciousness. The super powerful technology is our future, without us necessarily facing the dystopian apocalyptic future or if it is Denzel Washington walking around in a long black leather trench coat.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 481 – Consciousness at the Crossroad of Eternity and Immortality

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about our own minds? What other about other possible futures?

Rick Rosner: The problem of consciousness is still not entirely acknowledged as a problem, as a technical or a technological problem. It will be solved too. It will be figured out. We will know how consciousness works mathematically, physically.

That’ll make it possible for everyone – eventually, for people who want to relieve their poverty of mind – to augment their consciousness. So, everything we want as humans will become a possibility, including immortality and various forms of worldly power through understanding.

Then the long ones that are following shortly thereafter are all the things that make it a less than a happy ending, which is that humanity becomes extremely devalued in terms of its consciousness becoming extremely devalued.

New structures, new conscious information processing entities and collaborations of merged beings and all that come along and transform the world into something that most people.

Most human throughout history would find this disquieting. So, the beings of the future will thrive and we’ll face new non-humans. But as far as humanity gets it; there will be humans who continue to live as humans but like super-powered humans, immortal humans with happy satisfied lives.

They will live in a possibly abridged post-singularity environment where they can do whatever they want. But perhaps somewhat shielded from the more intrusive disquieting aspects of the super big data, super high tech future.

So, one hundred years from now, you can live a life is a superhuman as a transhumanist who’s living in an abridged world. A world where you can do all the fun human stuff without necessarily facing the ugly parts of transhumanism. The humans do not count for shit anymore. All right. That is it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-18

Ask A Genius 480 – The Wonderful Future and Happy Endings

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/21

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I like happy endings. Does the end of the human era with the slow dismantling of problems about comprehension of the human organism lead to one?

Rick Rosner: I have been thinking. It is now clear that humanity is going to have a happy ending. There is a certain irony to that. That is, it is clear that it is highly unlikely – that given the state of technology that there is little chance – humanity on the planet will be wiped out either by something of our own making or by something not of our own making.

That is before we can build a structure that will intercept all possible asteroids which we eventually will. It is unlikely that our planet will be destroyed if the asteroid is going to hit us or that a random black hole will cross the path of Earth and destroy it – if it isn’t the sun burning out.

It will burn out five billion years before it is supposed to or any other cosmic accident will happen in the next 50 to 100 years before we can get a handle on most cosmic accidents. Similarly, it is apparent that the accelerating pace of technology and the scope of technology is such that we are going to have something like the singularity.

That the singularity people believe that all human questions and problems will be answered and solved. Although, probably not the one the singularity people sketch because their schedule is it all happens by around 2040.

I guess you could call me a slow singularity person where it all happens, but it may take another hundred years past that to get everything going. We will solve all those medical problems. They will be understood, and almost all medical problems will be addressable and even if they are not within 100 years. You’ll be able to move out of your body.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 479 – Predicting Sex, Expecting Sex, and Entitlement as Evolutionary Baggage in Incorrect Prediction

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/20

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the prediction from a central processing arena for conscious thought? Is this always and only the main operation of the brain?

Rick Rosner: There are plenty of instances where prediction is not the main job of the brain. A more general way of starting to think about what the brain’s job is, is to think of it as a game that your brain is trying to score points; or, you in combination with your nervous system use you as an organism, or try to score points with these points vary from person to person and from moment to moment.

And even with the inner person, you have various parts of the brain and body trying to accomplish various things that may be at odds with each. Maybe, one of the biggest areas in which accurate prediction and surprise minimization is not the objective of you as an evolved organism is in the area of sex.

Think about how many guys both human and otherwise walk around inaccurately thinking, “She wants it,” when they mean females, it is evolution. Given that you are good, you’ve evolved as something that has managed.

You come from a long line of organisms, billions of them, stretching back for hundreds of millions of years. All the way back to the beginning of life. A source of beginning is sex. Those who all managed to get laid.

Given that the guy did try to get laid, it is safe to say that your brain will set you up to say the wrong things if it will help you get laid. So, the guy thinks that she wants it. Even though in reality, she does want it.

But it may help you get laid because you think she wants it. “I am going to go ahead with this,” and then the woman like you that maybe goes along with it, or maybe she has no choice because you are that big an asshole.

But your prediction that she wants it is inaccurate. However, you move forward anyway because your evolutionary history is of a being who evolves through a lot and comes from a long line of creatures who managed to get laid in one form or another.

Evolution says, “I want you to make that mistake and go ahead and try to get laid.” But I will try to learn more about this principle and see what subtleties are since he’s written a thousand papers [Ed. Karl Friston].

I am sure you are also this guy started off as a physician, psychiatrist, or somebody who deals with the issues of people with broken brains. So as soon as he addresses the idea, the situation of brains making an accurate prediction.

Because that has been his clinical practice for his whole life. So, it is an interesting place to start.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 478 – Freely Give and Ye Shall Freely Receive

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/19

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does this free energy principle fit into the framework of thinking in animals?

Rick Rosner: I have started learning about this. That it’s thinking in animals. Maybe even animals are not sophisticated enough to think but have some agency in the world or it is not a true agency because it is not based on thinking.

It is still moving along a gradient moving some wavering poisonous substance, like an amoeba. They are minimizing their free energy, which goes along with a general trend in cognitive science. It is in the right direction. That the thinking in the brain as predictive tools.

These predictive tools are for your brain’s main job. Your brain’s main job is to predict what happens next and prepare you for that to do it, thus reducing risk and increasing longevity. This free energy minimization also has something to do with a bunch of principles of physics including the path of least resistance.

The shortest path and time that the light will always pick. A light will pick the path that gets from one place to another in the shortest time, which can be used to explain things like refraction.

However, free energy minimization is a tendency of thinking systems without being the absolute determinative factor so it might be better. I am sure the guy is Karl Friston who has written more than a thousand papers. He addressed a lot of stuff that I have not come across yet.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 477 – Free Energy Principles and the Mechanics of Emergence in Life

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/18

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the deal with the free energy principle of Karl Friston? This you brought up. I’d like to talk about it more.

Rick Rosner: I started learning about it. I came across an issue of Wired Magazine. It has an article on Karl Friston and his principal free energy minimization. The overall principle or of an organizing principle of all animal life.

He calls this free energy. It has analogies with entropy and lack of information or free energy. What’s important about his system, it at least puts a lot of ideas about cognition on a vaguely mathematical basis.

It has a sense of adventure about analogies between mathematical properties and cognitive processes. Free energy is basically the capacity to be surprised, which is also equal to, in certain ways, the entropy of the system.

The capacity to be surprised about a certain situation is the number of different possible outcomes that there could be. So, a thousand different outcomes for some game between a couple of teams.

You have the capacity to be surprised if you read nothing about the outcome. Because it could be any of a thousand things. So, many of the outcomes would be a one in a thousand event, which is a rare surprise.

But knowing what the outcome is going to be, you minimize your surprise; you minimize your free energy; you minimize your entropy. Because what’s going to happen, you are not going to be surprised.

If you go to one of three things that could happen out of a possible thousand, you minimize your surprise with this principle.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 476 – Scientists in Science Costumes, Clowns with Clown Patois

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/17

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Even with this clownish behavior, what will happen with science?

Rick Rosner: We are not going to do anything about global warming. That whole set of related belligerent people with belligerently ignorant beliefs will persist even beyond Trump.

Probably, as long as Fox News keeps telling people that everything happening to Trump is a witch hunt and its fake news, this chunk of the American population will continue to buy that. When Nixon went down, there was a sense of national shame. His base still had 50 percent support among Republicans, even as he resigned. But they got quiet for a while.

That may not happen now because the same way global warming makes the oceans hotter, which makes hurricanes and tropical storms more powerful; Fox News continues to pump energy into the delusions stream, which will keep tens of millions of Americans not smart – when Americans need to stop thinking wrongly.

Even as Trump is revealed to be a terrible guy, I am not sure what you can do about Fox News. There used to be a thing called the Fairness Doctrine, which said that if you had a politician representing one silo. I do not know exactly. I should read it.

But somebody representing one side had to be countered by stuff on the other side. You couldn’t have a Rush Limbaugh on the air for three hours a day. Unless, you had the obvious contravening viewpoint on an equal amount of time.

Then the Fairness Doctrine is gone. The Fairness Doctrine did not even address people spewing out fake news. Except I do not want to call it fake news, because that is what the Right calls, “Actual news,” with people spewing out a stream of lies.

Because that did not even enter into the national awareness; that that would be a thing that was done as a vividly at it’s being done now.

I do not know that you could ever pass legislation requiring truth in what is pulp news or, even more, opinion. Without that, even as Trump falls, it will continue to have a huge chunk of the population of 60 million people, maybe, believing bullshit. Okay! That is it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 475 – The Next While in Crazyville’s Villa

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Where does this leave real knowledge of the situation?

Rick Rosner: There are plenty of reasonable opinions, which means nobody knows what’s going to happen exactly.

But it is reasonable to think that all these investigations mean that Trump will not get re-elected. His approval currently runs at about 42 percent, which is a crazy high number for a guy as bad as he is. He thought earlier this week; he got pissed that Michael Cohen was going to prison.

Mueller issued two more memos about ongoing investigations. Trump did not even show up to work one day this week on Wednesday. Even though, he lives in the place where he works. All he had to do was put on a robe and slippers and go downstairs, but he stayed upstairs all day sulking.

I do not think that has ever happened before in the history of the presidency; that a president takes a sulk day. I mean everything is completely nuts. and the Republicans and Trump’s base, which include lots of faithful Christians, are pretending that this is okay.

It means that even after Trump fails to be re-elected, if he does fail to be re-elected; this will probably by then be one quarter to one-third of the country. They won’t go away. That strain of nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-science.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 474 – The King’s Ball(s), and All Out Celebration (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How is this going to be perceived?

Rick Rosner: There is the investigation that will start shortly into one of Trump’s country clubs. Abuse of mostly undocumented labor and these laborers have been abused.

So, all this stuff is going to come out about Trump. Reasonable people think this will be revealed when the Democrats take over the house and have the power to subpoena tax records and everything else.

And when Mueller gets closer to the end of his investigation, it will show that Trump has had a criminal career spanning 40 years or more. But Republicans and evangelicals are saying well as long as the country is in good shape.

None of this stuff matters. It is all inconsequential stuff that nobody got killed. It is in. It is violating campaign finance laws and paying off mistresses and all this is okay. It wouldn’t have been OK. I get most of my information from Twitter. Everybody is saying, “Well, this is rank hypocrisy.”

That had Democrats did any of this stuff. It would be different. The Republicans were going crazy. In fact, they did go crazy over stuff that was much more minor when it was done by Democrats. Some angry liberals think Springsteen, possibly Michael Moore, are saying that Trump may well get re-elected, even as all the stuff he’s done as a fraud is revealed.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 473 – The King’s Ball(s), and All Out Celebration (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/14

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s going on today?

Rick Rosner: Alright, so, it is Friday, December 14th, 2018. Trump: there are more investigations into Trump than ever before. I have not tried to dig up a list of all the different investigations. It was taking some time. I have not found a compiled a list. But there are at least six investigations going on, possibly more in a month when the new Democrat-controlled House of Representatives takes over.

That will probably mean another half a dozen or more additional investigations, new investigations, including what happened to the hundred and seven million dollars that donors sent to pay for the inauguration festivities.

That is nearly one-eighth of a billion dollars. Where did the money go? Because that is one night of parades and parties costing a lot of money. However, there is no way it cost one hundred and seven million, especially since people were happy when Obama was elected.

Obama had like close to a dozen presidential balls. Trump had three or four. So, there is no way that you could spend one hundred seven million. Unless, there was a crime. Twenty-seven million or twenty-six-million to the party planner for it. What party planning results in a twenty-six-million-dollar bill?

So, there is that is a new investigation.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 472 – Corroding Unifying Institutions (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/13

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would be the downside of this shift?

Rick Rosner: It is the constant distractions. I am reminded of another science fiction story from probably 60 years ago by Kurt Vonnegut, where the concept of equality in his future, in the future of the story has been taken to the point that people who are smarter than average have a buzzer going up in their ear every 30 or 45 seconds, which makes it impossible for smart people to form coherent streams of thought, and thus reduces them down to the same constant level of cognition as everybody else.

And so, constantly being occupied with social media and ephemeral noise people are completely distracted. You see it on the street. You see people who have been zombified by the content coming over their phones. And it is not exactly pop culture; it is the stuff over people’s phones via text, which is individualized culture.

They are getting texts from people they know about themselves so it is even more specifically tailored for them and it eats up people’s attention and productivity. So, that’s a huge downside, especially if they are doing that shit while they are driving.

But the upside, once we get a better handle on being able to deal with this stuff, will in the future involve adding to our cognitive abilities and information processing ability. The upside is that people who are good at keeping up will gain enhanced abilities; having the best apps, by having the best add-ons to their brains, they will be the most productive effective citizens of the worldwide thought cloud and will gain more and more resources, whatever those resources are in the future.

More and more in the future, information will create money and the people who are the best at sucking out the processing information will be the rich people of the future. And the people who are bad at it, they’ll make bad decisions about their consumption or will become technologically Amish to some extent; they will miss out on being the apex predators of information of the future.

There are all niceties we can think about and work out in general. That’s the deal that the old institutions fall away and are replaced by attention to new and constantly changing stuff.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 471 – Corroding Unifying Institutions (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/12

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What will happen the short-term with these hammer blows to standard institutions like the church? How will society adapt to this?

Rick Rosner: I haven’t thought about this much before but the entire 20th century, the second half at least, functions to erode unifying institutions. Patriotism, religion, fricking Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts; from the ’60s on, there was increasing cynicism about big institutions that people had believed in or at least a century before.

That’s continued as you indicated with more and more revelations about the Catholic Church and perhaps churches in general that they may facilitate sexual abuse and other abuses. And so, the question becomes if these institutions continue to erode what replaces them and what provides an alternate glue for the social fabric.

I would suggest that the new glue is pop culture/current events literacy; that just keeping up with what’s going on occupies more and more of people’s…well; it is what was formerly occupied with institutional knowledge and in deference and attachment.

People, in general now, are attached to just keeping abreast of what’s happening, what interests other people, what’s highly ranked among other people, and what political views are held by people they respect.

Joe Haldeman, a science fiction writer; one of his novels probably written in the ’70s or the ’80s had moment-to-moment rankings of the most popular celebrities in the world and this ranking would be constantly available and it was constantly shifting.

It is not too far off from what we have with social media right now where people are particularly concerned with where Ariana Grande ranks in say the number of Twitter followers or Instagram followers versus Kylie Jenner at any given moment.

But you can look up that stuff if you want, but people are cognizant of what Kylie and Kendall are up to and what Ariane is up to and what their thoughts on stuff are or what videos, for instance, Ariana’s released, which express her thoughts about her own celebrity and other stuff.

People are occupied with keeping up with this stuff and are rewarded for keeping up with the best entertainment that society has to offer. There’s too much entertainment now. There’s too much consumable stuff.

There are too many takes on things and by being able to keep up with who has the best takes and the best entertainment, you’re able to sort through the avalanche of pop culture and pick out what you like. I guess that’s all I have on that for now.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 470 – Buying or Selling Online (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/11

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: eBay, you can look around and find other places that offer slightly – like Etsy – similar stuff, depending on your category. Etsy is not a bid based app. Everybody sets the price.

It is good if you do not want to wait. But on eBay, you are waiting 6 days or something until the bid ends. On Etsy, you, sometimes, pay a little more. But then, there are of items listed simultaneously on Etsy and eBay with the minimum starting bid being the Etsy price.

I do not know the etiquette of doing that is. But then, there are other places. If you want really high-end stuff where you will pay a lot more, and the prices have been or may seem double or triple what they might be on eBay, one place is called First Dibs. There is a place called Ruby Lane.

There are other boutiquey collectible sites. If you look around, you can find versions of eBay that are crappier than eBay with items even cheaper than eBay.

I don’t know if anyone has done anything on the economics of collectible stuff. Where there should be a mathematical function of what the price of collectibles is, given the absence of other factors, other factors being, for instance in the case of Beanie Babies; they were very collectible 20 years ago.

It was right at the end of the 90s and 2000s. People paid a bunch of money for them until everyone realized that they were bullshit. The people hoping to make a lot of money ended up losing it.

But in the absence of some market collapse, for something where there has been an established market for a collectible over decades, there will still be waves of fashionability and unfashionability.

Like Antiques Roadshow, people will realize – like the fancy heavy wooden granda furniture – stuff is kind of worthless. People do not want it; it reminds people of their grandparents. Fashion aside and market collapses aside; I suspect the price of collectibles to go up based on inflation or based on attenuation of supply, like with comic books, where decades of parents throwing away their kids’ comic books.

I had a comic book collection. If there is a rate at which the collectible items become more rare, because they are subject to loss and destruction, and then there is an increase in population; if the population has doubled or tripled since the first issue of action comics with Super Man, you would expect a number of collectors to, at least, have tripled and, actually, maybe, more than tripled because the internet gives people opportunities.

We know it gives people to share their terrible political opinions and to radicalize one another. But it would increase the number of collectors at a greater rate than the numbers of increase in the population because more information about stuff is out there.

Which you’d think would make collectibles an investment, it probably would not, because you are buying from people who know what they are doing. If you are buying from an auction house, when you can buy things online, you are paying a premium to the auction house.

One more thing about knowing whether what you’re purchasing on eBay is fair priced or not. If it is a popular item with 6, 8, or 12 bids on it, you can click on the bids and see who is bidding on it. Not the names of the people but the number of transactions that they have done on eBay.

If a bidder has a thousand or more transactions listed with a number listed in parentheses beside their name, they are probably a dealer. It would be insane for someone to go on eBay to then buy a 1,000 things without selling anything.

A big number means a dealer is trying to buy that thing and means that that dealer thinks that he or she can make money if they get the item at the price that they have bid, which means that it is fairly priced; unless, you’re dealing with a crazy obsessed person.

That’s about it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 469 – Buying or Selling Online (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/10

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: eBay, there are about 3,000 items in this category for sale at any given time; this category that my wife likes. It gives you a chance to see how much stuff is really worth by seeing how much stuff is really worth.

In terms of being able to buy things, obviously, eBay is being able to buy stuff that you couldn’t buy before the internet. Early adopters of the internet, they went on in roughly 1995. I do not know when eBay came online, but I think 10 years after that.

It gives anybody sufficiently diligent an idea of what stuff is worth, which is, sometimes, great because sometimes people will put stuff up for sale and they have not done sufficient research. Then they give it a buy now option; then you may be able to get a bargain.

But generally, that doesn’t happen. When my kid was younger, I was trying to get us a whole bunch of Legos for cheap. But because eBay has established a stable price point for Legos.

There weren’t bargains to be had. That aspect of eBay is great for sellers. If you do your research and look at comparable items, you can get a decent idea of what price you should accept.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 468 – Buying or Selling Online (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you know about buying or selling online?

Rick Rosner: Like we’ve said, high-IQ types get obsessed online; I have been obsessed. My wife has simple tastes. She shops at thrift stores. I used to get her a lot of flowers 30 years ago.

Now, we have a garden. So, we can get them out of our garden. There are no needs to buy flowers anymore. She did get some collectibles. She liked this collectible item. I have been cruising for cheap but good examples of this type of item.

Plus, you can use eBay to buy stuff. If you look around, you can get fantastic deals, because China wants to bury us. It is the way the Chinese economy and the economic disparities have made it so that you can buy stuff from other countries for just a pittance.

That is using eBay to buy it now option. You are not bidding or competing with people. You are simply buying the lowest price and not the lowest auction price. But if you’re going to bid on stuff, I am a swooper.

The swooping philosophy is coming in at the end with your best offer with about 8 seconds to go before the auction ends. This doesn’t give people time to get in there and outbid you, to think about it.

If their best offer is less than your best offer, and if you bid 10 minutes before it ends, it gives people time to think about it. If you come in at the end, then if your best offer is higher then theirs, then there is no time for them to reconsider and raise their bid.

It feels good and bad. You are not permitting others to outbid you. At the same time, that is the way that it works.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 467 – Spirituality as a Political Tool (4)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: It is a rare person who continues to believe that the Earth is flat. But just because no one thinks the Earth is flat anymore, except lunatics, and the flat Earth is a naive belief from thousands of years ago, that that naive belief has gone away doesn’t mean that religion will go away. It is just that specific areas of knowledge will squeeze out religious belief in certain areas.

There will always be room for religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs about the world, even a fully scientifically explained world and science will change too. That fully explained world will still have room for religious overlays.

There will always be places to have or insert mystical beliefs. There is a thing in quantum mechanics called Bell’s Theorem. Einstein had trouble with quantum mechanics. He thought that you just can’t have a world functioning this randomly.

He thought there was a structure behind the structure in quantum mechanics; that behind randomness of quantum mechanics there was a layer not accessible to us that made the random not really random.

But with Bell’s Theorem, no, it works and to the extent that quantum mechanics has been proven to work; you can’t have secret mechanics behind determining outcomes. However, under IC, the things that happen apparently randomly in quantum mechanics; those things bring information into the world.

Under IC, that information reflects the state of something; that state of, say, the information being brought into the universe, as the universe accumulates information then it has to be about something.

It doesn’t imply a certain framework behind the apparent randomness of the universe, but not in the way Einstein believed. But in a similar way, it is possible to say, “There is this system. It explains things. But there is still room to say that this also exists. That, yes, you have a scientific world but there is also room for beauty, good, bad, and truth.”

That will always be. Although, the evidence and theory-based framework will continue to shape not just science but non-scientific beliefs.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 466 – Spirituality as a Political Tool (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/07

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the types of the first discussion? What does continual encroachment of more accurate views of the world mean for religious faith and faith in general? Because the trend over centuries has been a decline in outright belief and liberalization of those who do believe.

Rick Rosner: Generally, there is a low cost to have beliefs or large philosophical beliefs about how the world is, believing in a god or a bunch of gods, or no god or whatever. Whatever you believer at the large scale, unless you’re working in the field and or somehow run afoul of some grinding mechanism of where religion meets politics, it doesn’t affect daily life.

You navigate your daily life using a bunch of specific knowledge, situational knowledge. You don’t cross the street on a red light. You don’t drink Draino. You cook the chicken before you eat it.

None of those have large religious import. It is a whole different set of knowledge. People will continue to believe in and have hopes about what the world is. People’s beliefs that are, to some extent, religious over time, on average, be more informed by actual information about the world.

It is a rare person who continues to believe that the Earth is flat. But just because no one thinks the Earth is flat anymore, except lunatics, and the flat Earth is a naive belief from thousands of years ago, that that naive belief has gone away doesn’t mean that religion will go away. It is just that specific areas of knowledge will squeeze out religious belief in certain areas.

He thought there was a structure behind the structure in quantum mechanics; that behind randomness of quantum mechanics there was a layer not accessible to us that made the random not really random.

That will always be. Although, the evidence and theory-based framework will continue to shape not just science but non-scientific beliefs.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 465 – Spirituality as a Political Tool (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/06

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Let’s talk about the whole deal, the use of Evangelicals in politics.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The political use of religion.

Rosner: There is a better word than “use.” The energizing of the base.

Jacobsen: The zeal?

Rosner: It feels like, with the Evangelical voters, this has been going on for the last 150 years, but it hasn’t been. Because this has only happened for the last 30 years. Because conservative think tanks have been thinking about how to get leverage over the American populace, how do they get voters to vote in their people.

Before, in America, you had a more benign form of evangelism. “Christianity close to home” would be a good phrase for it. The 50s and 40s in the, at least, idealized form of America.

You have a bunch of towns each packed with a bunch of churches. Each person went to a church or a synagogue. Each worshipped in their own way, but each in their own Judeo-Christian values and each more or less worked out for each other.

In more sinister cases, they became busybodies on people’s behavior that fell short. It was a more benign form of pervasive religious values, not particularly coercive but with some aspects of coercion.

It is not strident and not feeling threatened and not trying to opposed religious values of others. When necessary, it is not seriously impinging on politics; this is where the conservative side has been piling up now, and a large number of the Evangelical voters.

Any mainstream politician, liberal or conservative, has to claim to be religious. It is a very brave and exceptional politician who doesn’t claim to be religious. It is a rare group of voters that will vote that person in.

The dog whistling in politics every time a politician makes a public statement. The religious voter understands the statement in its nuanced meaning but the non-religious don’t because it is a dog whistle to the religious. It can be used cynically.

The American version of this isn’t new. There is always the potential for it, as long as there has been religion or politics. Although, you have instances of it. There has been the potential for it as long as there has been religious and politics.

Jacobsen: It goes back to Constantine.

Rosner: We don’t burn people at the stake. It has been done at the cross-purposes of politics and religion. By embracing science, you don’t necessarily avoid; you open yourself up to a whole different set of tragedy.

The atomic bomb is one.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 464 – Spirituality as a Political Tool (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/05

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Conceptions of the world apart from factual knowledge. We take the scientific knowledge or a theology from the past, then they are applied to describe the real world in some way, either to derive meaning or functionality, or both

Another way that this has shifted is as a political tool. We have talked about how some spiritual conceptions of the world are used as political tools.

Rick Rosner: You’re talking about Evangelicals and politics.

Jacobsen: Not just them.

Rosner: Maybe, Saudi Rabia driving religious fervor up with anti-Western fervor in particular, and politicians using religious fervor for cynical purposes.

Jacobsen: Yes, I would extend this to Catholics and Evangelicals too, which are big hunks of the population.

Rosner: You’re from Canada. Is it there too?

Jacobsen: Take, for instance, Alberta or even Saskatchewan, there is controversy over the implementation of a single school system or a merger of the religious and secular public schools, to reduce costs.

Also, the Catholic kids are paying for the Catholic schools and the non-Catholics are paying for the Catholic schools, apart from the contentions of labeling kids “Catholic” rather than “kids with Catholic parents.”

The finance differential seems unfair to me. So, there is a proposal for a single educational system without any particular religious or other orientation.

Rosner: I am sure this pisses off a bunch of Catholics.

Jacobsen: 40% of the population are Catholics, so certainly.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 463 – Religion, the Scientific Framework, Physical Models of the World, and Diminishment (5)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/04

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A functionally unlimited of them, too. It is a “for all intents and purposes” infinite.

Rick Rosner: Yes, although, that gets scary. But when you say, “Unlimited,” it tends to imply an infinity. Our experience of the world implies huge worlds but not infinite.

Jacobsen: I like the phrase “functional infinite” or “functional unlimited,” which means a very large finite but an unknown number for that finite.

Rosner: The whole thing is either an infinite set of things in the set of all possible things, which is problematic, or you have this infinity, or maybe not.

Jacobsen: In a similar way with can or cannot exist, some things are perceived to different degrees of fidelity. Not perceived by someone does not necessarily mean non-existent, but it’s not perceived into one’s cognitive apparatus. But then, other things are perceived to different perceived grainily or crisply.

Rosner: The best we can say is infinite or not infinite. Our ancestors will argue over this for generations to come.

Jacobsen: That’s why I like the prior mentioned phrase.

Rosner: The idea of IC, of the universe as a self-consistent information system, where any large system is built from information. It is a step back from the purely cold and godless Big Bang, big science, framework; that we’re currently under.

In that, it doesn’t impost God the Creator, but it does suggest a proliferation of consciousness in entities across the universe. In that, the universe has 10^22nd stars with something like half of those stars potentially having planets.

So, you have, at least, a billion-billion environments for life to evolve. If you look at the evolution of life on Earth, if life is going to evolve, then cognition is going to evolve. So, you have both the probabilistic argument, the Drake Equation or some version of the Drake Equation, that says, “Yes, it is unlikely that we’re the only consciousness in the universe,” then the technical aspect of consciousness as information sharing is not a miraculous thing but is a natural consequence of a large self-consistent set of systems.

It means that you have a system potentially full of conscious entities. Not in the kumbaya crystals and I hang amethysts from the wall of my bedroom and my chakra power…

Jacobsen: [Laughing] or hanging a picture of Mother Mary Magdalene on the wall.

Rosner: Yes, thinking beings probably arise in a bunch of contexts and they probably have consciousness, and the universe itself may have consciousness. Some of these thinking beings may survive for millions of years and, in the case of the universe, maybe many hundreds or thousands of millions of billions of years.

It presents that idea that there are conscious entities with godlike complexity and persistence, which is a baby step away from the fully cold universe.

Jacobsen: What about the pre-fully cold universe with the original major religions posited? Their views of the world.

Rosner: You talked about a particular religious philosophy that lives and serves to live in the cracks to fill in the blanks. There will always be blanks. What comes after people and future people will always yearn, people will not only yearn for science, for purely mechanistic explanations of things.

People evolved to search for significance. We evolved as omnivore survivalists. We look for exploitable regularities in the world to survive. So, people will always look for patterns within patterns and patterns within the ineffable.

The possible wondrous things that exist but just beyond our understanding. So, religion and mysticism will never go away. But there will continue to be squeezing, one would think, in the way religion has been squeezed for hundreds of years.

But the understood squeezes out the incompletely understood wonderful, which doesn’t mean what is understood isn’t wonderful; it also means the possibility that what becomes understood involves things that would be considered wonderful by religious people of past eras.

The idea that the unification or the unified nature of the universe, how every point in the universe knows how just about every other point in the universe is doing at every level of the universe speaks for a cohesiveness that may not have the same coziness of God being in charge of everything but does, possibly, offer a certain satisfaction in the wondrous ways that this happens.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 462 – Religion, the Scientific Framework, Physical Models of the World, and Diminishment (4)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/03

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: However, you and I have been talking about IC for years now.

IC still proposes a unifying set of principles that account for what goes on; although, those principles do not necessarily mix or are fuzzy at the edges. The principles of existence, under IC, which are the principles that we’re talking about, pertain to things that not only are non-contradictory in terms of existence.

But non-contradiction becomes stronger the more information that you have in the system; a system without information is fuzzy. You have all sorts of things that are dictated more or less by quantum mechanics and that can exist, or cannot exist, or are on the cusp of being existent, to the extent that they do or don’t contradict the rest of the information in the system.

The more information that you have in the system. The more you have to be contradicted. The more things have to come in line with the information in the system. It is a fuzzy system of rules of existences that get tighter and tighter the more information that you have, which means more space, more time, and more matter because these reflect the amount of information in the system

That still doesn’t allow for a creator or a religious point of view. However, if you look at consciousness, and this is probably the second principle of IC, consciousness is a technical principle or attribute of large-scale information sharing in a large self-consistent system.

For a large system to exist, it must have a large degree of self-consistency. That self-consistency requires large-scale sharing of information because you can’t be consistent about what you don’t know, what information you don’t have.

The universe has to consistently keep the rest of its positions as part of self-consistency. As defining it, the universe has to continually define itself. If consciousness is a necessary adjunct of this large-scale sharing of information, then it is largely unavoidable in large-scale information processing systems.

Unless, it is specifically designed against. If specifically designed against, that implies the hand of a creator, because we create worlds. At some point, we will have the technological wherewithal to create simulated worlds with simulated beings if we wanted.

We could create a self-consistent world that has all the self-consistency imposed from the outside and then there is no large-scale information sharing. We build computers. They process information linearly. They do not police themselves, mostly.

Computers aren’t conscious. But the existence of large created systems implies that they are part of a larger world of beings that are conscious. Consciousness, then, may be an unavoidable aspect of existence.

That while still not implying a creator in many instances, or even most instances, does imply the existence of consciousnesses of unlimited extent and power.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 461 – Religion, the Scientific Framework, Physical Models of the World, and Diminishment (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/02

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: In the 160 or so years since Darwin, halfway through it, you have Big Bang theory coming up, which postulates a world without any special agency.

Nobody had the idea of a unified field until the 1700s, which is compact equations for physical phenomenon. You do not get unified field theories until Maxwell in the second half of the 19th century.

Those are four equations that thoroughly describe the behavior of electromagnetic waves. After that, the idea of unification really catches on; we’ve been on that program strongly with most scientists not thinking about philosophy on a daily basis.

But if you ask most scientists about if they believe in the idea of a unified explanation for the entire universe, I’d say they believe in a unified explanation of the universe with 2/3rds believing in one or that it’s possible in the future.

A unified scientific explanation under the current theoretical and experimental support for that point of view; there’s no room for a creator. There are some views that try to work together with modern Big Band physics.

God is in the world but God is simply in everything in motion, or set everything in motion. But beyond satisfying compromises like that, God has been squeezed out.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 460 – Religion, the Scientific Framework, Physical Models of the World, and Diminishment (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: But I don’t think there the level of conflict seen in the past 100 years seen between religion and science. Science wasn’t seen or embraced as a program that fully explained everything until the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s.

Yet, you had Newton was arguably more religious than scientific. He believed that he was doing God’s work by doing science. He believed that God wanted us to know the world, and doing that was working on His behalf.

It is God helps people who help themselves. Newton was one of the first guys, people, to come up with a scientific theory that really was fairly concrete and made predictions about the universe.

It extended from us to the rest of the universe into infinity. It was right there in the Universal Law of Gravitation. Universal theories are going to start crashing into religious doctrines, which tend to be universal.

Then you have the tendency of science to keep pushing humanity away from the center of creation with the biggest push or the biggest shove against humanity is the theory of evolution, which comes up in the 1850s.

It arose before that but not convincingly until Darwin and someone else who I forget who did it. He was the co-thinker-upper. He co-published, almost, with Darwin. Darwin’s version of evolution caught on.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 459 – Religion, the Scientific Framework, Physical Models of the World, and Diminishment (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/30

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One of the main conflicts over time has been religion and, well, theology which comes from religion and changes in the scientific framework of looking at the world, which is a refinement of looking at the natural world.

Often, this has led to a diminishment of religious authority as a say on what the world is or looks like.

Rick Rosner: The authority is on what set of beliefs that you give yourself over to. To the huge percentage of Americans who profess to believe in some fully Christian point of view, then the scientific view does not hold sway, except insofar as science giving so much to the world and then you’re denying what you find convenient.

Historically, it starts with a beginning. There was no religion or science. But religion got there first in terms of philosophy. In that, it is easier to construct a system of belief that doesn’t have to account for the entire world.

It doesn’t have to be a full on match; I am putting myself in a cul de sac here. With religion, you can make a set of stories about the world, which would fit whatever aspects of the world that you need.

But it doesn’t have to be subject to any form of rigorous logic. Religious institutions and churches come into being. They get a lot of leverage over people’s lives and beliefs, and have all sorts of authority in various ways.

The Greeks and the Romans did not embrace a program of experimental science to any significant degree; they did not science. But it wasn’t part of an overall philosophical push; that science can be used to fully understand and explain the world.

So, there were little outbreaks of science. As far as I know, there was no thorough conflict with religion. But then you have a religion that has been in place for a millennium or more, like the Catholic Church, and with Copernicus and Galileo, their view of the world is challenged.

Catholicism and others have had a long time, like 1,200 years to fully being fleshed out. But you can imagine a younger version of Christianity not having a problem with the Earth orbiting the Sun.

It is not anti-Christian at the root. God made the Sun and the Earth to orbit around it, for us. That does not seem too blasphemous. It did bug powerful Catholics, though.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 458 – The Future of Cultures (11)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/29

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If someone feels warm to their Jewish ancestry, they educate their families, get together with their families, have some meals, and feel a connection to their ancestors and those who are alive and present.

Some want to trash on that. But they seemed to have made a category error. It is painting religion with the same brush.

Rosner: People who critique religion come in different flavors. Some are thoughtful; others are looking to be an asshole.

Jacobsen: If the religion endorses or the sect of leader has a leader in its history that endorses, and the community affirms, the misogynistic aspects of it, those seem clearly bad to me.

Those deserve open critique and widespread condemnation. Other ones that simply speak to vague notions of doing good to other people, including the Freemasons: brotherly love, relief, and truth. Are those bad?

Even though, those are vague. Does that make Freemasonry bad, religion bad, or mysticism as a whole bad? I think this notion reaches its apex and collapses in the modern period.

Rosner: This has been a place for open assholery. Aggressive atheism is a breeding ground or attractor for assholes. I guess you could almost consider this fundamentalist atheism. There is a certain combative jerk who embraces atheism as a cudgel to get into vicious troll wars with people.

The same way that MAGA people often in combination with coming out of an evangelical tradition could get into vicious troll wars. It’s a function, partly, of social media giving everyone a hammer to go after everybody else.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 457 – The Future of Cultures (10)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/28

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Based on the interviews, the issue is a religion per se. It is fundamentalist forms of it. The liberal forms are fine. The fundamentalist forms of non-religion can, sometimes, be more dramatic than that.

My concern is freedom of religion and freedom of belief, and freedom of conscience. Someone who is being mistreated in a fundamentalist religion should have the right to leave and have the free choice to do so.

If someone is experiencing this in some non-religious group, they should have the right to leave it too. My concern is people able to freely live and guide their own lives as they see fit, especially as this is more of a problem for women – which is why women’s rights are more of a concern for women.

It is deeply simple “religion…”

Rick Rosner: What we see in America over the past couple of decades with religion, it has been politicized. It has been politicized in a way in which bad guys are in charge. At various points in the past, even now, religion politicized in such a way to be more tolerant and to help people.

But the forms that the politicization of religion in America has taken are mostly toxic, lately.

Jacobsen: In terms of the narratives of religion, they can be more functionally true in terms of guiding life compared to some of the ones on offer in the secular community.

Rosner: Yes, you can have traditions stretching back hundreds of years. That is concerned with or synonymous with being a good person.

Jacobsen: Maybe, it is less about functional truths about the larger cosmos and more about the functional truths of everyday life.

Rosner: Of being a good person in society, as you noted about the larger metaphysical beliefs about existence, they are less about the general ideas of existence and more about the specific precepts about how to live among people.

If you take the rules of living as a decent person, you can strip away the mysticism and still have the beliefs of what is good and effective ethically, long-established. Some are outmoded like not eating pork or what to do about sleeping on the sheets of someone menstruating.

It may have been practical 2,000 years ago, but not so much now.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 456 – The Future of Cultures (9)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/27

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I think similar trends can exist with these familial and other trends, how ever they are formed, will continue to persist based on natural inertia of history and culture.

Rick Rosner: We have talked about this before. There is a splitting of paths. Depending on how much technological weirdness you can tolerate, there will continue to be unaugmented humans living what we consider normal human lives even 1,000 years from now.

Those lives, what is continued normal, will continue to change and suck up more technology but still living lives we will still understand. But above and around those, there will be increasingly weird, to us, augmented, changed, and tweaked humans and other thinking entities establishing stable cultures and easy ways of being.

The forces that will line up to make it convenient to live in a number of different ways. 200 years from now, there may be four demographically dominant ways of living: 1) traditional humans living traditionally with potentially expanded lifespans, 2) augmented humans living like superheroes and practically indestructible but still following human objectives and imperatives to be studly and rich and powerful and to get laid, and following this, maybe, 3) augmented humans and AI entities are finding it convenient to merge as hyperconnected information thought blobs, and then beyond that 4) you have the worldwide thought blob manufacturing consciousnesses at its convenient, where it needs it.

Beings voluntarily popping in and out of existing based on the information processing needs of the overall information processing enterprise, all these levels, if these are persistent means of culture, will be reinforced by how easy it is for people to live in that culture.

There will be some mobility. People will balls or gumption can change. There will always be escapees. In your interviewees, you talk to a lot of people who have left Islam and religion in general to kind of go out on their own.

People who were part of fundamentalist and constraining religions who have had enough of what they consider oppressive, to try and live without it. You will have people and entities who travel out into the various ways of living.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 455 – The Future of Cultures (8)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/26

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Helen Fisher is a leading biological anthropologist. She talks about love and aspects of it. It matches some of what you’re saying.

Rick Rosner: The economics of love is there, of two people making shoes as a couple is more effective than one person. But then there is the biological economics of it. That two people may be more successful at producing kids who survive.

All those forces are braided together and in the same direction, in the same way a game show pushes towards the same direction. The pushes in the future will not come from nature but from altered nature.

The beings who take charge of their own drives and objectives as well.

Jacobsen: There is also the sexual wall of the progressive and non-religious popular culture, and the traditional and conservative religious culture of much of the world. Those two sub-trends with the overarching narrative of technologically driven change.

There is a wall. There won’t be much change. But once that wall is collapsed with replication of human-level consciousness, then it becomes immediately cheap. Something akin to the Genome Project costing a billion dollars and then going down to 1,000 bucks.

Rosner: It is Black Friday specials. You can get two genomes run for you, your sister, and your spouse for 100 bucks.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 454 – The Future of Cultures (7)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It would be a change of over 6,000 years. Much of the family unit was constructed within the framework of a holy text.

Rick Rosner: It was probably around a bit before that. You hear speculation. I have heard the theory that prehistoric human culture was matriarchal.

Jacobsen: It might have been patriarchal but matrilineal.

Rosner: I read texts speculating or postulating that women were the leaders. That they gave out the sex and had multiple male partners. They were in charge of things. That is not a traditional family structure. But at some point, the most convenient structure was pair bonding.

It was two different-sex couples or people raising kids.

Jacobsen: I mean the last 6,000 years of heterosexual pair-bonding with a framework provided by a holy text and so a literate culture guiding it.

Rosner: The religious texts reinforced it first, or, maybe, the pair bonding was already pretty solidly in place, and then the reinforcement came later.

Jacobsen: Regardless of what happened before, if we take a holy text, it is, at least, a change in 2,000 to 6,000 years of human history.

Rosner: Without a doubt, it has gone on for 6 millennia and probably before that with different levels of formality or civilizational support. You always had a minimum biological support.

To get someone pregnant, you need, at least, a momentary pairing up, enough to have sex at least. At some point, I have heard arguments about the birth of romance. The idea of love as fairly recent within the past 2,000-3,000 years.

The idea that you should be emotionally bonded. That emotional bond should be the number one thing in the relationship, as opposed to the economic bonds, which may be more recent than the heterosexual pairing itself.

Love as the glue is a recent idea.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 453 – The Future of Cultures (6)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/24

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: But if we look at the width and size of generations, the bigger impact on this will be the respect for women’s rights and aspects of this emerging in movements like #MeToo, as this is hitting big countries like India now. It will have a significant impact on all of us.

Rosner: The general tendency driven by the Golden Rule is not judging a book by its cover. To judge whether people are fully human or not, it is not judging by race, ethnicity, sex, or gender, but everyone has a brain.

The brain is the great equalizer. No other set of characteristics determines someone’s humanity more than the ability to think. It happens in the demographic segment by demographic segment.

That women are considered to be intellectual equal; that ethnicities are considered equally justified in wanting to be treated decently. Now, for the middle of an awakening, where people with different sexual and gender orientations, they are fighting to be considered equal and not crazy.

In the end, you’re left with anything that can think. In the future, we will be left with controversies about what thinking and feeling mean in augmented beings and in artificial beings.

That already extends to some extent to animals, where something with a tinier brain but still has consciousness. This sort of stuff will play out over time. Biological family structures will, eventually, cease to be the, by far, most culturally convenient way of being or living structure.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 452 – The Future of Cultures (5)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/23

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: But with the 80-100 years that it will take the Muslim population to rise to the larger portions of the population.

By then, you are looking beyond the near future with the human domination and then moving into the mid-future. It won’t be Muslims increasing their demographic significance in America.

But more overwhelmingly, the entire or all of the existing societal structures will be more thoroughly overturned by the market and technology-driven changes to society. Within 150 years, people will have practical immortality.

Science will be advancing at a fast enough clip – and medicine – that whatever ails you; for most people, for every ten years older that you get, science is able to add another 10, 20, or 30 years of life.

Eventually, people, in practical terms, will be immortal. They could look forward to living for several centuries.

Jacobsen: If you take the modern scientific advances, the societies that accept those or put those into the educational curricula; they see a whittling down of fundamentalist strains of religion.

By liberal religious and non-religious people, they seem like the problem. As they become more dominant around the world, noting, of course, evolution is not seen as the dominant accepted theory by the global population.

There will be a necessary shift in worldview as there is an adaptation of traditional religious beliefs.

Rosner: We have called this the “hollowing out of religion” People stop believing in the mystical aspects of religion less and less, and follow the principles less and less.

Jacobsen: Yes, they become more Spinozan. I think evolution will be the big one. Because it is so simple. I think Daniel Dennett called it a “universal acid” in that sense.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 451 – The Future of Cultures (4)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: My wife and I, before we were married; we are broke. Once we got married, it turned us into a powerful income generating and savings team.

It made me straighten up and get employed. We played by the rules. We didn’t think of this in terms of a strategy to accumulate assets. But married people tend to get assets. I was friends with lesbians back in the 80s.

There was the whole deal. Lesbians tended to be broke, at least young lesbians. They were kind of at odds with the culture. It meant to some extent taking shitty jobs and not have easy lives.

That would apply to anybody at odds with the culture. You can make the argument that the very best people in the culture; those who are opposite of Asperger’s people. The super glib and social people can schmooze themselves into leadership positions, higher paying jobs, higher quality spouses.

If you’re good at riding society, whether intentional or not, it is the way society is set up. You are going to thrive. It is almost tautological.

Jacobsen: Those people dominated the culture as per the rules set out before It is a simple recipe of three things: have strong family and communities ties with bonds across generations, have shorter generations between generations, and also have an affirmation of large families where kids are seen as “gifts from God” rather than financial burdens within a certain range of finances.

Rosner: Lance likes to argue the immigrants and Muslim, mostly worried about Muslims, will out-reproduce non-Muslims in America until they become a significant part of the society.

He likes to talk about European countries where Muslims are more than 10% of the population and disruptive cultural forces. He likes to bring up Sharia Law and so on. He thinks this will happen in America. Right now, Muslims are 1% of the population.

Yes, they tend to have larger families. But it will take a long time for the demographics to play out.

Jacobsen: 1/3rd of those born into a religion leave while 2/3rds stay.

Rosner: Just because you are out-reproducing other religions, it doesn’t mean that you win, especially with losing so many followers.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 450 – The Future of Cultures (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/21

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: You mentioned off-tape the traditional forces or the forces for tradition out-reproducing simply the more eccentric ways of living. A good example might be Catholic families.

If Catholic families pump out 5 kids on average and atheist families only pump out 1.6 kids on average, then eventually Catholics and Christianity more generally, and more religion more generally, will be the more dominant cultures.

Because the big religions that survive across the generations and centuries are good at passing on themselves, at indoctrinating people – as opposed to people with more fringy beliefs like forms of atheism and agnosticism. It is only recently within the last couple hundred years that scientism has been powerful enough to be instillable from generation to generation.

Jacobsen: These beliefs do not have to map onto the real world to any high degree of fidelity. In fact, they simply have to value the particular set of things that shorten the span between generations and increase the offspring per generation

Rosner: You’re saying get them barefoot and pregnant and spit out as many kids as possible.

Jacobsen: But also provide the values for family and community to provide the comfort to be able to do these things in contexts where this wouldn’t happen otherwise.

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: In other words, in terms of the traditional roles being affirmed, men orient yourselves in such a way to be able to provide for your family. Women, in terms of your role being affirmed, take care of the home, have and take care of the kids, and bring forth life in an image of Christ thing.

Rosner: Yes, because of everything lining up.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 449 – The Future of Cultures (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/20

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Although, there is room for variation on that. There are plenty of gay people among humans and a certain gayness among animals. That may or may not – gayness – add to the reproductive fitness of a species.

But it certainly doesn’t detract by much. If it were really a hindrance to the reproductive success of a species, it might get evolved out. But it hasn’t. The people who will have the easiest time in human society, at least until recently, would be heterosexual reproductive couplings.

That is where evolution gets its oomph. Family, tradition, culture, religion, and communal life have all arrows pointing towards this. If you live by the dominant forces, the structures living by dominant forces become extinguished when those forces change; and, we’re about to see a huge shift in what the dominant forces shaping human society and transhuman or post-human – whatever you want to call it – will be.

The shift away from the purely biologically and evolutionarily determined forces, and towards market forces combined with technology. It is already happening. It seems weird because we live in a highly sexualized society stuffed with porn.

But people are having less sex than they did in the 60s. People are having fewer kids than before. People are less preoccupied with hooking up and relationships, because there is so much other compelling stuff being generated by our media plus our social media in combination with our increasingly powerful technology.

We have talked about this before. As we get closer and closer to replicate consciousness, we will be able to augment ourselves; we will be able to build other powerful information processing entities.

All these will be able to change what our base drives if we wish to. All these forces will erode the old forces.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 448 – The Future of Cultures (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/19

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the future of cultures or, in particular, sub-cultures?

Rick Rosner: Culture is two things. One is the structure of society. Another is the type of entertainment people like. Let’s talk about the future of societal structure, societal structure lines up with what is convenient and productive for that society.

I am thinking in terms of game shows because I worked on game shows. Who Wants to be a Millionaire began in 1999 and is still on the air 19 years later. Jeopardy was on the air in the 60s, went off for a few years, and has been on solid since the 70s, I think.

It is similar for Wheel of Fortune. It is a pretty straightforward show where the best competitors win. They are watchable but basic shows. You want to root for somebody. You want someone to do well. The competitor to do well.

It is a straightforward show. The show The Weakest Link is an unwatchable show because things did not line up in the same direction. They went through various rounds of questioning. In the various rounds, they would vote off the player they thought was the weakest link.

It was never the weakest link. It was always the player who was the strongest who the weaker ones teamed up on.

So, a couple dickheads would be competing at the end. Then the MC insulted the contestants. It was a hard show to watch. It was unwatchable, at cross purposes to itself, and things did not line up.

I wrote on it for a while. The questions were easy. It was easy to write insults. But it was hard to make a show that you would want to watch more than 2 or 3 times. It wasn’t pleasant and never delivered the desired outcome, which is that the best player won.

We can expand that general principle to societal structures. The most pleasing family structures and societal units are the ones that exist in agreement with the overall principles and objectives of the society.

For human society and to the extent that animals have culture, everything lines up with what has arisen through evolution. That the different sex couples pair up in the case of many, many species and, certainly, humans, and then they reproduce.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 447 – The Future of Values (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/18

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: There will continue to be some form of human economy. The financial transactions at the highest level of civilization will be built around the value of all bunch of stuff that is valued now.

Human artifacts, I assume there will still be some market for human-produced items. It will be a weird ghost market. Where all the necessities of life not costing much, and the ability to produce anything, including things that are almost identical to human artifacts, it will wreck the market for human artifacts, except in the ghost economy.

The economy that remains when the more powerful and sophisticated economy has moved on. It is probably the safest bet to say that durable and powerful information processing and storage will be the most valuable thing.

The civilization of the future; the economy and the whole culture will be information processing based. You will still have consciousness, as we’ve talked about. It will turn out to be inseparable, in most instances, from powerful information processing.

It won’t be this weird, sterile robot world with sterile robots living sterile lives. It will be vibrant and full of emotion. Those things will happen among all those entities that will be super AI’d up.

Things will be super fast too. Moment to moment transactions will be super fast. But there will be longer arcs around big data phenomenon. Things will still unfold over months and years.

The civilization will put a premium on things that can process data. That means there may be some things on the Periodic Table of Elements that may still be pricey, because the automated mining and refining may make some things like gold and platinum semi-rare.

I guess real estate will still be valuable. Because you still need places to put stuff, infrastructure. Humans will still take a lot of space. Although, the structure of real estate will change too.

With automation, you will be able to make the whole planet down a couple miles down all over it into honeycombs or something. You can maximize the level of the surface area of things that can be done 30, 100, or a 1,000 fold. But you still need land to build things in and on.

That’s enough of that.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 446 – The Future of Values (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/17

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about the future of values and what this implies for sectors of society, we can focus on America, since this is where you’re from.

Rick Rosner: I am not talking about the Golden Rule. The last few months, my wife who seldom unreservedly likes something. She likes these little mini-mosaics from the 19th and the first half of the 20th century that were from Italy.

They were these little flower brooches and sometimes pendant earrings that are made of tiny pieces of colored glass. I have been looking at stuff 80-to-100-years-old. For the past two years, I have been a model for Lance while he creates a fantastically accomplished portrait.

I was thinking that sometime in the future; this stuff will not be valued as much. Because the dominant culture and the dominant constituents of that culture, or the dominant entities who determine what that culture is, will be to some extent augmented or trans-human.

People who have been tweaked biologically or technologically to have increased capabilities, increased lifespans, increased physical characteristics, and so on, not necessarily superhero-like.

It will be focused on information processing. You and I have talked about the near future, the mid-future, and the far future. If you are speaking in terms of the replacement of humans as the dominant entities, the near future is still human-dominated, the mid-future is the changeover, and the far future is the most powerful entities on Earth around as we add stuff to the Earth and other parts of the Solar System.

The various cutoffs are between near and mid-future. It may be 100 years from now. Then there will be more than 100 years. There will be humans around, lots. But they will not be running the show; unless, they are augmented.

The things that will be valuable will be changed. For one, anything manufactured that is not overly complicated will be dirt cheap. Because of a lot of manufacturing, e.g., food and furniture, will be pumped out by the hundreds of thousands of items with automation.

The fabrication of stuff will not cost much. Unless, you’re talking about stuff that is very intricate at a microscopic level, e.g., biotechnology, and whatever the future of integrated circuits looks like.

Everything else will be cheap. Augmented or not very augmented humans will be able to live their lives if society makes room for them – if we don’t run into some form of dystopia. People will get along even though humans are not in charge anymore.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 445 – Paths of Increasing Order (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How can that argument be misinterpreted or misused?

Rick Rosner: One of the greatest philosophical cottage industries has been being wrong about consciousness. It is easy to make category errors. The category error is one of the most fruitful areas of doing jokes.

We should talk about category errors in joke-making. You are talking about one thing but then it turns out that you’re talking about another thing. I should be sitting in front of Twitter looking for some of these.

It is hard to talk about evolution without teleological language or biases slipping in. Because the deal is evolution doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t have a purpose. Evolution exploits niches in the world.

For instance, there is a niche or set of niches biased towards the formation of visual receptors. It turns out that it is relatively easy to evolve eyes. So, eyes have evolved a gazillion times over evolutionary history.

When you discuss stuff like that, it is often easy shorthand to say stuff like, “Evolution likes eyes,” or, “Evolution is biased towards eyes,” which, if you’re not careful, assigns purpose to evolution.

I assume, similarly, if you’re not careful about talking about information processing that is at a high enough level to be considered conscious to avoid certain mysticisms sneaking in, I don’t know.

To reiterate, we have a lot of questions as to why increasing order in the universe tends to generate little individual information processors. This becomes more about questions than about answers.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 444 – Paths of Increasing Order (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why is information processing the path increasing order takes?

Rick Rosner: In another discussion, we talked about what life is, or at least higher animal life. It leads to the question, “Why is information processing via modeling the external world internally and react to it the path that increasing order in the universe takes? Are there other paths of increasing order that the universe can take?”

Let’s assume information processing is the preferred path, why does the universe need additional information processing when the mechanics of the entire universe encompass information processing on a universal scale?

That all the physical interactions in the universe involve sharing information or, in some cases, obliterating information. Why does the universe generate little individual information processors? There are many other associated questions.

What role do these individual information processors play in the overall business of the universe?

Jacobsen: In most cases, would the answer be “not much”?

Rosner: I am not sure, because we do not have a good model. It is reasonably safe to assume that the universe, if it is conscious, is, for the most part, not aware of the evolved structures within the information that comprises its consciousness.

Imagine the universe is conscious, it is also easy to imagine that the universe has no idea what is in the information-bearing structures that is its consciousness from moment-to-moment, including structures such as us – and others on other planets – that have evolved as information processors.

That is the answer to one questions. Evolved conscious beings or manufactured conscious beings made of the information that comprises the universe may or may not play a role in the overall business of the universe.

But it is possible for the universe to simply not be aware of us. We live on almost entirely different planes of existence.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 443 – Intelligence and Minimal Feedback Systems (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/14

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: You can have moths. Moths may have some idea of space, still; moth space is, maybe, still 3-dimensional but doesn’t have much in it. They have reacting to light, navigating via light sources, and so on.

Bugs are often fatally attracting to street lights. They are attracted to light whose angle to the bug does not depend on changes in the bug’s location. If you’re navigating via the Sun, your angle to the Sun doesn’t change.

It is in the same location in the sky relative to you because it is so far away from you. But if you move from the streetlight, since it is so close, and you move, your angle to the streetlight moves

You are drawn into this fatal spiral of bouncing off the streetlight because your navigation system doesn’t understand the nearby light sources.

Anyway, in a moth’s picture of the world, you have the source of light, which has a position in space; you’re navigating by the light, the food odors, maybe some visual signals, but it is underpopulated and under-understood space. Intelligence in non-biological systems is the ability to model, understand, and react.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 442 – Intelligence and Minimal Feedback Systems (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/13

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does a principle of persistence and a base feedback with the environment imply a level of intelligence?

Rick Rosner: You can argue the information content or the amount of information in the model of the environment and the repertoire of responses, the flexibility of responses, can be an index of how smart the organism is.

You have to distinguish between things that are purely mechanical reproductions of the environment. You can have a glass lens. It can show an inverted or distorted image, or a focum or more focused image, depending, of the environment.

But that is not modeling the environment. It is simply a purely mechanical manipulation of rays of light. There is an index. It should be possible to assign a value to the amount of information held within consciousness. Max Tegmark, maybe, has attempted to do that.

I don’t think entirely successfully. You can intuitively index that. Humans have a highly developed and multifaceted understanding of the outside world as a model within consciousness, which is replicated in many ways within consciousness.

Higher mammals, including dogs, have less sophisticated models. As you work your way, we down the ladder – we have talked about this – of mental development. You have models of the environment that are less and less detailed or less and less encompassing.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 441 – Waiting for the Shoes (and the Beat) to Drop (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/12

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Stupid stuff continues to happen and come out of the White House every day. So, I think that in the years to come; this period will be the focus of some movies, some books, similar to other crisis points in history, e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis, Watergate, and so on.

All of those have been crisis points in the history of the country. With the Cuba Missile Crisis, it was supercharged for 10 days, where Americans didn’t know whether or not they would be blown up in a nuclear war.

Similarly, we donèt know how much damage will be done when Trump is held to account. It is not 100% certain if he can be held in check via normal legislative means. That’s it. We are in limbo.

We are in limbo with the real possibility of horrible stuff happening and now know what that horrible stuff will be.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 440 – Waiting for the Shoes (and the Beat) to Drop (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/11

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: We are waiting on Mueller. Trump’s behavior keeps getting more destructive. He is noting that he is ready to start a trade war with China. It has become increasingly clear that he is just terrible at everything.

He doesn’t give a shit about the country. He has said that he doesn’t care about blowing up the national debt. He is presiding over a tax cut. He doesn’t care. He notes that if this debt becomes even more serious; it doesn’t matter because he won’t be in office.

You have to be increasingly dumb or racist to continue to support him. He continues to surprise at the level of incompetence and cravenness that he shows. But the consequences of his awfulness continue to fail to catch up to him.

It seems as if the consequences that will manifest themselves starting in 2019 will be so much greater than the consequences that Trump has suffered so far. We are in a limbo.

Reasonable people expect things to get more horrible for him. But in the coming months, things will continue along the trend of craziness that we’re increasingly used to, but it is unprecedented. We may be expecting much worse to the point that some point in 2019; they may have – the White House staff – to prevent Trump from using the nuclear football.

But even that, it may be too crazy even for him. It is a weird limbo. We have much more awfulness. But it is even dangerous to the country.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 439 – Waiting for the Shoes (and the Beat) to Drop (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/10

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Right now, we are in this weird semi-limbo in America. Where the ball has been tossed into the air and is at the top of its arc, it is not moving up or down. It is just a moment.

It is at zero upward or downward velocity. The Democrats have taken back the House but won’t take it back for a bit. In the lame duck session, there are efforts to strip the incumbent Democratic governors and legislatures of power.

They are working to fuck over Democrats while they still hold power. That is frustrating because the national Congress has attempted to do a couple things. It will be a couple days until the dissolution of the Congress.

They are working on James Comey testifying. They are going to try and see if they can gin up any further information on Hillary Clinton. It is one last gasp. So much bad stuff and so much bad behavior come out of the Trump White House every day, it seems super unlikely that he will survive to run for president in 2020.

He may make it. He may not be kicked out of office. He may not quit. He may survive the next two years and the president. That he will have to fall at some point. We are still waiting for all the shoes to drop.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 438 – Tolerance for Risk (5)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: The average lifespan in the 30s was probably 65/67. Now, it is closer to 80. Actually, it is probably much more if you take the more health conscious sectors. There have been splits in lifespans over the last couple decades.

For the first half of the 20th century, everybody was pretty much leaving their longevity to chance. There weren’t that many Jack LaLannes trying to figure out how to maximize their lifespans.

Now, you have larger segments of the population interested in living a healthy life, as healthy as they can. But then, you have people who are chaotic and dumb, and eat whatever they want.

But if you take out the people who aren’t trying to maximize their longevity and health, that leaves the people who are having a lifespan of close to or at 90. It is a big enough segment of the population or a big enough part of the national zeitgeist or mindset.

Now, the avoidance of risk is a huge part of our culture now. Although, people are not overly aware of that because it is not presented to people as a unitary idea. Instead, it is presented to people as a bunch of individual products or initiatives, or fixes when stuff turns out to be dangerous.

For instance, in California, we have been having these deadly wildfires. It is only in the past decade; there is now a push for fireproof houses. It is a question as to whether we should build houses in forested areas or not. If you do, how do you make those houses less burnable? But part of those less burnable houses, it is making people not burned up in wildfires rather than part of this overall risk averse push.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 437 – Tolerance for Risk (4)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Does this relationship with less willingness to die more impact men’s self-image than women’s because women tend not to be the ones doing the deadly activities as much?

Rick Rosner: Yes, there are gender differences. But the mindset that we should die for stupid reasons has become more and more part of our culture. That when you look at cars; cars have metal dashboards and no seatbelts in the 1930s.

They also went as fast then as now. There were fewer streets or freeways where you could go 80 and most cars could not. But most people probably regularly drove more than 40 miles per hour in the 30s from time to time.

If you got in a wreck driving 45 miles per hour in 1938, there is a high probability you’d be dead. You would hit the dash or fly through the front windshield, be impaled by the steering wheel, and then be crushed by the crunching of the car.

Now, cars have acquired probably more than 100 safety features. If you buy a car now, you would be surrounded by 100 airbags, have a passenger compartment not crumpling with the rest of the car, and a seatbelt plus shoulder harness.

You have computerized collision dynamics prevention. You have a self-driving doodad setup. Even though, people drive crappier now than in the 30s, probably. The risk of dying in a car wreck is – I don’t know – probably a tenth of what it was then because of the safety features.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 436 – Tolerance for Risk (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/07

Rick Rosner: So, the purported softer generations that are cognizant of bullying is contradicted by what these tough older people are doing, which is getting fat and being stupid. You had a question.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Mores and norms change over time. What defines “weak” now compared to 60 years ago and 2 millennia ago?

Rosner: I think one is that people are more reluctant to die. If you look at history, there have been plenty of opportunities of people to go off to war. There has been a risk of death for ill-defined ideals of nationality.

World War I was a particularly ill-defined war. What were the countries fighting for, it wasn’t clear to the people fighting. It is not clear to us now. The Civil War was pretty clear, though people still argue about the causes.

World War II was particularly clear. In that, the German and Japanese agendas seemed super bad. But most wars via thoughts about nationality are vague and are based on the idea of, basically, not wanting to die.

The Vietnam War was, according to most measures, made things worse. Yes, Saddam Hussein was probably killing thousands and tens of thousands of his own people. Going in there and deposing him in a sloppy way has lead to the deaths of a million people or more since 2003, the prospect of even more deaths across the Middle East deriving from this too.

You can probably get 80% or more of reasonably informed people to say that that was a fucking terrible war. I would suggest that people on average are less willing to participate in war or run the risk of getting themselves killed.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 435 – Tolerance for Risk (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/06

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: I grew up in a time when bullying was almost considered okay. A certain amount of bullying from peers and adults in life, especially PE teachers, was considered good because it would ‘toughen you up.’

We internalized this stuff. I punched myself in the face, repeatedly, to toughen myself up, on general principles. I punched walls. I still punch walls. Everyone was supposed to be tough.

Now, we are entering an era when we are supposed to be much more conscious of bullying and less tolerant, conscious of microaggressions, and then old guys, such as myself might say, “Aren’t we raising a generation of soft babies?” The response, “Is that so bad?”

If we raise a generation that has been conscious and do not tolerate bullying, does that mean we will end up with a generation of soft and weak adults? I would suggest that “No! It is a false connection or a not 100% solid connection.”

That raising a generation of compassionate people doesn’t mean that it is weak people. If you want to talk about weak, 2/3rds of Americans are obese. Speaking of weak, this ‘tough’ generation isn’t tough enough to stop themselves from overeating.

Much of the adult population thinking Trump is okay. Affection for Trump is probably largely correlated with age. The older that you are then the more you are to think that Trump is good.

These older and tougher generations are not even tough enough to exercise the mental discipline to realize that Trump is this incredibly bad guy who is corroding American society.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 434 – Tolerance for Risk (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/05

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You had a pitch to Bill Simmons. There was a list of stuff. It was when we started writing together, which was several years ago. One pitch was on risk.

Rick Rosner: The idea was that I would do a series on stuff that would be changing to such an extent that it will pretty much be going away. One of the things that I suggested would be going away was tolerance for risk.

It is another way of saying that as average lifespans increase, then life becomes more and more precious. People are going to treat themselves as being more precious. That has lots of implications.

There will be less tolerance for things like smoking, for additives that might give you cancer. An increased awareness of things that might kill you. Either based on actual studies or simply a feeling that some things are dangerous.

We are seeing this play out in certain ways. Idiots, against all science, have decided that vaccines are dangerous. An increasing number of idiot parents aren’t letting their kids be vaccinated, which reverts to the old-fashioned danger that your kid will get a dangerous disease because assholes didn’t vaccinate their kids out of a misplaced sense of the risk of vaccines.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 433 – Sucking (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/04

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: But you could make an argument. I mean this as a general argument that could be secondarily made: the opioid crisis, suicide in middle age, poor diet, inactivity, and obesity in men can be indications in a society.

If the development of a society declines a bit, these problems will rise. These are indicative of health problems but also of a developed society in moderate decline.

Rick Rosner: If this society wasn’t so good, if the cheapness and availability of delicious food that made us fat were not as available, if the entertainment kept us lazy, and if the overall good conditions that allowed us to get injuries and then be treated with drugs – like Oxycontin – that we can become addicted to, I agree.

These are the secondary effects of the overall quality of life. Expectations will keep rising for the quality of life.

Jacobsen: That is non-trivial. What do you mean as the driver of the increased quality of life?

Rosner: Technology will keep driving the increased quality of life. Entertainment, medicine, and food will improve; there will be more and more awesome stuff and more and more wherewithal to experience.

Jacobsen: Where is this technology being driven from?

Rosner: It is market forces plus Moore’s Law plus just increasing understanding of everything thanks to AI plus big data. We are going to figure out more and more stuff. The more and more stuff that we figure out then the more and more awesome stuff we can make.

Things will keep getting more and more awesome until our very humanity is stripped from us.

Jacobsen: From the inside out?

Rosner: Eventually, there will be better containers than bodies to contain consciousness. The individual consciousness, at some point, will be supped up to the point where it ceases to be the unit of consciousness and experience.

There will be many more ways to experience consciousness. There is a horrible and creepy movie called Under the Skin. It is super creepy. But basically, she is operating a venus fly trap. She draws guys in.

They get more and more excited and horny.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] it is like the woman from American Gods.

Rosner: They get stuck in this ooze and remain in this state of suspended horniness. But they don’t matter because their brain has been taken over by this constant anticipation of getting laid by Scarlet Johannson.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: They are then taken over by this ooze. That is what will happen with the technology of the future. We will be more and more excited by this technology until we’re completely enveloped by the technology and then morphed into all sorts of forms of the future that we, as humans, will find disturbing.

Throughout the process, we will continue bitch about stuff and continue to find examples of assholery and suckiness. It used to be the notion of a clean future and everything is awesome.

A current version is a bunch of awesome stuff in the future but people don’t really find it awesome because the future is grimy, rainy, and gross. The first example of that was Blade Runner, which was an amazing but grubby future.

There was one show that lasted only one show on Netflix called Altered Carbon. It is a lazily imagined future. They took all the tropes from Blade Runner including the rainy sets, AIs, cyborgs, and nudity, because it was for Netflix or, maybe, Showtime. It was the dirty future, which is probably closer to the future.

It is increasing wonder and awesomeness. I’ll tell you what is amazingly wonderful and awesomely sucky, Khashoggi. He transmitted his torture and murder via Apple Watch. He has an expectation of things going badly for him in the embassy.

He sets the Apple Watch to transmit to his fiance to the cloud and on audio. He ended up transmitting his own torture and murder. It is on audio. Plus, Apple Watch tracks your heart rate. His heart during torture started beating harder and faster until it stopped.

So, the various investigating authorities have a fairly complete account of the guy’s murder, which is both awesome, amazing, and super terrible. It would be science fiction if it was something that was imagined 12 years ago.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 432 – Sucking (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/03

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Can we create the Google Suck-O-Meter? The level of suckocity for this company or celebrity.

Rick Rosner: My Google celebrity is artificially inflated because I have the common first name and not uncommon last name. The guy who created CHiPS shares my last name. It is not all me. If you put quotes around it, it probably drops further.

It is still not all. It is an index but a sloppy index. But social media is an awareness of assholery and suckery amplifier. People share their gripes. I had this thing happen over the past two weeks.

Not only is it an incidental amplifier of gripes and discontent. It is used in a propagandistic way. Twitter and Facebook are built to amplify people’s anger. Over the past few weeks, I have had 100,000 followers, new ones, per day, until I had gotten 1.2 million new followers.

I believe that that is a foreign government trying to amplify my recently increasingly pissy tweets, usually against the Republicans. They have been against Kavanaugh who is baldly partisan and the least popular nomination since they started polling on the public opinions about Supreme Court nominees.

He seems like a pretty terrible guy. So, my tweets have been extra angry and extra pissy. Somebody who is trying to subvert the midterm elections decided that my angry voice should be amplified by having more followers.

Because I think that the more angry tweets and then the more followers to amplify this. I looked around to say if this was happening to others. Chelsea Handler said that this was happening to her too. It is an angry time. It could happen to others.

Thanks to social media, we can widely share our gripes; even though things are better now than at any other time in history, and are getting better on average, some things are getting worst such as storms.

Storms are getting worst. Climate change is adding heat to the oceans and the atmosphere. The more energy air and water has, then the more devastating the storms will be. It is not basic physics but understood physics.

A hot hurricane will be more powerful than a colder hurricane. The heat sucks more water into the sky and propels winds, drops more rain, and so on. Others things are getting better steadily. The lifespans are increasing, except for America where opioids are impacting us and obesity.

But it is mostly in the opioids. That seems to be the main culprit. It is really the fault of a single company, Pruitt Pharmaceuticals or something. It is the company that developed Oxycontin and promoted it.

They created oxycontin and the promoted it as non-addictive, which turned out to be not true. Once they were found out for that, they promoted a non-addictive or a non-abusable form of oxycontin that was harder to crush up, was time released, and was bonded with this gummy stuff.

People know this company has made billions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people and nobody knows if they will be held accountable for it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 431 – Sucking (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/02

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is sucking?

Rick Rosner: Sucking is the corporate or non-human entity aspect of an asshole. I was supposed to go into a genetic test today, because I am an Ashkenazi Jew. We have certain genetic characteristic aspects that are being studied.

A lot of Ashkenazi Jews have the BRCA gene, which predisposes you to breast cancer. I was told to go to the testing center. I am told that I do not need paperwork because I am in the system.

It turns out. I am not in the system. I leave I come back. It turns out, yes, I am in the system. No one apologizes. This sucks. If you google the title of the organization and “sucks,” there are 500,000 entries.

When you’re getting your blood tested, and any mistake is made in how stuff is made and handled, and the insurance is involved, I heard about terrible billing policies and other complaints about the managing of the company by former workers.

When a company fails or an entity, or a product fails to meet normal current expectations of quality of competence, that thing sucks in the same way a person who fails to meet standards of behavior is an asshole.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 430 – Asshole

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is an asshole?

Rick Rosner: An asshole is someone who continues to take more than their fair share in a socially understood context. Someone who continues to speak on their cell phone. Even though, we understand that, at some level, you should not do that. There is no reason for you to be standing in a line and yammering really loudly.

That is a violation of social norms. Smoking has become an asshole move, at least in enclosed public spaces.

Jacobsen: I see three levels there. A single of each and then a combined. One example, it was smoking. It was making some spaces unacceptable for smoking in public. Then it became possible for the culture to disapprove.

Even though, at the outset, there were campaigns to get pregnant women to smoke. In North America, now, we have #MeToo and all its variations. It is an interesting one. It is happening massively consciously.

There can be comedic representations of what to do and what not to do.

Rosner: We do not know where it is going to end up. Some things will be unacceptable that used to be, more or less, tolerated, like grabbing someone on the ass. If it is a man grabbing a woman on the ass in the context of “I like your ass, sexually,” it will go away.

One baseball game, the manager slapped one of his players on the ass, after a noble strikeout. He took a lot of pitches but he just didn’t manage to get on base: “Good job!” I was shocked.

It was obviously not sexual. I was shocked to see an ass slap in the era of MeToo. It made me think if these sorts of ass slaps will survive or not. General assholery is taking something other people have the good manners to not take, like taking the space with your noise or smoke.

The violations that generally aren’t reaching the level of reaching criminal consequences down on the perpetrator. One is texting while driving. It is also illegal but it is almost never enforced. They have better things to enforce. In LA, the first offense is a small fine.

If you are a big enough asshole, the 50 bucks will not teach you the lesson. Being an asshole is little offenses as opposed to Bernie Madoff that loses people millions of dollars, he wasn’t even good at what he was doing. He was good at the sales part of it.

He was a good salesman. But in terms of keeping the scheme going, there were plenty of people that what he was doing was so obvious mathematically that people tried to raise red flags. Because he was bad at the math part of it.

But they couldn’t get anyone in authority to believe them. Anyway, that is being an asshole.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 429 – Flavours of Revolution

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/31

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking about revolution and its different manifestations.

Rick Rosner: We were talking about revolutions in the context of rising expectations. It is often cited within the French Revolution. People do not revolt when really, really downtrodden. It is when they see the possibility of change that is not happening fast enough to suit them.

I don’t know whether this is true. Although, it would have to mathematically have to be true. In that, if change is people pushing for change, and if a revolution is people breaking from the established societal structures when the change isn’t happening fast enough, it is not like they’re going from 0 to 100.

0 is pure misery. 10-20 is gathering change and then to 100. But there would be some change before revolution breaks out. I do not know how helpful that idea is. But it is like that truism that has been disproved, like the frog in boiling water.

It turns out. Frogs will get out of boiling water, whether raised immediately or slowed raised in temperature. Frogs will get out in either case.

Jacobsen: The importance of the myth there is the reality behind the intended message, but the mythology of the actual imagery. Even though, the reality of the imagery is false.

Rosner: The frog in boiling water is helpful, even if it is not a thing that frogs do.

Jacobsen: In America, one of your more important moral voices was Martin Luther King, Jr. He had the notion of the arc of history being long and bent towards justice. In a similar way, democracies can be seen as mini revolutions happening in 4 year timespans, 5 year timespans.

But sometimes, the political system can lock up, can gum up, can have certain stoppages.

Rosner: It is two steps forward and one step backward.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 428 – Scientific Nihilism: Nihil (5)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/30

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you look at humanism, they have the view of the cold universe but the meaning you get is the meaning you make, the Golden Rule matters, compassion matters, and science matters.

Rick Rosner: It is science plus existentialism.

Jacobsen: Yes, but not as bleak, it assumes a tendency in the inherent goodness in people.

Rosner: To wrap up, the possible future systems of belief are not as bleak as cold naturalism. That order in the universe might be a thing. That order might be connectable to ethics.

That is, in a set-theoretic way, there are, to some extent, absolutes of existence. Because one of the problems of cold naturalism is that universes can wink out in a quantum mechanical manner, leaving nothing.

No record of that existence. It is not as if the universe never was; it is that the universe never was, according to some versions of super cold naturalism. If there is a set-theoretic requirement of possible universes to exist, the constraints of what can and can not exist are not sufficiently tight to deny everything.

There may a certain absolutism to our existences, even though they are temporally limited. On the third hand, the whole set-theoretic argument itself be demolished by shit we discover farther into the future.

Jacobsen: If you take naturalism and the characterization of a cold, random universe, in the same way the Enlightenment was a reaction to the superstition and bigotry of the Christian church for centuries, and if you build a natural philosophic worldview, then you will derive naturalism through fundamental epistemologies. Your ontology will reflect this.

Rosner: That’s what happens a lot. As humans acquire or develop the power to make their wishes come true, they also tend to acquire the power to realize that said wishes are meaningless or some other bullshit.

Jacobsen: I think it’s a psychological construct. If you find yourself in a world of decentralized importance, at least geographically – so to speak – or topologically, your internal locus of control probably reduces. It is a theory. But I think it might be a psychological reflection of worldview.

People saying, “Humanity and its lessening importance in a role in the universe implies a lessened importance of your own role,” which is probably the wrong frame of the conversation.

When you’re talking interpersonal things, you’re talking about how to relate to one another, and when you’re talking about how to relate to one another, then you’re talking about ethics. It builds right back into the Golden Rule, and it builds right back into its fundamental emergence in compassion.

That’s not meaningless at all.

Rosner: The upshot is that as we gain more and more control over the world and ourselves. We will have to rebuild ourselves. The values, translated as human values, will become, to put it glibly, post-human values.

This is what yelled at Lance for the last few sessions. What of your values will make it? He argued, “People will realize marriage is between one man and one woman.” He believes it will become well-established and completely apparent to everyone.

Jacobsen: It never was well-established. That’s a new thing!

Rosner: The idea that we’re going to keep biologically having kids and most of the conscious entities on Earth will be biological humans having biological kids. It will be the thing for the next 100 years.

Then it is “Katy, bar the door!” for a trillion alternate forms of consciousness.

Jacobsen: Anything that’s talking outside of the universe, the natural world or the physical world, is automatically a metaphysical perspective. Hence, the prefix. If you’re talking about an information processing universe that implies an armature, it automatically becomes not only an information-based universe but also a metaphysical informationalism.

Rosner: That’s true. Unless, you can haul it back into physics by coming up with some proof. But yes.

Jacobsen: When people talk about naturalism, whether humanistic or rationalistic or empiricist, or they have a split in their mind between a theology and they incorporate that somehow, looking at those ideas, the concept is a natural world for all of those.

It is almost taking metaphysics completely out of the equation, because they don’t see it as important. So, those questions do not get asked because they are keeping all the frameworks within a naturalistic perspective.

Rosner: To put it in general terms, any time that you take the dominant belief system in any civilization; 100% of past belief systems have been debunked by future or coming belief systems.

So, the idea that the natural world is everything and that it rolls along randomly or according to raw randomness or probability.

Jacobsen: Cosmic billiards.

Rosner: Yes, a clockworky kind of deal, the history of the past ideas getting debunked: those ideas themselves will probably get debunked themselves before too long.

Jacobsen: That would undermine entire philosophies.

Rosner: Well, all philosophies get undermined. That’s the nature of how stuff goes.

Jacobsen: The successful one gets refined. Newton is good for engineering but not black holes.

Rosner: What survived in the philosophies of antiquity, maybe Plato’s Cave, everyone knows Plato’s Cave.

Jacobsen: Laws of Logic, Animalia and Plantae, the first biological/taxonomical classifications there. But if you are talking about the world made of water, a world made of the infinite, and a world made of air, if you have Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, then, yes, those are definitely gone.

Rosner: Democritus gets credit for first postulating atoms.

Jacobsen: He and Leucippus, they were the Atomists.

Rosner: The argument is, you have to have smallest possible things in the universe or things are infinitely divisible. Once someone makes the argument, one half of the argument will be right.

Jacobsen: It’s those monads that you were talking about.

Rosner: Most philosophies get their asses kicked by increases in knowledge.

Jacobsen: But those are bounded to physical models of the world. So, the idea that everything is made of water, infinite, air, or atoms. Most are gone but atoms stay.

Rosner: Thos are bound to shit visions of the world, bound to wild guesses about the structures of things in the same way we are making wild guesses about Set Theory and armatures and ladders of armatures, and all that.

All that stuff will be rejiggered by future discoveries.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 427 – Scientific Nihilism: Nihil (4)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/29

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes. There is another layering on top of that new fuzzy, dynamic set theory. It is based on the information. I think, by the way, as a side note; I think information is important because you can put this in the language of math.

It is not only the 10^85th and the pasts and those single sets of 10^85ths for those sets of possible futures. It would also be the stacking of that, as everything is correlated – as has been said – but some things are more correlated than others.

So, you have these numbers but they are precise in a statistical sense without being absolute. They would not be 0% or 100%. They would be a fast landscape of ups and downs.

Rick Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: It is kind of interesting. I guess it would concretize the imagery given about an information map being laid out, in terms of how 3-dimensional space represents different objects in terms of relatedness to one another.

Rosner: Without understanding what I’m talking about. I have said that the universe is its own map. The universe as laid out may be the richest and most efficient layout of what can happen next, because not everything can happen next under the really fuzzy and f-ed up rules of this set theory, where there is a set of next possible moments.

Jacobsen: It can be seen as a matrix of the elements. You can invent a mathematical symbolism with the sub-numbers and sub-letters stating that this is the most likely possible next state if you were to collapse the set into what is most likely to happen next.

Rosner: There is a consensus or statistical consensus of next possible moments.

Jacobsen: A lot of summing and averaging [Laughing].

Rosner: There are a set of moments that are equally probable, then there are those that are less probable but related. Even though, they are super probable; they are more probable than something that’s even crazier than that.

The Philadelphia Flyers have this new mascot, a terrible mascot who is orange with bug eyes.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: The odds that you flip a coin and it stands on an edge are vastly more probable than that the Philadelphia Flyers’ mascot shows up in your living room. It is not zero but something like a 0 plus a google zero.

Jacobsen: Not the entire thing, but could it be more likely that little itty bitty bits of him pop into the living room.

Rosner: Yes. I read these textbooks that talk about the air in the room evacuating the room. It is possible but highly improbable. But there are usually more likely things happen. You’re in an airplane and somebody shot out a window. There is a cause for that.

You have to wait for the lifetime of a google universe for air to just statistically drift into the corner and suffocate you.

Jacobsen: It doesn’t crash much. The system doesn’t crash much or at all. The contextualize framework of all those together – the gazillion units of whatever time or unit; one of the units can simply wink out of existence.

Rosner: The pog world is limited in time. The simple citizens would not live long enough to encounter a glitch.

Jacobsen: In a normal circumstance, the air could rush to the other side of the room, suffocating the person and then they die. In an airplane, it could be much more likely that it could exist.

But if you take a bunch of armatures, you can take a massive weave of them linked together informationally – and similar to other things rushing to one side of the room, then you could have an entire universe or armature in the massive weave simply winking out of existence as if it never existed in the superstructure.

Rosner: Yes, I think so. To bring this back to religion and belief, it is stuff that we are not capable of definitively characterizing, but that is pertinent to the nature of existence. It points at one of Feynman’s situations, which is that regardless of what we believe now or what I think we will believe in the near future; there might be a new series of discoveries, physical and metaphysical, which will vastly change what we believe into the indefinite future.

Jacobsen: This raises other questions for me. If you take a rationalist or a humanist lens, or an empiricist lens, each takes the no magic position. But they also take the naturalist perspective, which you are taking.

They tend to take meta-naturalism. It is their metaphysical worldview. What an information-based view on the universe takes is an information-based metaphysicalism, that’s not naturalism.

There is a similarity with Newton’s and Einstein’s math working in different frames. It is just that one is a little more comprehensive and contextualizes the operations of the world better because you’re incorporating information theory and communication theory: Big Bang, expansion, deceleration, and the production of natural objects.

Rosner: You can have statistical naturalism, which incorporates tendencies towards order as a statistical likelihood that becomes informationism or the idea that the idea increases in information over time – or the universe is an embodiment of information.

Jacobsen: Typically, what I hear from that camp, which is an important camp from modern science, the naturalism camp, they talk about this as a conclusion of modern science or a principle of natural science.

But science was natural philosophy, so, yes, you will derive naturalism from science. The idea of the universe runs along its course in its dynamics and natural objects rise, run along, and fall away.

Rosner: Nothing means anything. But we have built towards that over the past 2,000 years, which is every time science stuck its nose into the world. It met a pullback in perspective and a reducing of the importance of humanity with the most famous step being the end of the or the replacement of the Ptolemaic System with the Copernican System.

The Earth at the center to the Sun as the center, building to the Big Bang and then us as simply one of 10^22nd stars in a randomly occurring and playing out the universe. So, we are extrapolating that nothing means anything based on all these previous demotions of humanity from the center of existence to just a little blip in this vast universe.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 426 – Scientific Nihilism: Nihil (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/28

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Here’s the argument against magic, whether in a simulated world or a natural world, a good simulation, one that you can’t tell is a simulation, will not break its own rules on a regular basis; so, a simulated world where magic is possible is breaking the rules of nature, and those rules are what appear to apply.

You can not go around violating them willy-nilly. Otherwise, you’re living in a shit simulation. The point of a good simulation is the simulation being good.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I like that argument. Baruch De Spinoza had this notion of a natural world. He deconstructed, maybe in Ethics, all these basically supernatural beliefs, e.g., the liturgy, prayer, and so on.

He simply does not take into serious account the supernatural beliefs of the standard faiths. They are irrelevant and nonsensical. He says there is a natural world, and no afterlife. What you’re saying takes an IC context with that plus a digitized form of that…

Rosner: We will see a gazillion convincing simulated worlds in the future. We already have them. You have a number of games with believable reality. But they are market and technology-driven.

It gives them both severe limitations. Nobody or few people think, ‘Wow, I am really in this world.” Unless they are psychos or idiots.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: Few simulated worlds, even in the super high-tech future, will be entirely devoted to being entirely convincing so that you’re immersed without realizing that you’re immersed.

There may be a niche for that. The people who want the San Junipero experience from Black Mirror. Even in the show, the characters know that they are living in a simulated world.

It is just a nice one. But they also know that they are somewhere else. That they are a digital simulation housed in a bank of computers.

Jacobsen: That could be programmed out.

Rosner: Some people may want that. But the preserving of the illusion of a simulation means that it won’t glitch regularly. There are all sorts of arguments. We have already started talking about the ratios of infinities. The ratio of simulated to natural worlds; you can argue if there is such a thing as a natural world.

If there is a ladder of worlds with our information of the universe is stored in a higher storage, and same with that, and if that infinity is a real thing, and if it does make sense, how can you know that all infinity universes along that ladder are not infinity themselves?

There is a whole system of logic that has to be fleshed out. We have tried to use Set Theory to talk about the set of all possible universes. We have had reservations. In that, the members of the set are fuzzy, perhaps for quantum mechanical reasons.

Jacobsen: Also, there is something that should be included in that. The current fuzzy set should include an implied past, somehow, and a set of possible futures.

Rosner: Yes. You can characterize a fuzzy particle precisely. Thus, it is not entirely legit to state that states of quantum existence or the possible worlds are fuzzy because of quantum mechanics, because of the math of quantum mechanics.

Since a particle may be fuzzy or an electron, while not precisely defined in space and time, it is a precise object or mathematical entity in quantum mechanics.

Jacobsen: I have heard this defined as precise not as in 0% or 100% but as statistical precision.

Rosner: Also, fuzziness seems like it will always creep in. One reason: if you imagine every possible world as a moment, or as a string of moments along a worldline, the deal is, when you’re working with it, you’re working with a single moment or a series of moments.

But “moment” cannot be precisely defined because moments are quantum mechanically linked to one another; you cannot entirely separate the moments because the moments are defined or the worlds are defined by the playing out of a string of entwined moments, which seems brutal in a set-theoretic point of view.

Jacobsen: You have Set Theory. You have Fuzzy Set Theory or Multi-Valued Set Theory. The form you’re talking about: let’s say you have a universe with 10^85th particles, we’ll call those particles elements to put them in the language of Set Theory.

You have that, in the language of set theory, with a set of 10^85th elements plus the 10^85th implied past elements plus the 10^85th per possible set future elements.

Rosner: It is like a tapestry. You have a bunch of tangled particles comprised of the past putting limitations on the future, but the weave untangles the further into the past or into the future that you go.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 425 – Scientific Nihilism: Nihil (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/27

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Apart from individual believers, does this impact the intrinsic claims of validity or veracity to divine inspiration to holy books?

Rick Rosner: You can’t overestimate the power of casually held and inconsistent beliefs. Right now in the world, your mainstream American Christian believes in God and in science, even when they contradict.

Because their belief is loosely held about each thing. People don’t require themselves to have completely consistent belief systems. People live their lives. They casually believe what they’re going to believe about God and science.

Most people are never going to examine their beliefs so that they are squared away and consistent. It will be the same thing in the future. People believing in both religion and science in casual ways; that is probably not consistent or logical, and just people will live their lives that way.

Jacobsen: That is the individual believers again. Given the understanding now, is it plausible, apart from possible, that these texts were divinely inspired or not?

Rosner: I think in the future people will increasingly put things in a secular context. These texts may or may not have been inspired by God, themselves, or their friends, but not, in fact, from divine inspiration.

Jacobsen: For instance, I think it’s 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles. You can find a guy named Ahaziah. One says he came into power at 8-years-old. Another says that he came into power at 18-years-old.

I think it’s those sorts of fine print that, as people tend to take on more secular perspectives and simply enjoy the worship and the community without really consistent beliefs about it or examines of the text, will simply ignore this more and more now.

Rosner: I don’t think those inconsistencies are disqualifying. You are looking at many hundreds of years of potential mistranslation. In the early Rennaissance, and maybe even longer, if you are looking sculptures of a Jew, sculptures of Jews would have horns sticking out at the temples.

Because there was some mistranslation in the Bible that Jews have horns. It was not meant as disrespect. It said that Moses and other Jews had horns sticking out. If you are a Biblical scholar, there are probably many words that can be argued over endlessly based on a mistranslation.

Jacobsen: I’ll ask another question. If, theoretically, we had the perfect intended text in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, is it plausible to say that those were divinely written?

Rosner: Not to me, it is not plausible. You can still believe it. You can probably make arguments from complexity. Intelligent Design people like to argue that eyes are too complex to have evolved without intervention, which is the dumbest possible argument because eyes are one of the most independently evolved organs.

They evolve all the time. If you are an organism across hundreds of millions of years, you would have to be doing something way, way wrong not to evolve eyes. You could argue, “How could these systems evolve as set out in the Bible or the Quran, or whatever the holy book is, without God directing it?”

You’ve got a bunch of sheep herders. People who grow wheat and make shoes. These barely technological civilizations or these sub-technological civilizations. How would they come up with this stuff without God coming along?

They probably did not have underwear. I don’t know. How can people who did not make underwear make these holy books and immense ethical schemes?

Jacobsen: Under that scheme, does that mean no magic in the universe? As you call them, the principles of existence or the more common label of the laws of the universe.

Rosner; Yes, I subscribe to that. We live in the natural world. When a macro event happens, it has a cause. Quantum events can happen with a certain amount of randomness because that is built into quantum mechanics.

But when a baseball hits you in the head, there is a thrower and a ball. There is a system in place. You can argue for magic via simulation. People like to argue that there are probably more simulated worlds by a ratio of infinity to 1 than naturally evolved worlds.

I forget the exact argument.

Jacobsen: Is this the Bostrom argument?

Rosner: I forget. But the world feels natural.

Jacobsen: You could apply a reality-simulation certainty dichotomy. Something like this as a principle. In our model, we have the possible states of existence as infinitely more than the states of non-existence.

In that sense, with the argument of simulation being an infinite possibility of those, you really cannot distinguish between those two. Either one of those is reasonable in an infinity context, potentially.

Rosner: That’s reasonable to me, at this time.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 424 – Scientific Nihilism: Nihil (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/26

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are scientific nihilism and its future?

Rick Rosner: Scientific nihilism will not survive the era of big information. People get this idea that the universe is a big clockwork, even though it cannot be with quantum mechanics. It is indeterminate.

That doesn’t disqualify the view that the universe plays out as a series of random processes. Everything is destined to go to shit. The expanding Big Bang universe will continue to expand until it is cold, dark, and mostly empty trillions of years into the future.

Everything, eventually, goes to shit. A lot of or several of those ideas aren’t true now. In that, entropy does not rule the entire universe; it, certainly, doesn’t rule planets with life orbiting stars. It applies to closed systems.

Open systems can shed waste heat and actually increase in order. We are the current end product of 4.5 billion years of increasing order in our solar system. I believe that a future scientifically based view will be that increasing order is built into the universe and that there are values associated with this.

If you look at ethical values, most of them or most ethical goods involve not destroying shit or preserving shit, whether preserving life or the quality of human life. The Golden Rule is treating people as you would wish to be treated and if you wish to have a good life.

Goodness in life is based on freedom from chaos to a large extent. Chaos being war and cataclysm and disease. You want to hold onto the good things in life. The holding on is preserving order.

Order is built into ethical values and vice versa. So, I believe that future systems of belief that incorporate science will increasingly incorporate ideas of increasing order rather than the half-assed belief in nothing mattering associated with scientific nihilism or that many people have in the back of their minds lazily with an acceptance of a scientific point of view.

You can also look at Feynman. He wrote this article or gave a speech 50 years ago. Where he talked about the three directions that science could go in, science could run into a wall and everything that could be discovered scientifically would be discovered scientifically but that it wouldn’t explain everything, or it would explain everything, or there is an unlimited stuff to discover with science and science would continue to make gains without ever reaching completion.

That has pertinence to what we can anticipate. It can be set as an analogy to future forms of beliefs, what we believe in the near future, which I believe will increasingly be the universe having scientific explanations with a bias for increasing order.

Jacobsen: Do you mean localized order?

Rosner: It is localized negentropy. But I also believe the universe has increasing order on average as a whole. That the universe is built from order. That all the matter and structures of the universe can only exist in the proliferation of particles that we have and in the precision with which those particles are defined in their interactions and positions in space, etc., etc.

That only happens because there is enough order in the universe to permit that. If you believe that ordered systems generally have a beginning point, a point at which the system did not exist and so had zero information; you have to believe, at some point, that the system going from the point to now must have had increasing order, whether synthetically in an artificial world built or in an evolved natural universe.

You have a universe that went from zero order to a shitload of order. I believe that future belief systems would incorporate the science and this idea in the future.

Jacobsen: How would this work in the near future with beliefs that imply a continued belief – sorry – in things like the Quran, things like the Bible, things like the Torah, and things like the Kitáb-i-Aqdas?

Rosner: In numerous of our conversations or interactions, I have mentioned this a gazillion times. That Reformed Jews do not even know what they believe. In Sunday School, I was taught Jesus was a great man, a great leader, who had great things to teach us. He just wasn’t the Son of God.

He was not the Messiah. We were still waiting for him. Increasingly but not exclusively, there will be people who embrace traditional religions in a non-religious way. They will embrace the ritual without buying the divine aspects to it.

It would normally require belief in it. But it will be hollowed out. There will continue to be people who are adherents to the major religions. But that there has already been a large hollowing out of belief.

There will be increasing hollowing out of religion. As I said, Reformed Jews do not even know what they are supposed to believe.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 423 – Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is about god or gods.

Rick Rosner: Or ways to believe in God.

Jacobsen: Then the ways of belief within this.

Rosner: You mentioned off-tape the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Jacobsen: Some of them aren’t meant necessarily to be mean in most aspects but as catharsis. Same with ex-Muslims who left fundamentalist Islam and lost their jobs, their family, their community, their faith, and may be restarted at 40 with a child after a rape, and so on. It is a catharsis.

Parody religions can be a catharsis.

Rosner: The mechanism could be the investigation of the arcana of a parody religion. It makes you realize some aspects of all religion are jokey and then feel catharsis about leaving it. It is social support.

Jacobsen: That’s the biggest thing.

Rosner: Growing up in Boulder, I encountered all sorts of culty religions. I did a job with people who felt as though they were involved with ‘higher dimensions’ through engagement with float tanks of a sort.

You could find a dozen or so beliefs that are not mainstream American beliefs, which is a different form of investment. You get support if you immerse yourself. In Scientology, that would be a tough religion to maintain.

Unless you had been doing it long enough to handle being out and about and exposed to critiques of Scientology by the greater culture. To be around Scientologists for 5, 6, or 10 hours per day, I remember being in college.

My first year, Church of Christ was big on my floor. They had activities for their people 6 days or nights a week. They wanted you constantly hit with the message and not hit with “why the hell are you doing that?”

I remember one girl. I came to my school during the second semester. I missed the whole soap opera of the first semester. I joined in the second semester. The whole floor was Church of Christ.

This guy was a cool guy, ex-football player. He got sucked into it. This girl liked him because he was still a studly guy. She followed him into Church of Christ. What was supposed to happen at Christmas break, you were supposed to tell them what town you lived in, what town you were going back to; they would make sure that you were hooked up to the Church of Christ in that town, so you’d continue to be hit with the message.

Somebody dropped the ball with the football guy. He went home for a month and wasn’t exposed to any Church of Christ. He was like, “What the hell? No Church of Christ for me. I am back to the Kavanaugh life of beer and babes.” He was blissfully free.

But the girl who went with him was stuck in there to be with him. She was stuck there. She was stuck in this oppressive and culty version of Christianity and was pissed because she didn’t get the guy that she liked.

Jacobsen: One thing, it is much harder, as this comes up, for women in those circumstances, because women tend to have less economic degrees of freedom. Not only in America, but it is also even exacerbated worse in more poverty-stricken areas, where men hold more of the cards.

That is an amusing case of being the case but also serious, then there are the ones that are more serious. It comes up in the secular community. Why so many men? Why so many white men? You can not the amount of dependence forced on women in those communities.

The socioeconomic traps for women, not simply “I didn’t get the guy and followed into the Church of Christ and got trapped.”

Rosner: Yes, the religions bend, you can find freedom in a culty religion if you’re willing to cynically gameplay. The televangelists who tell people that God wants them to have a private plane, so send them money.

Again, there was one guy on my floor. He was super-duper Church of Christ. He dressed in disco clothes a lot of the time. It was clothes that showed off his package. Gabardine pants that were 20% stretchy material that hugged his bottom half. Satin disco shirts too; the non-believers, we would ask him, “Why are you dressed like a disco king?”

He would say, “I want to look good for Jesus.” Ways of believing, you can immerse yourself in a boutique religion. You can believe with various degrees of commitment in a mainstream religion.

You can incidentally embrace the current scientism, vaguely believe science has all the answers and that the universe is a random process playing out – and nothing really matters: scientific nihilism.

Then there are a couple of ways that I believe. That I think people will increasingly believe in the future.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 422 – Aging, Bad Brains, and Conservatism Swings in Time and Attitudes (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/24

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: As change accelerates, you have more of a push on the fear end and disorientation end. Then you have more old people surviving into their 70s, 80s, and 90s who need dumbed down media.

It seems ridiculous people who are not part of the demographic that 40% of America still supports Trump. But when you look at the pressures that create conservatives, those are durable.

It will take a long time, perhaps until 2030 or longer, to drive dumb, racist Trump-loving conservatives back out of public life; enough of them backing out of political life, that we begin to have a reasonable political culture again.

The next two years, will require investigations into Trump and into his Republican cronies for corruption and rigging the election, and all sorts of stuff. Mueller has already indicted dozens of people.

We are waiting on Mueller’s biggest indictments and the overall report on Trump and related issues. That will roll out over the next two years. That will be a daily negative attack ad on Trump backed up by the results of investigations.

This should serve to erode support for Trump, except that the people who support Trump will continue to get their information from media, led by Fox News, that will continue to spin the information in such a way that they will be skeptical of the next two years of revelations of exactly how evil Trump is.

Although, Fox News, Wikileaks, the National Inquirer, and other associated Twitter accounts have been going silent, which is making people speculate – or causing them to speculate that – Mueller has told them that they are about to be indicted for campaign law violations for several things.

So if you can put some kind of a leash on the untruthful propaganda coming out of rightwing media, the next two years may serve to be more erosive of Trump supporters. In 2020, there is a new census too.

It may be that we will see reduced Republican gerrymandering. But that is not a sure thing because Trump named two Supreme Court justices and one of them, Kavanaugh, is thoroughly a political hack.

He will consistently and corruptly – in many people’s minds including mine – rule in favor of Republicans. That’s it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 421 – Aging, Bad Brains, and Conservatism Swings in Time and Attitudes (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/23

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the math behind reliable demographics?

Rick Rosner: The deal is, for the last 20 or 30 years, people have been saying that the Republican Party in America will collapse demographically. Because Republicans tend to be older and old people tend to get even older and age out and die.

They tend to eventually withdraw from political life, from voting and everything, either because they are too old or too dead to vote. Also, America gets less white, and people who aren’t white tend not to be Republicans.

Republicans have pushed them further and further into an extreme corner trying to hold onto their extreme voters, who tend to be old and white. Republicans tend to hold onto power in spite of demographic power by gaming the system.

In 2010, they gerrymandered the country, so that they, Republicans, could win; even though, they may be getting 5% fewer overall votes than Democrats. But at some point, you have to expect the Republican Party to demographically collapse.

People who are optimistic can look at 2018 as an opening salvo in the collapse. But maybe not, because the Republicans own the Supreme Court, which may allow them to get away with more rigging of elections.

Also, we can look at the creation of new Republicans. Younger people who are more altruistic and, perhaps, less motivated by money self-interest – and minorities – tend to demographically gravitate to the Democratic Party.

Republicans: let me postulate here, older people become conservative when they become afraid of change. Let’s say the impetus to become conservative is, at least, somewhat proportionate to the rate of change, the faster things change in culture and technology, then the more terrifying it is to people who no longer have the up-to-date skills and intelligence to embrace the change or the changes.

Once people begin to fall behind the curve of change, they look at ways to stop it. Increasingly, since the rise of Fox News, conservative media has gotten increasingly used to, and increasingly good at, exploiting the characteristics that go along with the fear of change, which is the loss of thinking ability.

People live longer now. It means that they have more years with old people brains that do not think as well, and conservative media has learned to dumb itself down to be attractive to older and dumber people.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 420 – The Physics of Punching (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: In an earlier time, when I was a kid in the 1970s, I had been bullied and ridiculed a lot. In 9th grade, I punched 6 classmates. I did not get into trouble. But that was a different time.

Any punch you do of people (not drywall) should be before you are legally an adult. Unless you have been punched first, you probably don’t want to punch someone, because you can be sued, especially in America.

If you are going to punch somebody in the head, I recommend the cheek. The side of the face, say between the cheek and the jawbone, where you give them a message; that they have been punched in the face.

If you hit square on with the greatest surface area, you probably won’t break a knuckle or damage them too bad. Then you won’t leave a mark. If you leave more of a mark, then that’s bad, because it is more evidence of punching them.

You can punch them in the soft areas, like the gut or even in the groin, which won’t leave a mark and is helpful when you’re denying when you did it later. You don’t want to hit them in the mouth.

Drunk people get in fights and punch people in the mouth. It is filthy. There is a chance that their teeth will puncture your hand. If drunk, a) you may not remember. You may awaken and have a swollen hand.

Your hand is swollen because it is superinfected. The teeth break the skin, I have known people who actually walked away with a tooth stuck in their hand without realizing it until later.

Teeth are filthy. If you relax your hand, your hand has been injected with all sorts of mouth bacteria. As you relax your hand, you pull the tendons back further up your arm that has been made filthy from the teeth.

Then you go back to sleep and forget when you wake up, you have a horribly infected hand. You can go online and read the medical journals about this. Also, if you are going to be punching stuff and be effective, you want to study punch mechanics.

It is punching effectively – not punching strategy if you study boxing – that is about transmitting force through your fist. Those aren’t very effective because your fist and lower arm do not weigh that much.

And the person you’re a person can see it coming if you are punching people against my advice. Instead, you want to punch straight out, so by the time the punch lands; you’re pushing with your whole arm out through your arm.

You have also rotated your upper body, so you’re leaning into the punch. So, you’re transmitting not just the weight of your fist and arm but, to some extent, some of the force and inertia of your upper body.

So, by the time the punch lands, your arm should be almost straight and your left shoulder – if you’re punching with your left hand – should be rotated towards the thing that you’re punching to rotate and provide a strong base, the base of your body, to add force to your punch.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 419 – The Physics of Punching (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/21

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: The drywall in our house was built in 1966. It’s 5/8ths of an inch thick. I think more recent drywall is half of an inch thick. You will easily punch through 5/8ths drywall.

In even older houses, you have plaster in half. You have vertical studs and then horizontal strips of wood to hold this mortar; that is probably 58/ths. Over the mortar, you have several layers of plaster that have been trowelled on.

You will not punch through that unless you’re a superhero. There’s that. If you are going to punch through stuff, then you want to punch through the greatest surface area of your knuckles.

If you make a fist and then look at your fist, you’ve got your first knuckle. The knuckles furthest up on your arm, right where your fingers start. If you look at those knuckles, and then the inch and a half or the two-inch lower half of your fingers when you make a fist, when you punch something, you want to make sure it’s with the whole lower half of your fingers.

It should all make contact with whatever you’re punching, so that the force is transmitted to what you’re punching but it is transmitted across seven square inches. If you hit something off, so that only one or two knuckles make contact, that’s no good. You might break a knuckle.

The way to transmit force with your fist is across the greatest surface area of your fist. Otherwise, you break your hand. Boxing gloves are not to protect the head of the person punched but the knuckles of the person punching because your head is less fragile than your knuckles.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 418 – The Physics of Punching (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/20

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the physics of punching [Laughing]?

Rick Rosner: For someone who is somewhat of a wuss, such as myself, I have done a lot of punching in my life. I have punched a fair amount. I was a doorman in bars for 25 years. I got punched – I don’t know, maybe – a dozen times.

I would usually forget to punch back. I never punched anyone in a bar. I worked in one chain of bars if you punched a customer. But you got $25 if you took a punch. I used to punch myself in the face to toughen up.

In the gym, I used to work with the big rubber guys for practice. That you’re supposed to beat up. I punched a lot of walls. This past week, I punched two walls because I got pissed off. Yet, having punched a lot of walls, I never punched through it.

In movies, you always see people punch through drywall. The angry husband or dad punches next to the wife’s head and then punches through the drywall. I have punched a lot of walls and never even dented drywall.

We should talk about the physics of that. For one thing, most walls have a stud, at most every 16 inches. A vertical piece of wood holding the wall together every 1 foot and 4 inches. So, if you punch and happen to be over or near a stud, the wall will not move or break.

Your fist is, maybe, 3 or 4 inches wide. There is only a sweet spot of around 3 or 4 inches between studs where you might get enough flex in the drywall to crack it, and break through.

But that three and a half or 4 inches gives you less than a 25% chance of hitting the sweet spot. Also, it is harder to punch through drywall than you think.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 417 – Monitoring Deviancy

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/19

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The right and the left have valid arguments here. They tend to argue two points here. Conservatives argue fatherlessness. Liberals argue patriarchal structures in society. Both make sense.

If you look at the prison population, the ISIS population, and others, they are fatherless very often, including the women. The structures around the society. They encourage the idea that women are objects or their form, in general, is something that men can own.

If you look at the African-American community in rap videos, often, it is not necessarily the best representation of women is not being objectified. School shootings tend to be mostly white boys.

Rick Rosner: This argues against privacy and for algorithms to spot potential shooters. Because what comes up after a shooting is that there were all sorts of tells, in the case of the Parkland shooter, that guy had been turned into the cops dozens of times for being a psycho and various people had dropped the ball.

There was the guy who’s dad gave him guns back and then he went on a rampage. The cops came and took the guns. They made the dad promise not to give the kid guns. Then the dad gives the guns back, and then the kid shoots up a place.

I just argue; there are all these influences in populations in general. It is a tiny minority who become shooters.

Jacobsen: But if you look at the media, it is women as objects.

Rosner: Like today, DJ Khaled is all over Twitter being made fun of, because he is saying that he is the king of the house because he gets blown but does not go down on his wife. This is one of the biggest rap producers being an idiot.

Most people are able to look at this for what it is, which is braggy nonsense. Rap, no matter how misogynistic some of it might be, does not cause most people who listen to it to commit rape or homicide.

Yes, you can exert pressure to make rap less misogynistic. But in terms of minimizing the number of shooters, we should probably develop things. We have this sinister algorithmic stuff like Cambridge Analytica, used to figure out who is voting for whom and how to change minds and stir trouble.

You can use the technology is a similar way, to monitor people’s web presence to pinpoint people who need to be looked in on – to see if they are building an arsenal in their bedroom.

Every time a person shoots up a motherfucking place. The reporters do the post-disaster research and find out that the person had been turned into a cop a gazillion times and the neighbors were afraid of the guy.

None of this made it to the point of definite turning in. Maybe, we need an agency. If there were a branch of some law enforcement agency, I don’t know. If it was devoted to promoting the finding of pre-crime, it is like Minority Report.

Jacobsen: How will this not infringe on fundamental rights of people? In China, they have mood chips in the caps of some workers in order to know when they need a break, when they need to keep working, and when, potentially, to demote or promote them.

Rosner: My answer is I don’t know how you do it. If you tasked people, like a segment of the FBI, to figure out what you could do, and how it couldn’t infringe, and if it infringes then it wouldn’t piss everybody off, every time a person shoots up a place; we find evidence of them being a psycho beforehand.

Is there any way to get at this information beforehand and take action beforehand? It may not work before. If you find reports of people, and if they come in, then you can monitor them if they become an active shooter or not – as they are likely to do it.

Like those cops who examine this kid, who show a kid as a disturbed person, the cops give the guns to the dad. But if that agency had been instructed properly, or trained properly, maybe, they would not have believed the dad’s bullshit to not give the kid guns.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 416 – Unable, Cannot, Don’t Want To

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/18

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Obviously, you know about Incels.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Right, I didn’t know about them until the attacks in Canada.

Rosner: I didn’t either. It means a creepy guy who can’t get laid.

Jacobsen: Or a resentful guy who can’t get laid, it could be the nice guy but turned bad.

Rosner: Yes, it is all rolled into a creepy guy. Once they call themselves an incel, it is bad. When guys are faced with not being able to get a girlfriend, there are several reactions that they can have, “Maybe, someday, I am only 15 or 18. Most people eventually find partners.”

Another reaction that I had starting too early. I didn’t do anything about it. It didn’t work for me, for a long time, “What can I do to make myself more worthy of getting a girlfriend?”

Jacobsen: At the same time, it puts women on a pedestal and can be unhealthy too. It can be a barrier because it is a turnoff.

Rosner: You have to be reasonable about it. But you cannot be reasonable until you have educated yourself.

Jacobsen: If a guy or gal are looking for a long-term relationship, men need to know that, in general, financial stability is the most important, according to surveys.

Rosner: I started in high school. They are not looking for financial stability. You can be patient. You can address it by trying to improve yourself and trying to learn more about social relations or, the third thing, simply guys getting hostile and predatory.

They get really mad. They feel entitled to sex.

Jacobsen: You can see demographic trends. If you look at mass school shootings, 92 of the 94 in a decade and a half long period in the United States were men. Most were aged 17. 2 weren’t.

The most probable group are young men aged 17 who are white by a race or Caucasian by ethnicity. This may come out of the Incel community. Even though, if you take into account that there are more white males than other males in North America, the majority of them will be white males, still.

Rosner: I agree with that to some extent. But a bunch of guys may gravitate to simply wanting a killing spree, wanting to do this thing. A lot of them find an issue to justify the killing spree.

The Incel thing can be one of those things. You can go with ISIS, the Incel thing, or being screwed over at work. But it is a chicken and egg thing. Which came first? The ISIS affiliation, the Incel thinking, the being pissed off at your boss, I would say in some cases that the urge to kill a lot of people – as a cool way to go out – came first.

Jacobsen: I suspect the Incel community is minor and still reflective of a larger phenomenon. If you look at the Kurdish community, one ravaged by war. In many stories, these can be people who have gone through a trauma but react in the manner of building culture rather than being reactionary.

It was pointed out to me. That rape as a tool of war remains prominent. The boys and men are killed off. The girls and women are raped. It is the state and the soldiers feeling as if they own the female form or women and girls.

Incel communities reflect this. They feel entitled to sex with people simply for their existing.

Rosner: They reflect attitudes but are a small example of what can happen.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 415 – 2100 to Infinity

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/17

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, it is an extrapolation to 2100. China will lose about 33% of the current 1.5 billion population. India will continue to grow but taper off as development happens, life gets better, and life gets more precious, and so on.

Rick Rosner: Yes, it is the curve. As people experience less mortality, they have fewer kids.

Jacobsen: One is the empowerment of women. It is a catch-all of women having more say in their lives.

Rosner: In brutal terms, India is still a super rapey country. It will address a lot of women’s empowerment issues.

Jacobsen: In Nigeria, they have, like most African countries, more births per woman, more deaths per woman, and so on. It is more infant deaths and maternal deaths.

Rosner: You can probably expect more technological access for Africa now with Wakanda.

Jacobsen: With Wakanda, it may act as a release valve for refugees in Africa from war-torn areas.

Actually, I did two interviews with two atheists who stopped believing in Burundi. It was having political strife. They fled to Nigeria or Kenya. I got their stories. They stopped believing in their faith.

Rosner: If African as a continent gets its shit together, it can be a huge amount of human capital.

Jacobsen: One aspect is recovering from colonialism. Another is stopping focusing on grievance politics about colonialism. It is valid to get some form of acknowledgment and boost post-colonial context from the globe and forgiveness from the other country.

But a grievance politics about the past will not allow, in the long term, countries to move forward. I hear both arguments and see validity in each.

Rosner: A positive erosive trend is the accessibility of technology, so people who are sufficiently motivated and intrepid and ingenious can reap benefits from worldwide technology – even when their country is going batshit.

I think that will continue to be a trend. It will be an eroding of nationalism as the more talented people sidestep their local politics or national politics to engage in worldwide thought commerce.

Jacobsen: Most tech-savvy people tend to be internationalists.

Rosner: You do not even need to be an internationalist. It is finding talented people wherever they are. If your country is a mess, then you’re looking outside of your country.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 414 – ‘American Food’ in China: China is Eating Our Lunch

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why is China eating our – Americans’ – lunch? What is the anecdote?

Rick Rosner: I bought on eBay Minoxidil, which is this stuff that I use to try and keep my hair. For 99.6% less than I used to pay for it, it is super cheap. When it first came out, it was by prescription in the 80s.

Now, I just paid less than 67 cents per bottle of 5% solution. That’s just crazy. This is with shipping included. It is because you can buy a drum of the stuff, of the powder in China. It may show in a 45- or 55-gallon drum and then you can sell it.

The per unit cost per bottle may be 20 cents per bottle. One time, I spilled some on a tablecloth and mashed the tablecloth on me, the Minoxidil, because that stuff was precious back in the day.

Now, it is cheap. The deal is, if you can find what you need from China, you will pay 90% less than what you would otherwise. It is not good news. It is good news for a while for consumers. But it is not good for us in the longer term.

Because it means that we will get our asses kicked by a combination of human capital and high technology, and dedication to progress. Also, it is a low wage environment over there.

As I have said before, it is the worst possible time to have America governed by a bunch of morons. If you let America do what America has done for more than a century, America will do okay and will possibly do great.

But if you have a political party that cynically tries to strip America of what makes us legitimately great, we will get crushed by what you called the big three, where there is a big four with America. You mentioned Nigeria.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 413 – I Must Scream

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is this thought about the limited visions of the future?

Rick Rosner: Given the limited capacity to imagine the future, a more idealized version would not include the 1960s ones with the world inhabited by dystopian advanced intelligence, exemplified by the Harlan Ellison story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, where a supercomputer has taken over the world, hates humans, imprisons their consciousnesses, and just tortures their consciousnesses for all eternity, 24/7.

Jacobsen: Also, knowledge is not produced in a vacuum. Stories are not produced in a vacuum. Same when talking about consciousness being tortured. There is a zeitgeist. You gave this example months ago. In the early Industrial Era, the lungs were bellows and the heart was a pump.

Rosner: They looked for mechanical descriptions. That’s true. When people thought about duplicating humans, they had a much more mechanical mental image of what that duplication would look like.

Jacobsen: They had the basic idea. Biology is technology. It’s just not the technology we’re used to. For instance, if you take the recent Ridley Scott piece, which has been praised or lambasted, the Prometheus and Alien: Covenant dual prequels to the Aliens series, he is not a creationist but more of aliens came down and engineered.

Rosner: Yes, I always got pissed that the Aliens series had the good first and second ones and then they went to where I didn’t want them to go. I wanted them to go to the planets where they made the acid-blood creatures because those people feel as if they are engineered creatures. They were engineered to fight wars for people.

Jacobsen: He viewed the Juggernaut ship as a battle chariot. So, you had the right idea.

Rosner: You never get to see the fully developed civilization because that would be too expensive and take too much hardcore imagination.

Jacobsen: Also, Giger is dead, which makes the job harder.

Rosner: You would have to go beyond Geiger anyway because he was good at imagining good penetrative, sexual aliens.

Jacobsen: Right, the biomechanical Freudian nightmares.

Rosner: You can imagine future mechanical humans into dry robots and wet robots when people of 1 and 2 hundred years ago imagined replacing the human body. They imagined clockwork robots made out of hard mechanical stuff.

So, you have dry and hard robots. Then when we imagine replacements for our physical bodies, we imagine the Ridley Scott deals that are wet and soft. You cut open an android in Ridley Scott movies.

They are filled with white goo, as their circulatory fluid. They soft and messy, are as gushy and messy as any human. That is a different model. That we will harness biology to build replacement organs that work because they are close to the organs that we have in their soft-squishy organicness.

Jacobsen: With that series, the metaphor that he builds with the main feature with the black goo is that it is a form of AI. What is the main fear of modern culture? What is the big thing coming around the horizon more and more?

It’s AI. It is the metaphor of the time. 10 or 20 years ago, or even further in fact, but coming into the mainstream, we had the idea of the brain as a big mainframe computer that is super efficient and gushy.

A three-pound mass that is sticky like hot, wet oatmeal.

Rosner: But replicateable via hard electronics.

Jacobsen: Massive serial processing in particular.

Rosner: Now, we are getting to the models like the way we think the brain actually does work. The feelers reach out and try to make a connection. For those that work, they stay, but the ones that don’t then die away.

The general cell count stays the same but the linkages change.

Jacobsen: When people talk like that, they talk in the manner of popular neuroscience. When I visualize this, it is not simply dendritic or axonal feelers. It is really an increase in gap junctions. Because it is the axonal-dendritic connections and the gap in between.

That is the important part.

Rosner: Okay, if a dendrite can reach out and go, “Hey,” and then get a connection, is that what happens?

Jacobsen: Axons are the main feelers. Dendrites as the input. Soma or cell body as the main cell part. Axons as the outputs. That’s where they get the computer model of it from, the 1,000-10,000 connections.

But they don’t physically touch similar to early physics when atoms do not talk.

Rosner: Right, it is air molecules, so you never touch things. If you break a cracker or a vase on the moon, you can put it back together with bonds, at least according to what I’ve read, as strong as those before you broke the thing.

Because air does not coat the surface and then the surfaces are free to come back together and bond together with a lot of the original bonds reforming because air just cats everything and makes for crap bonds.

That’s why superglue works. It gets in between two gaps and absorbs the excess air. Air is the crappiest glue. It makes almost nothing stick together. It incorporates the air into something sticky, and then you can get the nice bond.

Jacobsen: The gap junction is an empty space from which to spit out neurotransmitters across.

Rosner: To use an old model, it is a transistor gate kind of.

Jacobsen: The metaphor reflects that, of the time.

Rosner: We are in the beginning to see things. I think information processing will dominate the next few centuries. I think we are seeing the beginning of our information-processing metaphors.

I think it is the right framework via which to view the near future and much of the present.

Jacobsen: One add-on, the future is not predetermined. We don’t know. There are a bunch of competing ones. Just the humanistic one, there is a certain flattening of everything trying to bring everyone to the same level.

There are the authoritarian ones. Where it is highly hierarchical, we see this in authoritarianism of various forms.

Rosner: The gross trends of the future are pretty hard to avoid, which is that the future will be dominated by increasingly powerful information processing. With the powerful information processors not being unaugmented humans, the major players – the types of future players – will not be too varied.

There will not be that much variation in the types of major players. I agree with you. What will be less determined is what will happen to the formerly dominant groups, is it a nice human future or a future that discards us?

I think the general thrust of civilization is probably unavoidable. But the specifics of how nice that civilization is, is up for grabs.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 412 – Explicit and Implicit Characters and Plots

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/14

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the wave of new shows?

Rick Rosner: There explicitly state that their characters are terrible. They are the worst. There are shows, like sitcoms generally, are explicitly presented as huge assholes. We are supposed to be entertained and have learned how horrible these people are.

These people are presented as problems for themselves and others. It is explicitly stated that these people, these products of America, are awful and then we are supposed to be entertained by their awfulness.

There is a sub-text that, maybe, we should not be as awful as this. Seinfeld was one of the first shows to wallow. The idea is no one learns any lessons because it was a terrible sitcom troupe.

Most of the decades of sitcom are that people are generally good, goodness will prevail, and then people will learn their lessons. There is a backlash against this. It is seen as cloying and done lazily. Most sitcoms from the 60s through the 90s were lazy.

So, anyway, the degradation of culture was able to help. The end for this one.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 411 – Gods, Old and New

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/13

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the old ways people believed in gods, and, to some extent, still believe in gods?

Rick Rosner: In the old days, which is Greece and Rome and before that, you had people without a lot of science and technology but who had sufficient technology and civilization for them to consider bigger questions of existence.

When people barely had language or had no language out on the Savannah 100,000 years ago or 150,000 years ago, any belief in gods would have been shared without anyone else and would have been a vague sense of rightness or wonder.

A person without language could see a tree with a different color that they’d never seen before, like a Jacaranda or a Bougainvillea. I don’t know if they had that out on the African Savannah.

Something with a shocking color and still have a sense or feeling of beauty. Or they could bring down a large animal in a hunt. They could still be favored by existence. There might be feelings of their in godness.

That the world has provided for them or has given them a special visual treat or something. But really, then, you get the cave painting gods. Some speculate some of the cave paintings were meant to be in homage or a figurative sacrifice to God.

You’re saying, “Hey!” But we don’t know; the cave painting people didn’t leave too many clues behind. People like to say that you can get clues about how people felt about the afterlife and, therefore, God by their burial practices.

The things a living person would need put in the graves. So, fine, but we don’t have a lot of information, you can then get to the civilizations that everyone is forced to study. The Greeks, the Roman, the Etruscans, and so on, the people from 10,000 years ago up to 2,000 years ago.

Those people didn’t have a lot of science and technology. But they had enough that they could live in towns and cities, and their lives were stable enough that they could – and they hand language – start thinking about questions beyond day-to-day existence in a more systematic way.

They developed extensive sets of gods to account for everything they couldn’t account for given their level of knowledge about the world. The idea of gods intervening on a daily basis and fighting with each other via humans.

Gods coming downing and humping humans to make demigods. Their gods were active because they needed to do a lot. Their world was largely unexplained. Then the gods get consolidated under the big current religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

I don’t know exactly what the push is, but religions with a bunch of gods were superseded with religions having, usually, one god. As the world becomes clearer, perhaps, it becomes more efficient to group all divine powers under a single deity.

There is a thing going on with the late Roman Empire. I doubt that most citizens of the Empire believed in the full pantheon of gods. Religion got hollowed out. People paid a lot of lip service to Roman religion.

But a lot of people probably didn’t believe in the whole thing. Maybe, the new religions with the single gods were easier to earnestly believe in, because you didn’t have a frickin’ clown car of gods.

Maybe, it was easier to bring back sincere belief. You have, from the time of Christ up through now, these big religions and with many people sincerely believing that the information in the religion was provided through special spokespeople directly from the deities.

Moses gets the tablets. Jesus’s disciplines get the Word and write down stuff. It comes directly from divine beings. It is similar to the kings of Europe. That system of kingdoms stood for many years on the idea that kings were kind of anointed by God or somehow had the power via God to rule over everybody.

As with all these beliefs, it is probably a combination of sincere beliefs and not having the time/gumption to question the beliefs. Then a big chunk of people who think, “Yes, it is bullshit.” But it is a continuum.

You have people actively questioning it. But you don’t have a lot enough of that. Because there is no overthrow until the Rennaissance. Then you have full and complete belief in gods and kings.

Then you have degrees of laziness, cynicism, and dealing with the tasks of life, and not having the time or the curiosity to really question stuff. Plus, there’s still not enough information to definitively overrule these beliefs.

Who will you believe? The person who says the Earth goes around the Sun, or a religion that took 300 years to put up a cathedral with a 250-foot tower, and whose representatives dominate every aspect of life.

Those are the flavors that you get from the Rennaissance until now. Where 400 years ago, people start noticing that systematically applying analytic skills to technical problems leads to good results.

You can make machines to do jobs for you. You can make trains and ships. You can find math that accurately represents physical processes like gravity. Then increasingly, you get what you’ve told me to call the God of the Gaps.

That as the world continues to fill with scientific and technical knowledge. If people want to continue to believe in God, their belief will be strongest in where science hasn’t yet extended.

For instance, the mind and consciousness, even today, there are more people probably believing in the special divinity of the mind than in the special divinity of any other things. Because it is the last big area that has not been adequately explained, except the entire universe has been explained by Big Bang theory.

Today, you have several predominant flavors. You have the entirely scientific people, who may or may not be that scientifically literate or not.

But a science-oriented person or believing person will believe there is no divinity in the universe – and it is all random processes. And if there are some things that science cannot explain now, there are things that science can explain later.

There is a slightly more sophisticated version of that expressed by Richard Feynman. Even if science is never able to completely explain everything, even the things that we can explain through science, they have a scientific basis.

But it is too tricky and complicated for us to explain it. That’s science as default. That everything has a scientific explanation, regardless of when if ever scientists come up with an explanation.

Then there’s “meh” science. People think, “Probably science, but I don’t care, I’m busy.” That flavor of belief has probably run through humanity for all of history. People who don’t give a shit and have a casual acceptance.

They will not strongly examine the prominent beliefs of their society. They are spending too much time on other things like investing, getting laid, and so on.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 410 – Homo Opinionem

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/12

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was the book that you were reading? Did you finish it?

Rick Rosner: I may have mentioned this in another session. I finished reading Homo Deus. It basically meshes with something else that we were talking about, which is the types of gods that you can believe in.

A lot of this was without research, so a lot was taken out of my butt. This guy did a 400-page treatment of the history of belief and then speculated about the future. He argued each god represents humans’ position at some point in history and prehistory.

The idea of finding the divine in everything. Pantheism makes sense when humans are primitive and have not developed civilization yet, when they are out there and struggling to survive amongst every other species.

So, things are on more of an equal footing, so you find the divinity in everything including the animals that you are hunting. The next step is monotheistic religions where God has created Man in God’s image.

Now, Man is on an elevated position of dominion over the rest of nature. It is consistent with the newly formed agricultural civilization and the formation of towns. You go to town and farm dwellers.

At this point, humans have a pretty good control over nature. They can raise their own animals and crops. The author argues that it would feel like shit if you had to continue to consider every other species divine.

Because these are now animals that you’re raising for slaughter. For everyone’s peace of mind, animals lost their divinity. Once you get the Rennaissance, you get humanism, which the author posits as the worship of humans with the increasing knowledge of the world and doing stuff with that knowledge.

The author argues that the final belief system for humans – which will lead to the end of unaugmented humans – is data-ism or worship of information and information-processing, which he says we are starting now.

I agree with him. It will be this way for the next many centuries. It will be more and more about information processing, which will dominate the world. Where he gets it wrong, I think is right at the end.

He thinks that consciousness is a) no big deal and b) characteristic of humans and animals but not of AI or, at least, a helpful characterization of AI. He argues AI will get increasingly powerful and render humans irrelevant.

I don’t disagree with it. It is similar to horses. He argues horses are amazing creatures capable of a bunch of stuff. But nobody uses horses on a daily basis. Nobody uses horses as a part of daily activities in the cities anymore, because we have invented better ways of transporting us than horses.

He says AI, as it takes over, will have less and less use for us and for consciousness. I think this is where he goes wrong. Because I think consciousness is an unavoidable characteristic of high powered information processing.

When you have a whole panoply of AIs, some of which are simpler and do not have sophisticated consciousness, and then sophisticated AIs with consciousness, and AI-human hybrids, you have these consciousnesses and not quite consciousnesses acting on each other.

He does not think consciousness will be a part of high-powered information processing of the future. He thinks high-powered AI will simply not value human consciousness at all. He thinks they will look at humans the way humans look at horses.

Interesting and fun, and capable of a lot of stuff, but not really involved in the main work of society, he says consciousness will go by the wayside. Future AI will not value humans and their consciousness at all.

When he goes wrong by discounting consciousness as part of information-processing, he reaches the wrong conclusions, I believe. I think it lead me to a more reasonable conclusion, at least step in history.

Where there will be a bunch of different consciousnesses 100-200 years from now, he argues AI will not give a shit about consciousness at all. There will not be any moral judgments by AI.

It may be nice and let unaugmented humans go on about their existences without giving much of a shit about us. But in a world that has a whole bunch of consciousnesses because it has a whole bunch of different powerful information-processing systems that combine and bud off with each other, those moral judgments will be more central to civilization in 50-200 years from now.

The only way, I think, that consciousness will be addressed – that the issues of which consciousnesses get respect and don’t – is to develop a technology where everyone’s consciousness gets preserved.

Everyone who wants it, get it. Because it will be increasingly cheap to create and preserve consciousness. We will have a mathematical understanding of how consciousness works. We will be able to replicate it.

There will be commerce in consciousness. There will be an economics of consciousness. There will be a system that acts to preserve consciousness because it will be helpful in many contexts.

In the context in which it isn’t particularly helpful to the dominant means of the time, it will be so cheap to preserve anyway. That the powerful entities in charge will simply go ahead and preserve it.

It is consistent with the idea I had for not quite a science fiction story but for the background of a story. In the woke future, all animals with consciousness have been infected with more sophisticated consciousness than they previously had.

Everything has gotten smarter. Bears, deer, rabbits, and so on, are smarter. Everything has a worldview. A picture of the world that is the best that they can have given the size of their brains.

It is the kingdom. It is the animal kingdom, where animals can communicate with each other in ways that we communicate with each other. Animals have a vaguely, roughly human equivalent human understanding of the world, where they had zero understanding of the overall nature of the world before.

Because they never had the brains to develop a science and a language to develop a complete picture of the world. Here, animals are abridged versions of humans. They still have to function in nature as animals.

But the covenant set up amongst all animals is that if an animal is going to kill another animal then the killing animal has to absorb the consciousness of the animal it kills. It is the only fair thing to do.

The animals who do not exercise this courtesy are considered assholes. if a coyote is going to take out a rabbit, the coyote that takes out the rabbit will take in the rabbit’s feelings and awareness.

This way the rabbit has an afterlife of a sort in the coyote that killed it. I kind of see that existence being the way in which the blob will work in the future. The worldwide thought blob.

Consciousnesses will be absorbed and combined, and everybody will be reasonably happy because they will have a certain kind of immortality where their thoughts and experiences remain relatively preserved – even as you get absorbed into the blob.

There will be a bunch of commerce in consciousness. Both as the driver of future civilization and to provide solace for the participants in that civilization. It is part of the deal of future civilization.

You don’t get fucked over consciousness-wise. You don’t get thrown away. Unless, you’re okay with getting thrown away.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 409 – Number-Curious or Hidden Figures in Numbers: Numbers of Here-and-Now and There-and-Then as We Understand Them

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/11

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is God a mathematician?

Rick Rosner: As an analogy about the weird things that may arise in our future understanding of existence, think of the number line, it is the 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, 11 apples, 14 apples, and so on.

Every 4-year-old can count to 10. It is the simplest kind of math. But as mathematicians poked more at mathematical structures, they found more and more weird stuff. The Complex Numbers, the square root of negative numbers, the different magnitudes of infinity, the countable infinities that are Rational Numbers, uncountable infinities that are Real Numbers.

I bet if you looked into it; there are probably 50 or 100 different numbering systems that mathematicians have uncovered. You have fractals. You have Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems. It says a bunch of stuff. It says that there are true statements that can never be proven to be true.

The mathematical system that gives us the counting numbers can never be proven to be consistent. There are all these trap doors and crazy surprise, even lurking behind the most conservative parts of mathematics.

I am saying, similarly, there will probably be explosive surprises lurking behind our existences and the existence of the universe. That given that we’re generally wrong whatever we believed to a certain point, where what we believed is overthrown by what we believed in the future.

Nothing can be ruled out, except, perhaps, the things that we have believed historically. Like I said, we’re never going to arrive at a conclusion that the universe is really run by Roman gods. But it is not unreasonable to think that, at some point, some point 100-200 years from now; the paths of exploration and knowledge will conclude that there are entities in the world that have the powers that we once associated with once-debunked gods.

It is not that the old-school gods will be brought back. It is that some of the ideas of omniscience or omnipotence – some aspect of godhood – can be found to be embodied in the principles of existence.

It seems ridiculous and antiscientific. But we just don’t know what the future will hold. I can imagine a future where everything has a scientific basis. Almost every material manifestation of the world and every phenomenon in the world has a scientific explanation.

But if you keep poking the logic as to why science is effective in the world, if you dig deep enough, it may show surprises or paradoxes that allow for the idea of things we thought that we were beyond, including the ideas of God.

I think it was Einstein who said one of the most amazing things about the world – not a direct quote – is the way in which mathematics is so crazily good at describing the world. It may be that as we try to figure out why that is the case.

If we poke deep and long enough, it may lead us back to areas of belief that we thought we were done with.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 408 – All for the Price of Time: New Logic, New Science, and New Gods

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/10

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is this God proof you’ve been thinking about for the last little bit?

Rick Rosner: It is a super sloppy and unrigorous proof that some time in the future. We will discover an omniscient and/or omnipotent God or gods. The crux or spine of the proof is that we’ve been wrong every single time in history.

Initially, the Greeks and Romans had a bunch of gods. Then the major religions that replaced them – Christianity and Islam – tended towards singular or solo gods. One big God in the universe.

Scientific-based or science-based versions of the world replaced those gods. For the past 200, 300, or 400 years, we have had an increasing belief in scientific and naturalistic explanations for everything.

It goes against the previous 10,000-year of belief. The proof that we’re going to be wrong in our scientific beliefs is that we’ve been wrong about everything leading up to those beliefs.

Even if you grant science being the true version of things, that has only been 4% of the last 10,000 years. So, we have been way wrong 90%+ of the time. It is a strong argument that as time goes on and we learn more about the universe; the odds that there is a purely cold and random universe explanation for everything.

The odds that that viewpoint will stand without being corrected by later discoveries and insights are pretty low. If we drew a quadrant or a grid with the various general types of belief in gods, atheism, agnosticism, monotheism, polytheism, and all the different degrees of belief and flavors of belief and non-belief, the idea that any part of that grid is off-limits to justified beliefs in the future might be wrong because we’ve been so wrong in the past.

You and I could imagine a semi-naturalistic world with a bias towards increasing information, which has room for plenty of god-like entities but none of which are the ultimate creators of anything and none of which is omnipotent.

Even if that becomes substantiated, I do not think that is reasonable to think that that is the endpoint. I think our understanding of things will keep expanding over time and become more rooted in or based on what we discover about the universe and the logic behind the universe: the rules of existence behind the universe.

There are plenty of places in that logic – that future logic – where crazy surprises can lurk. Those surprises have an almost statistical tendency to overthrow previous beliefs. I am thinking that there is a non-zero chance in the future that we will end up believing in god-like things that would be shocking to the scientific thought of today, but wouldn’t align with the old forms of gods either.

It is not like there will be science and logic pursued into the future and then ending up with the Roman gods, and then end up with a form of old-school polytheism. But we may find hidden in the structures of logic and the structure of the universe that there is room for crazy twists in the belief about the nature of existence and what is behind it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 407 – Holographic and Distributive Information Networks

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the split between forms of information processing at a large-scale, potentially?

Rick Rosner: I haven’t done that much thinking about it. Hawking suggests that the surfaces of the event horizons of black holes are holographic and contain a bunch of information.

It is 3-dimensional with the consequence of being shrunk down to a 2-dimensional surface. I do not know the math of it. But I know what I read from articles. I can conceive of something like this.

The information from the events that transpire in the center of the universe basically get plastered up against the rest of the universe given enough billions of years. It can be seen as a painting over of the rest of the universe.

It is not that the clusters of matter aren’t maybe the sole repositories, specific bits of information, but there is a sequential painting over by receiving radiation somehow encodes the history of the universe on the rest of the universe.

That still leaves the problem about how you get specifics out of everything. Even if there is no place in the universe that contains the logical associations and instructions around the concept of “orange,” you are still able to pull out of the whole mess the notion of orange within a series of associated and specific things.

You are able to think about those things, not in their original context. You can think about them in a new context. It means that we’re not that far in thinking about how the information is encoded, retrieved, and manipulated.

I hate the idea of holography. It is one of those things that people default to because they do not know the math of it, and it seems mysterious. But it probably can’t be discarded as a context or an analogy to think of.

Then that leaves the further question, “If it is all holograms, how do the clusters function here? Is everything some mix between holography and specificity?” It would make sense in terms of how the brain is structured.

In that, we know from experiments that you can poke into various parts of the brain and get very specific reactions in terms of what is being thought about. This book, the researchers found that there are specific neurons that light up when you think of specific people.

The two people he gave were Bill Clinton and Homer Simpson. That is a site-specific associated with very specific entities. At the same time, there are still arguments for distributive storing of information.

Those two things may not be mutually exclusive. Maybe, you do have a neuron that specializes in, among other things, Bill Clinton. But it is linked to thousands of other neurons.

That massive connectedness may be some distributive scheme that does pop out specific information at specific locations but, somehow, it is able to do it via something that is informationally smeared out.

It might be more efficient to have smeary storage of information that is still able to pop out of specific nodes. Still, I don’t know how that works. I would guess that there are information advantages. I would guess this is both for holographic and distributive storage.

I guess the universe is set up to or structured in a way to maximize those efficiencies. But that doesn’t get us anywhere. It is simply hand-wavey.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 406 – Science Faction Halting

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What happens if the science fiction future does not become future science?

Rick Rosner: What you’re talking about harkens back to Feynman’s three scientific futures, one where science grinds to a halt because the things in the world that can be understood by science are limited.

There are things that science can’t understand because science can’t decipher it. Then there is science understands everything. There is a limited number of things to understand and science is able to understand all of it.

There thre is the future where science keeps plugging along because there is a limited number of things to understand and science keeps chugging along and making new discoveries using increasingly powerful techniques.

With regards to the actual future and the science fiction future, there are some things that are probably absolutely impossible like time travel and FTL travel. But those are simulatable via information processing.

About anything that can emerge in a science fiction way via increasingly powerful and sophisticated and power information processing will come to pass, all of this will have some suckiness due to us being able to imagine things being better than they are.

There will be increased expectations due to market forces, where there is not enough profit in making stuff perfect and completely non-sucky, and the compromises of time and money.

People, or what people turn into, will have to do what they have always done, which is build their best world based on what is available to them. Netflix presented to me in 1980. I remember how awesome it was when I first saw HBO, in 1980.

You could see a whole movie and not a shitty movie from 20 years ago. But a whole movie that had been in the theatres 18 months ago and boobs on TV. That was so fucking fantastic.

I quickly learned that it wasn’t that fantastic. But imagine giving Netflix to me in 1980. It would be awesome. You learn about Netflix. You learn that if you do some really hard binging for 2/3/4 months out of the year.

You exhaust the easily awesome stuff: the Bojack Horseman, the Black Mirror, and then you’re left to sift through the sleeper hits. The private life with some celebrity. It is the same deal.

What seems amazing only seems amazing for a second, then you’re left to make the best of it to make your own little oasis of goodness from the rinky-dink technology that you’re surrounded with.

We live in a paradise of food. Supermarkets, imagine taking someone 1883 and then dropping them into a Costco or a Ralph’s. But to a modern and informed consumer, you have to walk, take your time, really see if you need a 48-pack of Pop Tarts, or whether that 3-pound box of triangular ravioli is something you’ll be sick of after 1 pound of it.

Whether that package of a dozen chocolate, chocolate chip muffins are awesome or simply disgusting, people will still have to exercise judgment and make reasonable guesses about how to reduce their exposure to suckiness and assholes.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 405 – The Democrats and Republicans

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/07

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do the major political parties in the United States of America represent?

Rick Rosner: The major political parties, Republicans and Democrats, take huge demographic slices out of the population. When you look at the expressed values of each party, they’re both positive in terms of their explicit values.

Republicans have traditionally stood for traditional values. Patriotism and self-reliance and a country that is strong in the world. Democrats stand for the positive values of community and tolerance.

There is some overlap of positive values between the two parties. Between them, they represent the entire spectrum of positive values. Historically, you have huge parties. Parties that encompass or each encompasses 40% of the population.

It is less now as people hate the parties. But I assume there were times in the past century when close to 90% of people belonged to one of the two major parties. Now, it is down 65% – ? – of American adults.

But you had these huge parties. These parties would slice through huge chunks of America. The people in the parties were representing a whole bunch of different folks. Demographically, and to some extent ideologically, the slices are taken through America by each party captured enough of America that the parties weren’t cray.

You had enough variety that each party would behave more or less reasonably. Even Nixon himself who was a little bit of a criminal and a little bit mean and awful, even under Nixon, the Republicans did a lot of good stuff. They started the EPA.

Nixon started the EPA. They started the War on Cancer. They behaved reasonably. There was a certain amount of cynicism. He didn’t care about the environment. He figured it would be a good thing to do.

But over the last 30 years, the Republicans saw that they could gain or find an advantage. That they could attract more easily than other segments of voters. They could pull into their tent and keep in their tent dumb assholes.

Or to be nice, the low-information voters, voters who do not know a lot and do not care to know a lot, and want to know easy explanations and might be angry or scared. There is that cliche phrase: economic anxiety – that led to the election of Trump.

People who are dumb jerks who can be told easy stories and who are more vulnerable to branding and catchphrases. So, once the Republicans started doing that, they represented a tighter and tighter sector of America – a tighter and tighter more assholish sector of America because of primaries.

In the primaries, the person is the biggest asshole wins. The person who is the strongest to their parties leaning wings: if the Democrats, then to the left; if the Republicans, then to the Right.

In the gerrymandered district, the person who wins the primary wins the general. After 30 years of this, of pandering to dumb assholes, Republicans are more and more solidly comprised of dumb assholes.

There are tens of millions of Republicans who aren’t dumb assholes. But, unfortunately, now, the loudest millions of Republicans are the dumb assholes. They are the ones who elect the people and the ones who get elected.

People without integrity. People who win by any means possible. In any case, one political party has gone completely crazy and has given it a ruthlessness that has allowed it to dominate. There are three levels of the government.

They own all three now: Supreme Court, the Judicial, the Legislative, the Executive, the Presidency, and the House and the Senate. That is where we are. Everybody is hoping that the Democrats will manage to scratch back one half of the legislature.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 404 – No Credit Where Non-Credit Isn’t Due

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/06

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: I think we’ve talked about this before. But that may be giving books too much credit. I am sure there are books that get it way wrong too. There are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of science fiction books.

But only dozens or hundreds of science fiction movies or TV shows. So, they stand out more. You can swim through the sea of crap and find the people who do a good job. The guy who wrote The Windup Girl. Charles Stross, Neil Stevenson, David Marusek when they write about the future.

I should find some female writers about the future. We can talk about the ways in which the future goes wrong on TV and in movies. Thing one that makes me crazy is unaugmented humans being the primary form of conscious life more than 100 years from now.

The major offender is Star Trek. You have regular people with regular bodies zipping among the stars centuries from now. Mostly, it is regular people walking around on starships.

One problem is the ships are going faster than light. It is one of the only ways to make stellar exploration narratively doable. It is not the only way but the main and easiest way.

The Aliens series, they will try to reboot it again in the next 5 years. That series has ships that can’t go faster than the speed of light. It actually has people in cold storage. It is narratively tougher.

But it seems somewhat more accurate. Although, a much more accurate version would have the exploration of space is largely automated, at least in the early periods. It depends on what you call automated.

But it is fantastically wasteful of people and resources to try to send other humans to stars. You can’t go faster than the speed of light. You are sending hunks of flesh that are at least 50 kilos, plus food and water.

It is a huge expense in terms of getting it off of Earth and into space. There is a model. Is it von Neumann? There has been a model popular for decades with galactic-explorers that go out into space.

Jacobsen: Do you mean the von Neumann probes?

Rosner: They have instructions to replicate themselves and proliferate as they go out. There are problems with that method too. It announces you to the rest of the galaxy. Also, it is unsophisticated, as you have probes that double and then double again.

At least, it does so without sending people out as well. Even Hawking made this mistake, the only way to save humanity is for humans to get off the planet and colonize other planets. Actually, Hawking doesn’t make this mistake.

He says that if we want to guarantee humanity’s survival then we should have colonies elsewhere. Other people make the mistake of thinking to reduce population pressures; we should colonize Mars.

It is super expensive. It takes a long time. It doesn’t do anything to put even a tiny dent in burgeoning populations on Earth. If you’re looking at 200-300 years from now, anything that has mostly humans and a few scattered virtual beings or AI.

I had an idea or have all sorts of ideas. Fictions projects that I do not turn into anything because I am scattered and lazy. I think it would fun and interesting to present an empty world of the future 250-300 years from now.

By empty, I mean the world population of regular humans or largely only somewhat augmented humans. The population going from a peak of 12-14 billion 80-100 years now declining to less than half that.

Another 200 years later but with hundreds of billions of virtual conscious beings. Conscious beings of human-level information processing abilities and levels of consciousness existing virtually along with all sorts of other forms of AI.

Big swarms of these mostly existing in ways that don’t necessarily overpopulate the Earth. There are fewer people on Earth than there are 300 years from now.

But there are 100 or 1,000 times as many conscious beings as there are now, but existing within information processing infrastructures and with much of the Earth being Disneyfied having been taken over fairly extensively by nature management technology turning much of the Earth into a giant park.

An apparently wild, undisturbed natural realm but one that is being extensively monitored to make sure we don’t fuck it up again. With much of the Earth have a subtle level of tech, tech that tries to be unobstrusive. While, at the same time, you’ve got tech having fantastically penetrated the Earth but in a way that leaves Earth’s surface or alrge parts of the Earth’s surface apparently pristine.

That’s just an opening thought. I would have to work out the whole thing.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 403 – The Overturning of Normal Human Life

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/05

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What bases are there for what you call the end of normal human life or a steady erosion of normal human life?

Rick Rosner: We were talking earlier: Is it surprising or weird that we’re at the end to having no alternative to human life? For the last 10,000 years of human life, all that is going to become a minority option in the next 150 years.

More entities, people, augmented people, and other entities will have a vast array of choices of how to exist from moment to moment in the coming centuries. It is weird that we live at the cusp of it.

Even though, we have been living normal human lives for 10,000 years. It is not that great. It is mostly sucky. Especially until recently, as recently as the beginning of the 20th century, the average human lifespans only went to 50 years or less.

Even with our increased longevity, the period in which we’re at optimum physical and mental ability and attractiveness is only about 25 years. Before your early 30s, you are clueless. You are attractive and competent from the mid-20s to mid-40s.

Then the signs of aging start to make you invisible if you’re interested in being attractive to people. That goes away for everybody by age 50. It is a short little run. We are talking about a few decades.

Somebody is really strong if they can lift their body weight. If we fall more than 6 feet, we break. We can’t hold in our heads a string of numbers longer than 12 digits. The 12 digits are only now because everyone as to deal with area code for texting and stuff like that.

The general rule is that it is possible to imagine vast improvements in any area of human performance that you can think of. We will get those improvements. The price of getting those improvements is the blessing and the curse with the way people living being overturned.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 402 – Moore’s Law As Moore’s Laws (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/04

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How might this trend in Moore’s Law relate to evolution?

Rick Rosner: I think evolution is imperfectly opportunistic. That all the organisms in the world are facing the conditions that they face; life is organisms facing conditions. According to traditional ideas of evolution, organisms that have abilities well-suited to their conditions are, on average, more successful at passing on their genes.

But there are a gazillion assumptions hidden in that idea and a bunch of probabilistic landscapes spread out for these organisms. Every organism has a set of things that it could possibly do given what it is.

An amoeba isn’t going to tap dance. But there is some variability in amoeba behavior. You have these landscapes of what the organism can do in terms of behavior when faced with various situations.

You also have various probabilistic landscapes in terms of what is doable genetically. Is there something in the amoeba’s genome that would let it change color to somehow absorb more heat? Would that be helpful if it possible?

Every organism faces a landscape of things that it could do both behaviorally and genetically. Groups of organisms have probabilistic landscapes as to whether a novel behavior is going to be embraced by the group.

You have probability working all the time through organisms. Where things that are genetically easy, there is a possible mutation to make this happen easily. For instance, there is a crazy mutation, as far as I know, in all mammals.

There is a gene that turns off muscular development. If that gene fails, if there is a glitch and the gene is missing, the individual organism will have double the muscular development of organisms in that species. You can google this.

There are dogs, bulls, people, and all sorts of mammals that have double the muscle. We know that just from looking at mammals that doubling muscle is an easy glitch. But it has not caught on. It has not spread through the population for probabilistic and other reasons.

It might be too rare for there to be enough organisms with this glitch to pass it on efficiently. It might not be advantageous enough and may come with extra costs. Organisms with double muscle are less fertile. Maybe, they die earlier. Maybe, they cost too much. They have to work harder to find all the nutrition to support all this muscle.

A genetic glitch that supports all this muscle has not become common for all sorts of probabilistic reasons. Associated with the idea of evolution as being probabilistic and opportunistic, more likely to take easy ways to do stuff or to do the hard stuff, for instance, there are no organisms that I know that can achieve escape velocity and escape Earth’s gravitational field.

There are no organisms besides humans who can do it technologically rather than evolutionarily. There are no organisms that can get to an escape velocity of 25,000 mph. Because the genetic mutations to do that are almost inconceivable.

Also, there are no immediate conceivable advantages to achieving it. You leave the atmosphere and then die. It is not efficient at focused technological things that humans have become good at.

As far as I know, there’s not much more genetic advantage to faster travel. For instance, a cheetah can travel at 60-70 mph. It is not worth the extra effort to double the speed to 140 mph. You already locked in the niche at 60-70 mph.

Evolution is imperfectly or weakly opportunistic, but widely opportunistic. It will take anything probabilistic that is accessible and advantageous. When the AI guy said duplicating the brain’s special architecture will take more than 100 years – I assumed that he would say, I would disagree with that.

Because I believe the brain has found a bunch of easy tactics to function. This guy finds that the neural nets are super simplistic. He finds that there is no way you can build a brain out of something as simple as that.

My thinking is the brain takes whatever simple things it can get to easily build. It takes advantage of, according to probability, most opportunities to develop efficiencies in information processing.

You will find most of the simplest ways to do neural nets or simple feedback information process, and maybe some more complicated or complex ways to do information processing.

They will be mixed haphazardly, except with a focus – as evolution is focused on the tasks that it needs to focus on to help the organism thrive in its environment. The brain takes a bunch of simple mechanisms, optimizes and combines them in an imperfect and haphazard manner.

You get a fairly well-functioning brain out of good but not perfect systems and components because everything is built out of this probabilistic and opportunistic evolutionary and sloppy mechanism.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 401 – Moore’s Law As Moore’s Laws (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/03

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did the conversation with the AI guy go?

Rick Rosner: I talked to a guy who works in AI. He told me that I was way off about human-level AI in the near future.

I said that we were talking about different things. I said I was talking about computational density. That is, we are coming close to the computational density of the human brain.

But we are, certainly, farther away from replicating the architecture of the brain. At that point, we got distracted and then the conversation fizzled out. He would have fought me if the conversation continued.

He would argue that it would take about 100 years or more to replicate the architecture of the human brain. I disagree. I think replicating the architecture will go slow initially and then fast.

It will be a hockey stick thing, which is seen everything in the development of technology. It goes hand-in-hand with science fiction stuff. The predicted stuff never shows up as soon as it is predicted to show up in science fiction, but, eventually, it does show up.

If you combine both things, it will take longer to replicate brain architecture. But when it takes place, it will happen in a hockey stick manner. It will be sputtery and puttering and not great and then become super efficient.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 400 – Moore’s Law As Moore’s Laws (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/02

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the plural nature of Moore’s Law?

Rick Rosner: People have been arguing for years. Moore’s Law is a set of laws about the rates at which various computer components shrink down, become more powerful, or the number of transistors you can jam onto a chip.

It is a combination of these laws. Every 18 months, something is supposed to happen. A micro transistor is supposed to shrink and so on. I think it celebrated its 50th birthday. It has been going for a while.

For at least 20 years, people have been speculating when it will stop being able to continue. Some argue it already is past that point. There was a well-respected person giving a speech in March saying that the more computation you do then the more heat you generate.

The number of calculations per second is such that there is not efficient way past a certain limit, even if you keep shrinking the transistors, to push the heat out of it, especially if you’re producing 3-dimensional stacked systems.

Everybody in the past saying it was over, then it hasn’t been. At the very least, it has to slow down. These doubling times of three years and so on. But the performance of computers now, instead of doubling every two or three years, can’t keep going.

It looks like there are only, according to this article, doubling times of 20 years. That’s thing one.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 399 – Golden Age of Comedy

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did we come to the Golden Age of Comedy?

Rick Rosner: I have a half-assed and obvious theory. Dominant media attract the most talented people. The shift over the past 120 years. The stage gave way to radio, to TV and movies. Now, radio sucks.

Because there are so many other media that pull the other good talent. That radio is this neglected wasteland with few good broadcasters. I would say Carolla was the last great one. But he is a podcaster now.

Mad Magazine was this little comic book. There was a Golden Age of Comic Books, especially horror comic books. Until they were shut down in 1954 when a book by Frederic Wertham was published, called Seduction of the Innocent.

It said comic books were destroying America’s boys. Then there were congressional hearings. The horror comics got shut down. All these authors and artists were working for EC comics. You had a giant corral of super-talented writers, artists.

The EC was decimated, more than decimated. It lost most of its titles, but Mad survived. You had a super big concentration of talent working on Mad Magazine. It was not only funny and incisive in satirizing American life and culture.

It was also a really good capsule guide to American life and culture. Most of what I know about the 50s comes from me collecting Mad Magazine in the 70s; all those issues from the 50s.

Many comedians of the latter half of the 20th century up to today mention Mad Magazine as being a major influence. It can be cheesy and super juvenile. It was squeezed out of its niche as being the leading satirical magazine by more salacious, less innocent products into the 70s and beyond.

The 70s, you had National Lampoon, which was an outgrowth of Harvard Lampoon. One a movie and another a dramatization. In the 70s, the National Lampoon took over the premiere satirical magazine.

It has a good 10 years and then was squeezed out by the company self-destructing. One of its greatest minds may have committed suicide; it is not clear. Out of National Lampoon came SNL. They poached most or much of the talent.

National Lampoon branched out into stage and radio productions. Then their stage of performers were poachers – some writers too – by Lorne Michaels. SNL has been in production for 44 years now.

It seems like a normal part of the comedy landscape, when it came out it was revolutionary; but when it came out, it was revolutionary. There had been sketch-comedy shows before like the Carol Burnett Show but nothing targeted at young people – and as irreverent and as anarchic as SNL.

Also, it also arrived during the downfall of Nixon, so the timing was great. Now that it has been around for 4 decades, it seems normal; people have always felt comfortable saying, “It sucks,” because, on average, about 1/3rd of its skits work.

It is actually a good batting average. A huge percentage of the things that it tries like coming up with new skits every week work and then become cultural touchstones.

Jacobsen: Who are some of the top comics with an influence from prior eras that led to now? Who are people you look towards in a similar way you look to Mad Magazine?

Rosner: As a general thing, before Mad Magazine, there was a little mass market satirical attack on American culture and American politics. Lenny Bruce gets a lot of credit for being among the first in the late 50s and early 60s.

A comedian who went after actual targets. There is a trend in comedy around the same time in not only telling jokes but also making it personal by telling about yourself and the world you live in, as opposed to the “take my wife, please” jokes like the Catskill/Borscht Belt comedy of the 50s.

People who came out and told generic jokes for people who wanted to get out and laugh with little social outrage. The Borscht Belt refers to resort hotels in Upstate New York where a lot of Jewish families would go in the summer.

Those places would book good but harmless comic: Henny Youngman, and so on. Then the comedy scene got targeted: Lenny Bruce was ruthless, Mort Sahl did political comedy. Then you had a wave of attacks through political comedy.

Mad Magazine did a lot of stuff against the Vietnam War – not as harsh as the National Lampoon when it came out. Then in the 70s, you started having the brick wall comedy clubs like Carolines in New York.

Then you had this wave of comics that came out of there: Letterman, Leno, Seinfeld. Before Letterman and Leno were talk show hosts, they were good comics and personal comics.

Comedy became developing your own comedic persona. This is who I am; this is my life; this is why it is funny. Then you had sitcoms developed around these sitcom characters: Everybody Loves Raymond. Roseanne was based on Roseanne Barr’s comedic persona as a stand-up comic, which she developed in Denver in the early 80s.

This character of the “Domestic Goddess, ” as she called herself. It was kind of a terrible housekeeper and mother and celebrating her own messed-upness in those roles. She was saying that she was entitled to be. That those were terrible roles anyway; that they deserved the full force of her half-assedness, as a wife and mom.

Along with these satirical pushes, you had an evening out of the comedy landscape. There is a Thomas Friedman book that says the world is flat. It is a book about economics. It makes the point about the increasing interconnectedness of the world reduces competitive advantage among producers and countries. Anyone can get into the economic game now with everyone having advanced communications technology.

When I say, “The world is flat in comedy,” I mean everything is knocked down; everything is subject to being made into a comedy. None of the taboos or few of the taboos are left that dominated TV from the beginning of TV through the 80s.

You and I talked off-tape yesterday. I mentioned some of these projects that celebrate the end of taboos. Preacher is a TV series where the Christian God has disappeared from Heaven and may be living as a dog in New Orleans.

A preacher goes out having super violent adventures trying tot rack down God because he thinks God needs to get back into Heaven. He runs into this Catholic military organization, which has the job to protect the descendants of Jesus for the past 2,000 years.

They always have a Messiah on hand, a descendant of Jesus, but because the descendant is the product of 2,000 years of inbreeding the Messiah is completely retarded.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: This is a TV show! There is American God. One is called Bilquis. She shrinks them down, collapses them down to their penis, and then absorbs them during sex. This is a TV series! It is not even a pay per view channel.

It is a regular cable channel. In movies, you can only say one “Fuck” and its remains PG. More than one and you get an R rating. On cable TV now, there are no limits; Atlanta, they say, “Fuck.” A lot of the FX shows. They say, “Shit,” a lot.

FX seems to think that saying, “Shit,” is okay to a certain extent, to be edgy. Comedy Central on South Park, they tried to swear more than any other show in a half-hour episode. You have references to anal sex on Prime Time sitcoms.

It is shocking to someone as old as me that this is going on. Nothing is off-limits. Even if it hadn’t been off-limits, I do not know what you would do in the current political landscape, where a major political candidate in Roy Moore in Alabama, I think, was narrowly defeated because of accusations that he was a pedophile.

We have another blatant pedophile – a proud, strong pedophile – who is running on a conservative ticket in one of the Southern States right now. You have something like 6 white nationalists and white supremacists running as candidates across the US.

You have the president caught on tape before he was president talking about grabbing women by the pussy. You have Samantha Bee on her TV show calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt.”

We mentioned Roseanne. Her show was cancelled because she compared a black woman, Valerie Jarrett, with Planet of the Apes – that she was a product of it. The landscape has been debased, but, at least, we have the comedic tools to go after it now. Unlike, the miserably bland 70s, where you had shows like The Brady Bunch that tried to get comedy – and, I think largely failed – out of a bland and limited palette.

It left most serious issues of life off the table. That is enough of that.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 398 – Proximal & Distal, Relevance & Irrelevance

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/30

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is this armature, this background structure?

Rick Rosner: The connective structure and the hardware, which you can’t see, is probably reflected in the locations and relationships among celestial objects, which you can see.

That massive information processing structures that have a lot to do with each other are going to be located close to each other in the universe. We never see the hardware but we see the relationships among specialist subsystems via what bodies in the universe are close to each other.

A quick analogy: the parts of the brain that have to do with listening is highly related to the part of the brain that has to do with speaking. Both are highly related to whatever part of the handles language.

You’ve got decoding what you hear, if it is speech into language, translating thoughts into words that you say. So, all those three rough modules will be highly connected to each other in the brain – you would assume, more connected to the part of the brain that handles walking, skipping, running, and so on.

You would expect in a universe that is a massive information map or is the information itself; you would expect the celestial bodies, the celestial structures, that encompass the information involved in speaking, listening to speaking, and words, to be close to one another in a universe composed of information. That’s reasonably clear, right?

Jacobsen: It depends on the isomorphism.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 397 – Talkin’, Chattin’, Communicatin’, Speakin’, Conversin’, Dialoguin’, and Discoursin’

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/29

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 396 – Simplest Forms Most Beautiful

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/28

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What will be the basis for replication of consciousness, the non-mystical deeply interconnected information processing of the brain?

Rick Rosner: Humans will be able to replicate or come up with things that think; it will be in a way that is compelling and similar or ways that are quite similar to the ways humans think.

Because we will have directed development and exploration. The brain via evolution has most likely exploited all the simplest ways to process information and to share with itself/modules of the brain to share information. You get this conscious arena where these specialist systems are sharing information.

All the sharing is a product of opportunistic development and undirected development. As such, it is not going to be magical. It is going to be sub-optimal and, thus, approachable technologically.

There is nothing about the brain that is so insurmountably complex that technology can’t replicate it, for the most part. With any failed replication of thinking in the near future, it will probably not be that big of a deal.

We will probably be able to come up with brain-like information-processing systems that are as good as human brains within 60 years.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 395 – Brain Efficiencies

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/27

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does the brain achieve its efficiencies?

Rick Rosner: One way is specialization. I am sure. It is important for humans to be able to recognize verticals and horizontals in their field of view. I am sure the neural circuitry associated with that is specialized to do that task, and does it much more efficiently than a bunch of generalized circuitry would do.

I would guess that there is specialization throughout the brain. Another thing the brain does is that is has evolved efficient pruning to turn general circuitry into efficient circuitry by sending connections out and then pruning the ones that aren’t helpful.

There’s a third efficiency, which is efficiency generalizing – having the most efficient general neural net circuitry with even some specialization mixed in with the generalization.

All of this is extremely powerful because it is the product of hundreds of millions of years of brain development. Leading up to humans and then a couple million years of brain development in hominids and homo sapiens as well; however, it is also somewhat sloppy because it is based on evolutionary processes, which is not optimized to weed out all sloppy and inefficient structures.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 394 – Moore’s Law Running Out of Power

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/26

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is going to happen to Moore’s Law?

Rick Rosner: Moore’s Law is going to be done in the near-future. You can’t build a transistor that is smaller than an atom. The brain is a product of evolution rather than directed technological development has reached a limit of compactness that is probably much less compact than the most compact circuitry that we could invent.

The brain already hit its own Moore’s Law, the end of its Moore’s Law. Though, the brain has other constraints. One of the main ones being how big can you make the head without killing the mom at birth.

Whether or not we have hit Moore’s Law in human-made circuitry, we are going to hit it in the next 20 years. Further improvements in performance are going to be through more and more efficient ways of organizing the circuitry, I do not know much about computers.

But when people look back on computers of the past 50 years, they will seem primitively straightforward and unspecialized.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 393 – Filling Foods

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are some quick examples of foods to keep you going?

Rick Rosner: A couple examples of food would be rice cakes, popcorn with no butter and a little salt, or you can drink water (a disappointing dietary choice). For a while, there was a product called Full Bars.

[Laughing]

You ate them, and then they puffed up inside of you. But they were a failed product.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 392 – Our Narratives and The Future

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/24

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we were talking off-tape about our stories and the future, and the way the future will be talked about regarding our stories. That needs unpacking.

Rick Rosner: I think there are certain eras that tend to be more attractive to writers and producers. People who do projects and books. Anytime there is a great change in society, not anytime because the 60s are terrible to try to capture.

Because it looks goofy often. Times of war, like WWII, get tons of projects. Anytime you have a good author that captures an era. There is some storytelling set around 1800 because Jane Austen was writing around 1800.

I am thinking that the era that we are entering into, looking back 2 or 3 hundred years from now, will be a popular era to examine through stories, whatever the main entertainments are then – whether still books, movies, TV, or some advanced version of those.

I think there are a lot of themes and forces that will make for good storytelling. One theme is that we entering into an era when some people will die and others will keep on living for extended periods of time.

There will be struggling with that – the unfairness and politics and philosophy of that. Another theme is AI on a trivial level. We already have it. A lot of science fiction of people living in a more automated world, often with the robot butler and the robot girlfriend.

But in the future, looking back on near to mid future, we will have a lot of stories wrestling and conscious-thinking beings wrestling with their roles and what they want to be.

Whether or not they will acknowledge other conscious beings and that whole huge struggle as people and other conscious beings tries to straighten everything out, a third theme that will happen a little later is conscious beings struggling with the devaluation of consciousness.

Consciousness will always, I think, be, perhaps, the predominant – perhaps not – form of information processing, but I do not know of any form of information processing that is as versatile and powerful.

So, consciousness will continue to be a big deal, but it will also become more and more understood. People will have to confront the mechanicalness, the non-mysticalness, the non-magicness and the tragedy of what consciousness is.

It is a technical deal. While it is powerful and emotionally powerful, it is not necessarily this transcendent thing from the divine that has been plugged into us. As consciousness gets deconstructed, people will have to struggle with disillusionment and the loss of the last piece of magic in the world.

I think that is three big themes that will be moderately interesting to the residents of the future.

Jacobsen: The representations that they get from us will be stories. I mean stories in a broad sense. Stories from Twitter accounts, social media in general, correspondence that we’ve kept, or representations of objects that are digitized.

I mean, this before we get some hard math of what makes up a mind, so we can put that into a digital substrate. We are putting our stories into the future by making them now.

Rosner: One huge trend in storytelling is that they become more and more multimedia and embracing of more and more of the senses. We get closer and closer to putting ourselves in each others’ heads.

That is another big theme. The present tends to look back on the people of the past and feel sorry for them. I think that is a legitimate deal.

Because life keeps improving and people’s understanding of stuff keeps improving, then you look back on people back in 1850 trying to struggle to live and understand and look for clues as they fight against cholera and so on, e.g., of the five sisters and one brother of the Brontes only one makes it to 39.

These are among the most gifted family of their generation.

Jacobsen: This becomes a common story. Even with extended lifespans, even with some great productions of literary works, art and so on, those are really low fidelity. Any knowledge about what’s going on inside people’s heads.

That will be more or less low fidelity extrapolations of what’s produced, which won’t necessarily give that much of an insight.

Rosner: One tragedy will be people not being able to pass on what is inside their heads, except only through social media or through extended writing. There is loss via death but also loss through the very imperfect ways in which we can communicate our experiences to each other now.

Jacobsen: Nature is ruthless with us.

Roner: Yes. I said this before. In a way, we are living at the end of the world; the end of the unaugmented human world. People have lived in it for at least 5,000 years. Depending on what criteria you use to define civilization, you could take it as far back as 10,000-20,000 years.

There have been about 107 billion people who have lived so far. Those people are lost.

Jacobsen: Completely lost.

Rosner: If the future cares about them at all, they could replicate them with calculated guesses and simulation. If you have the choice between that and nothing, you would take that. Lincoln left a huge historical record, for the time.

Among the people of his generation, he is, probably, among the top 10 Americans in what he wrote and other people’s observations of him, in what’s known about him. He also left descendants. So, you could probably get at most of his genes.

It will be possible to resurrect Lincoln with some limited degree of fidelity. According to some index of the future, you will be able to come up with an 82% accurate representation of Lincoln.

Jacobsen: That makes the separation between stories, even in a broad context, and stories in the future, where a math of the mind or a mathematics of consciousness is slowly and inevitably produced – and humans become less central and important.

Rosner: The stories of the future will focus on individuals to an extent, as they always have, but they will become, to an extent, more distributive as the walls between people’s thoughts break down – as it becomes easier to transmit thoughts between people and the walls thinking come down.

The focus of stories will eventually move away from individuals, as long as you are dealing with eras in which the individual has become less important. That’s not exactly it. In that, the movers of the future, the power entities, may still be considered individuals to some extent, but they may be collective individuals or teams of linked thinkers.

It will be in a way that is not Borgish. You may get horrible Borg-like things in the future. But the future will still contain a lot of the emotional experiences that we have now, except conveyed via different aggregations of information processors.

The stories of how that will transpire are going to be huge. 150 years from now.

Jacobsen: The inevitable process will work as with every other generation. Woody Allen had a statement that every 100 years there is a flush and a whole new generation of people.

Maybe, every 20 or 30 years depending on the culture, sub-culture, or group, then you have a new generation of people who will be more willing to accept what is going on around them with more pervasive artificial consciousness and the decoupling of regular consciousness and the ease of acceptance of new technology, which, to prior generations, would devalue what they cherish and consider the norm.

Rosner: That seems valid.

Jacobsen: It seems a natural extension of the way nature treats us as a part of nature, and the way we deal with the sentiments and consideration of people centuries and centuries ago.

Rosner: Yes, we get impatient certain eras because they seem so uniformly benighted and miserable. Monty Python used to make comedies in the miserable Middle Ages, but the stories set in the Middle Ages – not everyone loves those stories because they are so grim and grubby.

I like near-future science fiction because that is where all the cool stuff is. I don’t necessarily want to see people being farmers in 1954. Because there is less fun there. I understand there are all sorts of human drama.

But I prefer my human drama to come with sky cars or some crap.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 391 – Return of the Translation of Information Problem: Physics & Mathematics, Topology & Geometry, Representation & Universe, and Armature & Physical Framework

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/23

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This leads to question with regards to IC. What do particular sizes of objects mean over time in terms of information and information process? Also, why those types of information processing? As well, how do they relate to one another?

Rick Rosner: The answer to the first question is “I don’t know.” The various sizes of objects in the universe and the types of information is also an “I don’t know.” I can expand on that.

The idea of orange or the idea of an orange the fruit. I do not know what that would look like informationally. It is some kind of combination between localized and distributed information but it is nowhere near as localized as the information in a computer – where things are described by very specific lines of code.

But I do not know that much about coding, so, maybe, there are less localized forms of characterizing objects and stuff.

Jacobsen: If you take a simple commutative math arithmetic, there are few variations on the representation of the information; but if you take Algebra, there are more ways to represent the information.

I suspect that there are different types of information that can arise that can represent different types of processing but represent the same information.

Rosner: I half agree with you. I think the same information can be represented in a bunch of different ways. But I don’t think you can have universes that are that much different in terms of basic structure, unless you engineer some universe.

I think the physics of information is going to be the same from the universe to another universe.

Jacobsen: Think about a cube or a Moebius Strip, if you look at them from different angles, you can get a similar representation.

Rosner: It may be possible to drag enough matter around to allow wormholes to allow faster-than-light. It is where you connect two distant parts of the universe. You might be able to bend space enough to do that.

That space would have a different topology than a universe without a wormhole. But the physics that lets you do it would be the same in both universes, donut universes and regular universes.

I think the rules would stay the same. It is just what you can do with them and what might arise from them, which might be different but the physics will be probably the same.

Jacobsen: I like that idea. It leads to segmentation for me, three – actually four. In one, you have the physics, the math of it. You have the topology and the geometry of it. Then you have the representation of it, the information. Then you have the armature, the physical structure from which the stuff is allowed to exist in the first place.

The stuff that you hadn’t mentioned before. The principles of existence but represented as the math or as the physics. That’s interesting. Because you should be able to translate the rules or the physics into the topology into the representation and that into the armature.

You should have a basic isomorphism there. However, that should not make them necessarily the same in scale or in purpose.

Rosner: I still think the most basic or most approachable, or most appropriate geometric representation of the information is a 3-dimensional information map that looks like the universe. You should be able to represent that in something like a line of code.

But the most appropriate form is the visual form. The information transmittal of the universe is largely visual. Photons transmit visual information. Neutrinos do that, too; except, they make everything seethrough because they can peer through anything.

You have the universe constantly transmitting images of itself to every other part of itself. It is a very visual thing. You mentioned arithmetic. But it is not simple encoding that informationally into/experientially into an information processing system.

It wouldn’t be a matter of stating a couple rules. It would be deeply rooted in the history of the information space, or the mind, of the universe that would encode based on vast experience of how counting and numbers work – how the Unitary Principle works. That things have oneness.

A thing that is a thing is one thing and then you can combine them and then have two things. It seems super simple because we are used to it. But building a system that truly understands that, it is not as simple as that.

Jacobsen: Given those particular types of structures and representations of information, why those structures and representations of information?

Rosner: That is asking a whole bunch of different questions. Ultimately, that boils down to why the universe is the universe and why it looks the way it looks, and is there another way for a universe to look and work.

You can answer it bit-by-bit. 3-dimensionality is the best and, perhaps, the only marriage between spatial flexibility and informational compactness. That you can do a lot in 3 dimensions.

In 2 dimensions, you cannot do that much because a line is a wall. You can’t have two lines; they can’t get past each other if they are going in different directions. In 3-dimensions, you can have a number of lines going in all sorts of different directions without being stopped by all sorts of other lines.

It is an unlimited number, not infinite. 3-dimensions are simple to describe, to characterize, informationally; the more dimensions you have then the more information you need to describe the space itself and the things in space.

I think there is probably some kind of information efficient push to go with the simplest flexible number of dimensions, which is probably 3. Why do you need neutrinos and photons as the two different long-distance particles? Why do neutrinos have to have a little bit of mass? These are things that are way, way ahead of things of where we are now?

Jacobsen: Why those particular relationships? Why not others? It is a deeper question.

Rosner: Why these things? Does it have a choice?

Jacobsen: It begs the question of what you mean by “choice.”

Rosner: Can you have a universe with 4 spatial dimensions? Can you have a universe with any dimensions but some other arrangement of information? Because dimensions are an arbitrary construct that works very well, where a lot of stuff that is, apparently, close to you based on how it appears to you visually and other interactions appears larger than something that is distant.

In terms of the universe, something that is way distant from you; it is partially a reflection of less information in common with that thing. Although, that also means the less information you have in common.

There is something in Linear Algebra – maybe – called the Kernel. It is what you can boil a matrix down to; this isn’t going to be helpful, but the less information something has in common with you – then the more different distant points there can be of things that have only 20% information in common with you.

Because there are a lot of ways to sample 20%. You would expect a universe that gets bigger in diameter, as the diameter increases, as distances increase, then you would suspect the circumference or the amount of different possible places at a given distance to increase with distance.

Because there are more and more ways to not have a lot of different information in common. I would guess the dimensionality of the universe – that it has dimensions – is based on rules of information and freedom of information to vary from point to point. That’s not too clear. But anyway!

Let me go back to filamentary nets, you have things with tight weaves like sweaters or carpets or fussy needlepoint dealies, but then you have loose nets like fishnet stockings or like those bags that the baby oranges come in.

So, I imagine that the filamentary structure of the universe is a bunch of intertwined but only loosely connected loose nets or widely spaced nets. That you can pull on one net without having to pull on that entire area of the universe.

Because, I think, the things that function as memories or the apps that aren’t always on and fade away to the edges of the universe; I see the edge of the universe being hot and messy and primordial and lacking a lot of organization because it is close to an apparent T=0. It is hot and chaotic, like the beginning of the Big Bang universe.

But within the hot chaos are volumes of collapsed matter, that function as memory and are, to some extent, shielded from the hot chaos by them being collapsed into themselves by them being down their own gravitational wells.

So, it is a hot broth with lots of tight nuggets in it. The tight nuggets are connected via filaments to a bunch of stuff including the active center. If enough stuff gets lit up, it lights up these certain concentrated areas and then turns them into active galaxies and, maybe, larger sections than galaxies.

Then they bubble out of the primordial chaos. They do not have to bubble up to the active center; they just have to bubble up enough that they are within the fringe of the active region of the universe.

It doesn’t take much of a pull or much deformation of the overall structure of space to pull up memories because the associational nets, the filaments, can be pulled. You can pull on stuff. Say you’ve got a thousand, roughly, different nets, you can pull on the corner of one net without pulling, necessarily, all the nearby collapsed areas along with it.

Because most of the nearby collapsed areas are parts of nets that formed at different times. So, the nets aren’t strongly tied to each other. But you can tug on one region and then pull it up without ripping a hole or deforming space badly. You don’t have to pull them that far. Only pulling them, maybe, T=way-close-to-0 to T=10%-apparent-age-of-the-universe; if they stay lit over time, and prove useful, they rise to T=20%-apparent-age-of-the-universe.

It gives you time. Because this would take billions of years for the universe to reconfigure and for new filaments to form. That is the whole deal there. I think that might be enough of a mechanism.

I think we’re getting close enough to a program that would allow actual physics to be done by, maybe, people who know more physics or, maybe, even us if we’re dogged and intrepid enough.

Maybe.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 390 – To Know You Know and To Not Know You Know, You Know?

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking for some time off-tape about explicit and implicit forms of knowledge. What were you thinking in terms of the distinctions and definitions there?

Rick Rosner: Yes, particularly as they apply to consciousness, Minsky has a model of consciousness, which is not bad: the society of mind. You have either evolved expert subsystems or subsystems that have arisen in an individual brain via experience and cultural imprinting.

Lisa Feldman Barrett in her book, How Emotions Are Made, argues from a constructivist point of view. She argues the emotions that we feel are basic and inherent to humanity are created in people, person-by-person via cultural imprinting and experience.

But regardless of whether our expert systems are inherent and evolved or whether they have arisen due to life experience, it is not unreasonable to look at consciousness as being, in part, a dialogue or a sharing of information among various expert subsystems – a whole bunch of them.

That is, informationally, problematic or, rather, a big pain in the ass because, generally, when we as individuals or as humans communicate and pass the information along to each other; we do it via some language, in general.

Either words or math, but we use language to communicate, there are more direct forms of communication. Forms of communication more directly sensory, like pictures, where you send somebody a picture or a video clip.

They can see what you’re trying to communicate; although, they may not get exactly what your meaning is, because we use language to be specific about meaning. Then if you extend the idea of language to the communication among the subsystems in your brain, that seems like a huge informational burden.

That every subsystem has to be communicated within a language it understands from every other subsystem. That seems like a lot of information flying around in addition to what the language is describing.

It also implies a language of the brain, which exists in the brain and not anyplace else.

Jacobsen: Linguists talk about a surface complexity of language, which really lies on a very similar substructure where, basically, all languages come from. It is a dominant theory, I think, in linguistics.

Rosner: You are saying there is a similar substrate all human languages stem from, and a constructivist, like Lisa Feldman Barrett, would be skeptical of it. She would say, “No, there is not an evolved language system for verbs and nouns. That we’re ready to have those based on a structure in the brain. Those, rather, arise via cultural imprinting.

Jacobsen: What about the ability of some people to speak at six months to one year?

Rosner: Even so, it does assume there is some underlying language structure, where you could add a second premise. The brain speaks to itself using some form of language substrate or something.

The signals need to be passed from every expert subsystem to every other expert subsystem using some carrier of information, which would be some form of language. But I suspect that there is a difference between explicit information and implicit information in the brain.

That much of what constitutes consciousness is an effective implicit information, which communicates information on an as-if basis among the various parts of your mind without that information being shared explicitly.

To start off, I claim, and I think a lot of people agree, you can know stuff without explicitly naming it. For instance, if somebody gave us a plate of food, we would think this is food or dinner.

Words pertaining to food would pop up into our heads. You put a bowl of food in front of a dog. The dog does not have words, but the knowledge pertaining to there being a plate of food in front of the dog pops into the dog’s head.

But it is not codified into a language. The dog knows the food is there. The dog, which I believe is conscious because I believe you can have consciousness without language, is conscious about the food, excited about the food, anticipating how the food will taste, smelling how the food smells, but the dog is not using language descriptors.

In fact, if you lost the language center of the brain, you would still know there is food in front of you. But you would not be able to characterize it in words.

Jacobsen: Let’s do a thought experiment, two people speaking two different languages, say romance languages, trying to communicate the dinner to one another. It seems like the similar case.

You have taken the language out of their brains, functionally, inasmuch as they cannot communicate directly to one another, but there is enough isomorphism between the way they process information and have an understanding of the world in order to communicate.

Rosner: So, one could say a bunch of stuff and describe things with their hands. If somebody was trying to tell someone else that they were having spaghetti, they could make noodle gestures and eventually get the message across.

Jacobsen: It is less efficient, but it is a form of language. The question then arises: if you bring people from different cultures together, but they could come to the same conclusion in the thought experiment, how constructivist? To what extent do constructivist perspectives, such as Lisa Feldman Barretts, provide an answer to that universality in information processing to allow in-species communication?

It does some form of argument for some inbuilt stuff in terms of a general information processing.

Rosner: I think her constructivist argument is the information we use to construct our consciousnesses is mostly received through experience rather than through previously evolved specialist systems.

Jacobsen: What if language and its structures is an evolved specialist system?

Rosner: I think a constructivist would argue against that. They would argue for a minimalist program, I do not know the various levels of an argument for in-built language. We, more than any other species, can manipulate the passage of air through our mouths to make a bunch of different sounds that form words.

There are birds that can imitate almost any sound that they hear. But they are not, as far as we know, doing that to communicate specific ideas or things about the environment. We use our repertoire of sounds to communicate using many tens of thousands of words.

There may be something that is evolved in us. Certainly, the architecture that facilitates speech is something that is evolved. But how much of the software behind speech is evolved, and how much is received culturally or experientially, is open to debate.

Jacobsen: There could be a hybrid argument.

Rosner: Yes. Regardless, you don’t need words to understand stuff. Because there are plenty of conscious species that are almost entirely lacking or would be in their natural state almost entirely lacking words.

That is entirely fair because, probably, among wolves. They have 20 or 30 different woofs or howls or whatever, which signal different things. But 30 different howls or woofs is not the average person’s vocabulary of 20,000 words.

Jacobsen: It could be an in-built thing. The greater level of cognitive flexibility of the human mind. Something like an emergentist-constructivist argument.

Rosner: You can understand things without having the ability to assign words to them, even something like a red light. If you had a stroke, and could no longer know any words whether speaking or hearing them, you are not aware of words being a thing anymore.

But you could still see a red light and understand what it is; something to regulate traffic. Although, you would not have words for “regulate” or “traffic” or anything. But you might still have memories in which red lights are an ingredient in those memories.

You would understand the red of the light as being equivalent to other reds or close to the red of an apple. You could understand all that without having to facilitate those concepts, memories, or ideas.

That is simply an appetizer before we get to the idea that, maybe, information is shared on a tacit as-if basis. We act as if we know things without those things being expressed explicitly, which would save a lot of information transmittal in the brain.

I suspect it is that kind of information-transmission that has things in common with the efficiency of quantum computation. Quantum computation computes things as if an entire set of things are true without those things all being expressed explicitly.

Jacobsen: Does that amount to a pseudo-true or a tacit true?

Rosner: I do not know enough to not be full of shit at this point. But! Quantum computers are best at processes where it is implicitly running a bunch of related cases in parallel.

The computer is basically straddling a bunch of different possible worlds. It is a kind of hyperbolic way of expressing it. But what comes out of a quantum computation are the things that would be true regardless of however many worlds or scenarios; some things are true regardless of which set of particulars the computation exists in.

A quantum computation, you can argue, exists in a bunch of small parallel worlds or in a set of parallel worlds that different from each other in some tiny, concrete ways. You only get the stuff out of the computation that would true in 8 different worlds or something, or given 8 different instances.

It is due to the quantum architecture of the linked qubits, computational bits, that let it function as if it knows each of these worlds. I would suspect that a lot of knowledge within consciousness is the knowledge that is shaped by the informational architecture of the mind so that what comes out is thoughts that are built from as if knowledge.

To put it into practical terms or more concrete terms, I don’t necessarily think each photon transmits an individual chunk of information like a bit does. That each photon is a yes-or-no proposition or an answer to a yes-or-no question.

I have a feeling photons may transmit information in the aggregate. As the energy that comprises them is lost to the structure of space with the structure of space encoding tacit information, which, and here’s another area in which my ignorance means that I am bullshitting, it sounds, to me, holographic.

That the information is there, but it is distributed and shared and is encoded in space as a whole.

Jacobsen: Some things localized but represented everywhere, tacitly.

Rosner: Yes, your mind knows specific things. You can know today is Hitler’s birthday. It is also the anniversary of Columbine. It is also 4/20, which is stoner day. Those are all really specific things. The knowledge of those things as they exist in your awareness may not be encoded in the transmission of specific photons in the way that information would be encoded in a computer through the opening and closing of logic gates.

Jacobsen: If you take the parallelism there, the mapping of your own thoughts onto the universe or the way the universe encodes information and your own or other minds, the assertion is the way the information is encoded is then reflected in the universe’s distribution.

I have a question. If we encode certain things in our mind. Certain forms of knowledge only relevant to human beings but not to lizards, dogs, to squirrels.

Does that, in a way, get holographically distributed to the rest of the universe in a way that is not locally represented without, for instance, is encoded in a specific photon? It is presented as if true without having a realized manifestation in the world. That form of knowledge or information encoding.

Rosner: I don’t know. I am not sure I am even speaking to what you’re talking about. I am not sure. In an extreme case, individual photons may not exist; unless they are singled out via some process. In other words, we are hit with light all the time, which involves being hit with quadrillions of photons in the course of a day or something.

I am not sure how much individuality those photons have in terms of passing on information. Unless you have an apparatus designed or that has evolved to pick out individual photons.

Or another way of putting it, all the information conveyed by photons locally in the course of a day. Much of that information is, maybe, erased by not being specifically noted. If individual photons do not cause individual events that are part of something ending up being noted or recorded, or changing something in a macro sense, I am not sure those individual photons can be said to exist in the way a famous individual photon, say in a double-slit experiment, with notification by scientists or something.

If the individuating information in those photons does not create discernible outcomes, I am not sure those photons exist as individuals. Similarly, but not really, there’s no way to tell electrons apart under a lot of circumstances.

I believe, and I don’t know for sure because I’m ignorant, there are plenty of electron-electron interactions, where it’s not legitimate quantum mechanically to talk about which electron is which after the interaction.

All you can say is two electrons went in and two electrons came out. That’s it. The electrons are identical. Not only do you not have information of which electron is which; there may not be a “which is which,” because they may be indistinguishable no matter how far down you go.

There are probably other experiments that you can design so you can tag electrons by giving an electron a distinct spin, a distinct trajectory. For instance, you can shoot two electrons across the room two meters from each other.

There would be almost no question as to which electron was which or shoot the electrons ten seconds apart from each other. You haven’t done anything to muddle which electron is which.

The odds that they have somehow switched and are indistinguishable are low. Anyway, I have a feeling information is transmitted in the mind, in a way that isn’t as discrete and localized as information being processed in a computer.

There are two long-distance transmitters of information: photons and neutrinos. I am lumping anti-neutrinos in there too. They may transmit different forms of information. I don’t know. There is a lot talking out of my butt here.

Even though what we are talking about is important, I am super ignorant about what I am trying to talk about. But neutrinos have a tiny bit of mass; photons have no rest mass. Neutrinos have a tiny bit of rest mass and travel some miniscule speed less than the speed of light.

But for practical purposes, they travel at the speed of light. They, maybe, have a billion times more kinetic energy than they do rest mass. They still have a little rest mass.

It means that, say, a neutrino traveling across the universe for 10 billion lightyears will lose the same fraction of its kinetic energy that a photon would lose, but also that a neutrino cannot lose all its energy to the curvature of space in the way a photon travelling to the ends of the universe would because there is still the rest mass that doesn’t get lost to the curvature of space.

Which, I would suspect has something to do with different types of information sharing. Taking a wild guess, it’s not even right to call it a “guess” because I am also guessing that it’s almost entirely wrong; that neutrinos reflect a deeper change in the matter of the universe.

Because if you put a neutrino, a proton, and an electron together, you get a neutron. That event is generally associated with fusion, where that neutron ends up being linked. You start with two protons, two electrons; you end up with deuterium, for instance, which is one proton, one electron, one neutron.

The neutron is now electrically neutral and is not interacting electromagnetically with the rest of the universe. It has entered this partnership with a proton, where it is part of a deuterium nucleus.

The neutron interacts with the proton as part of a nucleus, but the neutron has quit interacting with the rest of the world electromagnetically. It is a deep structural change.

Perhaps, the questions being asked and answered by neutrino-mediated processes – fission and fusion – are deeper and, perhaps, less implicit than photon information communication.

Perhaps, photons are really the ones that do the lions share of implicit describing of the world because they are better able to share information implicitly by losing information to the curvature of space.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 389 – Welcome to Star Bar

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/21

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You saw some of the recent Star Wars movies. Let’s hear it.

Rick Rosner: I saw both latest Star Wars movies, Solo and Last Jedi. It is no secret that there are two major models of interstellar travel in entertainment. There are Star Wars and Star Trek and then secondary or less important ones – Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica.

But all of them – including Alien or the Alien series. Nothing works unless you have faster than light travel. Because going from star to star at less than light speed means like a 40-year trip, generally, because even the most ambitious interstellar travel programs, I think, have ships that we could build now that would reasonably go more than a 10th of the speed of light.

You might be able to get them to go faster, but the trouble with going faster is if you run into anything then you ruin your ship. You need faster than light to get the characters from place to place in a reasonable amount of time without the risk of being destroyed by a dust particle.

The deficiencies of that model point to what could be a satisfying science fictioney, fictional, world of interstellar exploration set 150 years from now. You could have people aboard ships. But the ships would not be real.

They would be compiled from data from actual galactic exploring ships. But calling them galaxy-exploring is giving them way too much credit, but ships pointed at nearby stars. The only reasonable ships, at least at this point in our technology, wouldn’t have people on them, because that would be a huge issue.

You can have people on board ships going to some of the planets in our Solar System, but you cannot have people on board ships if you are aiming for nearby stars. It is senseless. You need ships that don’t cost very much, are full of some AI and a lot of telemetries, and a bunch of shielding or some magnetic field that directs particles away from the ship, so if it is traveling 10 or 15 percent of the speed of light junk in its path doesn’t destroy it.

To have a science fiction series based on the actual attainable technology of one to two centuries from now, you would have to assemble virtual ships based, at least in part, on the information you’re getting from these unmanned, cheap telemetry vehicles. Those heading out in all directions.

Those that are, probably, being followed by repeaters, by amplifiers – like a 1/10th of a light year away, because you’re not going to get adequate signaling, as far as I know, from a little ship that is going to be .4 lightyears from you, after 4 years at 10% of the speed of light.

I think you need to send a steady dribble of ships after it, in order to keep in touch with it. After a few decades, you would have a network of these ships. They would be sending all sorts of observational data.

From this, you could construct the experience of manned spaceships. But they would be virtual. People could take on various roles on these ships. You could have legitimate scientists doing legitimate research but who like the environment of being on a ship.

You could have virtual adventurers who like the adventure of being on a ship even though it is virtual. Given the control over thought and perception 150 to 200 years from now, you could have participants in the shipboard experience who do not know that they are on a virtual ship.

In addition to the hard data people are working with there, you could add fun plot elements like various aliens. You can travel as fast as you want in this virtual environments. You could travel from one direction to another at the speed of light because this would be based on the information already compiled.

A more realistic picture of this kind of entertainment could make for a decent show and would provide a more realistic picture of what we are and are not going to do in space over the next few centuries with some added dramatic elements.

I read a book called The Planet Factory. It summarizes the current state of knowledge about exoplanets. Planets orbiting other stars, of which there are plenty; where the vast majority of stars are orbited by planets, you’re always hearing in the news about the discovery of Earth-like planets.

But it turns out reading this book, “Earth-like” has, in every case, right until now has been an exaggeration. When they say, “Earth-like,” it means the rough mass or radius of the Earth or orbits its star at roughly the same distance as the Earth orbits the Sun.

But it turns out these so-called Earth-like planets do not have the conditions that support life. Most planets in an Earth-distance orbit are not that solid. They are gas planets. They do not have a solid surface, at least on you could use.

The planets with an Earth-like radius or mass are orbiting way to close to their stars, like 1/10th the distance to their stars as the Earth is from the Sun. It turns out this is discouraging, except that there are 10^22nd stars.

It means that there are at least that many planets. It may be that one, on average, on a solar system out of a thousand or five thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand have a planet that can support life, or a moon of a planet that can support life because you’re still dealing with 10^22nd planets.

Dividing that by 10^5th still leaves 10^17th stars still with potentially habitable planets, it doesn’t preclude life in other parts of the universe. What it does mean, though, we might have to travel a lot farther to find those planets, which is another discouraging aspect of the real universe.

It runs counter to the Star Wars universe. If you are a super Star Wars nerd, you have seen maps of its galaxy, which shows you how far apart the major planets in the whole deal are.

But I have never seen that. I would assume that they are not too far apart from each other. They talk in terms of parsecs, which is, like, 3.26 lights per parsec. Without faster than light transportation, that trip is taking 300 years.

It is in a galaxy where you’re likely to find a habitable planet within 30 lightyears. At least according to the message I got from this book, it might be 50 or 70 lightyears or more before you find a planet that is at all habitable.

It is brutal when you’re dealing with slower than lightspeed exploration. That is, if only 1 planet in a thousand is habitable, then it is 10 times the distance compared to a universe in which every planet is habitable, where you’re talking about 40 lightyears instead of 4 lightyears on average.

So, there’s that.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 388 – Demographics, Public Policy, and Public Rhetoric

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/20

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What will be the future demographics of religion, especially given the main predictor, probably, of the next culture is the size of a household and the overarching metanarrative and belief structure of the home?

Rick Rosner: Muslims have a birth rate of 3.2. Nonreligious people have about 1.6, so basically suburban whitey vs. Muslims. My conservative buddy, Lance, is always arguing that Muslims, if we let them, are going to take over demographically.

My argument against that is we don’t have that many Muslims in the US anyway, roughly 1% or about 3 million. There’s not enough time before future weirdness is fully upon us for a differential birth rate to, say, pump the percentage of Muslims – if Muslims are what you’re going to worry about – over 10%.

It would take, at least, 80 years. That is being wildly not conservative in your estimates. That is like wide open immigration, which the US doesn’t want to tolerate at the moment and then crazy rates of reproduction.

Even then, 80 years from now, having Muslims being 8% of the population is a) not going to happen and b) there are going to be so many other technological changes and sociological changes that 8% of the population being Muslim is not going to be the thing to worry about.

It might be if you were trying to address social change now in Europe. Some Western countries have seen the Muslim population approach 10%. Everything else that is going to happen is going to be more of a worry for Americans than too many Muslims.

To go from that to a general point of view, the future will bring us incredible abundance, but the deal we make with the future will also bring us incredible weirdness. Conservatives, of at least the American type, are against weirdness and change or, at least, pay a lot of lip service to it.

Right now, the conservative politics in America is owned by rich people who want to see if they can squeeze more money out of America: pay less in taxes, take more and more profits. That is the real agenda.

Then there is the semi-fake agenda of standing for traditional values and being against change because change means the ungodly erosion of everything we stand for. Even though, the conservative president and the Department of Justice is taking kids away from parents who want asylum and putting them in mini-concentration camps.

The conservative politics are the most hypocritical they have been in living memory, but they still stand against change: gay rights, gay marriage, against trans being a thing. Along with that, much conservative politics is zero-sum.

The philosophy for us to hold onto what we have then other people have to be denied access to what we have, particularly, right now, immigrants. All this stuff serves the hidden but main agenda of conservative politics right now.

For rich people to get more money, including the idea of taxation as theft or government services should be privatized, Carolla talks about things. He has become increasingly libertarian. One of the things that he brings up is that he doesn’t get his money’s worth out of the taxes that he pays as a rich guy that are more than a regular person pays, e.g., public services, streets, schools, and garbage pickup.

He is not getting his money’s worth. He has a problem with that. Carolla is smart enough to not entirely believe this point of view. But there are a lot of other people who try to manipulate people into the zero-sum points of view: “any money given to taxes are given to people who didn’t work for it.”

On the other hand, we can talk about the guy who is best known for making claims about the future path of history is probably Karl Marx, who came up with the whole idea – I haven’t read enough of his work but have read enough about him – of communism.

It includes a whole history of what has happened in the past and extends it into what will happen in the future, concluding with workers eventually obtain the means of production.

That is, capitalists are overthrown and, eventually, workers own everything and use the means of production and capital -money, equipment, and factories – to make stuff for themselves and each other, and the common good.

He is wrong. In that, he was seeing an old-style industrial future. People making the stuff that they have always made but more productively and better, and using what he conceived of as the means of production, e.g., factories and heavy machinery.

Karl Marx didn’t anticipate the information-based future at all, as far as I know. I could Google it, but I do not want to. He was dead wrong. We are not going to live in some communist utopia.

His idea that you can predict the future is not entirely wrong, especially since the future is coming at us so fast. There are some things that you can predict. One is that stuff will continue to get cheaper, as long as you’re talking about basic necessities and some not-so-basic stuff.

Being flooded with entertainment and information, if you wanted to do the math, it would be the cost per entertainment option. I am a kid of the 70s. We had 3 network channels on TV and PBS, and one independent channel that put on crap.

We had no choice. Now, we have a thousand choices for what to watch on TV at any given instance. I belong to the TV academy, so I get to vote on the Emmy’s. That means we are sent DVDs of every show whose producers think has a shot of winning an Emmy, of getting nominated.

I am sitting in a room next to our huge TV, which is cheap now. I am looking at 7 boxes of each containing other boxes of DVDs containing thousands of hours of entertainment. 98% of which is better than any of the crap that we were forced to watch in the 70s.

There is some way to apply math to that and then come to the conclusion that entertainment is fantastically cheap and improved. It might cost 15 bucks to go to the movies. But you can stay home and watch shows on Netflix for 11 bucks a month now.

You can watch Netflix for 168 hours a week without exhausting what is on Netflix. That is 2/3rds of a thousand hours. It is 700 hours of entertainment if you’re able to binge that much for pennies an hour. Food and clothing cost a quarter what they did compared to the average income of a century ago.

So, we are already live in an era of plenty, thanks to technology. There is an era 100 years or 150 years from now, of ultimate plenty. Where once human cognition and thought and consciousness are all mathematicized, and replicated, it’ll be possible to live on the cheap – a cheap cyber-existence, where you are not even part of the material world, for zero.

That’ll be a choice. If you are broke and/or old and worn out, you can take a path 100 to 150 years from now, where you can live for basically free in a cyber version of reality. We can look at, I think, several paths people will take, which we have talked about a lot.

But most of these paths include some levels of abundance because manufacturing both the necessities and the stuff isn’t too crazily luxurious, but will still be awesome compared to what we have now, will be super cheap.

We will still have people who are the technical Amish. People who choose to maintain various levels and limits of historic human existence. Of the 12 billion people we will have by 2080, many billions of those people will choose to live traditional human lives.

They will choose to limit the weirdness that they embrace. They will limit the amount of built-in technology that they allow in their bodies. They may live in nations that limit these options for them.

These lifestyles that are less weird than they could possibly be. There will be a gazillion different flavors.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 387 – Eye for Eye, Graham for Graham, Evangelical for Evangelical

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/19

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you were talking with me, off-tape, about young people. You were talking about how, for the most part, Evangelicals in the United States – in particular, the Dominionist/Reconstructionist form of it – have destroyed faith in faith, so to speak in the United States.

Rick Rosner: It is midnight. It just turned June 20th. We are in the middle of this taking kids away from people trying to show up in the US. They are up to nearly 2,500 kids separated from the families they’ve shown up with.

This is Trump’s deal. The whole country is in a tizzy. Because it seems to be super creepy and morally outrageous and feeling Hitlerish and fascistic. Then you have the others, the “20%.” They are still strong with Trump.

They say, “If you don’t want your kids taken away, don’t show up at our border.” Even though, it is legal to show up at the border and ask for asylum, but another thing the Trump administration is doing is understaffing the legal places you can go and ask for asylum.

People get frustrated in getting turned down 5 times in 5 days and try to go somewhere else, then they get arrested and their kids get pulled. It seems Trump is running a blackmail scheme. You go with him. You give him money for the border. You give him everything else he wants for immigration, then he will quit doing this stuff to kids.

Things are pretty horrible in the US right now. It is pertinent to what we have been talking about with what we call the hollowing out of religion, which is people turning away from organized religion but mostly people who still consider themselves part of organized religions while having a harder and harder time believing in all aspects of that religion.

What you and I both noticed based on our reading is that the younger people are demographically in the US, the higher percentage of them don’t have a religion. This has been attributed to, at least in what I have read and, I think, what you have read, the intolerance and hypocrisy of some of the preachier religions in the US: the Evangelicals.

20/30 years ago was when the Evangelicals were pulled into politics, in the Reagan Era. That is 35 years ago, and more now. Republican strategists realized that Evangelicals might be able to be mobilized to be a political force for Republicans, who were the family values or called themselves the family values party.

Evangelicals got pulled into politics. Then in the past 10 years, there has been an acceleration of Evangelicals, at least, abandoning demanding the politicians they support to follow their core values as long as those politicians support the things that the Evangelicals believe in, which are a lot of traditional things.

No gay marriage, anti-abortion, pro-Second Amendment, really straightforward and stereotypical values; it has reached an apex with Trump who is a horrible guy. He seems to be getting more horrible by the week.

In 2010, 21% of Evangelicals said that someone like Trump’s personal behavior didn’t matter as long as he supports what the Evangelicals support. In the past 8 years, since 2010, the number who says what a politician does in his personal life doesn’t matter has gone from 21% to 71%, and among white males has gone to 81%.

Apparently, younger people look at Evangelicals in this form of hypocrisy and are turned off from religion. Also, to some extent, the Golden Rule has decoupled itself from American conservative evangelism.

The historical trend in the Golden Rule is treating everybody as you would wish to be treated. The way that the footprint of the Golden Rule is spread is over the past centuries; more and more people have been included in people who follow the Golden Rule’s understanding of who other people might be.

That is, at first, maybe, the Golden Rule may apply to people within your own tribe, race, state, sect, or gender. You might only grant the status to people within your group. But through the march of history, more and more people have been included by reasonable people as people who deserve equal consideration: gay people, lately trans people, people of all different races and genders and nationalities.

We understand we have brains that work more or less the same way; we all feel the same emotions, even though our behaviors, orientations, and colors might be different. We all, essentially, have the same consciousness.

We all hurt and love. This Golden Rule consideration has been extended by reasonable, kind people to all sorts of other people and beyond people – to animals, to the extent that we think they can experience happiness, sadness, and pain.

Some of the traditional religions are trailing that understanding. Some of this understanding is science-based, as we explore the brain. Some of this Evangelical religion, and other religions such as strands of Islam and most of the major religions, is/are anti-science, which is not to say everyone.

But there is a big anti-science demographic among American conservative Evangelicals; a reserving of human consideration only for people who are similar to you. Young people who are strongly a part of the world are rejecting that.

I guess in an ironic or perverse way; religion is wrecking religion. Maybe, it has always been like that to some extent. But it certainly is happening right now in America, where people who are supporting Trump and his inhumane policies are probably turning off a lot of people who may have been fence sitters about conservativism.

If conservativism is not going to denounce this fascistic cruelty, they are going to lose people. How fast? How many? We will find out in the mid-term elections, which are about, now, 139 days away.

We will not find out exactly because of gerrymandering. For Democrats to win back the house of representatives, they have to get about 7% more votes in total and in the right places than Republicans do, because Republicans have a built-in advantage based on how they engineered the voting districts across America for Congress.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 386 – New Normals or Decay of Culture

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/18

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is Trump the new normal or not? A huge conversation between us preceded the recording today.

Rick Rosner: I will not have definitive answers to several of the questions here: is Trump an anomaly in American political history? Are politicians after Trump going to be Trumpish?

A related question: is depravity or salaciousness in popular culture part of an expanded arena of art? Or is it decadence that indicates the decay of our culture? Before you started taping, you and I were discussing the relative war criminality of Bush 43, the younger one, and Obama.

Bush 43lied us into the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of between 300,000 and even a 1,000,000 Iraqis and other people across the Middle East. You argued. I was persuaded. Obama was pretty killy to the point of committing a lot of war crimes in a destabilized Middle East with the drone policy, with screwing up in Libya with Qaddafi.

But neither of them compare in terms of horribleness potential to Trump. Trump has only been in office less than 2 years, so had less than 8 years of either Bush 43 or Trump. So, he hasn’t had the opportunity to mess up the Middle East.

But he has already been pretty killy. He loosened the rules of engagement for taking on ISIS, which led to increased civilian deaths. But the two pretty previous presidents were responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

Our discussion with Obama giving a speech coming out against Trump and the Republicans saying that they are corrupt and interested only in maintaining power at the expense of traditional American values.

Him being that explicit is a new thing. While both his predecessor Bush 43 and Obama himself can be considered overly killy, to the point of being considered war criminals, especially from viewpoints outside the US, you are outside the US, Scott.

Obama stands up for a return to political morality. We can hope that he still has enough influence over much of America. That he will get people to turn out for the mid-term elections, which are now in 59 or 60 days from now.

We are hoping the Democrats win the house to put some breaks on the out of control White House and the thoroughly corrupt and compromised Republicans holding public office now, and high state office – governorships and controlling state houses and gerrymandering their states to give Republicans an unfair advantage in elections.

Anyway, I remember in the late 1960s and early 1970s reading a couple of science fiction novels, in particular, Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. Both by John Brunner. They present near futures about 20 years from then, where you had a president who is an idiot figurehead. A good-looking man who stood for nothing and did dumb stuff.

There’s actually historical precedent. Warren Harding was elected because he was a good-looking guy and among our worst presidents in the 1920s. Super corrupt and super incompetent, he died 2.5 years into office, I think, limiting the damage he did, but still damage.

He was elected on the basis of being handsome. In the 1980s, we had Reagan, whether you agree with him or not, who had actual substance and a political substance. You can argue that he, personally, was not super smart.

But he tried to appoint competent people. They fit his Republican philosophy. They were competent and experienced people, even if you did not like their philosophy or actions. He listened to professionals. He got into plenty of trouble.

His professionals got him into the Iran Contra scandals. But Trump is a more pure version of the science fiction vision of a vacuous idiot who is completely at the mercy of corrupt interests.

He is close to the president Camacho in Idiocracy. Plenty of people have, or quite a few people have, predicted vacuous national leadership. For the first time, we have a completely vacuous, amoral, corrupt, and stupid president.

So, the question is: is this just a crazy or one-time disaster? Or are we going to have idiot presidents half or two-thirds of the time until America falls apart? Science fiction writers also like to present futures in which America cannot hold itself together and then splits into several countries.

You could argue that would be the end of America. If America breaks up, that is the end of the American experiment. You could also argue changes. America turning into some crazy dictatorship where people’s rights are violated but no one cares because we are immersed in entertainment.

That would also be a type of end for America. There could be a third and likely end of America. As AI and augmented post-human humanity rises, forces become more powerful relative to the forces of national unity, so that the American national government becomes increasingly irrelevant over the next century.

The new economic and political structures arise that supplant the American governance. There is still an American government, but there are other forces that become much more important relative to an increasingly irrelevant US government.

A related question already posed before. I think of a principle often overlooked and still overlooked. In early science fiction and TV fiction, and movies, people writing about the future during the 1930s through the 1960s, often, presented rational futures.

They had the idea that as technology becomes more powerful and people essentially become smarter with the help of technology that people and civilization become more rational and life becomes cleaner and nicer.

It is the world seen in Star Trek. Where there is not a lot of foolishness, the public spaces occasionally seen with the crew of Enterprise returning to Earth. You see these big open plazas filled with well-dressed citizens. Everybody is behaving.

There is not a lot of floating or no floating advertising. It is not a grubby world. It is a clean-well-ordered world. It is not until Blade Runner in the 1980s where you see a grubby future.

Now, the grubby future is a default science fiction future. A lot of unimaginative crap science fiction takes that model rather than the clean science fiction novel. There is this one-season, probably, show called Altered Carbon set centuries from now.

It has the same rainy streets as Blade Runner and grubby sexualization of everything but more so – to cover for crappy writing and lack of imagination through showing a lot of genitals.

A more well-thought out but not necessarily more accurate presentation is Minority Report. It has a semi-grubby world. A world still plenty grubby, but has some nice parts; that has some public places flooded with advertising.

It floats in the air personally directed through individuals’ information-gathering equipment, e.g., contact lenses, and so on. Then if you look at actual culture, in the 1970s, things were pretty clean.

Bowdlerized, censored, one of the chief examples being The Brady Bunch, which was a completely sanitized version of life. They barely talked about anything. It was a completely harmless, sickeningly sweet sitcom that didn’t address any prurient issues whatsoever.

Now, you have shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There are a lot of filthy shows on television now. The question is whether filth or being able to talk about anything in popular culture.

I’ve been shocked to hear jokes about anal sex and blow jobs showing up in prime time NBC sitcoms. It seems crazy to me that we have come this far since the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when things were clean and censored.

The question is whether this serves a wider artistic service that is part of a better discussion better than the crappy, lazy, and censored 70s or whether this is a reflection of the degradation of our culture akin to the late Imperial Romans being depraved, corrupt, and this weakening their civilization to the point where the Roman Empire fell.

I do not need to go on further. Right now, what has happened in the last couple of years since the rise of Trump, there has been the corruption of American Evangelicals, where 10 years ago 70% of Evangelicals said that politicians’ personal morality mattered.

Now, it is down to 20% of American Evangelicals. 80% is pretty much saying that someone as corrupt as Trump is okay as a leader because he’s scoring wins for the Evangelical side.

To me, that says a pretty much complete moral surrender and corruption of the Evangelicals. An erosion of American political standards. That, I think, we’re at a moment of national political peril.

Then you can circle back to the question of whether the increased decadence or increased filthiness of entertainment is related or not. The increased scope of American entertainment that has given us Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos are considered by many, including me, pretty good pieces of art, occasionally rising to the level of great art.

This is called the “Second Golden Age of TV.” There is a lot of TV that is great. But is the greatness, which includes presenting really jaded views, helping undermine our culture and leading to our downfall?

Let me give one more example, Netflix show called Ozark. Every single character is corrupt and evil to some extent. It is a lazier, lousier, more derivative telling of Breaking Bad with what looks like a typical American family becoming entirely corrupt.

With money laundering and drug cartels, murders, nobody is good, even the youngest boy in the family at 14-years-old becomes a money launderer. It is not art. It is a default thing. It is one show, where everybody is terrible.

The end. That’s enough.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 385 – The Natural Philosophy of Information Theory

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/17

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the science of information in cosmology?

Rick Rosner: The philosophical reason for not having entirely black holes. If the universe is made entirely of information, there is no way for the finites amount of information – I don’t think – to close themselves off from the universe that they formerly occupied by accumulating more and more information.

There is no way for a black hole to go all the way black, which would mean it is exchanging zero information with the rest of the universe; where in an informational universe, the black hole is getting information, still, but it becomes less and less of the information that defines it.

It is never infinitely less. Even in a traditional black hole, as my buddy, Dylan points out, you still have Hawking Radiation. It is still under debate whether Hawking Radiation functions to let information be communicated from inside to outside of the black hole.

Although, Hawking Radiation is much more weak than the kind of thing that I am talking about.

The end.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 384 – Baited to eBay

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen:

Rick Rosner: Close to 30 years ago, when my wife and I first moved to LA, she worked at a small company. It had become fancy and medium-sized, and had become wildly popular in a 1980s dynasty nighttime soap opera way. It was a fragrance company.

It was the Reagan Era with big hair and shoulder pads, and a certain amount of excess. My wife was working for a company caught in this tide of elegant and slightly excessive living. We don’t live excessively. She’d go to work and come home, and say, “Wow!”

She was intimidated because coworkers would be wearing Chanel suits and big cocktail rings. This was when people wore a lot more jewelry than they do now. I was mostly unemployed. She would come home. I might still be in my underwear because I’d be working on this novel all day, which is really not working.

My work: I would model for art classes and bounce bars. So, I was mostly unemployed. I couldn’t help her buy Chanel suits or cocktail rings. But I wanted to do something for her. So, I looked into making jewelry.

Happily, I was surprised to find jewelry has a huge markup. The difference between the retail cost of jewelry and the cost of the materials can be 10-fold. I began making jewelry for her. I could make crazy stuff because I could make it cheap.

I made her a brooch/a pin for her lapel, which had 70 karats of amethysts and blue topaz. It cost less than $100. I found a place that sold chipped gemstones for 1 buck a karat. I used silver findings. The prongs that hold the stones.

The thing looked pretty and should have cost $800 if you bought it retail – if you could get anything that crazy in retail. So, I did that for a year or two. I got hip to the way jewelry works. I started becoming gainfully employed writing for TV.

I gave up on the jewelry stuff. Every once in a while, I would poke around in stuff. I have not poked around in the world of jewelry in a number of years. I went on eBay. I ended up getting some pop-up ad.

It is this little ring of gold plated silver with three one-karat pink sapphires, with each pink-shaped sapphire being the shape of a little birdy. It is three birds on a telephone wire with the telephone wire being the ring – and with little teeny, probably, white sapphires standing in for diamonds along the wires the birds were on.

So, you have this ring. It has three karats of pink sapphire. It is gold over silver. This thing, shipping included, was $2.19 from China, which is just freaking crazy. So, I looked into a bunch of others. I got it for my wife. She wore it once.

[Carole Rosner chimes in.]

Carole Rosner: Hey!

Rick Rosner: [Laughing] it’s not your deal! If you wore it twice, the per wearing average cost will drop to a dollar, so you have to wear it, at least, one other time [Laughing].

But this ring made of silver and gold, and little baby fake diamonds, and three real pink sapphires is two bucks shipping included. I looked around. I saw these other rings, which are beautiful art décor rings with real baby sapphires – baby sapphire baguettes set in azizis standing in for diamonds and filigree and so on.

Stuff that is labor intensive. But you can buy these rings. That look like something that would have sold for $250 for the décor era. Now, it would sell as a piece of estate jewelry for two grand. But you can buy a ring that looks like a reasonable knock-off of this for two bucks shipping included. Because China!

This is not the only kind of goods that you can get. There is a thing called micro-needling. You got a dermatologist. They aerate your face. You’ve done some lawn work. You know how some people run rollers over a lawn and punch a bunch of holes in the lawn. Micro-needling does that to your face.

You roll a wheel with a tiny one- to two-millimeter needles in them. You roll this over your face. You bleed a bit. It wakes up your face. It makes your body send all these healing agents to the poked areas. You end up getting younger looking, healthier looking skin once everything heals up. I bought one of these wheels for my scalp.

Because, apparently, it can help your scalp if you want to keep your hair. After 6 months, it got clogged with hair and clogged. I found it, shipping included, from China for $1.99. I think China is going to kick our ass. Right now, we are a rich country.

China, on a per capita basis, is a poor country. But we politically hitting ourselves in the head with a couple of hammers. We are not doing what we can to keep up. China has the triple threat of a vast population of 1.6 billion people.

People who will work for super cheap. The per whole country’s designed to run on cheap wages. And people who have technical expertise. People who can be trained to do great work, who do not get paid a lot relative to the first-world countries and a gazillion of them.

I guess a determination to fulfill this national destiny. For hundreds of years, China and, to some extent, Japan; one of those was called the Hermit Kingdom. They wanted nothing to do with the rest of the world. They wanted to be left to themselves. They did not trust the foreigners who came exploring.

They were very insular. Now, they are not. I think China thinks it can end up being the big dog country in the world. And if Americans keep being lazy and dumb, I don’t know.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 383 – Cudgels of Stupidity

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What happens when power enters the wrong hands?

Rick Rosner: Cudgels of stupidity that end up in the wrong hands, end up in the hands of people with no morality.

Jacobsen: If we look at the lies of Trump, they continually catch up with him, in some manner. It doesn’t amount to any strict action. However, it does catch up. People lose respect for him, see through him.

Rosner: If you look at his popularity ratings, they started at 50% because people were willing to give him a chance, but then they slowly sagged into the mid-30s and often for the high 30s. Now, they crept into the 40s.

Because people have had a year and a half to consider Trump. They figure: if they like his agenda, then they can deal with the terrible crap that he does. The conservatives are much louder in shouting their conspiracy theories and in what they think is good about Trump.

People who think Trump is terrible to outnumber those who think he is okay. But there is not a concerted effort on the non-conservative media to contextualize Trump to make people understand in a yelly way – the way the conservatives do – to make people who hate Trump to structure it.

It is structuring it so we understand why he’s terrible. But we have a harder time than the conservatives in making the leap from him being terrible on a personal level to why it is terrible for the country.

Conservatives can tell you Obama was terrible for the country. They can tell you Trump is great for the country. I don’t think non-conservatives have that much-structured argument. We know things suck.

But we do not have as much clarity as the conservatives, which is a bad thing.

Jacobsen: It comes out in who farther right conservative Republicans direct their vitriol at or heaviest critique. The heaviest critique does not lie with the Democratic Party.

It lies with Islamic terrorists. That form and minority of Islam is Islamist, and so a political form of it. If I reflect on what they point to, they could point the finger back. In their own party, they have Dominionists and Reconstructionists.

Rosner: Every time, or often, I go to work with Lance. When I walk in, he’s got a podcast going. Some conservative guy is yelling at him, just yelling and making some complicated for why everything is a Deep State conspiracy against brave conservative figureheads like Trump.

Then it is making those arguments at the top of their lungs. Liberals do not have people yelling like that. We have people being reasonable. I am not sure the reasonable people helping people coming to their own conclusions is as effective as the yelly conservative guys on the other side.

Jacobsen: That leads to a question, “Do most Americans seem equipped to think critically and rationally about issues facing them in the modern world, at least in their own country?”

Rosner: Yes, most do. But there is a segment of people – a big thick segment – who don’t have the time, interest, or, in some cases, the wherewithal to think critically. Not everyone wants to watch three hours of political news a day.

They want stuff digested for them. For those people, there are conservative media providing powerful, simple arguments for them. I do not see powerful arguments being presented as much on the liberal side.

The liberal side is more do-it-yourself. Here is the news. Here is what’s going on. You guys build a worldview based on the news we’re bringing to you. But I would think a segment of the population would be okay being yelled at from a non-conservative point of view, and being persuaded by the yelling and the simple, powerful arguments.

I think people susceptible to simple, powerful arguments are not just Trump people, except Trump and conservatives are the ones making the loud, powerful, simple arguments.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 382 – Almost, But Not Quite, So Never

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/14

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You once asked me, “What would the physics be like if the force of gravitation is attenuated as you’re collapsing an object – a potential black hole for instance – reaches an escape velocity of close to the speed of light?” Let’s explore this.

Rick Rosner: I believe gravitational force is not just a function of the matter in an object being attracted to all the other matter in an object. But it actually has something to do in interaction with the rest of the universe.

The way Mach’s principle postulates that inertia is the interaction between a stationary or a moving body against the background or versus the background of all the other matter in the universe.

If gravitation has a Mach’s principle type thing going on, it doesn’t even have to be a strong Mach’s principle – and in fact, it is probably a weak Mach’s principle based on what I have been thinking about the last couple of days.

If the matter is defined in space, if the fuzziness is reduced by all the interactions it has with all the other matter in space, I used this analogy a zillion times. The universe is a giant gunfight. It detects every participant in the gunfight by bouncing every particle off every other particle.

Everybody is shooting at everybody else. The universe roughly knows where everything is with all the shooting and bouncing going on. The universe detects itself. In a collapsing body, you have an extra gang fight going on, with more bullets being shot.

Because as you have a sphere of matter that becomes more and more dense, the closer all those particles get together and to each other, then the more particles they can exchange. That probably includes virtual and real particles – black holes are hot.

The things collapsing in black holes are hot. There is a lot of radiation floating around. I would guess that this extra level of interaction – the extra bullets hitting all this collapsing matter – serve to define matter in this collapsing object more precisely in space, which has the equal effect or equivalent effect of making space more capacious.

Because particles are more precisely defined with extra interactions that reduce their de Broglie wavelength. That has the equivalent effect of increasing the apparent size or scale – actually shrinking space – of space.

So, smaller particles are the same thing as bigger space. If you are looking at a picture of particles, enlarging the space looks the same as shrinking the particles, I am guessing that within a near black hole; there is more space inside of it than outside of it.

Because space inside a black hole is more capacious and the closer it gets to a black hole then the more energy the particles accumulate or, rather, the more and more tightly defined that they become.

They become, apparently, smaller and space becomes apparently tighters. That is, there appears to be more space within a near black hole. So, you never get to the ultimate collapse because the more these particles interact with each other.

The more these particles interact with each other. The more they shrink space; the more they are precisely defined. And they never get to the point of smashing into each other with such compressive force that they go to a singularity, or even to an escape velocity greater than the speed of light.

I think we could do some math on it. It could be a publishable thing.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 381 – Outliers, Hang-Abouts, and Deviants

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/13

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are some of the things to focus on for the outliers in astronomical objects?

Rick Rosner: A list of stuff older than the universe would be a good start, and what would happen if gravitation is attenuated in black hole type situations. In IC, it postulates a universe much older than its apparent age and dark matter may be super-collapsed matter functioning as galactic haloes.

That points at certain suspects in stuff that could be much older than the universe and most, if not all, of the stuff, is hard to detect. It is right on the edge of being detectable. Stuff one might be brown dwarfs, stars below a certain size burn all their matter and end up being a ball of, I think, oxygen nuclei and possibly iron but fairly heavy nuclei.

They are not heavy enough, though, to collapse the star further and do further fusion. Because it is only through fusing, and fusing, and fusing, and fusing, until you get down to iron, that you can’t do any more fusion.

If it is a big enough star, the density of all the iron collapses the star into a neutron star. This is ignoring the various red giant phases and supernova explosions. One of the last stages of a star that is big enough.

Three end stages of stars: brown dwarfs for little teeny stars, neutron stars for medium size, and black holes for bigger ones. Plus, there are probably some other things that I do not know. But once something hits a brown dwarf, it is a big ball of heavy nuclei plus the electrons, just out there in space and barely radiating because it is a thing that is not fusing anymore.

It is still hot because it was fusing; but now, it is not actively generating energy anymore. If it is, it is simply from further gravitational collapse, but it is hard for it to lose radiation because it is in a vacuum.

Like a thermos, it can’t conduct heat through direct contact through stuff. And it is small and it is super dark. A brown dwarf would be hard to detect and could hang out for a long time cooling and cooling.

But they have detected some brown dwarves that are cooler than they ought to be, given the age of the universe and the age of our galaxy. If they found a bunch of these that are way cooler than they should be, a level of coolness that could be attained after only 30 billion years, it would be noteworthy as being a problem with Big Bang theory.

Then you can look at the other end of the universe – far, far away from our galaxy. You can look far back in time from our galaxy, where stars and galaxies have formed way too soon after the big bang.

If you find clumps of matter that formed way faster then you expect them too, given the young age of the universe, because the farther you look than the further back in time that you look, then that points to some things that might be older than the apparent age of the universe.

And we can look and see what other stuff that we could see that might be older than the apparent age of the universe, possible candidates and actual candidates, which have been found and need an explanation as to why they’re younger, even though they show evidence of being older than 13.7 billion years.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 380 – System of a Diagnostic

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/12

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What else on Quora commenters?

Rick Rosner: One of the claims of the theory is the universe possibly has consciousness because we tend to think that any sufficiently large and broadband sharing of information in a self-consistent system will likely have the kind of awareness that we consider consciousness.

That it is one more kind of system diagnostic. One more reflection of the world that the system can comment on. That an information processing system is analyzing some chunk of the world.

In humans’ or other animals’ case, it is the world that has immediate significance to that individual. Among the things significant to the individual are the individuals’ thoughts to themselves. They are one more thing for the system to comment on, analyze, and share with itself.

That sharing with itself. The self-commentary is not a lone consciousness. That is a mistake everyone makes. The sense of hyper-reality from super-powerful analysis of the information under consideration and the feel of what comes from that is what consciousness is.

It seems reasonable that the powerful information sharing within the universe itself is strong evidence that the universe probably has consciousness. The universe has consciousness.

One of the commenters on Quora said, “I see no room in the universe for consciousness or a soul.” I know he didn’t see room for a nodule for a soul. That is the immediate image I got from that comment.

To be clear, there is no special nugget in our heads, I feel, or in the noggins of any conscious being, or in some realm beyond; no nugget inside or beyond our brains. Unless, you consider the entire mind its own magic nugget.

But rather, consciousness is a global characteristic found in the process of all the information being shared globally. That there is no one place that consciousness resides. That it is the feeling of fleshed-outness that you get when you get a hunk of pertinent information to the thing that is powerfully analyzing that information.

That information is being continually shared among specialist subsystems. That is a global thing. Everything becomes fully painted, fully fleshed out to the degree that your awareness can do it.

Awareness when sober is different than awareness when shitfaced. Your painting is way crappier if you’re drunk or if you’re a grasshopper or a dog. It doesn’t have all the dimensions and all the depth.

Regardless, it is still a global phenomenon of information sharing among all the parts of your brain that are part of that information sharing system, which doesn’t include the stuff that you’re unconscious of.

Consciousness is the conscious arena; the place where information goes when it meets the entrance requirements to receive that global, multidimensional consideration because it is not straightforward like walking or breathing.

The end.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 379 – Mathertime

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/11

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have an announcement. What’s up?

Rick Rosner: I am happy to announce. At the prodding of a mutual friend, who took Lance, J.D., and me out to dinner, Lance said, “Why don’t you put your science money where your science mouth is, Rick, and actually start working with some scientists to see if your work goes anywhere?”

I started some baby work with a professional physicist named Dylan. He said we can get a paper published in a journal, which can discuss one falsifiable aspect of our theory. That is, if the universe is older than it appears to be, then there should be stuff in the universe that appears to be older than the age of the universe.

For years, you and I have been sending article links back-and-forth to each other about the universe is as old as this and the universe is as old as that. Often, the plus or minus on this old thing, whether a white dwarf, an early galaxy.

They find a galaxy 12.8 billion years old plus or minus 2 billion years with the plus end, making it 14 billion years, is old than the Big Bang age of the universe. There is a lot of stuff out there.

As a first project, I want to put together a compendium of all the candidates for all the stuff that, potentially, the general class of objects or classes of objects and the individual objects in the universe that have the potential to be older than the cosmos.

I will get feedback from you, Scott, and also credit you in the paper. But things are starting to turn. What we have been doing has been doing, that is, to the extent that we have been doing this stuff, I believe somebody could build a relatively complete understanding of what we’re trying to do, and what this project’s pluses and minuses are.

Where it might agree or false short with experimental evidence, but, I agree. It is time to put a few science clothes on, to see what on it can be done via standard science channels. Do you agree with that?

Jacobsen: It seems like a good idea to me. I note two points of contact within the conversation. One in the academic world. One outside it. Both seem partial and legitimate but not complete.

On the inside, academia seems to work as a means for quality control, to keep cranks out of the mainstream conversation. It provides basic training for people who will work with those leading in the field.

So, it provides the proper skills, the proper knowledge, and keeps cranks out. On the outside, it can prevent people who legitimately may have revolutionary ideas out of the conversation.

Rosner: I agree with both of those things. However, the math and demographics of it. There are many more cranks than people who have revolutionary ideas that turn out to be good. So, though, it is a baby with the bathwater situation.

You have to limit cranks. Otherwise, nobody ever gets anything done because you’re dealing with people wearing tinfoil hats. 99.9% of the theories on the outside will be not great. On the other hand, you may be missing a potential revolution. But the math is daunting.

Project one may lead to a paper. Under that project, any good theory of the universe should be able to go from the laws of information to the structure and dimensionality of the universe.

With that in mind, a baby step in that direction would be a paper that discusses whether there is more space if you could observe space from inside a black hole or an apparent black hole than the amount of space as observed from the outside (the black hole).

Even that sentence, it has a lot wrong with it. A black hole probably contains a singularity. So, there is nothing inside of it. So, that needs to be modified. But the general idea, there is a concentration of matter you’d find in a planet or a sun, or a neutron star, or something that approaches a black hole.

It might define space to such an extent that the scale of space is shrunk down, which effectively makes more space within that object, more volume within that objects. To the extent, that I think there is no such thing as a black hole.

Because the processes that make for a black hole shrink space down in the black hole. You get a black hole when gravitational forces are so strong that they overcome all possible forces in the universe and then it squishes down to zero radius down to a point – a fuzzy quantum-mechanical point but still a point.

Under a theory where the interactions among matter define space, you never get to the maximally squashy point because matter creates its own extra space by defining space more and more precisely as it shrinks down, as the ball of matter shrinks down into itself.

Until, at some point, you reach a limit of compactness. That is where things get hung up – and that stops short of being a black hole. Project two would be examining the math of that. If there is more space in an object with a gravitational field than you would think than observing that object from outside and using normal geometry, I did a rough calculation.

It would be on the scale for something on the Earth – mass and radius of the Earth. The extra space would be, if you could do it, the diameter of the Earth observed from inside of the Earth if you could somehow do it.

It would be 8 millimeters wider than if you viewed it from 100,000 miles away. A tiny little effect, 8 millimeters different in a measurement of an 8,000-mile diameter. Dylan, the physicist, was excited about the first idea.

We have not gotten into the second idea in depth. Since he is a traditionally rooted physicist, We will see if he is as persuadable. He is an enthusiastic guy. It is good he is willing to dive into it. But I feel I will need to do more fast-talking to talk him into idea number two. That is all I got for this.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 378 – Supplanting and Expanding

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/10

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does the supplanting and expansion of Universal Gravitation by General Relativity lead to some thoughts about IC?

Rick Rosner: When Newton set up his theory of Universal Gravitation, that all the matter in the universe attracts all the other matter according to the formula m/r^2 or m/d^2 where “d” is the distance between the two masses who’s gravitational force is being measured.

There is some little bit of evidence that he considered trying to account for the dimensionality of space but then threw up his hands and said, “We are going to assume that it is a background that exists.’ I do not know. I am not a historian of Newton.

In any case, Newton assumes a fixed space of three Euclidean spatial dimensions. I do not know if he talks about a time dimension, but he talks about a straightforward Euclidean flat space in which all the gravitation happens.

Einstein comes along and presents gravitation as a bending or deformation of 3-dimensional space, where under Universal Gravitation objects follow paths that curve because of gravity.

But under General Relativity objects, including light, follow geodesics, which are the general relativistic equivalent of straight lines and it is space itself that is bent by the presence of mass.

It accounts for more stuff. The math is harder. But it lets you do more stuff, including having a picture – namely, the Big Bang – of the dynamics of the universe. But it still assumes space exists.

There are people like Wheeler who try to come up with programs like “It from Bit,” which is looking at the universe as a giant processor or a big computer. Somewhere included under that effort is the idea that the information of the universe should also determine the structure of the universe.

That the relationships among the particles in the universe should determine how space is shaped. That there is no pre-existing space where things play out. That space should follow from the theory – why space is three dimensional but bent by gravity.

It should all come out of some overarching theory of how information works. Einstein was a step forward. But there is room for further steps forward. My theory in the Quora responses has been legitimately criticized for being hand-wavey and not sufficiently turned into equations.

Those criticisms are legit. At the same time, there have been hand-wavey theorizers in the past. They, often, didn’t make the 100% persuasive case for their theory. They simply got some retroactive credit, like Immanuel Kant postulated “Island Universes.”

By which he meant, there were other galaxies in the universe. I forget what his logic was or if he assumed that there just can’t be one galaxy. 200 or 300 years later, he was proved right and is mentioned when stuff is written up.

But he could not prove his supposition 200 years before there were not sufficiently powered telescopes to prove the existence of other galaxies. Wegner was the continental drift guy. There was one guy 300 years before him who said, “It looks like the continents might have initially fit together.”

No mechanisms were proposed. That is the guy from 1500 or 1600 gets some retroactive credit. Gamow himself, one of the originators of Big Bang theory was notoriously bad at math.

So, he had to work with other people to help him mathematicize it. His theory did, indeed, contain a lot of math about nucleosynthesis, what elements would be formed in the Big Bang and what elements would be formed later in stars as stars cooked later.

Even though, he was bad at math. He did get some math in. His theory gets credit.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 377 – Ground Control to Quora Tom

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are some of your comments on the Quora commentary on IC? We just saw it.

Rick Rosner: It is June 11, 2018 today. And you just pointed out to me this Quora thing. Question: “Why do you think Rick Rosner’s theory of the universe is valid or not valid?” It went up in April, 2017 – 14 months ago.

About 500 people have looked at the question, as far as I can tell, and, maybe, 5 people responded to it. The responses were pretty legit in my mind. The first response was, maybe, the most extensive. It, in a nutshell, says, ‘If this is going to be a real theory, it should be presented as a real theory. You should not have to wade through a 218-page interview to get a sense of what it is about. It should be in a legitimate forum with math and the proper framing, and all of that stuff.’

Thing one, you do not need to read 218 pages to get a sense of the theory. You and I did an extensive interview, but only 20 or 30 pages talk about the theory. Those are legitimate criticisms. If the theory, if at all possible, wants to receive the proper consideration, it should make predictions and conform to existing experimental data and observational data.

It should make predictions that can either come true or not. If they didn’t, it would tend to prove the theory false. That’s, according to a standard picture of how science works, how science works. Scientific theories make specific predictions and once those predictions are measured experimentally or evaluated experimentally then that helps determine the fate of the theory.

There are some objections. I have some quibbles. According to roughly the same theory of science, old theories putter along accumulating glitches – that is, experimental results that do not entirely conform to the experimental predictions and then being modified to see if they can fit those experimental results and, eventually, getting rickety like an old jalopy – until a better theory comes along and can fit more experimental results and offers a better point of view.

A little bit or a lot bit how Einstein’s General Relativity supplanted and expanded Newton’s Theory of Universal Gravitation.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 376 – A (Apparent Non-Socialist) Socialist Civilization

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is our future civilization?

Rick Rosner: We have a future where things will be cheap. By the way, we live in a socialist civilization right now. Nobody acknowledges this. But dead people give us everything; they do not hang onto anything.

Inheritance is the engine that runs our civilization and economy. People die and then their stuff gets owned by other people. Giving 100% of your stuff, it doesn’t get more socialist than that.

However, the future will be less socialist that way because people will die less and less. Anyway, there are several dimensions or axes. That you have to look at. People will be sort of enclaved. You can argue people are enclaved now.

Every once in a while, a new type of person is celebrated in the media. The Yuppies in the 80s, Hippies in the 60s, Beatniks in the 50s, Women’s Libbers in the 70s, all sorts of variations. Buppies, DINKs – Double Income No Kids.

People form new lifestyles all the time. In the future, there will be a greater spectrum of lifestyle. There will be a certain amount of enclaving, of people teaming up to share lifestyles, because of accepting technology or rejecting it.

Although, people will have the same amount of mobility in the mixing of lifestyles, as there will be more to choose from than from those now. It will be enclaving of picking ways of life and picking the philosophical beliefs that support those.

At the very traditional end, we will have humans living as we do now, and dying, because it is too weird not to. That supported by religious or philosophical beliefs. At the other end, you will have people living wildly technologized lives, which given trends in technology will probably be merging with technology and with each other.

The ability to accomplish new stuff, new and powerful stuff. It will be at the high technology end. There will be more traditional humans crafting or home crafting stuff. That may have some quaint appeal. That will not be as powerful as the highly augmented and technology powerful people are doing.

The traditional lifestyles will be eroded by the awesomeness of established technology. Technology comes along with the early adopters trying it out, even though it sucks and is unwieldy and it takes a lot of technical expertise to use.

That new technology becomes established. People begin to understand what is good and easy about it. Once it is well-established, it goes to work on the rest of the population. Similarly, there will be a constant erosion of traditionalist stances, as the great stuff of the future proves to be too attractive.

Anyway, you will have a big spread of people from the most traditional to the most wildly experimental. But across the whole spectrum into all the lifestyles, you will see an accelerating increase in standards of living or in simply powers over the world.

Because it is weird to talk about standards of living when you’re talking about entirely new standards of living. People at the very highest technology end will continually be exploring.

That’s enough of that.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 375 – An Era of Wonders, An Epoch of Suckiness

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/07

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What can we say about social media? You have been having some troubles with Twitter. Also, you had some thoughts on superhero movies. Please elaborate.

Rick Rosner: I can only surmise mathematically. I am getting fewer likes, retweets, and so on, drastically fewer. Only a few days ago, there was something on social media. People running the medium or algorithms running the medium do something called shadow banning, which is reducing your reach – reducing the amount of communication that you can have with other people on the medium.

The limiting of the number of people who can see your postings. There is overt explicit banning. If you are running a Nazi feed, where you are saying, “Kill all the Jews,” they will send you a notice saying, “No, you are done.” Twitter has been slow to do that.

I have been posting scathing but not obscene or particularly offensive tweets from a liberal perspective on Trump and his minions. I may have generated some complaints, since there are ways to report a feed that you do not like – to complain about it to Twitter.

Twitter’s algorithms received them and then decided something was wrong with what I have been saying and has been shutting me down. I am not allowed to advertise. But I have been advertising something. That may be frowned upon.

I have been putting out four-letter words with asterisks. Twitter doesn’t like that either. You cannot even chat with somebody via instant messaging because they tell you to go to instant messaging to resolve these things – so no good calls and then you get these typed responses from a hotkey. It delivers an unhelpful paragraph.

It is really hard to address anything to know what you can do, what you need to change, when things will change; in short, Twitter sucks. It is unfortunate for an important social medium. It is usually the source of breaking news.

It is also the source of social protest. It is useful. But Twitter’s growth has been limited by how miserable it is and how pissed off everybody is who uses it. It only has about 330 million monthly active users.

While Facebook has about 1.5 billion, almost 5 times as many, though, Facebook sucks too. Young people think Facebook is for the old and have gone elsewhere. In general, all social media kind of suck.

I think that is an indication of the limits of non-sucking of human administered tools. We are mentally the same people, or at least in terms of our brains the same as people who lived 10,000 years ago.

We have better equipment, better algorithms, better communication relationships with our technology, but humans are still the highest order executive functions for, at least, the big decisions of what goes on in large institutions.

Social media, government, entertainment, that means there is an inherent ceiling that you can’t go beyond because humans suck – because we have limited mental and executive capabilities.

Now, within Google Translate, you told me. Anytime you have AI or machine learning; if it is sufficiently complex, the machine learning starts doing things black boxy. You cannot tell exactly what they’re up to from the outside.

You told me Google Translate developed its own private language, not spoken by any human on Earth because Google doesn’t talk. But it made it mathematically or informationally more efficient. Instead of translating from each possible pair of languages, Finnish to Croatian, Urdu to French, if it is translating 110 languages into each others, then, instead of having 100*109/2 or something like 6,000 different handshakes, Google found it more informationally efficient to have a metalanguage at the core, where all the other 110 languages go into the core.

Google finds the meta-word that equals the word in Urdu and then links it to the meta-word or word equivalent in French. Instead of having 6,000 different handshakes, Google has 110 links from each human language to its metalanguage in and then back out.

Somehow, that is more efficient in the way consciousness may be a more efficient problem-solving or information-processing tool than having apps for each conjunction of events or types of information.

You have sneaky and black boxy forms of emerging, if not intelligence then, sophisticated information processing, but everything is still for humans’ benefit and humans are still in charge of the important decisions.

For example, take superhero movies, they have credits that are 8 minutes and may encompass 8,000 people. The movies themselves moment-to-moment have a lot of awesomeness. They are awesome graphically.

Since they are an investment of $300 million – $200 million for the movie and $100 million for the publicity, and the script has been gone over a million times and is as packed with decent dialogue moments and turns of plot, and the actors have been physically trained and beautified to the nth degree, and the stunts are great, except, it is still a superhero movie that has characters coming out of children’s comics books from 45 or 55 years ago.

So, there is a ceiling to a superhero not sucking with the ceiling being it is still a frickin’ superhero movie. As we move into the era of humans being more and more linked with machine learning and – we can hope – being able to handle more linked and complex relationships between data, that the sucky ceiling will be lifted.

Certainly, the stuff in conjunction with us has led to better lives for us compared to people 2,200 years ago. The suckiness ceiling has already lifted immensely. We can hope that it keeps going in conjunction with our non-organic information processors get better at understanding and manipulating the world.

The end.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 374 – Out With the Old, In With The New

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/06

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you’re dealing with the way we think, and when you’re dealing with the structure of information as it is represented in the world, how much is old information? How much is new information?

Rick Rosner: You and I think the universe may be older, much older, than it appears to be. If that is so, another question might be, “How good is the universe at eradicating old stuff and replacing it with new stuff?” If it is 100% good at it, then you need more sophisticated theoretical arguments to establish the universe is older than it appears to be because there is no physical trace.

But if the universe still allows some stuff older than its apparent age to survive – and my image of the old stuff that is allowed to survive is keeping a hard candy in your mouth for a while. It gets ablated, eroded, but still some of it survives right until the end.

There might be structures in the universe that might be eroded through radiation and other stuff that might erode information, but the old stuff still survives in an eroded form. An associated question might be, “What percentage of the universe is older than the apparent age of the universe?” Then you can get specific about some celestial bodies that may be older than the apparent universe.

Then there is the metaphor used by us. The physics of the universe has much to do with the physics of thought. The physics of thought can be mapped, pictured, or expressed in a physical space that has some of the same physics as the universe itself.

How much of our consciousness is built from old stuff? How much is built from new stuff? I think the metaphor is capacious enough, has enough room, to have models of memory that have something to do with the way the universe looks.

In that, when we remember old stuff, obviously we cannot remember anything but old stuff, we have, kind of, a general idea of what we’re remembering. That quickly becomes, if we have the available memories, quite specific – second grade.

We have a rough memory of being younger, of our teacher, how the school was like, maybe our classmates. That makes sense in terms of information. It also makes sense in that a lot of people in neuroscience like to say that the brain’s job is to be a prediction engine.

It helps you cope with the world by helping you predict what will happen next, which means that your brain needs models of various degrees of generality. If you are meeting a new person, your general models of what people are like may be more helpful than the more specific models if you are running into a specific person again.

So, it makes sense that memory would function in both generalities to be helpful at prediction and with specificities. It also makes sense that the universe might contain information at various levels of generality and specificity.

We know what that feels like in terms of experience. The representation of that may include old burned out galaxies where the structures get ablated or seared away by new radiation that might be streaming out of a central black hole or might be coming from other parts of space.

If the information is stowed safely down a black enough hole, maybe, it won’t be washed away and some specificity might be washed away.

One more thing, there is a hypothesis. You could hypothesize that we know, in some way, as life has evolved from no life at all through simple plants and animals to the fairly sophisticated consciousnesses of mammals and then the world that humans have built via their consciousnesses.

We know that is in some way an increase in order. You can wonder. Does that increase in local order on our planet and on quite a few other planets throughout the universe increase the order of the universe itself?

I would hypothesize that, yes, it does. The universe makes use of any available mechanism for preserving and generating and processing information. No matter how localized to a certain planet and specific to a set of organisms.

It may not make great use of it. I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis to say that, yes, any mechanism for processing information is somehow reflected in the universe’s processing of its own information for its own purposes.

I don’t know exactly how it works. I talked to an AI guy yesterday. He said that AI is far behind where people think it is because we haven’t been able to duplicate the processes happening in the brain at all. But all we have are simple schema and algorithms.

I would argue the brain itself uses simple algorithms and neural networks and other stuff. Anything that works and is easy to set up, probably exists in some form in the brain for the brain’s own purpose.

I would suggest similarly that there is a chance. Any form of order in the universe is somehow used by the universe for its own purposes, even if it is for a slight increase in the universe’s net efficiency.

The end.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 373 – Up, Up, and Away, and Away

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/05

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the upper limit to the size of possible universes?

Rick Rosner: If there is a set of all possible universes, which is an iffy proposition considering the profusion of possible universes there may be, it boggles. It is the set of everything, basically. Who knows if the set of everything can even be a set? There are some questions raised.

For instance, there is a thing called the Anthropic Principle in physics, which some people find to be a useful tool. The idea is that you can draw certain conclusions in physics from our existence.

That the universe has to follow certain rules in order to permit evolution – for there to be planets to exist long enough for us to evolve on those planets, for us to evolve to be able to think about the universe on a planet.

Some people like to extend the Anthropic Principle in certain directions such that every possible universe should, maybe, permit the existence of things that can observe that universe.

That seems to me to be too strong a thing. You can imagine a universe that comes into and winks out of existence prior to any conscious observers evolves. You can use a similar anthropic reasoning to draw conclusions about the possible size of the universe that could contain species like us.

You couldn’t have a universe that only contains ten atoms. That universe, only as long as it had 10 atoms, couldn’t evolve observers like us, have people evolve on a planet like us. It couldn’t contain Earth.

We know the planet Earth is roughly 5 billion-years-old and the universe existed roughly 9 billion years before Earth congealed into existence. You can imagine a universe that contained things like us, people like us, or conscious observers like us.

That is only 2 billion years old, where a planet congeals into existence. It only takes it a billion years. Once the planet exists, evolution reaches a point of having conscious beings, where evolution moves fast. It is only another billion years for that to happen.

That would be a lower time limit. You couldn’t have us show up much faster than that in a naturally evolving universe. And you may be able to make anthropic arguments about the upper limit on the size of a universe that contains organisms like us, at least, maybe, we’re only seeing the parts of the universe that are apparently 14 billion years old.

But, maybe, that is only a bud within a larger universe that grew independently, budded off. That larger universe is vastly older and, maybe, you only find creatures of our level of sophistication within the more limited universe that are on the scales of being only 10 or 20 billion years old.

You tend to find more complicated creatures proliferating through larger universes and not creatures like us. Where, we are limited to a smaller universe – the 13 billion-year-old apparent age variety. That is a possible set of principles to look at.

There is this other thing that shows up, which is a possible ladder of existence. Which, I find problematic because it contains infinities. To get to that idea, every normal human has a brain, which processes information.

But we each also have a mind, which is the information-space that we’re conscious of. We are not conscious of the space itself. But we are conscious of the awareness of what we are aware of, what we’re thinking about from moment to moment.

We are conscious of a set of information. Because that is the information we’re working from, at any given moment. We are aware of certain things. You are aware of where you are. Maybe, it is on the computer. Maybe, it is on a bench having lunch. Maybe, it is the afternoon and 2pm. Maybe, you are pissed off and in traffic.

Your mind, at any given moment, is the information that you’re aware of at any given moment. That mind, that information that you’re of; you’re aware independently of it. You do not feel you’re aware.

You are not aware of your brain clickity-clacking like a giant computer, or of neurons sending electrical signals to one another all over the place – and dopamine and serotonin being emitted and absorbed. All of that.

You are aware of the contents of your mind from moment to moment. It may be possible to mathematicize the information you’re or everybody is aware of. It may be possible to develop a physical model of that information that you’re aware of at any given moment with a set of principles and a geometry.

If somebody said, “A penny for your thoughts,” in the year 2052, you could send them a mental map of exactly what your thoughts are. It is a little mind-map. A little universe of that, that you could zap to them the structure of what is in your brain moment-to-moment.

You have your brain doing brain stuff moment-to-moment. Then you have your mind, which may very likely exist in its own information-space. Then to take it one step further, which is what IC does; that if our mind is an information-space. Then, perhaps, the universe is similarly an information space, where the information it contains has its own geometry and physics which we live in.

If any of this is reasonably close to true, then the information-space that we live in, which is the universe; outside of it and beyond it in an entirely different space, there is the brain – organic, mechanical, or whatever – that supports the information being processed in the information-space that is our universe.

It may be possible that every information-space requires some kind of other space. Some kind of another world that is the physical support for this information. To imagine that, if somebody obliterated your brain, a piano fell on your skull and squashed your brain.

Most people would assume that your mental space would cease to exist. That you cannot have the mental space, your mind, without the brain, the physical hardware that supports your mind.

So, it is a two-part deal. If that applies to the universe, the two-part deal is that we live in this physical space and the physical space implies the support space, the hardware, that allows the universe to exist. That it can’t just support itself.

If so, that implies a ladder of existence. If our physical world is a physical information space support by a physical world outside of it, then that implies the physical world outside of it is itself an information-space that is supported by a physical world outside of it, and so on out to infinity, which is problematic.

Because it is this huge-ass ladder to infinity. But to really have our dinky world of 10^85th protons, we really need an infinity of containing worlds? That seems problematic. It may be legitimately problematic.

In that, it may not accurately reflect what is going on in our universe with any supporting structures, which may or may not be necessary. Or it may be something problematic. That as we learn more about the universe or the principles of existence.

Maybe, a thing that we will have to get used to or think more about, or something. But one way of thinking about it rather than thinking about it as this infinite ladder towards infinity of information-spaces being supported by further information-spaces.

You can think of it as pairs of information spaces.

If the universe is a big mind-space or information-space with a support structure to contain it because our minds are a certain size with a certain amount of information. It is a 2 or pound thing in a universe with 10^85 protons.

Our universe around our brain is a vast support system. But it is still just a system between our mind and this vast support structure. If you imagine the universe needing its own vastly larger support structure, then that is fine too if they are no upper limits on the size of universes.

You have our mind within the big ass universe. Our universe supported by an outside vastly bigger ass universe. That is fine. That is a pairing between a big ass world and a bigger ass world.

Maybe, that is the deal. That every world that can possibly exist has an implied much bigger supporting world. That is alright. Because, even though you have big and way bigger, everything is still finite.

It is the principle of no biggest possible universe. If it is a real principle, then is no problem. Because you have got all the way up to but not including infinity. You can have all these pairs of universes. The big ass and big triple ass universe, and big octuple ass universe and so on.

Then it is a relationship between the structure and its container and so on. A Big Bang universe has T=0 but does not have a matter zero. A Big Bang universe pretty much always has the matter that it started with when everything started.

It was all packed together into this one infinitesimal point. The amount of matter was a point and then blew up, but the amount of information was always the same. An information universe, which you and I like to think about, is much more likely to have a T=0 but also an I=0. It is information zero. It is a mass-energy and space zero.

If we live in an information universe, that has big bangy aspects but is really built on information. Then it is reasonable to think that that universe has an implied beginning with a null universe out of which it coalesced as it generated and absorbed more and more information, as it was able to contain more and more information.

A metaphor for that might be a babies mind. Let’s say it almost contains nothing at birth, but as it arranges itself and gets more sensory input, as the dendrites get paired away and so on, the baby’s mind takes shape and contains more and more information.

Until, by age 5, a five-year-olds consciousness is not much different from an adult’s mind in terms of the information it contains on a moment-to-moment basis. But it started from an almost null information state, whether before or after birth…

Anyway, it is easy to imagine a baby’s mind started with zero information. It is easy to imagine that any kind of information-based universe implies a past that contains a point of zero or null information. No space, no matter yet, stuff coalesces into existence.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 372 – Hollow Spheres and Blackish Holes

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What happens in a hollow sphere for a passing photon? How does this relate to the posited astronomical bodies, blackish holes (rather than, similarly, black holes)?

Rick Rosner: If you are on the surface of a hollow sphere, you feel the pull of 10 meters per second per second that is holding you on the surface of this hollow sphere. If you drill a hole into the sphere and go into the center of the sphere, you are apparently weightless, wherever you are in the sphere.

The math works out that way. Any photons you should from the surface of the sphere as they crawl out of the gravitational well will lose the same amount of energy as any photons shot from inside the sphere through the hole you’ve drilled in the sphere regardless of where you are shooting from.

So, the gravitational acceleration experienced or a photon would experience as it climbs out of the pit – or the shape of the pit – is it curves downward until you hit the surface, and then it is flat all the way to the center and all the way from the center to the surface again, and then it curves back up.

It is like that shape you have seen. The cone that is pinched with the tip of the cone cut off. And the net effect of passing through all the little hollow spheres all the way to the center of a body is that it looks like the bottom half of a circle, roughly.

And in a blackish hole, we’re saying the scale of space itself tightens up. So, there is more space inside. There is more volume inside a blackish hole than what you see outside of a blackish hole.

That is another thing that buffers the gravitational curvature and evens everything out. At the neck, you get the super severe effects.

The end.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 371 – Future of Partnerships

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/07/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What will be the future of partnerships?

Rick Rosner: What you see in terms of partnership choices in the future may reflect mating strategies. When you have today and for the past few decades, you have unusual mating arrangements, like people in a three-way mating arrangement or a four-way.

It’s sensational. It is something you’d see in an HBO like a sex documentary. It’s seen as fascinating or titillating. But in the future, differing mating arrangements other than two people closely bonded for a period of time will become more common.

Partially because there’s more support for alternate lifestyles due to increased information via the internet and social media. Increased tolerance. And to say increased tolerance, the gender fluidity was something that was largely unheard of a decade or two ago.

Those people could change their minds about who they are sexually. People didn’t know that that was a thing and to the extent that they did know it was a thing was like, “Oh, come on, how much more are we going to have to deal with new genders or gender orientations?”

As time goes on, people will grow to be more at home than just with tolerant attitudes. Expansive attitudes. But in terms of mate selection, alternate or non-traditional partners— the non-traditional joining of people may in itself be a sexual strategy.

Maybe, a sexual strategy that in relationships where a woman is in love with more than one guy or is in love with a woman and a guy. A guy is in love with two women. Those things may turn out to be, for some people, ways to have relationships, where perhaps one or more of the people in the relationship felt closed out of partnerships in the past.

Either due to personal preferences or due to just not being able to find a niche to be successful in, not being able to find a way to be sexually successful.

Jacobsen: What niches in the future will be exaggerated, as some niches are more exaggerated now?

Rosner: What roles will offer certain people chances of sexual success the way the job role offered people success for 100 years?

Jacobsen: Yes, also, the characteristics or factors that comprise them. For instance, the modern LA version of the big booty with the Kardashians, for example.

Rosner: Well, I can tell you with regard to fashion, which is not to say body styles. But if you look at the history of fashion, some new part of the body is always being revealed or emphasized. In the ‘80s, leg holes kept getting higher and higher.

Instead of going straight across, at the lower thigh, they kept creeping upward until eventually you had thongs, so more and more of the upper thigh and butt was revealed. In various times in history, we’ve had side boob eras.

So yeah, we right now are in an era that emphasizes the butt. So, we can assume that trends in what we reveal about what we focus on in the body will continue to change. There will be the parts of the body that we focus on that will continue to change.

There won’t always be the emphasis on a single body part that we have now. But there will always be novelty. It won’t signify much. Fashion exists to perpetuate itself via novelty. Sometimes, it reflects something maybe important about the culture.

The way that fashion has shifted to allow for heavier people; the way that body consciousness in fashion has shifted in America and the rest of the world over the past 20 years to accommodate people who are on average much heavier than they were in the ‘70s.

But, fashion is fashion. It shifts around to give people an excuse to buy new stuff. And I have read arguments that say that trends in fashion have been replaced by an ominousness in fashion where anything that worked in the past can now be seen as fashion now.

That somebody could dress as they dressed 20, 25 years ago, walk down the street without drawing any attention because we now live in an era of any thingness. It may be due to increased information.

That if you can see all of fashion, all of the history of fashion, laid out in front of you just by clicking around on the internet, then there’s less era wise or now wise enforcement of fashion rules, because people have more information.

Similarly, in terms of competing for mates, there may be more of an anything goes because people have more information. And more access to all sorts of different people via social media. So who is going to be successful in the future at attracting mates?

I don’t know if it’s new. But it certainly is more important now than in the past, is people who accept all body types. People don’t apply rigorous physical standards of sexual attractiveness of the past.

They will do well now and into the future in which we’re growing more accepting of people as they are now. When I was growing up, we might get in the weeds here but…

Jacobsen: We have two minutes.

Rosner: Okay. Throughout most of the 20^th century, there were severe constraints on who was allowed to have sex. Married people were allowed to have sex. People who took themselves out of the realm of social approval, of course, could have sex, which meant like prostitutes.

There was a huge prostitution culture in the US in the first half of the 20^th century. But beyond that, people weren’t supposed to have sex. I mean there were times when people had sex, like World War II, standards were—it wasn’t overt.

Standards weren’t overtly low. Sexual prohibitions weren’t overtly lowered, but people about to go off to maybe die, yeah. There was a lot of people hooking up before they went off to battle and such. There was still urgency.

But there were still huge prohibitions on sex outside of wedlock. Now, most of that is eroded. And eroding along with that are standards about who’s attractive. Rigid standards of sexual fitness. And people who are able to see the beauty in everyone are going to want to be offered greater opportunities.

That’s about it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 370 – In the Long Run…

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/07/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about long-term solutions going into the future compared to the past?

Rick Rosner: John Maynard Keynes said that during the Great Depression, when somebody must’ve asked him what’s the best long-term solution. And he was saying, f- long-term solutions. We need to do something about now.

And the deal is, we’re perishable. We are flowers that bloom for a day and then die. We’re done in, even though our lifespans are longer, now by,20 years or so than they were when Maynard Keynes said in the long term we’re all dead—in the long run we’re all dead.

We’re still all dead eventually and pretty quickly. I have been helping my mother in law move into her senior living community, where the average age is, the mid 80s. And I’m the mid to late 50s now, but we do not have much time.

Unless there are great strides made in medicine, I have got, another 20, if I’m lucky, 25 years of competent life left. That’s just nothing. But anyway, we are, we are born and live and pass away fast. It’s understandable that our framework is short term.

We have evolved creatures and we’ve been evolved to create the next—to have sex, have babies, and send the next generation off to do the same thing.

Evolutionary forces tend not to work more than—I mean, an evolutionary victory is spitting out the next generation. Now, we’re—humans are in a slightly different position than a lot of animals in that human babies are born incomplete.

Because our evolutionary tactic, the thing that helps us occupy our niche in the world is having a big brain. But brains can only be so big before they kill the mother during childbirth by getting caught in the birth canal.

So, women, when they give birth, their pelvises split apart, the baby’s head gets forced out. The baby’s head at the point of birth has overlapping plates that can get compacted as the baby passes through the birth canal to make the skull just a little bit smaller. But anyway, human brains are as big as they can possibly be and not kill moms.

But that’s not big enough. So there’s still a lot of growth and wiring that needs to go on after birth. Which means that human babies take, at least ten years to raise. Nobody now would let 10 year olds out into the world on their own.

You can argue that human babies now take 18 to 20—well Donald Trump was just talking about how Don Jr. really can’t be held that much responsible for meeting with Russian.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 369 – Nude Art Modelling and Innovation’s Futurescape

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/07/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the future of innovations? Robots are taking over automation.

Rick Rosner: I have not been doing a lot of thinking about this. I have blindly accepted that future innovation will be done by the automated people are working in combination with AI or by AI itself. The most obvious steps forward, beginning ten, twenty, thirty years from now, are going to be in serious combination with AI or by AI on its own.

But thinking further about it, having been in the art model off and on, since I was twenty-four so more than thirty years, I have been working a bunch of places including the art places where you get good art.

Places like Art Centre Paladino or Cal Art or SVA New York. If the art is done by art students at art colleges like the University of Colorado, schools that don’t specialize in art. That’s a much lower level of skill and artistic insight.

So, I can imagine that what innovation isn’t done by AI for humans, then the concerns with AI’s will be that level of innovation and artistic creation that will make human innovation look crappier relative to it.

They will have such powerful technology that though human art will be crappier it can still be fun. So, you’ve got innovation with several flavors, probably many more flavors than that, but off the top of my head there will be pure AI innovations which takes a while to come.

Because AI is helpless at this point without being human directed. You will have AI that really innovates and other innovations being done by augmented humans. You will have innovations by defiant human people.

People who don’t like the coming status quo of everything being mediated through AI and who have diligently determined or developed the practice or their craft to be able to continue with the human arts of creation without resorting to AI.

This is a what my buddy Lance Richlin, a sculptor and painter does; he sticks to old forms, the ancient Greek sculptural methods, Renaissance painting methods. I tell Lance, at least he paints deep metaphysical themes, pains like modern people.

People talking on their cell phones in cars or they are texting while driving. He refuses to give in to modernity. So, you will have some innovation, some creativity coming from defiant defenders of human craft and art, and then you will have the casual creators of ridiculousness with t-shirt themes and memes done by regular people joking around.

So, that’s it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 368 – The Future of Remembering

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/07/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking off tape about the future of remembering. What are you taking into account when you are thinking of future of remembering?

Rick Rosner: Well I am thinking that in the future our brains will be augmented with. devices that. that will expand our abilities or help us maintain a decaying ability.

One of those abilities is a memory. One way of picturing the future is. when the brain starts to get old you go into some small business the way. Schwarzenegger walked into some joint in. his… I don’t know. what movie is that?

Jacobsen: Daycare movie, Daddy Daycare.

Rosner: Total Recall, you go to a joint and then 20 minutes they implant a whole new set of memories. and I just want to. it wasn’t Daddy day care.

Jacobsen: Daddy Day Care is the one where he says, “It’s not a tumor.”

Rosner: Really? Because in Total Recall he pulls something out of his nose. some kind of. anyway. I am just going to say that’s now how to remember. artificial remembering works. Where. for the past six weeks or so I have been tweeting. on Twitter I have been tweeting exerts from my memoir and trying to remember more stuff.

My guess is that. or artificial memory to most efficiently remember for you when your brain starts to go in the future. won’t be just one quick scan of the architecture of your brain, and what neurons connect to what other neurons. I am guessing that. it will have to ride with you. be a part of your brain for a long time and. witness a lot of your remembering over a period of months or ideally years. If you don’t actively remember something, that would be harder to find structurally via some short-term scan.

We have been talking about how memory is constructivist. and that the brain might be constructivist, that it is not. it may not. memories may be encoded in. not just individual neurons but in networks of neurons, that can also encode lots of other memories depending on. which pattern they are part of.

Memories might be encoded in patterns of neurons firing. You do not get a good idea of the pattern unless you get the neurons to fire to actually have that memory. So I am thinking in the future when you get artificial memory. you will get modules that will become part of your brain over time, learn how your brain works, it will take months and years.

Then there will probably be exercises, prompts in recovering memory; making you recall stuff like. Try to recall the year. What happened to you in 1982, you will be prompted and given images from 1982, at the memory parlor or at home when you are trying memory exercises. you will be given prompts about who is your third-grade teacher?

Your friends? Everything will be designed to actively get you to remember stuff. Because I believe those memories will be a lot clearer for the artificial memory to recover than some structural scan that just tries to map the dendritic connections in your brain. And that’s it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 367 – Mitigating Risk (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/06/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I want to take it a little bit deeper with that. If F. Scott Fitzgerald is stating that the trademark of a first-rate mind is one that can hold two ideas that are different simultaneously, then the assumption is that a decision has not been made.

So, that comes from that is the ability to be thoughtful, to deliberate, to reason in general.

Rick Rosner: You could boil it down to your unresolved consideration; you are undecided about some issue at hand, which some people have to decide immediately because it undermines something in their mind at the moment that is previously held.

It’s hard to persuade them otherwise even with fresh evidence or any persuasive argument. Lance was yelling at me. This is what we do with our web series. He was yelling at me about something. What is the probability that Trump will be charged with collusion with Russia?

Jacobsen: Did you mention the survey?

Rosner: Maybe, 40%, if you are wrong, are you going to give me $1,000? There’s no wrong there. I’m not signing a proof of probability to it. It’s undetermined. He was giving me shit for saying that there’s not enough information yet.

I’d say that that in certain areas it’s not wrong to not decide what’s true or not because there’s not enough information to decide. There are different things to know or attempt to know about the world. In most everyday things that are critical, we gather enough information to make the state of everything that we’re trying to determine into the state of certainty.

With the standard example being the red traffic light, now, there might be situations where it doesn’t matter what state the light is in, a little town at 4:30 in the morning where you the air is clear, you can see for a mile in either direction along a straight road.

You don’t have to care about the state of the traffic light. But in a busy city, your safety depends on knowing the state of the light and reporting cross or not cross. You accumulate enough environmental cues including photons of certain wavelengths from the traffic lights.

The odds that you’re thinking about the state of the traffic light green or red are less than one in a trillion. If people do make mistakes, they get distracted; they forget where they are; they step into traffic, but somebody who’s paying attention will wait for the significance of a traffic light.

It’s not a question that will naturally ascertain the state of the light to near certainty. And most situations are like that, but given your experience of streets and sidewalks, your next step is likely along the street.

You’re likely to still be on the sidewalk or on the curb or taking one step into the street. You’re likely not to be stepping into a hole. It’s based on your experience. If you’re prudent, you’re not looking at your phone.

You’re looking at the state of your environment to have more certainty by visually inspecting what’s going around you. So, most everyday things that are critical are things that you can ascertain their state to near certainty.

Another thing, there are still everyday things, where you can’t ascertain the state: Does a girl like me? It’s up in the air. You need to accumulate more information before whatever you would do if you thought that she likes you.

Then there’s stuff where it’s hard to accumulate information in a moment-to-moment fashion like Trump with various investigations and levels of collusion. It’s gonna take time. Or trying to figure out whether your team is going to win a game, you have to wait for the information.

So, there’s some uncertainty on questions of life or death. To think we can still screw up, because if you have an average lifetime, you have three billion critical decisions of the type including deciding on the weather light is green or red.

The odds of screwing up are one and a billion that maybe you will screw up three times. You might get in a wreck. I have gotten into wrecks quite recently. I got in a wreck in Albuquerque. The Sun was on my face. I didn’t even see a traffic light. I rolled through to what turned out to be a red.

So, I didn’t have enough information. I was assuming that there wasn’t a light there. I bounced off of my car, smashed head-on into it, into another car. That was all my fault. I didn’t gather enough information.

Jacobsen: Those were abrupt. So, depending on the channel of information, the context, I mean, which we’ve carved out of overtime. We’ve carved our environment. We’ve carved each other for selection up to latest various traits.

That we have sensory organs, cognitive capacities. Things like this. We’ve honed ourselves. So, we’re high fidelity within a relatively broad spectrum of environmental possibilities. So, whether that’s something relatively abstract like games or math to the things that are mundane, but pretty concrete, including knowing whether to cross the street if they’re showing a good to go and walk sign or not.

Because we have a lot of visual information, we’re getting a lot of photons to get an image. So, it’s relatively high fidelity barring some visual impairment. Then, that makes me think, what does this mean for contexts in which there are clear deficits?

So, the person who doesn’t have any social skills. They have the same cognitive capacities and sensory organs. So, they can see things they can understand; they can see. But they can’t, where they can see things and can have a conceptualization of things, but they don’t have that immediate understanding of what goes on in a social situation.

I mean, what they do in a social situation is completely inappropriate.

Rosner: You are talking about people with social deficits often. In the past century, from most people being looked at as awkward or bad cases, to people being looked at as people with specific ranges of deficits, that have a particular ideology.

That these deficits can be addressed in various ways via therapy or protecting those people, but since we value the lives of other humans. Aspergers isn’t particularly dangerous. It can in a lot of instances lead to people who want to be socially successful and are Asperger.

You’re going to have frustration. Unless, once they’re lucky, or unless they get training or learn to train themselves myopically through life-and-death deficits, we generally note those people and take measures to protect them.

Jacobsen: I mean, historically, those people would probably be weeded out or would have some use in a specific ritualistic sense, right?

Rosner: I mean, as somebody who grew up in the 70s, my metric for social success was whether I could get a girlfriend or whether somebody could get a girl. There is probably a number of people on the autism spectrum – higher than ever before.

Maybe partially because of environmental or cultural factors, maybe partially because we are able to identify people better than ever before, people get tossed into it because there are funds available to address these problems.

But these problems, some people would argue, are not problems. I’m arguing from a point of view that some people are perfectly happy to be on the spectrum and have the altered behavior and perception and thought that goes along with it.

There are all these people who are socially awkward and thus less socially successful. And that’s something you probably have in all animals.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 366 – Mitigating Risk

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/06/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We share the hope for the hollowing out of the more harmful aspects of religion. Many religious individuals share this concern as well. In common, decent people, it is a common desire to see religion cause less harm.

Rick Rosner: I expressed hope that in the future that there will be a hollowing out of some of the more pernicious aspects of religion as technological points. As technology explains more and more of the world and takes over more and more of the functions that religion has prompted, religion traditionally promises people.

But then I had a second thought which is that, since our thoughts are created and stored in our brain and the mind is the source of the reacting to the environment with memories and all that, and various stimuli are the contents of our awareness, the heart of our mind’s construction from moment to moment.

It means that at some moments you could believe in religion, in other moments you can believe wholeheartedly in science. And you can hold both those things in your head with difficulty simultaneously, but not with that much difficulty simultaneously.

And we don’t have enough information and awareness; we don’t have an infinite amount of information in our awareness at any given time. So, we don’t have infinite resistance to believing something that may go against other beliefs we have.

So, people may continue to be religious if in the future, even as they’re more and more tech and are persuaded by the efficacy of technology, as long as religion still satisfies emotional or cultural needs, it would be hard to eradicate it.

There is no need to eradicate it unless religion, religious beliefs, are messing up the world. I’ve always liked this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind, at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That runs back to Aristotle.

Rosner: Even if…I never read Aristotle.

Jacobsen: He said, “The mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain the thought without accepting it.”

Rosner: I mean that’s a good quote too.

Jacobsen: I mean the basic assumption behind that quote is you already have another thought in mind.

Rosner: So, while I don’t have that much beyond that, that’s more like half a thought.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 365 – Rosner Summer Camp

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/06/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How was the summer camp for you? For some, that is a common experience.

Rick Rosner: Ok so, after finishing the few miserable weeks of summer camp, I decided that I will no longer allow people to bully me. Only the ones that were quality bullies were allowed to bully me.

That was around 43 years ago and fast forward now when I’m 57. I go to 5 different gyms a day and do 150 sets a day. With around 5% fat in my body, I have around 97% of the strength of my age and height.

Since January 1^st 1991, I haven’t missed a single day at the gym. I was attacked by some guy who hit me several times in my knee. He was trying to collapse my knee, and then went for my arm and tried to bit me.

His skin was left there as I was wondering and waiting if I needed to do something and react, and take the shot. I went from being the 14-year-old guy who was hoping to get a girlfriend with my knowledge, decency, smartness, and brains.

I was barely naked, dancing when this happened. For someone who was homophobic, this was a certain conflict. I knew this might cause a violent reaction. But I kept dancing almost naked in front of that guy.

So, back when I was 14-years-old, I haven’t started the transformation yet, but the idea was there. The initial idea was given to me by our gym teacher Max who slapped everybody’s face. He thought I was more than a pussy.

He thought I was a rich pussy because my step dad was the owner of some of the property that was downtown. Apartments without a lot of value, where some cheap people lived. One time at the school gym while we were playing basketball or something.

We were taking the tops off as we were supposed to put the jersey on. I yelled out loud to the gym coach asking, “Where are the blouses?”, realizing I had refer to the dresses that the girls were wearing at that time.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 364 – Punks in Cyberspace and the Real World

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/06/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why is the science fiction of going to Mars unlikely to become a reality as it is traditionally presented to us in the books and movies oriented with a science fiction perspective? No matter how brilliantly portrayed to us.

Rick Rosner: Alright so, what isn’t going to happen in science fiction in the real world, we’re not all going to Mars; people may colonize Mars. That’s a multi-century project to terraform Mars and not that many people are going to go leave on the trips to explore the terrain. Same with trips that are light-years away.

So, even if so, it will take 20, 30, 40 years. Even if they’re hauling ass, but in the time it takes to colonize Mars or to mount an expedition to Alpha Centauri, the Earth is going to be wildly transformed, which is as we were saying earlier not captured by much science fiction where that science fiction aims for a sense of scale and excitement.

Science fiction might be the genre that is most active in terms of having three short stories, where you’re going to explore a single idea or single feeling, So, it takes advantage of short form, but the future’s not short form and a lot of the things going on though amenable to short stories aren’t going to adequately capture the grand scale transformation of life in the next 200 years.

Cyberpunk, which started in the ‘80s flourished to the ‘90s has captured what life is starting to resemble now. And only now is a lot of this sensibility making it into movies or its part of our vocabulary. As I said, we don’t yet have a vocabulary of the dismantling of consciousness.

We have metaphors for it. Childhood’s End from the ‘50s by Arthur C. Clarke, I remember, but it presents the idea of the dismantling of humanity once it has reached a certain level of development and is no longer needed now that this next level has arisen.

There’s another story from the ‘50s; The Nine Billion Names of God, which the purpose of humanity is to come up with all possible different names of God and once we’ve done that we wake out of existence.

Nobody that I’ve seen has addressed the waking out of normal human existence or that long state into weirdness that we’re going to run into starting 20, 30 years from now and going for the next few centuries.

I’m sure there are short stories that have tried to capture the narrative point of view of consciousness distributed across three or four or five people, where you can see that shared consciousness in a way that can play out narratively – as a bunch of different people’s voices playing out in a single awareness like the movie Inside Out, which has five characters each embodying a basic emotion inside one person’s head.

So, I assume over the next ten or twenty years that we’ll begin to develop a vocabulary of alternate forms of consciousness that will anticipate some of the changes that are coming, but not a lot of science fiction that is doing that right now. There you go.

Jacobsen: Cool. Okay.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 363 – Platonic Forms and Ideas, Memes and Archetypes

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about dissociation of memes defined insofar as they might be considered in the context of Platonic Forms and Ideas?

Rick Rosner: All right so, Platonic Ideas and Forms are the idea that there are in-built structures in reality itself. The Forms exist kinda in a space, an abstract space, beyond everyday experience. They exist within that space because of their perfection.

You have the Platonic solids, which are geometrically perfect. It’s why it is composed of 4 perfect prime equilateral triangles along with 6 edges of equal length and a cube is 6 perfect sides, along 12 edges of equal length, and so on.

They’re perfect forms, the Ideas (or Forms). Numbers are Platonic in their simplicity and unity. The “2” is a much more Platonic number that “2.7349,” but it has a unitary existence and utility, expression.

I would argue that non-contradictory Gorms are more likely to exist in the world. That these are ridiculous examples. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is still on the air, close to twenty years after it first premiered; it is still broadcast in probably more than 80 countries, in more than 80 versions.

Because Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? isn’t a non-contradictory structure. One person trying to answer questions. The audience wants for that person to win; it’s a really simple structure. Once you get past all of the other game shows compared to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.

There were other shows that were annoying, which had the flavor of Big Brother meets a quiz show; where the players can band together to eliminate at the end of each round, it is supposed to be the person is supposed to be the weakest link in the Weakest Link.

It never turns out to be the weakest link. The person who’s worst at answering questions is never the one who’s eliminated. It’s always the person who’s best at answering questions, because that person is a threat to everybody else.

So, the show didn’t work. It was contradictory because the best people and people you wanted to root for always got kicked out. It always came down to two having to choose between the final players, who were always two or three dickheads who managed to survive by voting dickishly.

So, it was a contradictory show; a show where you want to root for the best people, but the best people never made it. That made it a harder show to watch. It’s not on the air anymore. It’s not in agreement with itself, and with the principles of what makes T.V. good and people wanting to cheer for the right people.

So, simple Forms agree with themselves and don’t contradict themselves, so are better able to survive in the world, you see simple ideas that are based on simple Forms, like unawareness or the idea of oneness as things. On everything that is a thing.

Or that one is the simplest number, expressing the number of things. Two things like that. You’ve got one thing. The idea that things exist in discrete numbers, counting numbers one, two, three, and four.

That’s a convenient and non-contradictory way of being in the world, but then there is one apple. It is not one and a half apples, sometimes, or 1.2 apples; it takes a special set of circumstances to not be able to determine a oneness of a single apple. So, you’re drunk, or the apple is seven hundred yards away and you can’t see if it’s one apple or a couple apples, but in most contexts a single apple is a single apple, in a straightforward way.

So, the idea of distinct, discrete quantities. If these quantities are consistent over time, all these are non-contradictory properties as opposed to a frickin apple That’s one apple some of the time and zero apple some of the time and 4 apples rarely, but still some of the time.

So, archetypes are simple Forms; archetypes, stereotypes, and memes are things that tend to have some durability in the world because they are simple. In the case of memes, they can be clever. They can be simple expressions of a more complicated thing, the way words are often.

So, they have handiness, when a word or a meme is expressed as a Form or describes a Form that is itself durable and in the world, because itself is non-contradictory. That utility makes things like archetypes and memes survive culturally.

Like a meme or a concept that says, “Jocks are so much smarter than people who are not,” because in sports you have to think about so many different situations. So, your thinking can get better. That, as a concept, nobody’s ever heard that concept.

That’s not an archetype. The archetype is dumb jocks, because jocks who are physically impressive, stereotypically, don’t have to be that smart because they get by on their physical beauty and fitness and perfection.

It’s jocks versus nerds throughout evolution. So, the idea that I have found when I first started to try to have a relationship. I was having a bad time in my first relationship. My first, super hardcore, big time relationship when I was like 22.

23, I didn’t know how to navigate this relationship. I would turn to my jock friends, who’ve been dating since junior high school, because they were popular in junior high school and had some insight to give me because they’ve been dating for eight years.

Whereas, I’d only been dating for a couple years. They’d had relationships and stuff, but the idea that jocks are full of wisdom is not an archetype or a meme. Because, the idea of a dumb jock is much more consistent with the dynamics of the world, the statistical tendencies of the social world.

The more frequently occurring version of the world where under evolution when traditions are stable; it’s the dumb, physically perfect organisms that are successful at reproducing. It’s all the flawed geeky organisms who are forced to have to come up with different strategies.

They are the only ones to rise to the occasion of reproducing when things are in flux and this requires perhaps more thinking or flexibility in behavior. Those under what you think of as traditional evolution: jocks are dumb and adapted, and geeks are smart.

When in situations where you are having to survive on the margins via developed cleverness, so I don’t believe that archetypes are embedded in our brain, via evolution; they arise culturally, because they reflect common occurrences or properties, ditto for memes.

But archetypes and memes exist within a realm of cultural evolution rather than biologically. So, you could probably, if you really searched, you could find exceptions to that. For the most part, you might find a population of crabs that have lives of weird behavior.

You don’t know why they do this thing, but then you study them for 2 years. You find out that it’s this behavior, this thing, they do with their claws, that looks ritualistic or perhaps even like a tick, or an O.C.D. thing in crabs.

It turns out to serve a function or at least historically served a function. It kinda got embedded in their thinking. I’d buy that that’s a fact that happened. But I don’t think it’s that kinda thing, a general thing.

In general, our brains are super flexible. They embrace cultural efficiencies as they’re exposed to them. As people, as we’re animals, and as we grow up. So, that’s enough of that.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 362 – Reinvention

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You were a fake high school student, and a stripper and bouncer. When?

Rick Rosner: Into my 20s, early 20s, from 20 to 26, I was a bouncer and a stripper. I went to college in my hometown half-assedly. I didn’t like a class, so I would quit going. So, I accumulated like a year’s worth of Fs. I get a lot of As too.

If I like the class, I would go to class because my expectations for myself are low. I had a lot of time to read and think. For decades now, I’ve had a theory of the universe; though; I’ve been thinking about maybe it will come to fruition.

Maybe, it doesn’t; but the fucking up gave me a certain amount of freedom, I went back to high school one last time before all my hair fell out at age 26, and I graduated at 27. I wanted a place to think about the universe. I wasn’t there to hit on girls.

And my last semester, I moved to New York City where my girlfriend for my last semester at the University of Colorado became my fake legal guardian; “my fake” because I made it all the way to graduation without getting caught.

I used a fake identity for a long time. So, MTV was casting for 18-year-olds to play a game, to be contestants on a game show they had in development. So, this was another chance to be 18 again. I thought that I might meet a lot of funny people.

I offered to work through them, and because of that I eventually became a writer. If I start up as a fact checker on the quiz show, then I became a writer and was a TV writer for the next 25 years and worked on twenty-five hundred hours of programming on all the major networks.

I was nominated for seven Writers Guild Awards and an Emmy. Eventually, I married my fake cousin because I was working in TV. We’ve managed to have a – knock on wood – nice life in LA. So, brutal levels of screwing up both, later on before I ever worked for ABC, I was a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.

They asked me a flawed question. When you’re asked a multiple-choice question, the answer should be among the choices they give you. It wasn’t there. So, I sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, which is something I couldn’t let go.

But now, I chose to sue them which wasted so many thousands of hours of me pursuing a ridiculous lawsuit. Not ridiculous because I was wrong, I wasn’t; they were wrong. Ridiculous because it’s a game show and because the legal system thinks it’s a freaking game show: get over it.

But every few years, I want to do something stupid and pointless to see how to do it and see how it works out. So, I’ve done…I fucked up a lot, but there’s something to be said for imperfection and screwing up if you look at the biographies of so-called ‘great people’; a lot of them were flawed sometimes at the personal level, sometimes at the relational level.

Some of them had substance problems. A few people, even mother Teresa, received a bunch of criticism for being a shady operator: nobody is perfect. I mean you can strive for perfection, but you shouldn’t savagely beat yourself up for falling short of perfection.

The possible inspiration in failures and screwing up, in taking weird detours. You’re a gifted kid; you’re young; obviously, by virtue of being kid, other people are in charge of a lot of your life. So, there aren’t that many ways to go off the rails.

The way parents are now – helicopter type parents; you won’t be allowed to go off the rails and it’s relatively easy to be on a course of perfection with a highly scheduled course that includes carefully chosen extracurricular activities, prep for AP, for SAT, for ACT.

Among the high achievers, at the school everything is regimented, it’s easy to have a life that is so regimented that it feels as if you are on some close to perfect path to where you want to go. Then if something happens to wreck that perfection, it can bump you.

But nobody gets through even early life perfectly. The perfection you get from having a highly helicopter, helped out, regimented, academic and extracurricular career, and life offers the illusion of perfection or the illusion that perfection is attainable.

Because thanks to all the structure you’re given and your own high levels of motivation, you feel like you can pull it off, but nobody makes it through any significant chunk of life without failure. You’re gonna fail at some point.

It’s how you deal with failure that is the test of a person. But you could even fail at failure, I did plenty of that too; I like compounded right. I did one stupid thing and that I did another stupid thing on top.

You can even argue – which I have in a YouTube series, where I as the political liberal argue with a political conservative my vision of – America allows for failure with the social safety net, the tolerance of America.

They offer for difference and reinventing yourself, allows for people to fail and to get back up and with a little help to take another shot at building a life.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 361 – Ungentlemanly Ill-Wishing

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, Trump had a series of unfortunate events in 2017. Can you expound on those as far as you see them?

Rick Rosner: A little bit. He had a particularly terrible healthcare effort. It was super unpopular. Only 17% of Americans approve of senate’s efforts to replace healthcare, mostly because it was a massive tax cut for wealthy people and for insurance companies a total of almost around 100 million dollars.

Until healthcare was done, they couldn’t get going. They try to do the tax reform. Trump’s efforts to do anything is clownish and, obviously, not favoring the people who voted for him, which would be the big swathes of people who voted for him.

These conservative heartland people who are struggling. He got caught with backed up photos of Time Magazine hanging in front of his golf club, calling him “Man of the Year” or something like that. That never happened.

Yet, he gets support from people who voted for him and that support hasn’t significantly eroded. I read an essay a couple of days ago that says the people who did vote for him have been conditioned to not be able to have their minds changed by any evidence and that the best we can do is to try to make sure they don’t have political power in the future.

As opposed what other people said soon after the election, which is that we must reach out to them and understand them and try to persuade them, or recently people are saying they are unpersuadable, which seems based on the last six months.

It seems reasonable. Some have these particularly good insights, but other people may not have except for the small optimism that Nate Silver provides. He says that Trump seems to be losing overall support approval at the rate of about 1% per month, which after another several months would put us in the middle of the 2018 elections.

His approval may be in the twenties, which has been disastrous for the four presidents who had approval in the twenties. Every day, I check out the daily gallop poll results because they have the most immediate feedback about how people feel about what he has been up to.

Jacobsen: What’s going on with his vice president, Pence? He seems to be quiet.

Rosner: Well, Pence is a quiet guy. He’s not a flamboyant guy. He quietly goes about his business; however, he managed to be as implicated in at least knowing how he is tolerating cabinet members who were compromised by Russia.

So, he made the Russia thing and comes up with conclusive evidence that the Trump Administration was acting unethically. He may be as treasonous or whatever; he may be implicated also.

I’m trying to come up with some fresh thing to say about this whole mess. A guy came up to me at the gym. Nobody is talking about this publicly, but I have this feeling that this sentiment is out there. A guy came up to me at the gym, a conservative guy, a fairly conservative guy especially for L.A, ex-military, and he said, “I wish Trump would die.”

People don’t come up to each other and say that stuff generally, but I get the feeling that given that Trump is proving to be increasingly terrible and that there seems to be no way to hold him to account because the Republicans, while deploring some of the things he does, are pretty terrible themselves and don’t seem to be earnestly committed to holding him responsible for anything.

That this is a thought that’s maybe running through the heads of many millions of Americans. Not that this wish is coupled with any desire to act, but people are sad that he seems to be undissolvable from office.

There’s a tradition of not wishing the president ill out loud. For one thing, you don’t know what the comment might get you. You could have the secret service or FBI reach out to you to see if you are threatening the president.

That most people are aware of that being a possibility if you wish the president ill. Two, it seems un-American or ungentlemanly to wish the president dead. Nevertheless, a lot of people wish that he would disappear.

People don’t talk about it because it seems scary and bad manners to wish ill on anyone. I guess that’s it.

Jacobsen: Ok.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 360 – Lies, Damned Lies, and Fallout

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I mentioned the Satanic Temple and Lucien Greaves and poor journalistic practices, especially from Fox News. The Arizona chapter has specifically mentioned this to me in an interview. What was your experience? Let’s lay it out.

Rick Rosner: Let’s be clear here, I don’t have anything to do with any Satanic temple. You mentioned them in the context that you interviewed some people who are leaders of this temple, who have had gripes about the shoddiness of Fox News.

Jacobsen: They have been treated poorly.

Rosner: Well, they were not. Fox News didn’t apply ethical journalism to them.

Jacobsen: They didn’t apply journalism to them.

Rosner: Fox News is well known for conservatives calling everything fake news. If you examine various news outlets according to objective standards that have been applied to journalism, since journalism has been around, Fox News generally does the worst, they are the sleaziest, the most manipulative, the most exploitative of their viewers.

A few years ago, I was asked to give an arm of Fox News an interview. I thought, “How bad can they be?” At the time, it wasn’t a political type interview. It was a human-interest type interview because I am a semi-eccentric guy with the second highest IQ in the world.

They wanted to talk to me about my IQ. How bad could it be? Fox News had the idea that they could do a daily paper, newspaper type thing, that people would get on their tablets, their iPads, and whatever else.

People’s little computers. The Huffington Post is designed and came into its own. People prefer laptops and PCs. Fox News decided, “We can do daily paper, daily web paper for people’s smaller devices, for phones and for tablets. “

Obviously, they wanted it to be young and hip. I assumed they wanted to talk to me. This recorder was 23 or 24. That didn’t matter to me. She asked for the interview and I said, “That’s okay. That’s fine. I will give you an interview. However, you absolutely cannot. You must promise not to say who I work for.”

Which is a late night show I was writing for, because I knew from getting into trouble in the past for talking to reporters, my show did not want any press coverage of me on a personal level being associated with the show for various reasons.

Among them, I am not speaking for the show because the show has its message. It is a late-night show. Its message is: “We are funny ass show, good guests, great host. You should watch the show.”

I mean it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that’s the message and that the story that says look at this weirdo over here who writes for the show dilutes that message. The people who work on the show want a coherent message that doesn’t get messed up by some asshole who works on the show, whatever their personal weirdness.

So, I said, “Promise not to say whom I work for.” She said, “Okay I promise.” I did the interview, we talked for an hour or two across a couple of days, got some stuff on video. Then a few days go by, it takes a while to write one of these things up.

She is working on it, she calls me to let me know, “We have to let you know that we are going to say in the story who you write for.” I said, “You can’t, you promised not to, or I wouldn’t have given you the interview.”

She says, “Well, we are, because, anyone can go online and Google you and anyone can see, a single Google search what show you work for.” I say, “That doesn’t matter. I will get in big trouble. You promised that you wouldn’t say what show I worked for.” She says, “Yeah, but we are going to do it.” I go, “You can’t.”

She goes, “Well let me talk to my editor.” The editor: there are e-mails, phone calls, this goes on for about two weeks. I insist, they say, “Well, anybody can figure it out.” I say, “That doesn’t matter; it won’t matter to my bosses. It will matter that I consented to an interview in which it said where I work. This is a rule that I can’t violate, a work rule that I can’t break.”

And they say, “Well that doesn’t matter because…” We go back and forth. I plead. I get pissed. They get pissed back at me. After about two weeks of arguing they say, “Fine, we won’t.” But they were pissed, I was pissed too because they were politely wanting to break their promise.

Turned out that after she was done interviewing me. It seemed she was an asshole because you consent to an interview to set some ground rules. Now, those ground rules may be violated by assholes, but you can set them and expect them to be followed.

You can be super pissed if they are not. Even though given the history of journalism people, they agreed not to fuck me over regarding that.

At one point she asks, “Well, how do you get any sleep if you are up all night working on IQ tests?” Part of the interview was taking a bunch of IQ tests. A lot of these IQ tests take many, many hours to do a good job on. I said, “When you look at it, when you average it out, when I am working on a test, I probably don’t spend more than 45 minutes a day on them. It doesn’t occupy all of my waking hours.”

I thought it was a good answer. She asked how did I get any sleep. Well, because I don’t spend all my time on it, then the next day or later she asks the question again, “How do you get any sleep?” I said, “I already answered the question.”

I stupidly passively-aggressively and flippantly answer, “I don’t spend that much time on IQ tests. To be honest, I probably spend more time looking at porn than I do on IQ tests.”

I was let go from my job after that interview. I can’t say specifically why I was let go. However, it sure as shit didn’t help. So, the article comes out; they kept their word after two weeks of me insisting they keep their word.

However, when it came out. The headline I don’t know what it was, but the sub-headline was something you can look it, it is probably still somewhere online, ‘Man with world’s second highest IQ is addicted to porn.’ It was brutal.

Speaker one: How did you feel when you read that?

Rosner: I was super upset because I am not addicted to porn. I don’t look at porn any more than the average person. If we had to do percentiles of porn viewing, I don’t know, probably 30 or 40 or more percent of American men with access to a computer look at more porn than I do.

Completely average in terms of my porn, not proud that I look at porn, but one of over 100 million men look at porn from time to time. And it’s not that I am some sex fiend. I am a sexual person. For much of my youth, I did things to get a girlfriend.

However, now I am in my 50s, I take a testosterone blocker for my prostate, so my hair doesn’t fall out. That may to some extent knock down my libido. I am not I am this crazy sex, Anthony Wiener esp., super-duper masturbator.

I’ve masturbated a lot; so have a lot of people, most people. So, this comes out. Within a day, I don’t know, hours; I don’t remember. An article comes out on another website based on the article that deals with interesting things going on in the world of TV.

That article says, “Late night writer is addicted to porn.” That article names the show I work for. At that point, a couple of days I am in big trouble at work.

Jacobsen: How so?

Rosner: My family is not happy with me. They understand that I got fucked over, but it’s a terrible thing; it’s a lie. They fucked me because I was so insistent that the reporter hold to her promise they found another way to fuck me.

There was yet another way that they fucked me. I maybe shouldn’t have talked about anything regarding my work. Among the things I said was that only about 4% of the jokes that I wrote made it to air.

That doesn’t mean that I am a terrible joke writer. It means a bunch of good writers are writing a bunch of jokes throughout the day which, gives the host the most jokes, the most quality jokes you can submit.

So, you got a bunch of skilled writers who get more skilled over time, and more productive over time as they get better and better at writing jokes, and eventually after a show is on for year, if you have a skilled staff; that staff will write many more jokes than ever make it to air.

That’s a good thing. The better stuff you can give to help the show; the more selective the show can be and the better the show will be. I say 4% or so. The reporter said 98% of what I write doesn’t make it on the air.

So not only did they cut my success rate in half, but it was sloppy reporting and perhaps malevolent reporting to cut my success rate in half. 4% to 2%. It felt they were trying to fuck me for being stubborn with them.

Maybe, I should have been warier because it was Fox and maybe Fox doesn’t give a shit about accuracy or decency. I couldn’t raise a stink about it because I was working for the show, and protesting that they had lied about me being addicted to porn would have led to more coverage. I felt that would have led to more irritation on the part of my employers.

So, I sucked it up and hoped it would go away. Eventually, it faded from page one of Google if you happen to Google my name, I don’t know how many pages deep you must go now. Probably page three or four, but, at the time, I can’t say what goes on.

However, at the time I had the greatest job of my life, a job I had for over ten years. Three months after that article came out I had no job. I haven’t had a job since. The only satisfaction I got is that the Fox News enterprise went out of business.

That’s a small satisfaction, a small solace. So, they lied about me, and they may have caused. I don’t know, they may have caused severe career and economic damage, professional damage.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 359 – Technological and Political Disruption

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Hong Kong, you are dealing with one people, one language for the most part: ethnically and linguistically unified. Different than most aspects in India. You have a tremendous number of languages that can prevent an ease of unification.

It needs to be a translation of all the information throughout all the structures, so it’s more difficult. And that can put a buffer on the success of India economically, technologically compared to China. It does seem to be showing in some of the statistics on growth rates in terms of G.D.P., for instance, or P.P.P. China looks like a more likely candidate than India now.

Rick Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: So, it seems reasonable.

Rosner: All that seems reasonable, but, at the same time, they have so many more people than we do that even some of their crappy cultural aspects leads to the waste of human capital they have a human capital waste.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: We need to continue to be the dominant technological country in the world. We need to maintain excellent colleges, universities; we need to continue to be a place where technical innovation is valued and where yahoos don’t pollute the culture, so nobody wants to live in America.

Jacobsen: Also, the big secret weapon in the United States is the genius passport, the H-1B.

Rosner: Yes, if that it goes away, then we shot ourselves on the balls. Which we could do, but then that leads to another question, which is: America’s political system had sixteen years of political hiccups.

You can take the twenty-first century in American politics from starting with Bill Clinton’s Oval Office blowjobs.

Jacobsen: That’s true.

Rosner: He gets blown. Al-Gore gets pissed off when the whole Clinton thing comes out. This is the way I understand it, which may not be entirely accurate. However, Gore is annoyed with Clinton for humiliating the office of the presidencies.

Doesn’t seem to sufficiently help Gore get elected; Gore loses election 2000. We get a new president and leave our VP in there eight years followed by Obama who is a decent confident guy, but perhaps too conciliatory.

So, we have eight years of Republicans fucking over everything he wants to do. We all settled and saw lessons of how you can fuck up government, which the Republicans don’t hesitate to do for eight years.

Now, we go four years of a unified Republican government, but they accomplished something because now they can take credit for everything. But it’s government by yahoos, a-holes. So, some people argue Democrats are infected with greedy corporations too, but that’s an argument that fucked things up badly.

Anyway, we may be looking at another few years of super bad government. So, the twenty-first century sucks for America politics. We’re looking at twenty solid years, twenty. Two thousand and one 2001 through 2021 of bad politics.

You can imagine getting a whole lot better for a while after that. Now, that may or may not screw up America forever. Our democracy is durable. We’ve been through terrible periods, so it’s an open question as to whether Democracy formally met its match in terms of people manipulated by media and the rise of the empowerment of yahoos.

So, we don’t know whether America is screwed for good or whether we will come out of it, or whether the bias wrecked America. We could have permanently; there’s a possibility we could have permanently fucked up politics yet still be a free country for technology if technology could still flourish.

Even though our political leaders are all jerks; so, that’s question one: Is America screwed forever, or screwed technologically? Question two is: Does it matter for the lives of Americans to see the future?

Because you look at other countries that at one time ruled the world. England, Spain, Rome/Italy, life in England or in Italy or anywhere in Europe is pretty good if everybody gets to fully participate in the technological advances of the age.

Regardless of whether their country is the country; so, the US could screw itself up and become a once-great country and American citizens could still enjoy 98% of the fruits of technological advancement minus a certain amount of national pride because now China is the country.

It could be that all the great entertainment is coming from along some region that stretches from Shanghai-Hong Kong, if that’s even geographically reasonable, or the US entertainment industry moves to Vancouver because global warming has made Vancouver nice.

So, the US loses its coolness and is now. America becomes still a cool place, but not the coolest. Does that matter? Not to any great extent; unless, we become a religious dictatorship along the lines of The Handmaid’s Tale. Or Cory Doctorow’s Rapture of the Nerds.

Regardless, the future is going to be creepy. Humans plus technology into the future. The people at the forefront of that – the two or three or four billion citizens of the most advance countries – in the world will find their lives being radically changed.

First from generation to generation, one generation will live at a certain level of normalness plus weirdness, but they’ll be able to hold on to the values they always held for their entire lives. Go back to the twelfth centuries, so outside of war and conquest changes people’s social landscapes, both social belief and lifestyle landscapes change on a large average scale.

But the deal is if you were a shoemaker, it’s likely your dad was a shoemaker; your kids will be shoemakers; your dad was working on the cathedral. You might grow up to work on the cathedral. Your kid might grow up to work on the cathedral.

Now, you have lives where somebody was. There are a few people alive today. There is a very small percentage of people alive today who remember the transition from primarily horse and buggy transportation to powered transportation, who remember the coming of the phone, who remember the coming of radio T.V.

The Internet hits most people in the mid to late nines. Smartphones start coming out 2007. Now, we’re lousy with them. Our basis for behavior has been weirdified, but we still do pretty much what we’ve always done.

Most people, they’ve always talked on the phone. They’ve always watched TV, have always traveled via cars and subways, buses, airplanes. All of those things are in place for most of our lives. There are changes that don’t rip us apart lifestyle-wise.

So, each generation has its own way of being. We’re not the twelfth-century people. We are not going to stay to the same generation to the generation. We are the people where everything each generation has its way of the being.

Then the next few generations are going to see people have to super add-ons within their lives, not from generation to the new generation, but within people’s behaviors. These will be changes to our values too. Our values will adjust.

The generations who are among the first to have expected a lifespan of 150 years. Those people either are already born or will be born throughout the rest of the century. A lot of those people will have to acknowledge new partnership structures through childbearing.

People will access all sorts of genetic tweaks. These will be options, choices. People who can choose to have their thought, their ability to process information, severely automated or shared with other intelligence entities.

We’re going to have to make all sorts of choices, and so the weirdness is going to hammer us at a more and more frequent rate. So, in living, in those times with the disruption, those times will be at least based on tech as much as it is on the politics of the time.

The medium future will be a time of technological disruption. The technological disruption will be at least as significant as the political disruption. I guess we’ll stop there.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 358 – Manly Manning Up

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking about growing up in the 60s and 70s.

Rick Rosner: That came up. I have a stereotype view of who a good man might be. Someone who tries to be conscious in the world. That tries to be a conscious kind parent, partner, who tries to treat the earth kindly.

The person who is trying to make the world a better, kinder place. That wasn’t so much of a thing when I was growing up in some ways. If you make me keep talking, I am going to offer a bunch of examples.

Jacobsen: So that lays the ground.

Rosner: …Hold on, don’t get me wrong, to be clear, I have approved of striving through goodness in the world but if my background makes me cynical…Perhaps a little jealous because I didn’t get to grow up around…even I grew up in a time when bullying was thought to be good for you.

Jacobsen: What is the beginning of the story for you? One, you have a unique story, but one aspect of that hasn’t been fully explored. It is growing up in the Manly Era.

Rosner: Alright, I am so old that I was born in 1960. So, the leader of the country was one of the generals of the most bloodthirsty yet apparently justified conflicts in human history. We won World War Two with determination and industriousness and bravery, and thugness, and we thought of ourselves as justifiable in our evil as the people we were fighting.

But I am a Baby Boomer, I was among the generation that was hurt by people by men who went overseas and then slaughtered people in war. I have a dad. I have a stepdad. I have a father-in-law. None of them fought in World War Two, but they all either flew around, attended to, or guarded nuclear weapons during the Korean War era.

My dad was a navigator on a B36, which has the capacity to drop on H-Bomb on Russia. So, at the time I was born, violence and the thread of violence were very much open and into the fabric of America.

There was a relief that we can have everyday lives. That the world would end of the possibility of nuclear war but there is. There was our outcome. There was an undercurrent of threat and fear. There was no push at the time I was born, not that I would have been aware of it, because I was zero years old.

There wasn’t a push for the softening of men and then how they’re presented as visual jokes in movies, but they weren’t as pervasive a presence in American life.

Jacobsen: What were your parents and stepdad?

Rosner: My mom was growing up and went to a dance at the officer’s club at Kurland Air Force Base. She saw my dad in his uniform at some dance. My dad was fantastically handsome in the 1950s. He looked like a movie star.

He was pretty in high school, but full of zits. But he heals up and cleans up; my dad in a 1955, 1954, was a beautiful man and for her it was love at first sight. He is liked by her. My mom was cute. She was as beautiful for female as he was for a man.

She was cute and had a good head on her shoulders. My dad was okay with being into this marriage and stuff. The marriage lasted for five years. They get divorced when I was zero years old.

Jacobsen: How did that affect you?

Rosner: What if they had stayed married?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: I can’t imagine them ever…I mean they are completely mismatched.

Jacobsen: Okay.

Rosner: I mean, my mom would have been pissed off all the time at how my dad is. My dad is still a practicing CPA at age 86. He is one of the old-time brave CPAs, Mexican CPA, but he lacks any skills behind CPA.

His social skills are great when it comes to talking to clients about tax returns when it comes to maintaining a marriage or doing anything but taxes he is a little bit helpless.

Jacobsen: That seems like it comes from the times of manly culture and expectations.

Rosner: No, he did fine. He married three times. He is a fun guy and often easy going, drives sporty cars, makes a good living, so it was more a he was a little clueless about life skills and needed somebody who is going to be patient.

Somebody who is completely spacey. It made my mom crazy or annoyed. It eventually makes my stepmom annoyed; she was married to him for 15 years. She called him coma years. His third wife gets the hell out of it pretty quick too. It didn’t thoroughly last with either my mom or stepmom.

So, my mom moves where there is another guy who became my stepdad. She was in love with him before she met my dad. He waited for her to be done with this first marriage, so in 1962 she married my stepdad. My stepdad was a true man in the sense of the in the 1960s content.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 357 – Cycles in History: The Future of Kindness

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you wanted to talk about the future of kindness. What is our future of kindness, and what is your future of kindness?

Rick Rosner: Well, alright so, the present and past of kindness pretty much hinge on the Golden Rule. But you don’t even, for everyday acts of kindness, you don’t even need to apply the logic of the Golden Rule. We know what people want, from being around people forever, so kindness is generally, not being mean to people.

With possible exceptions of being mean to people where it would improve their lives to be mean to them, in an intervention, where being mean to people will stop them from hurting other people, then you can extend that to other creatures, within reason.

You can extend to the products made by people that you don’t want to wreck stuff, if it would make people feel bad, unnecessarily. Then there are the different levels of charity. There is the saying, “Feed a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish then you feed for a lifetime.”

So, it’s kinder to do something that leads to long-term benefits. Under Judaism, it is kinder to give to a charity then you don’t take credit for, maybe the people don’t even realize they are given charity, because that can be demoralizing. But basically, everything boils down to being nice to people.

The mid-future, we will have the dilemmas of who has feelings as AI proliferates and we merge with AI. Also, the problems of maintaining a sense of proportion, maybe purposefully losing a sense of proportion because say 80 years in the future there are some augmented humans who are 50 times smarter and more perceptive than natural humans.

Under that system, somebody could argue that those are the people that deserve all our considerations because they are feeling things much more intensely with all their added cognitive power. You want to maintain some lack of proportion where the smartest beings don’t get all the kindness.

That we don’t want to forget where we came from and where many humans will still be. The same way it is dopey to be cruel to animals because they are dumber than we are. Also, a part of kindness will be figuring out the setups for happiness, AIs or humans merged with AIs trying to fulfill those set-ups within reason.

And trying to figure out those set-ups themselves are reasonable, it still all boils down to being nice to thinking beings, but it will be tougher to sort out what thinking beings are, what they want, whether it’s best that they want those things, so you have a robotic assistant that has been programmed to appear to be conscious with feelings and drives, but is basically not.

It is simulating that stuff because maybe it is an easier problem in hardware and programming. But maybe, that thing would be more effective with feelings, and maybe there is an argument to be made for sophisticated pieces of machinery that simulate feelings, to have actual feelings.

I don’t know what that argument would be, why you would be arguing to turn an inanimate object into a thinking being with all the potential suffering and risks that might entail, and that doesn’t seem necessarily like a great move.

On the other hand, if you have a thing that is on the verge of thinking, but it exists in an equivalent brain damaged world because all the half-assed-ness that went into its construction, maybe, it would be a mitzvah to make it fully conscious.

There are going to be all sorts of arguments around who deserves kindness, consideration, legal rights, financial resources, and it all boils back down to having good models of what’s happening in the brains or information processors of these various things.

My conservative buddy Lance: that’s the thing people are resistant to because it is tough.

My buddy Lance last night went back to the black box argument saying he is not interested in if people have racist thoughts. Because I was arguing that everybody is racist to a certain extent, according to the definition of racism, basically making judgments based on people’s appearances and what you know about them, whether you act on those judgments or discriminate.

That’s one form of racism. It is making judgments. A different definition of racism is to be mean, be bad to people based on race. Lance was throwing out the first definition altogether, might as well disregard it, because you can’t tell what people are thinking, the brain is a black box.

So, even 80 years after behaviorism, some people will resort to black box arguments. And there will be different degrees of black-box-ism in the future when people try to make things easy for themselves, by saying we can’t know what is going on inside the heads of various entities.

That’s in my mind a bullshit excuse. The end.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 356 – On the Nurturance of Talent by Oneself

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You mentioned in prior sessions about coming to grips with the world, as you are very different. What about the youth that are gifted and talented and needing moderately to even highly different than the norm assistance?

Rick Rosner: Alright, so let’s start off with this. When I was a kid, I had to walk five miles through the snow to get to school. It was harder for nerds when I was a young nerd than it is now. Nerds are more a part of our culture.

Half of the world’s billionaires made their billions from computer coding and social media apps. It’s a nerdier world now and Zuckerberg and various other billionaires whose names I forget. They got their hot wives and girlfriends, and make millions.

I know one dickhead that spends a million bucks on his wedding in the forest to some smoking hot girl. So, if you are a nerd billionaire, you don’t have to come to grips with the world; the world must come to grip with you.

However, most gifted and talented are not going to become billionaires. There comes a point. You got to go back into my childhood, which included a bunch of uplifting sleazy movies that fills nerds with the idea that even though the hot girl usually goes out with jocks, one special hot girl will eventually see your kindness, your specialness, your intelligence and will decide to go against pride and be your girlfriend.

That’s horse shit. At some point, you do need to take a hard look at depending on what you want. The 2016 election brought out a lot of Gamergate, angry, nerdy, sexist, racist, controlling, socially isolated – except for saying shitty stuff on social media – guys whose best form of recreation and business is making people upset.

There are a lot of angry guys out there who have given up on social success in terms of getting a girlfriend and their economic success in terms of getting a decent job and decided to troll, not to be stereotyping, but there probably is a little stereotype in play.

So, you can live that, especially now that we live in a paradise of pornography. This thing of not being able to get laid, can be outsourced to the one billion pornographic websites. But, look at yourself and decide; do you want to be the angry anti-social, awkward person for the rest of your life?

If not, how long do you want to be that person? Is there anything you want to do about it? Anything you can do to be less at odds with the world, knowing full well that the world is full of bullshit. I am the oldest sibling in my various families. My parents got divorced; my step parents got remarried, divorced, all that…I’ve had, at various times, four siblings.

Nobody had the same two parents. I was the oldest of all of us. I could have used an older sibling to explain how things work, even though I thought sports were boring and stupid. I was irredeemably terrible at sports.

I would take a shot at doing sports because sports was the ticket to social acceptability, when I was little in junior high and high school. And I’m sure the whole regimen of high school has decayed somewhat, but not completely.

So, it’s not jocks versus nerds as much as it used to be, but it’s still cruel people versus awkward people. You must decide which aspect of yourself you absolutely must hold on to and which aspect of yourself you will try to modify to fit in better.

And when I was a kid in 1976, I suddenly became pulled to lift weights. Now, there is less emphasis on looking like a jock. You need to still be the kid who has channeled his desires to get laid into a lifting weight looking jock to some degree, tattoos around his biceps.

I feel Rambo is no longer a thing, and there are more ways to talk to people without directly talking to them. When I was in my twenties, the way you tried to get laid or at least make out with somebody is to go to a bar or disco dance, buy drinks and try to talk to people over the loudness of the music.

Now, you could, much more reasonably and easily, attempt to meet people via dating sites and other sites instead of getting laid by disco dancing; you get laid by typing.

Jacobsen: What about for the opposite case? What about a woman’s case who is different intellectually from her peers, against the norm?

Rosner: Okay, well, so, the situation is obviously different and the way it’s presented. I’m not a woman, so I can’t tell you directly. I will deal with what is presented is guys not being able to get a girlfriend.

Awkward guys, and then women of all types could meet with semi-awkward types, girlfriends and girls end up looking at boys with terrible guys…So, I mean, women’s problems are generally to find a guy who is not a shit head and protecting yourself from shit heads.

So, that you are still interested in finding other guys, and avoiding having terrible experiences with shitty guys. Again, this is a very exclusive talk because, straight guy talk, straight woman talk, because, of course, the situation: there are equivalent or similar situations for gay people and trans people.

The specific assumption is that in becoming a socially successful or socially fluid person is that you want to find somebody who you can stand being with and for that person to want to be with you. And there are plenty of people for which that doesn’t apply to.

There are temporarily asexual people; people who want to put of that stuff until they have accomplished their life goals. There are people who have had enough relationships to know that it’s not that much of a priority for them, but for a lot of people regardless of gender or orientation, a successful relationship is still the benchmark of being able to get by in society.

It’s what you want out of going into the world and meeting people and every gender and orientation has stereotypic, or statistically felt more frequent, pitfalls. Most of which we are not qualified to talk about now.

Women need – I’m talking out of my ass, but women need armor to negotiate the world of assholes until they can find somebody who is not an asshole. That’s what they want. Guys must negotiate their own awkwardness and rejection until they find somebody who wants to be with them. Gay guys, I don’t know.

If you are a hot gay guy, it’s not that your life is perfect. I’m sure that I am not qualified to talk about it. Relative to other genders and orientations, there’s a plentitude, a relative plentitude, of somewhat less than painful looking up for gay guys, as you say, “on average,” but who knows.

However, even if that’s true, you still must sort out what you want if what you are getting is what you want, but everything boils down to how much effort will it take to negotiate this is society, what are the easiest ways to become adept at negotiating society and how much effort are you willing to spend.

And, the internet is extremely, I think, helpful for giving you a rough outline as to some of the principles to getting by in society, of some pickup artist who is sleazy. At the same time, take a gingerly poke at it online to see if there are any principles that aren’t horribly scummy tools that can help you be less awkward when talking to the people that you want to make connections with: principle number one, become a person who merits the attention of other people.

To become an interesting, to become a good, person; not to become a peace corps worker or anything but to become your own best self. In high school, I was mostly terrible with girls and was resentful of that situation.

But looking back, I was a mess. It took a few years of messing with myself to become somebody who, maybe, merited the attention of people whose attention I wanted. Another principle is to learn how to go up to people and talk to people and if they reject you in one way or another, or if they don’t heartedly embrace you as their friend, to be able to walk away from that and still put yourself in social situations.

There are a bunch of principles like this which, you can also look at your circle of friends, if there are friends of yours who seem to fall into relationships easily, look at what they are doing. You don’t want to project desperation and neediness; people who are successful at meeting people, hanging out with them is a fun casual thing.

I know people who very quickly become very serious, glom on to somebody and that scares people away, but if you are somebody who seems to be fun to hang out with, then people will hang out with you.

And you don’t need to let people know how desperate you are to make connections. And, which leads to another thing; don’t be desperate to make connection. Find interest out in the world besides trying to fit in, that’s something more troubling now than desperation in the 70s, where the world is a more interesting place.

I keep saying that the 70s sucked relative to now, but that’s because that there is a lot of stuff to be interesting. Go out and pursue your interest, you may meet people via that. I mean, in the 70s, I went to a couple comic book/science fiction conventions, hoping to meet someone.

One of the five conventions, they were 92-95% guys; I was hoping to meet that somebody that belonged to the 5% of attendees who are female and then make some connection. And now, I don’t go to Comic Con. I’ve never been, but I assume it’s probably much less of a sausage fest if you go there.

You can see everything you are interested in and find other people who share the same interest. Also, my desperate in the 70s. My desperate friends and I did not know how to meet girls and did not even know if we would ever have a girlfriend.

The internet is a source of, “it gets better,” not for gay teens, but for any teens who are trying to get out into the world. It’s not a perfect source of information, but it’s a huge source information and you can go on it to yourself a reasonable view of the adult world you are moving into and your possible place in it.

And, there are more mentoring situations available. There were zero mentoring contexts when I was a kid. There are paid mentoring deals where you can find an organization including Johns Hopkins that has the institute for gifted youths or whatever they call it.

There is an institute for educational advancement; there are a bunch of organizations that are dedicated to gifted kids getting the resources that they need and, you know, most of the resources are to help kids succeed academically and professionally.

But the same people who can help you…who can mentor you academically and professionally, probably went through the same gifted kid traumas and situations that you are going through and they can help you, you know, negotiate in a non-academic, non-professional…they give you advice about not their field but about being gift in the world.

Jacobsen: There is always more, but we’ll stop there.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 355 – Listen Up! Perfectionism, Fucking Up, and College Admissions

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, perfectionism is a standard or classic trait of gifted and talented youth. You experienced that. What were your pivotal moments of perfectionism?

Rosner: I may have been more perfectionistic, but what I experience more than that were times I felt short of perfection and I fucked up. Beginning with at least first grade, where the teacher called in my parents, who have been told by my kindergarten teacher year before, that I was a genius based on an IQ test.

Because I could already read, which was unusual for that era. The first-grade teacher showed my parents an incomplete assignment that said, “If I were on Columbus’s ship, I would,” and that’s where I stopped because I realized I didn’t know crap about how it would be if I were a sailor with Columbus.

I was six years old. Maybe, I was perfectionistic, but I all of a sudden quit; I quit writing because I realized that nothing I wrote would be at all accurate because I have zero knowledge of what it was like to travel with Columbus.

But apparently at six years old, I was already underperforming and because my parents had left me with a scary old babysitter and had gone on a trip to New York for a week. My dad owned a dress store.

He goes to New York about five times a year to pick out clothing for the store because there was no internet yet. You had to do it in person and take a look at the clothing and once or twice a year my mom would go with him and when they came back from their trip I was turning in circles and chanting to God.

And that plus my screwing up in school earned me, I don’t know, nine months or a year with my personal psychiatrist. And, there was a pattern throughout my elementary career, which was a year of performing in school, and a year messing up.

In fourth grade, we found a dirty book on the playground or the teacher found a dirty book on the playground. It was missing its cover, but she didn’t realize it was dirty – so she brought it in and put it on her desk and we found it.

Then we spent much of that year or some of that year reading the dirty book and discovering how we get boners. It was also the year that we worked on being good at making fake farts. It was the year after a guy whose dad was a doctor told us how babies were made, so we were distracted by all that.

I don’t know that I screwed up that much, but apparently, it was enough that when I got a teacher who understood me, Ms. Jones, in fifth grade. Everybody was happy and I performed for her. She gave me – this was an era where special attention was not that big of a thing or even virtually non-existent – extra attention.

Everybody did the same work at the same pace. Ms. Jones was the rare teacher who got real work out of me because she gave me challenging work to do. I looked out because she moved from fifth to sixth grade the same year I did, so I get to have her for two years in a row.

I moved on to junior high school. I tried hard. All three years at junior high school I tried hard and did okay except for in PE class and French class where Ms. Davis, the French teacher, didn’t like you if you were popular.

Even if you’re only trying to be popular, I was far short of popular, but I wanted to be popular, and I wasn’t entirely serious in class, so she would give B’s and those were not good because I want straight A’s so I can more easily get into Harvard.

So, I would have gotten into Harvard. A student body president; my SAT scores were the highest in school; my grades were excellent; I was from Colorado, which made me geographically diverse. They didn’t call it that back then, but the deal was if you are from a state that didn’t send that many applicants, then your odds were good.

Back then, Harvard let in 20% of applicants compared to about 5% now, so given everything I had going for me I would have gotten in. I freaked out because I was still a virgin. I never had anything like a girlfriend. I wanted a girlfriend.

If I couldn’t get a girlfriend at my little school, then I was totally unable to get a girlfriend in Harvard where everyone was rich or a Kennedy or came from a prep school. I would be one more smart kid from a high school among everybody who has been the smartest kid in his or her high school.

I thought I would be lonely and miserable, so I decided to break into my school. This is still my senior year in high school when everything fell apart. I went from virtually all As to a bunch of Fs. I broke into my high school, stole my transcript and went back to high school.

That was the second senior year and I wanted to get a girlfriend. Because I had two families, parents got divorced when I was zero years old; each started a new family. I was going to switch families. I switched families. I went back to high school in a new town, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I didn’t get a girlfriend. I was no better at getting a girlfriend. My new non-nerd persona, which I modeled on (Vinnie Barbarino) the John Travolta character on Welcome Back Kotte; that lasted about 12 weeks.

Then I dropped out of high school and instead of going to Harvard, I went to the University of Colorado. My hometown school where I screwed up big time. I didn’t take CU seriously at all. I treated it as the cheapest place for me to live.

It was tuition plus room on board back in 1979 was 15 or 16 hundred dollars for the semester. That was all you could eat. At that time, I was eating seven or eight meals a day because I was trying to bulk-up, because that if I was big and muscley, I could get a girlfriend.

Alright, so, I had things in reverse, when the time I should have been big and muscley was in high school when I should have gone after football, but in college, everyone was trying to be smart at the time when I was trying to be Barbarino.

The perfectionism that drives and haunts a lot of gifted talented kids; it isn’t the end of the world if you fall short of perfection and there’re worst things in life than fucking up, especially at a fairly young age where it can lead to a new perspective.

Charles Darwin was a fuck up. He was wandering aimlessly through life. He didn’t want to be a pastor. He wasn’t great at school. Not sure whether his parents wanted him to be a doctor at one point, but anyway, nothing was for him, so they hooked him up with this ridiculous “do nothing” assignment for a position as a paid companion to a ship’s captain.

He got depressed on long sea voyages. Now, this was Fitzroy, the Captain of Beagle and Darwin was…his family paid for him to go on this five-year voyage and hang out with the captain, talking with him to be the ship’s naturalist, which he did a good job at.

Five-year journey around the world. He came up with a theory of evolution, so is one of the great thinkers of all of history. It’s a nice consequence in part because he had to give himself a different experiential background that most people of the time didn’t have or couldn’t experience.

Five years of seeing the entire world, seeing all these geological formations that convinced him the world was fantastically old. He saw all the speciation on this plot of this island and all because he was a fuck up who couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do.

Einstein has been presented as a fuck up. It’s part of his myth. When you look at his actual academic history, he was a good student. Leaving school, he had troubles with certain professors because he didn’t probably work that hard or paid that much attention, so he didn’t strike people as sufficiently smart.

I don’t know. Whatever they thought a young scientist should be like, he wasn’t. Mostly, it was the Jews that may have pissed off some people, but he did a little bit of fucking up, not as much as the myth would have it. He knocked up his girlfriend, later his wife out of wedlock.

They had a kid that they may have been so messed up that they may have left it in the orphanage or gave it up for adoption. Anyway, they had a disappearing kid. So, Einstein was a screw up in some way.

Newton wasn’t as much a screw up as the recipient of his mom screwing up and the horrible situation of the time. Newton’s dad died early. He was less than ten years old. Because when Newton was ten or so, his mom marries a new guy.

They didn’t have time for Newton in the house, so they gave him away to the local pastor or something. So, Newton got booted out of his house when he was ten and spent a few years living with an entirely different family until his family could take him back.

So, this probably didn’t do wonders for his disposition. He was notoriously a prick for his whole life. So, I don’t know; the point I’m trying to get at is that it feels good to perform in school and if you can do that it will get you all sorts of opportunities.

Or to perform in other areas, if you have landed a solid apprenticeship, say you are still in high school but you’re helping out in a lab someplace, all that stuff is awesome. But, falling short of perfection isn’t the worst thing in the world, you can see it even in what colleges look for.

My wife and I have been involved in college admissions for a while now. My wife works in the admissions office of a high school, so we see how it all works. Every year, we hear horror stories about how the kid with the perfect SAT scores, the grade point of like 4.7 on a 4 scale.

Even with the grades, extracurricular activities, and the high SAT scores from all the SAT classes, that kid doesn’t get into Stanford or Harvard because the admission rate is so low for selected colleges now that even with perfect credentials; you are not assured getting in.

The people try to come in with all sorts of hooks, traveling to impoverished countries to build houses or to help administer medical care. It’s getting into even mathematically, where it can make you look like you have canned experience.

It can be too designed to look good to admissions people. But, the deal is, nothing is going to give you a hundred percent chance of getting into a selected college. Unless, you succeeded at such a crazy thing, such as you’re basically a celebrity because of your achievement level.

You’re a nationally ranked athlete in addition to having excellent grades. That will get you in a selected school. Apparently, if you are a successful film actor, famous, that will get you in there along with excellent grades.

Or if your parents are going to give millions of bucks to the school, apparently like the Trumps…Apparently, his grades on tests weren’t that great, but his parents still donated. They are real estate moguls. They donated like 1.6 million (USD) to Harvard Medical School.

That helped him ease his way into Harvard. But short of that, all of the highest achieving students all over the world are applying to ten or twelve or more schools, a bunch of Ivies, Stanford, George Washington University, Bard, and so on, but our kid that went through this process and applied overseas to Oxford.

She applied to a zillion schools. You hear the stories. Stories of the kid who is perfect and doesn’t get into any of the Ivies. This is perhaps because, a couple reasons: one, it’s easier now to apply to a bunch of colleges because there are computer-based applications.

The selective school still requires an individualized application, but some of the less than highest, less than most selected, school are slightly less selective or slightly easier to apply to because of computer application.

That’s reason one so kids about twenty years ago will apply to two or three or four schools and that doesn’t happen with the high achieving kids. The ten thousand or fifteen thousand of those high achieving kids around the country each year.

Now, those kids don’t apply to 2 or 4 but up to ten or more schools. Some places keep track of how many schools have been applied to and then record for one year. A year or two ago some lunatic kid applied to forty-four schools.

And because people are applying to three or four or five times many more schools, each school gets five times as many application; instead of admitting 20% of applicants, they admit 5% of applicants.

And nobody can be sure of getting into any one school. The second reason is that since the time that I was in school and now; there has been a modification where everybody in America decided – parents across America – parenting became a burden.

When I was growing up, people liked kids, lived in the same house with the kid, did some parenting stuff with and for them, but nobody saw parenting as a job. The word didn’t even exist. You trusted your instinct as a person with kids and to get you and your kid through; you trusted the local schools, the public schools.

It’s getting roughly through the eighties, and increasingly till now; people began to take parenting seriously, which includes cherishing and nurturing the gifted. So, now, there are thousands of gifted kids who are appreciated and underserved by whatever their situation is.

But there are now tens of thousands of kids who are given special attention for being gifted and that means that those kids are given special treatment. If you are a gifted kid and if you are listening to this, now, everyone gets special attention and special prodding to take a zillion AP courses.

There is an appreciated and nurtured gifted kid who is likely going to apply to a gazillion colleges, highly selected colleges. There are, like a said, over ten thousand of these super student’s every year, but like the Ivies, most of the Ivies, only Cornell has a decent size.

Cornell now may admit three or four thousand students to each class. Look it up, but the Ivies; a Harvard, Princeton, Yale only admits about 1600 students a year. That means if you are one of the 10,000, you better have a hook in addition to fantastic grades or test scores.

With our kid, we went through the process. We could see, as the process went on, because, the college admissions process takes a year of solid processing – probably another close to a year of getting ready to do everything and by the end of it.

I have a rough sense where our kid was in terms of all the kids in the country. In terms of where her credentials ranked her roughly upon the high achievement kids, I could predict what school she would get into and what school she wouldn’t based on where I ranked her and the class size of each school.

Which, it was good to have an understanding so that there was completely freaking out because I was ninety-nine point nine something percent certain that she would get into at least George Washington.

Because George Washington has a big class size, I was confident; and George Washington doesn’t necessarily attract one hundred percent, unlike the Ivies. It doesn’t necessarily attract a hundred percent of the top students in the country.

So, I could see by doing the math that she would get in there and some other schools. So, I was probably the least freaked out member of your immediate family during that period. But, to get back to the point, these annual crops of students who are trying to be as perfect as possible to survive the ridiculous current admissions don’t need to be perfect.

Perfection won’t save you unless it’s some weird hyper perfection which means you are among the top two dozen percent in the country in some field, like movies, apps, or Olympic gymnastics or anything.

You’re an Olympic level athlete and have perfect grades; you will probably get into a highly selected school, but short of that it’s not the worst thing to take a look at, not what you want to do professionally.

But also what you might want to experience in terms of going on a goofier adventure, growing up and going to high school in the seventies, it wasn’t a serious time. The whole country was going a little nuts; it was the disco era much of it.

We had Vietnam. We had Watergate. America had lost confidence in its institutions and plus we were in the middle of the sexual revolution. And, people, a little bit older than I was when I was in high school, were in the discos banging the hell out of each other, eventually causing the herpes epidemic.

You went to bars if you were in your twenties. A lot of people went to bars, pick each other up, bang each other, gave each other herpes; yes, so, by the late seventies, there was a herpes epidemic, by the early eighties the AIDS crisis had started.

The people didn’t understand what was going on with that, but it was starting to be understood that during the seventies before herpes/AIDS, the idea was that humanity had finally broken free of ultimate strengths.

That everybody was going to be having as much sex as they wanted now in the new modern world and also an assumption that went with that was that everybody was into sex and that it was natural that everybody was having a lot of sex.

Then gays came along and Nancy Reagan started people to say, “No”; the children of hippies of the sixties generation. A lot of them were not of high school age and were growing up in families where the parents were still fuck ups.

They never entirely recovered from being hippies or you didn’t have to be a hippie to have a hard time recovering from the 60s and the 70s. So, you had a conservative wave of young people who were who were not as interesting as seventies people in going nuts.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 354 – The Informatonial Translation Problem

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking off tape about hardware and software and information and if you have a potentially infinite set of hardware and a hardware implies certain infinities in information.

Rick Rosner: I read this book that says that not only are your thoughts not localized, but even when they’re distributed across the brain they are what the author, Lisa Barrett, says is different every time. Every time you’re sad; your sadness lights up a slightly different set of neurons, but they average out to be an average sad.

But anyway, what she and neuroscience are finding out is that thoughts are hard to pin down, to pin it up to areas of the little neighborhoods of the brain, we would like to think of a better model of where the information in thoughts is.

If what we’re saying about information space is right, it’s obviously in the information space, but pinning it down may be tougher. We’ve talked about the ‘how’ of an information space, how it might work; we’ve never talked about it in terms of specifics such as a ‘why’ for the universe. Why should the universe be made from information?

Maybe, we’ve talked about that a little bit, but that should be further developed. I started to try to do that. And one reason is, let’s go from ourselves, where if we have a little information space based on the information that’s in our brain, which is with our brain being the hardware, then you got to ask: Why is the information existing in a space of its own separate from the hardware?

And why can’t the hardware be a part of that space? Why is there a division between the values held in the hardware and the hardware itself? Because the hardware exists as hardware plus it exists as a bunch of values that also exist within the hardware, the zeros and ones; the states of the various circuits in the chips.

As a first step there, the information that I’d hypothesize that we have in our awareness is information that will behave in certain ways independent but consistent, logically consistent, with what would have to transpire in the hardware.

But some future values of the hardware are not yet determined. But the information in an information space has to be sufficiently consistent and determinative that by following the rules of information in its own space it will follow the rules of that information as contained in the hardware which isn’t the best or clearest thought, but it’s the first thought.

So, that’ll have to be further messed with. But the deal is that if there are information spaces that information is internally defined to a certain extent to the point where it behaves according to its rules and the information existing as values in the hardware is similarly constrained.

And then the less constrained stuff, the open parts, the outcomes of various quantum interactions can be determined as the system moves into the future. So, you’ve got the determinant part that works according to the rules of information space or in the hardware and even then, you’ve got the open stuff which can be determined by the values that are input into the hardware which seems like a reasonable first step to the idea that the information when it’s sufficiently self-consistent has an existence according to the rules of information that allows it to have its own existence in its own space. Is that reasonable?

Jacobsen: In some serious ways, yes, and in some other trivial ways, no.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: There’s still the translation problem, which we identified some time ago. The translation problem is the one of precision because that’s off – a long way off, but ways to think about certain structures translating into those different sets of experiences, where a set of experiences can be labeled set sad, set happy, and so on, and within each variable there are micro changes and those micro changes are sufficiently similar to one another that you can categorize them as something as a dynamic set in themselves or labeled under emotions.

Rosner: That’s what Lisa Feldman Barrett indicates that there are states that the brain recognizes or that the mind recognizes as sadness but those states are variable; it’s not always the same sadness and so in an informational sense it’s always a little different and in a coding sense, a hardware sense it’s always a little different, but not vastly different.

That when you take real-time fast PET scans of the brain and you try to evoke certain states like emotions, the same parts light up but they don’t light up exactly the same from time to time to time.

Jacobsen: To me, it seems like the difference between microstructure and gross anatomy.

Rosner: Yes, that makes sense.

Jacobsen: You can see what is what, generally, with gross anatomy, you can’t with microstructure, but you can know more precisely what a particular thing is in decent levels of microstructure analysis.

Too much and it becomes useless, but at a certain level it becomes useful but at the macro level; the gross anatomy level, you can label structures such as the hippocampus for memory, cerebellum is for motor coordination…

Rosner: Yes, except every structure might contain a couple million or more neurons. The little subdivisions that might contain tens of millions of neurons. And then there’s the problem with if we’re arguing that the universe is an information space, that we’re seeing the information that the universe is made of in action, the universe follows precise rules of physics such as the distribution of matter.

It seems all the while orderly but also not pinned down. Everything orbits everything else that doesn’t seem to have crystallized precision. There needs to be a way to understand both: the order of the universe and the lack of precision, or what looks like looseness in the universe.

There needs to be a framework that accounts for both and also provides for some understanding of how hardware cannot intrude into a world of pure information. For instance, each of our minds have evolved over our entire lives; we’ve learned stuff about the world, forgotten stuff and we have structures – that our minds are highly ordered.

We know what we know for the most part, we can recall a lot of things, for instance, have you ever punched a duck?

Jacobsen: [Laughing.]

Rosner: You immediately know the answer somehow. You’ve examined whatever records exist in your memory about ducks and punching and you instantly can answer. Most people can instantly answer, “No,” which seems good informationally.

Have you ever kissed somebody for longer than five minutes? It is a little tougher but still answered almost immediately. It’s highly ordered and that order seems to come from lived experience with the brain being exposed to lived experience and having some way to, as that experience happens, file it away associationally, so it maintains a certain amount of integrity.

You don’t remember stuff that didn’t happen for the most part though that’s questionable, but with some degree of integrity and is highly retrievable. But there’s all this stuff that is highly retrievable; but that you don’t know at any given instant, so you could simulate a moment of awareness with a high degree of precision with the little bit of information that is in your awareness at a given time and somehow provide the illusion of the rest of this order – or artificially provide the order that exists from moment to moment because you’re able to work with this system of information that includes a bunch of stored information.

So, the natural system based on decades of life experience has all this information that adds a certain precision to your thoughts but you could fake that with much less information for a moment or two of thought as long as you give the brain the information that it needs to think those couple of moments of thoughts.

So, the hardware could provide a framework as long as that hardware isn’t perceived because of a lack of information like if you were simulating a couple moments of thoughts and then you quit and you let the system move on without supplying the missing information then the person thinking would either have his mind fall entirely apart because there was not enough supporting information or, and maybe both, for a few moments the person would realize that he or she knew nothing, had almost complete amnesia.

So, coming up with the rules of the existence of information space is based at least in part on the boundary between hardware and open propositions and determinative information within information space.

I’m hoping that’s a good way to set up a boundary; another way of saying it would be that quantum mechanics is famously indeterminate which freaked out Einstein and a lot of people that the universe should not be a clockwork completely determined to universe.

We might be able to say that where the universe is determined that’s due to the logical structure set up by the information and information space, where it’s open to take new values those values will be provided by information coming in from the hardware world.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 353 – Independent But Logically Consistent

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the blob?

Rick Rosner: At some point, once information processes, conscious information processes are decoupled from the human body. It can be easily moved around and merged with other minds or other forms of information processing.

There will probably be an extended period of controversy and struggle, eventual alliances, maybe a settling down after a century or two. The issue will be around how much you will allow your consciousness to be subsumed in some other structure.

There will be a matter of alliance of merging consciousness boundaries. So, your rights once you are merged with a large information processing entity. What are your rights if you to remove yourself from it in the future?

People will be able or the entity would be able to duplicate their consciousnesses, and will be able to extend a series of them out or venture out with your mind. You can send out a bunch of them and then re-join with them later.

There will be a bunch of issues about entities’ rights to join up with other entities in intimate information processing partnerships or alliances, or the rights to end those alliances. It will be, obviously, complicated.

Eventually, who knows, this is talking out of my butt, but at some point, as things settle down; there will be one or more Earth-spanning massive information processing entities, or as big as is practical – which will be pretty damn big..

Jacobsen: We called this a blob before, right? You took on that term.

Rick Rosner: The super blob, it could be something that extends for hundreds and thousands of miles across the earth’s surface or into the earth itself or circles the earth via orbiting stuff. One of the priorities will be special compactness; a solid sphere of computation is more efficient than a sheet of computation.

That sheet covering the earth surface because the ball of computation has a lower average distance upon its various component code, so it can compute faster. We will have vast structures; these structures would be the most powerful computing.

They will be gigantic. They will be the most powerful conscious computing information processing entities that we know of and sub-intelligences, smaller intelligences. There will still be smaller beings in this huge thing.

People can exist as people or whatever forms they want to take and they can go out and they can do their own computing, which will be super powerful compared to our mental computing now, based on the situation of all your computing as an independent entity is relevant to your situation in the world as an independent entity.

So, there will still be independent entities out in the world making decisions based on their local and specific situations. Independent entities will have a choice as to how much consultation they want to do on a moment to moment basis with the giant, super powerful processor.

Maybe, it’s expensive to have the power of the central processor, working with you as you go about your affairs or maybe it’s not expensive because the central processor finds it helpful to constantly gather information from independent entities that are linked to it.

However, all this stuff will evolve across hundreds of years until you have long periods of world computation. That could be minutes or days or something since every thing’s moving so fast, but we will have a stable, somewhat stable, arrangements about where negotiated computation happens.

Or, you will have stable arrangements that evolved between lesser awarenesses and these big central information processors. At that point, we will be well beyond anything that’s human relationships today, except for people who choose to engage in a throw-back cuddling for the reasons of being technologically Amish or to honor their ancestors.

Maybe, it’s an issue from time to time of safety. If information processing structures are being attacked, then maybe people will lock themselves down and exist without being highly linked to other conscious beings.

But normal human coupling at this point will be a rare thing in the sea of other forms of infinite means of intimate shared information process. Before that, this is this world of consciousness butting off and merging up into massive central processors.

That’s about three hundred years, four hundred years in the future. So, until then, we have to kind predict where relationships would go and the first thing. The first major thing would be any kind of widespread gender judgment or regulations.

Gender will fall as a thing that prescribes the maturity of the relationship you can have. That will fall within most places in the world within a century and then as consciousness becomes more mergeable, couple-hood will fall within a hundred and fifty years or two centuries.

Because there will be all sorts of new ways of merging one’s perception of the world with somebody else or other people. People in Western countries will have things with coupling as being romantic as sex, and then only secondarily for making a family or as for economic stability, to pull in resources.

However, as we gain control of our bodies and minds, relationships will form for reasons beyond sexual romance and sex. We will still have business linkages, defensive linkages, but people will couple up.

People will couple up to share their history with each other. Maybe, somebody has had an unusual experience such as surviving living for years in space or years under water and spending a year of developing some theory.

People would make you want to experience what it’s to be that person who they may be able to sell linkages: either your active consciousness or to form another record of your experiences as you live them.

So, that’s pretty much as far as I can go right now.

There will be coupling for the standard reasons replaced by coupling and tripling and quadrupling and all other forms of coming together for a vast variety of reasons. And then after it, eventually, there’s periods of strife as massive operations of information processing happen and as people try to sort out what role they want to have with the world computing apparatus; and then eventually, that settles down and you have this multi-minded and centrally-minded world-spanning consciousness. I don’t know, that’s as far as I can go.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 352 – It’s a Big Blob Out There

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the blob?

Rick Rosner: At some point, once information processes, conscious information processes are decoupled from the human body, it can be easily moved around and merged with other minds or other forms of information processing.

There will be a matter of alliances of merging consciousness boundaries. So, your rights once you are merged with a large information processing entity. What are your rights if you have to remove yourself from it in the future?

Jacobsen: We called this a “blob” before, right? You took on that term.

Rick Rosner: The “super blob,” it could be something that extends for hundreds and thousands of miles across the earth’s surface or into the earth itself or circles the earth via orbiting stuff. One of the priorities will be special compactness; a solid sphere of computation is more efficient than a sheet of computation.

That sheet covering the earth surface because the ball of computation has a lower average distance upon its various component code, and so it can compute faster. We will have vast structures. These structures would be the most powerful computing.

People can exist as people or whatever forms they want to take and they can go out and do their own computing, which will be super powerful compared to our mental computing now, based on the situation of all your computing as an independent entity is relevant to your situation in the world as an independent entity.

But normal human coupling at this point will be a rare thing in the sea of other forms of infinite means of intimately shared information processing. Before that, this is the world of consciousness budding off and merging up into massive central processors.

That’s about three hundred years, four hundred years in the future. So, until then, we have to predict where relationships would go. The first major thing would be any kind of widespread gender judgment or regulations.

So, that’s pretty much as far as I can go right now.

I don’t know, that’s as far as I can go.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 351 – Schadenfreude: How Do You Feel About Jung? Mixed.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/02/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You had some short ideas on Freud and Jung.

Rick Rosner: Schadenfreude is a helpful shorthand for a certain mixed emotion, and once you hear it, then it’s sticky for a lot of people who have experienced that Schadenfreude type thing. So, Schadenfreude is a meme once you’re aware of it, it sticks in your brain.

So, that’s what memes were meant to be, but then the term “memes” got taken over by people who do fun graphic jokes on Twitter and Instagram, and once they go viral they’re memes, but that’s a whole second meaning that isn’t exactly a sense of the first meaning.

That is a catchy mind bug that spreads through culture because the idea being expressed is handy or amusing. Then you said there was another thing you want to link to it.

Jacobsen: What do you think about Sir Carl Jung and the idea of the archetype? Those seem like memes evolved over time, which are almost statistical tendencies of forms that we have in our minds. They’re all Platonic-ish.

Rosner: I understand the handiness of archetypes and stereotypes; without admitting, I don’t think I believe in Jung’s form of archetypes. He thinks that we have evolved structures in the brain that we are more receptive to.

We have some cultural history already embedded in our brain via evolution and that can include archetypes. The myth of the heroes and certain types of men in some way and some types of women in other ways if they line up with certain archetypal roles.

I have never strongly believed in that. I believe in it even less strong now that there is more evidence in neuroscience that shows that the brain is constructivist instead of essentialist according to recent research results, which that the brain, each brain, builds its own concepts based on experience via culture and repeated personal experiences.

Those concepts aren’t inbuilt. People had arguments about this regarding language, whether we have inbuilt evolved language abilities or we have language centers evolved to make humans better at learning a language.

But a constructivist would say, “No, the brain is very flexible and it quickly builds structures in infancy when it’s super fluid, when it’s super flexible, in what it can do. It’s able to quickly build the capacity for language without having an inbuilt evolved capacity for language.”

So, based on the stuff I’ve read and heard about recently, I would disagree with a lot of inbuilt arguments as opposed to the spontaneously built over the life of your brain arguments.

Jacobsen: Okay.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 350 – Observation and Wisdom – Tabula Rasa Self-Experimentation

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/02/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we are thinking about how to observe better, so we go to physics and then we move onto the general.

Rick Rosner: That’s the first step to coming up with things about what you are observing. However, being observant and coming up with new original observations is a starting point, it is a helpful ability to have for comedy, for science. What other fields should we talk about?

Jacobsen: Those are the two main ones. For comedy, for science and physics, it’s not helpful, as you know, to be more observant by being more reflective.

Rosner: Perhaps, you need to develop tools to knock yourself out of the standard way of experiencing things less consciously. Often, we let things wash over us. We are used to things. Sometimes, I play games to help me practice observing a world that I am used to.

Game one is to imagine that, woken up in the world I’m in with no information about it and what can I figure out about that world from looking at it, and also I’m not allowed to gather more information.

I’m not allowed to be caught. I have to go about my business as if nothing is different and I have to gather information via the information I’m getting while going about my business. Even though, I’m not allowed to look all around because in the game that would get me caught as somebody who is new to the world.

Instead, I have to maintain my non-suspicious demeanor. I still have to figure out where I am, when I am. Sometimes, I play the game in a persona of some specific person from the different era, like Ben Franklin or Marie Curie or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I have to draw a conclusion as if I am this person. And, generally, you can only do this at a few minutes at a time before you forget that this is what you are doing. You must guess what year it is; you must guess that you concluded that it’s the future.

Is it a future version of your year or is it an alternate future? You have to try to suss out some of the technology that exists. If you are pretending to be Jesus, as I have observed a world, 2,000 years in the future or some other.

So, it is imagining someone from the past coming to the future and figuring out the world from that time. If you’re trying to observe a world 25 years into the future, you are in a car. You have to figure out how the car might work, how the radio might work, how the radio isn’t a bunch of little people in a prison, somewhere in the car.

Our comedies, playing the comedians, are going to be wrong about how the car works, about how the radio works because there are those millennia of intervening, of technology that you have no idea about.

However, you still must try to guess at what is going on. If you’re playing the video for Scott Fitzgerald, you must guess at why the car or the cars of today look like pieces of melted candy, as if you took the old angular cars or cars of the past and sucked on them for a while until they lost a lot of their corners.

So, it’s a game to increase, for very brief periods, your observation.

Jacobsen: How important is having memorized things before, so you have a database of experience and other previous observations?

Rosner: You are not allowed to use that; I am not allowed to go routing through what I know. If I am pretending to be somebody else who is suddenly awakening in my body. So, it is receiving on my sensory input.

I don’t have the power to go routing around in my memory for answers, except in a very approximate big way. I am a passenger. I’m not in charge.

Jacobsen: I get some images about how to see the world the way other people see it, or me, but if there is time travel, what about seeing the world, from someone in the same era, a different part of the world? In some ways, it’s functionally the same, in some ways it’s not.

Rosner: Yeah, that’s doable, but if you are seeing the world as someone else from a different part of the world then you’ve quickly concluded that it is the time that it is; it is that you are pretty much in the same era as you were when you were that person in a different part of the world.

So, if you are observing the world in America, while pretending to be somebody who had popped into your body from India, you have fairly quickly realized that you are in America, but you are driving around maybe and see a license plate of another place.

Or maybe, you see a TV. The TVs at my gym play videos. You may be able to reach conclusions by who is performing in the videos or could see a TV in a restaurant making a snippet of the news. But if you are pretending to be somebody from a different era, you may be able to make some guesses about how people are in this era.

Scott Fitzgerald could for our comedies because you are going to notice; people have devices in their hands that they interact with, either typing on or talking into. Fitzgerald would quickly surmise that those are some form of communication device.

Our comedies will too, but he would not have the idea of a telephone to work from. So, he may be drawing conclusions. At first, he may think that they are religious devices for people to worship something, or they are some talisman or fetish that they are praying to.

They must see one of those things up close, or see other screens in the world, in order to interact with information on the screens. So, that’s a game you can play to become more observant for a few minutes at a time.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 349 – Lines of Love Drawn in Trauma and the Colour of Trust

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/02/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I want to reflect more on the bad educational experiences for gifted kids, of the social experiences, which can leave such an impact on the psyche. Kids are in some ways almost crippled for social life, if not for a significant period.

Rick Rosner: All the bullying that I’ve read into was for the most part run of the mill. It was run by the white guys of the 60s and 70s. That served to eventually make me tougher and more determined to succeed socially.

What you read about are a kid goes out for a sports team, and a brave kid, it’s not anything to do with the sport, or maybe it is; once you read the case reports, everyone starts hazing the kid. It’s so brutal that it can include sexual assault.

I assume that would be hard with the violation of trust, which would be so severe. It would be Love Line. People would call into Carola and Dr. Drew. It was a show for people to call in and ask questions about romance, sex, maybe relationships.

Often, they would get calls of women with baby voices.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Was that a real thing?

Rick Rosner: Yeah! Carola tried to guess when someone had an unwanted sexual boundary violation, assault, based on the apparent age of the caller’s voice. So, Carola tried to guess at which age of the caller was molested because it was his theory that your personality would freeze at that age.

However, Carola is not a theorist; he’s the guy who makes jokes on the radio. But often his guess was good. Often, the caller would identify with him that something happens to the caller’s life at a young age, but it’s hard to draw conclusions from that.

Maybe, most people – unfortunately, given the culture – live in suffering based on some unwanted stuff. Early on, I don’t think it was everybody; something so severe in its violation of trust or boundaries could freeze you up for a while.

Which if you’re looking for tips on how to avoid that, one thing is to know what are the boundaries that exist and what they are. If I was lucky, I was knowledgeable about directing experience I read widely, so I knew a lot of things kids should not know, or figured out a lot of stuff.

So, a lot of people in my era were super naïve. I was naïve about some stuff, but not about other things. And when I was nine or ten, a friend of mined asked if I wanted to touch wieners. I would say, “No, that’s not something I wanted to do.”

Because I was innocent, the guy was curious. So, I knew stuff, but I didn’t have that curiosity. And I saved myself from an innocence, though I wanted potential early instances of that type of play. Others, I didn’t want to get engaged in. And we have the Internet now; and we also have an awareness of the better and worse behaviour.

That there are people out there being left essentially to unwanted sexual potential from adults. Kids should be made aware. Most kids have this respect. And if you’re listening to this, and the adults are not making sure that this stuff is available, go on the internet and teach them to yourself for a couple hours.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 348 – Genius Gone Mad and Bad

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/02/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why are there stranger male geniuses than female geniuses?

Rick Rosner: We, off-tape, were saying that there seems to be more wild-ass or weird male super geniuses than female super geniuses. And one reason may be that woman may have better judgment, and that part of being a smart woman might be looking at life, in general, and deciding that leading a normal life makes sense.

Because, I have certainly had crap periods in my life based on following my own weird plans; plans that if you look at them in the aggregate, you would argue that I deserved to lose a bunch of points of my IQ for pursuing these plans.

I tend to think I’m not a psychopath or a sociopath or maybe only 5 or 10% on the way to being one, but I tend to think that a good sociopath would not do anything sociopathic because, in a cold, unemotional sociopathic way, the sociopath would look at the way to live a smooth life, a life without hassle, and decide that I would pretend to be a normal person.

I won’t do a bunch of horrible antisocial stuff because the cost of doing the antisocial stuff is too high. The same way the idea of a super villain in comic books or movies who looks at his records of going up against superheroes and he clocks it, “I get beat every time. I’m going to retire and offer my services to the good guys.”

I come up with great shit and it turns out to not be so great enough. I could certainly help out the Justice League. I know that villains got something in them that even when they try to be good for an issue or two in a comic book, something snaps, and they go back to pure badness, but really, it would be so much easier to not be evil.

Jacobsen: The entire premise is hysterical.

Rosner: I want to see a whole movie. It will piss off people so bad; I want to see a Marvel movie where the superheroes take care of the problem in the first ten minutes of the movie, twenty minutes, and their next ninety minutes of the movie is them hanging out and solving little problems and designing a dream house.

Them doing regular people stuff and seeing if they can get a buzz, seeing how many shots of Bailey Irish Cream will it take to get Superman buzzed. Probably don’t want to use Bailey’s, he would end up super throwing up before he got drunk.

Maybe, you wouldn’t do it with superheroes. Maybe, you will do it with a group of teens that go to a spooky place. Like, you buy the rights to this shitty series of movies or a series of movies that ran its course. The Jason movies or the Freddy movies and they take care of the bad guy very thoroughly in the first ten minutes.

They spend the rest of the movie hanging out and wondering if he’s going to come back in some weird way. However, mostly hanging out. Alright, that was very repetitive, between the teens and the superhero. Sorry.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 347 – Snapshot – Growing Up Manly

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: In 1962, my mom married my stepdad. I was 2-years-old; we moved to Boulder, Colorado, which at the time was a small, not weird, college town, surrounded by farms and ranches.

Maybe, a population of 15 or 20 thousand; Boulder didn’t get weird for another around ten to fifteen years. It grew steadily weirder beginning in the late sixties. I didn’t relate to my stepdad.

He was an intimidating guy. He was 6’1 or 6’2, probably a 190lbs. Then going up to two hundred or more in later life. His arms and legs were spindly, but he was barrel-shaped and was physically imposing, especially compared to me.

It took me decades to realize he had a nice smile and a nice face, but I tell you he wasn’t as handsome as my dad or as fun as my dad. My dad who had good hair and a good face, drove sports cars and had visitation with me for a month.

For years, he’d drive me from Boulder down to Albuquerque in his Firebird or he had a GTO (he had something like that). My stepdad worked all the time and had a big stark nose from when having fallen on a pop bottle that had sliced open his nose.

He was grown up in Boulder, was a friendly local merchant owned ready-to-wear dress store on Pearl Street. It’s friendly at work. Then we would come home and be either quiet or pissed off about the assholes we’ve met during the day.

Though, I’m sure he called some people assholes and not too patient with the family. He’d go in my parent’s bedroom and fall asleep with the TV on. Over the next couple of years, it became apparent that I was both awkward and smart.

I taught myself to read before the age of 4. This was before there was an era of this being a thing with parents pushing their kids to do stuff like that if the kid could do it.

Kids were kids in his era. You lived in a household with your parents, but parenting was something that was an active concern. It was like they are adults acting like adults, kids acting like kids.

He went to school and everybody went to the same school in the neighborhood and everything was expected to turn out okay. And for the most part, things did turn out okay. There were plenty of outlier examples where things turned out terribly, but for most people everything was adequate.

There’s a movie coming out based on a crime novel called My Friend Dahmer written by a guy who grew up with the high school Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer was born on the exact same day I was born.

He was an increasingly odd kid as he was transforming into the homicidal monster he would later be; all the other kids knew he was way off. None of the parents or none of the adults in his world could much be bothered to notice anything about this hobby of going and seeing kids.

So, I’m looking forward to that movie because they will be indicative of the laissez-faire attitude of that time. So, I taught myself to read. If I’d been the same kid thirty or forty years later, I wouldn’t have to teach myself to read at the age three and a half or three quarters.

I would have been spotted as gifted and treated like gold, then stuck in all these accelerated programs. They would have had me reading maybe a few months earlier and everybody would be looking at acceleration and enrichment private schools and testing.

Instead, when my mom noticed my signs of precociousness, she freaked out; she didn’t know what to do with the genius; I was her first kid. She didn’t know what to do with an apparently smart little kid. The other moms gave her shit because she wasn’t even a teacher.

She wasn’t being a teacher then, but the neighborhood, the people in the neighborhood, saw that I was reading and doing other smart kid stuff. I asked a lot of questions. I used bigger words than most 3 or 4 years old.

They gave my mom certain amount of shit because they thought she was keeping me inside and drilling me, teaching me all these smart kid things when she didn’t do anything like that.

I stayed inside because I was not good with the other kids. They intimidated me. I preferred to stay inside reading or hanging with my mom. Then I went on to a public school. I was not good on the playground. There was one kid, whose dad had died and he used to lightly beat me up after school every day.

This was to contextualize that he felt sad because his dad has died. And nobody that I remember was particularly concerned that this kid was messing with me every day. And this is early elementary school, say first, second grade.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 346 – Faith Given Up and Taken Away

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the problems of faith? We have been talking about these for some time.

Rick Rosner: When we were talking, you talked about what we’re talking about, which are issues like abortion being in an intractable problem of today and into the future. We’re never going to get the two sides to agree.

It would be nice to come up with a list of our intractable problems of the future. Problems and big controversies that are likely to come along. That will divide people along the lines, political lines of faith.

So, the legalization of new forms of relationships: is that when people eventually want three or four way marriages to be binding under the law or take place as part of a church? Some people may get annoyed about that.

I’m suspecting not because there won’t be as many because it’s tougher to set up a relationship like that. The more people involved then the less stable that’s going to be. Also, in a multi-person relationship, people who would be inclined to get upset can imagine that only heterosexual sex is happening in that relationship, as in like you’re a Mormon, marriage with your sister’s wives.

Nobody’s getting upset about that. The women are having sex with each other; maybe that stuff happens, people to people, but that’s not why the marriage is that way. That’s not supposed to be the deal of that type of marriage.

Jacobsen: What about that the big culprits currently and in the future? Will they be the same ones? The Shiites, the Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, the Buddhists, then there’s the big populations of religious individuals who were or are against gay marriage, homosexual marriage.

Do you think the mores will have shifted enough such that their disgust or disapproval of it will be much less in the future?

Rosner: I used to have hope that religious impediments to what might be considered progress would tend to lessen over time, and as people see the fruits of progress, but the conservative buddy, Lance, convinced me that Islam has enough adherents.

The rate at which Muslims reproduce is such that it’s not going away. Islam is going to be a major force in the world over the next couple centuries and longer. And you could argue the same for everything to a slightly lesser extent about Catholicism, and other forms of Christianity.

There are so many people who believe along those lines that the dwindling will take a long, long time.

Jacobsen: This is coming out of some obscure interpretation of the text that comes out of a straightforward interpretation of a couple of lines of the texts, by enforcement from religious leaders in the culture they happen to live in.

Rosner: I’d like to say you can find anything in the Bible and the same applies to the Quran and also to support your particular point of view.

Jacobsen: They have statements about homosexuality being an abomination, for instance.

Rosner: But you could probably find as many countervailing statements that say leave people alone.

Jacobsen: What ones are often referenced?

Rosner: The verses, I don’t know that stuff. There is an anti-masturbation little passage in the Bible about that; you’re spilling your seed on the ground and the sin of Onan. It probably is, but like I don’t see a bunch of big biblical campaigns against masturbation.

It’s like a chicken and egg deal. People turn to their religious text to find support the point of view that supports them being offended. I’m not sure it’s the other way around, but the big story in the in the liberal news is there’s some pastor who says that he’s saying that God wants Trump to nuke North’s Kim Jong Un.

So, you can think there’s always this. There were a lot of pastors out in the world and believe that you could’ve found anyone willing to support some horrible point of view.

Alt-Right’s other stuff, it’s an ongoing a tragedy about religion that for the longest time now and ever since the Reagan era the biggest jerks espousing religious points of view get the most exposure.

The people quietly try to live their lives according to religious principles of tolerance and charity towards people.

Jacobsen: What about religion as a political force? If you look at the history of Islam, you compare the history of Christianity.

Rosner: In America, it’s a policy to talk about America of the past 40 years, where the conservative think tanks research how to motivate people and discovered that to keep a conservative and motivate a conservative base you want to mobilize the evangelicals, which they did.

But they propagandize the evangelical sections of the church, which made them stronger and made them politically active. Even to the point where now the evangelicals haven’t turned out to be so manipulatable, that they regret that, many of them, aggressively supported our godless president who lies about being religious over Hillary Clinton who seems to have an indication of having a lifetime of faith.

But Trump barely has ever gone to church. Clinton, Hillary Clinton has gone to church her whole life. Now, it’s come out that she is considering becoming a pastor. I don’t if she said it or if her pastor said that they’d talked to her.

He said that she’s considering doing that. And this doesn’t lead to anybody from the evangelical side saying, “Maybe, we heard her wrong and maybe we should give her the benefit of the doubt regarding faith.”

No! they’re all like, “she’ll have good luck practicing religion in jail, when people are about to be prosecuted.” That’s what they say and not many of the most politically active evangelicals disdain the woman with a record of talking about her faith over the guy who has spent his life talking about grabbing pussies and banging women.

When people think about Trump, the first thing they think about him is not that he’s not religious. That would be like number eight on the list to number 11. But the religion is in a fairly sad state in America because ostensibly religious people are embracing jerks at this point.

Let’s get back to the list of stuff that will freak people out.

Jacobsen: Taking this point as segue, the heavier use of religion as a political tool; a political tool for the rich and powerful.

Rosner: People forget that it wasn’t always like this. That it was until the Reagan Era that the evangelicals were a political force. I’m sure that if you went back to Harry Truman’s time you could find groups like Catholics or Truman.

People distrusted when Kennedy was running for president. He had them come out and say that he is an American, first, and his loyalties is always the whole little pithy quote. That his number one allegiance is to America.

His Catholicism comes in a far second. People are distrustful of religion and politics. Anyhow, onto the list of people who will freak out about rights for non-human intelligence.

Jacobsen: Including animals, not official.

Rosner: That’s a thing that already exists. So, it is not a new controversy about animals and it’s not a huge controversy. You have people getting all pissed off about different levels of how horribly animals were treated.

That is of a more general argument about that you shouldn’t house billions of animals in inhumane conditions in general; the argument usually doesn’t get down to the small details of how smart animals are or not.

Or where there will be a bunch of forms of thinking and information processing, but that is independent of a human. So, when an old rich guy starts replacing his brain and wants to argue that he is still the same guy and has all the same legal rights, people will argue about it when that applies.

If your brain is 80 percent mechanical, the 20 percent that’s organic according to an MRI is dead. It’s like, “I still have the same rights.” If that guy moves out of his body into some other robotic body, does the guy have the same rights?

Does the guy who moves into cyberspace? Does he have to have the same rights? So, there’s that problem. There is the problem of wanting to legalize or become legally married to an artificial being.

That’s something that doesn’t show even in a legit way. But it’ll show up in a dumb sense in the next 20 years, somebody will want to marry a sex robot. Most reasonable people will say that’s dumb because that robot is not sentient.

It is as if it is a sophisticated callboy. You can’t marry a toy. Then over the next 18 or so years, you’ll have a true sentience among them: commercially available companions. At that point, it becomes a real issue that has been further clouded by idiots of the past trying to marry toys.

People trying to do arts. There will be a circus like aspect to it like the first time 40 years ago that a gay marriage license was issued, which happened in my hometown Boulder Colorado.

A city clerk decided to say, “Alright, I’m going to marry some gay people. Why not?” It was in the 70s. The licenses she issued didn’t stand up because there was no widespread legal course for what she did, so she did it on her own.

Then within a few days of her issuing licenses, a cowboy shows up at the city clerk’s office with his horse to marry his horse. So, you will always have jokers making fun of this stuff. But anyway, that’s a thing that people freak out about.

Jacobsen: There’s a distinction between values. One associated with conservative viewpoints, conservative reasons; the idea of transcendental laws coming out of religious faiths or faith. They’re split.

They’re the other side to the left or the social-oriented who often, more often, point to universal human rights. That’s the rub for a lot of these controversies.

Rosner: That split will show up in the mid to far future with regard to what to do with sentient artificial beings with rollover. There’s liberals who will argue that you can’t dump thinking beings in landfills, even when it becomes possible to buy an ascendant being for six bucks.

Those beings will be subject to abuse. And liberals will argue that there needs to be a bill that those things need to have rights that are the right not to be treated like crap. And conservatives will argue that only things organic, especially humans, that’ve been touched by the hand of God that have rights and deserve consideration.

So, moving further on the list, you got people playing God with medicine at some point and people will start getting upset about different levels of life extension. When people start growing organs in pigs, which is going to be a thing.

Pigs are genetically close enough to us; they make a good place to grow replacement organs. You’ll have a hell from all animal rights people, who will be upset. Other people will we should not be playing God.

The same thing with playing God around genetic manipulation, gene tweaks. I can take a small example of people saying, when people start looking old, people going to the Bible or the Quran.

People could go to those genealogies saying people are only meant to live x years because God deemed it. So, in creation therefore, people trying to live longer is against God’s will and we should, therefore, make it illegal.

I can argue that at the same time. The Bible has a lot of people living for 800 years. Methuselah lived for at least 800. That was pre-flood. See, I could see these debates happening.

And these are dumb and silly arguments happening now over many things, especially in America. Though, the utility will tend to blunt a lot of these arguments. When certain technologies show themselves to be helpful and not leading to cats and dogs together, they fit in.

That certain new technologies fit into society. They’re helpful to people, so religious arguments tend to be blunted. I’ve always been surprised at how the issue of cross-racial relationships evaporate without a big fight.

People now take whomever they like without regard to race. In fact, when a company wants to show that they are a hip company, a modern company, they’ll often put up a cross-racial couple in their ads. Cheerios does it.

I can probably come up with another dozen examples. Nobody disapproved of it all, except for a few assholes; everybody except for a few assholes is with it. This may be because it doesn’t hurt society.

It’s fine. The obvious utility of people getting to be with whom they want has somehow overcome people’s prejudice against us. You’ll have issues around gene tweaking, especially when people use it to change their appearance or their gender.

You will have issues around new forms of relations, of marriage-type relationships, but even more so you may have people getting upset about people being intimately plugged into each other.

In the mid to far future, where the boundaries between entities are blurred, where two people in cyberspace, two entities, who may or may not be human, merge into one temporarily, permanently even, or there will be a lot of freaking out.

Especially more than 100 years into the future, people will be subsumed into larger information processing structures. There will be concern from the liberal side. This is the people’s rights to exist; they are being violated because it won’t be entirely clear in every case, where individual will stops and group will begins, and who’s making the decisions and whether the individual wills are being participative in these group wills entirely with their consent or not.

On the conservative side, and in these big blobs or agglomerations of thinking entities, they will now completely violate the spirit of the world. The books can be completely against God.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 345 – Snakes: Religious Politics, Political Religion

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: IC leads to infinities: different types – and relations amongst and between the types.

Rick Rosner: So, that gets scary. Because anytime that you say there is an infinity or that there is anything that is unlimited, then that implies some kind of infinity and all of our experience of the world tend to fully add the possibility that our world is huge but not infinite.

Jacobsen: But I like the phrase “functional infinity” or “functional infinite,” which means a very large finite but an unknown number for that finite number.

Rosner: But the whole idea or the whole question of infinite versus finite is: either way, there’s a huge but finite number of things of all possible things. That is problematic and then also it is problematic with this or that infinity, or maybe not.

Jacobsen: I remember hearing as a far-left philosopher who is dead, who stated that in a similar way with “to be” or “not to be.” Although, he didn’t use it in that phrase. He was talking about the arguments of “being” and “nonbeing.”

If you talked about the “tuned in” and the “not tuned in,” so something is tuned in or not, but the degree to which is tuned in is the degree of fidelity. That not necessarily being tuned in to someone does not necessarily mean nonexistence.

It means not tuned in, so it may exist or may not to some degree or other, but it’s not tuned in and other things that are within our experience within our consciousness are tuned in to varying degrees of fidelity.

And he used that to kind of shut it down to 2,500 years of arguments around being and nonbeing. I get that from what you’re saying in a similar way with infinity and infinity.

Rosner: The best that you can say now in that infinity versus non-infinity would be something that we or our descendants will be arguing about for quite a while.

Jacobsen: It will be a question that will be asked to make either of those answers meaningless.

Rosner: Yes, true, that and it may be infinity versus non-infinity; maybe, that will be one of those things that turns out deriving the solution to the problem.

Jacobsen: And that’s what I like for it with “functional.”

Rosner: The question for free will is that you’re maybe not framing things properly when you’re asking is there free will. The idea, I see the universe is a self-consistent information system; that any large system is a system built from information, which is a step back from a purely cold Godless Big Bang science framework that we’re currently under.

That it doesn’t impose God the Creator, but that it does suggest a proliferation of consciousness in entities across the universe and that the universe has something like ten to the twenty-second stars with something like half of those stars potentially having planets.

So, you have at least a billion billion environments for life to evolve; that if you look at the evolution of life on Earth, there is a good chance that cognition evolves. So, you get both the probabilistic argument that it’s unlikely that we are the only conscious beings in the universe.

You have the idea of consciousness being a technical aspect of information sharing as not miraculously originating things, but is a natural consequence of large self-consistence. That means that you’ve got a universe that is naturally full on conscious entities – not meaning the kumbaya like mystical, crystal on the wall of my bedroom to get my power, but in the sense that there are more conscious entities than us and than those on thin surface of the Earth.

The thinking beings who probably rise in a bunch of places and those thinking beings would often have consciousness and the universe itself may have consciousness, so some of these thinking beings may survive for millions of years.

In the case of the universe, perhaps, many hundreds or thousands or billions of billions of years, which presents the idea that there are conscious entities with God-like complexity versus which it’s like – I don’t know it’s – a baby step away from the fully cold universe.

Jacobsen: What about the pre-fully cold universe that arose within primitive – by which I mean antediluvian – or original major religions? I guess, that also makes it like Orthodox Judaism, Confucianism – within their views of the world.

Rosner: When you talked about there is a certain philosophy, religious philosophy, that lives in the cracks and then you search to fill in the blanks. I forget the name. But there will always be blanks to fill in and people will always, and what comes after people will always, yearn for science or a purely mechanistic explanation for things. Not only that.

People evolved to search for significance; we evolved as omnivore survivors. We look for explainable regularities in the world to survive, so people will always look for patterns within patterns, patterns beyond what’s known and the inevitable, the possible wondrous things that exist.

But beyond our understanding too; so, religion will never go away, never go away. Otherwise, they will continue to be squeezed – one would think in a way that religions have been squeezed for hundreds of years.

What they thought they understood, they were squeezed out. What is understood is wonderful, and also there is the possibility that comes with what becomes understood involves things that would be considered wonderful by religious people of past eras; the idea that the unification, the unified nature, of the universe, how the universe knows about every point in the universe, has a rough idea of what’s going on in every other point of the universe.

That every point of the universe speaks for a cohesiveness that perhaps is having a satisfying cohesiveness that does offer a satisfaction in the wondrous ways that this happens.

Jacobsen: This segues into a topic we were talking about off tape.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: Which is conceptions of the world apart from factual knowledge, we take the scientific knowledge. We take failures from the past. They are applied to describe the real world in some way either to derive meaning, functionality, or both.

Another way that this is shifted is then into a political tool. We were talking about some ways how spiritual conceptions of the world then become used as political tools for some people in general.

Rosner: We were talking about the exploitation of the, to be specific, Evangelicals in U.S politics.

Jacobsen: I would not merely state some Evangelicals, but I would state that as a big category. But I would state religion at large in much of the Middle East North Africa region.

Rosner: Then that being a big example. Another example might be Saudi Arabia is whipping up anti-Americanism to serve their own purposes in a religious way. Various regimes have anti-Western purposes, say with Saudi Arabia with politicians using religions for further cynical purposes.

Jacobsen: I would extend that by the way to Catholics and Eastern Orthodox as well, which are big hunks of the population.

Rosner: You’re from Canada. You see things happening, similar things happening.

Jacobsen: Take, for instance, Alberta. It is a province where, or you can use Saskatchewan, too, where, there is controversy around the implementation of a single school system for all citizens.

Where non-Catholic citizens are paying for their kids to go to Catholic school and Catholic parents pay for their kids to go to Catholic school – apart from the contentions around labelling kids Catholic for the kids with Catholic parents, the Catholic parents are paying for kids to go to Catholic school, but the non-Catholic parents are paying for their kids to go to Catholic school.

That seems disproportionate to me if not outright unfair. Many parents have to move, for instance, so there is a proposal for a single educational system without any particular religious or other brands, so some of the single secular schools.

Rosner: I’m sure that this is a bunch of Catholics.

Jacobsen: Sure, it’s forty percent of the population, roughly, who are Catholic. So, it becomes a matter of contention, but it might also become a matter of contention for other denominations because they might watch this and think, “Okay, what about us now? I am homeschooling nine kids, for instance.”

Rosner: Let’s talk about the whole deal where the use of Evangelicals in politics.

Jacobsen: The political use of religion; the co-opting of religions for political use.

Rosner: When you get things with the energizing of it, still not the right word.

Jacobsen: The zeal.

Rosner: No, where you roll out and implement what you want anyway, it feels like traditional values of Evangelical voters. This is something that has been going on for more than one hundred years, but it is the exploitation of Evangelicals and the political right that is only thirty, forty years old.

It is a consequence of conservative think tanks researching: how do we get leverage over the American populace? How do we get voters out to vote for people? Before that, at least in America, you have more now hen nine versions of Evangelism and of Christianity.

You can call it Christianity close to home, where the fifties, the forties at least, in the idealized version of America; you have a bunch of towns backed with a bunch of churches. Most people went to a church or places of worship like synagogues.

Everybody worshipped in their own way roughly the same set of Christian values. They all looked out for each other. In some more sinister cases, they kind of looked like busy bodies and looked down on other people – perhaps whose behavior fell short of their ideals.

But all an all, it felt like a fairly benign version of pervasive religious values. Not particularly coercive but with some aspects of coercion, but not strident, not feeling threatened, not trying to impose religious values by any means necessary.

Not seriously infringing on politics. The current brand of politics, the conservative side, is propped up possibly by a forged number of Evangelical voters and how every politician, regardless – any major politician, has to claim, whether liberal or conservative, to be religious.

It’s a very brave and exceptional politician who doesn’t claim to be religious. It’s a rare group of voters who vote that person in, but all the religious test in politics for a politician’s base.

They can make a public statement that contains certain things appealing to non-religious voters, but the religious voters understand the politician to say, “I’m with you. I’m going to defend your values.”

Anyways, that’s all fairly new. Cynically though, instances of it, there is always a potential for it as long as there has been religion and politics.

Jacobsen: It went back as far as when Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion, basically.

Rosner: We don’t throw people to the lions. We don’t urge people to say all that stuff is done at the intersection of religion and politics. So, it’s always a possibility and by embracing science you don’t necessarily avoid it.

But you open yourself up to all different sets of tragedy, the atomic bomb can go off now and then everything is obliterated.

Jacobsen: What does this continued encroachment of more accurate views of the world mean for religious faith or faith in general, because the trend over centuries has been a decline in outright belief in and the liberalization of those that do believe in traditional religion?

Rosner: Generally, there’s a low cost to have large philosophical beliefs about the way the world is, believing in God or a bunch of Gods or no God, whatever you believe. Unless you’re working in the field; unless you somehow run afoul of some grinding mechanism where religion meets politics, it doesn’t affect your day to day life because you navigate your day to day life using a bunch of specific knowledge of situations.

These allow you to cross the street on a red light. You don’t drink a draino. You cook chicken before you eat it. None of those things have large religious import; that’s all a different set of knowledge.

People will continue to believe; people will continue to tell the hopes about what the world is; people’s beliefs are to some extent religious, and over time on average more informed by actual information about the world.

It’s a rare person who continues to believe the Earth is flat because nobody believes the Earth is flat anymore, except lunatics. It doesn’t mean that within the flat Earth there is a naïve belief from thousands of years ago; that that naïve belief has gone away either.

It doesn’t mean that religion will go away. It is a specific area of knowledge, which will squeeze out perhaps religious belief in certain scenarios. But there are certain areas, but there will always be room for religious or mystical or philosophical feelings and beliefs about the world, even if a fully scientifically explained world.

Science itself will change, but even that fully explained world will still have room for religious overlays. There will always be stuff to discover; there will always be places to conserve mystical beliefs.

There is a thing in quantum mechanics. Einstein had a problem with quantum mechanics, where he thought you can’t have a world this randomly. He thought that maybe there was a structure behind the structure to explain the lack of structure of quantum mechanic’s apparently random action.

But there was another layer of information that wasn’t accessible to us that makes the random not random, and the things like those since quantum mechanics have been particularly proven to work.

You can’t have secret mechanics going on behind hidden mechanics determining outcomes. However, I see that you do have out of the things that happen apparently randomly in quantum mechanics; those things bring information into the world and I see that information reflects the state of something.

The state of say information being brought into being; the universe is accumulating information and newly acquired information has to be about by something, so it does imply a kind of framework behind the random action that will not express itself in the way that Einstein believed, but in a similar way there is always room to say, “I got this system. There is still room,” and to say that this also exists.

You got a scientific world, but there is also room for beauty; there is also room for good and bad; there is also room for truth; and that will always be the evidence and theory based great work, which will continue to shape not scientifically but non-scientifically.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 344 – Exceptional Giftedness

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do exceptionally gifted (IQ170+) children get support or other gifted children for that matter?

Rick Rosner: There’s an industry devoted to serving or several related industries devoted to serving kids identified as exceptional, but the private schools are designed to appeal to parents who want concierge education for their exceptional kids.

Growing up in the ‘70s and for most of the 20th century, people thought that regular public education served almost everybody and this idea almost begins with the beginning of the country whereas the US expanded westward.

One square mile out of every 36 square mile plot of land or whatever you want to call it, a section of land profits from the sale of that 1/36th; one mile out of 36 square miles of land was supposed to go to building schools.

So, schooling for everyone was a big deal. Then there was further development in the US. Throughout the 19th century established state schools, most states in the US have one or two big public colleges that are supposed to be cheaper than private colleges.

So, there’s been a long-term emphasis on having an educated population and with that education being supported by the government. The government is democratic. There are been democratic ideas that have infused ideas of education.

That it should be firm; that there should be a place in the educational system for everyone. And a hundred years ago, the idea of the comprehensive high school, which spread across the United States, supported the idea that the teenage education for grades 9 or 10 through 12 should take place in public high schools.

That was for everyone regardless of interest or ability levels, but there would be within these schools communities that could support schools of this size. These schools would run from 1,200 to 3,000 students.

There would be educational paths for everyone and that everyone would go to school together and learn to function in a little-abridged version of society together, which was unlike schools in other countries like Britain where people in their early teen years are divided between schools on vocational tracks and on academic and professional tracks.

But in America, everybody was supposed to go to the same stereotypical high school with cheerleaders and football players and nerds and student council leaders and everybody mixed with everybody else.

The way that everybody was supposed to mix with everybody else in a democratic society. People were then with perhaps the unstated idea that they’re going to learn academically as much as you’re going to learn socially.

You’re going to learn how to get along in this abridged version of society, which didn’t work. So, for decades and decades, maybe even now, there are plenty of movies that over the past 50 years or more present high school as a jungle.

But middle school or junior high school are the jungle, where the people are at their worst; where the hormones start kicking in, people start caring about their place in the social pecking order and haven’t learned any restraint yet.

So, it’s the sixth through eighth or seventh through ninth where kids are at their most asshole-ish. Then high school kids have started to learn to acquire some sophistication and restraint and are starting to learn how to behave in a version of society.

And I spent many years in high school; many more years than most people because high school was interesting and I kept going back. And I disagree with the idea of high school presented in the movies as a vicious, murderous sometimes, place, where the high school can be a place where people haven’t had their ethics eroded yet because they haven’t had to confront corrosive, competitive aspects of adult life.

Most high school kids, though by no means all, are taken care of to some extent; they have food, clothing, and shelter provided by their families. I say at least 80% of high school kids have basic necessities provided by family members.

And kids in the traditional stereotypical high schools. They’re the kids who maybe don’t have those things provided or are not under the scope of consideration. They are in the stereotypical comprehensive high school of the 20th century.

Impoverished kids who don’t have a family structure are virtually invisible and if they do show up they’re a special problem that the community can address. So, under that system, people can afford to be nice; they’re being taken care of.

There is competition in some areas: sports, academics, getting boyfriends and girlfriends, but stuff isn’t life or death and people can afford to and often do behave as and think of themselves as good people.

They try to behave ethically and have the resources to do so. And I find that it’s later in adult life when push comes to shove in life situations that people become more vicious.

So, anyways, the thought beyond that this comprehensive system was supposed to be for about everyone, whether the kid is going to be a mechanic taking short classes in high school or whether the kid is going to be a professor taking calculus in high school; both those kids could see each other in the cafeteria and play on the same teams, go to the same dances.

It was a one-size-fits-all system that didn’t necessarily serve everybody, especially in periods of relative decadence including the period I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s when I was a teenager from 1973 to 1980.

During the last period, we ended/lost a war that had gone on for a dozen years and more. We lost Vietnam. We lost a president to corruption to Watergate. People who were disillusioned with institutions. At the same time, the pill entered the market; the birth control pill in 1960 or so.

So, you had such a growing sexual revolution and women’s liberation and sexual liberation coupled with disillusionment and hedonistic singles culture. Everything combined to create certain laziness in education in the 70s.

There’s this movie coming out called My Friend Dahmer, which I read when it was a graphic novel. One of the themes of the graphic novel was that Dahmer is clearly disturbed; this is a kid who several years after graduating would become a serial killer and a cannibal.

During his high school years, he was turning into the severely disturbed person that would later become the Dahmer we know and that all the kids knew about it, but none of the educators could be bothered to pay any attention to this drunk, bust-up kid walking the halls every day.

Based on my IQ scores and doing ell n school when I tried, I was considered a gifted kid. There wasn’t much in the way of gifted services for me. Sometimes, the teacher would spot me as somebody who deserved or needed special attention and would give me advanced work to do advanced projects.

But mostly it was assumed that I would get along with everybody else, but my grades might be better than most people’s because I had the ability to do it. But people didn’t worry too much about singling me out, getting me special stuff, I desperately wanted to be normal.

My family, my mom wanted me to be normal. I wanted to have a cool kid’s high school life being popular, having girlfriends. I didn’t give much of a shit about the academic excellence that I would sometimes achieve, but only because maybe it would set me apart from other kids and some girl would like me for that.

I was desperately looking for me to get to something that would make girls not think I was gross. Within a couple decades after I left high school, a set of related industries popped up, which are designed to identify and service gifted students.

Partly, this is because the people my age, the software and hardware geniuses, maybe didn’t care as much about being normal, but cared more about learning how to program and make computers. Those guys grew up to completely change society to a computer and technology-based society and being a nerd went from social death to barely acceptable.

The whole world has become more technical. I can mention the Flynn Effect that in the 50 Years after World War II the average IQ of the entire planet went up by 15 points because our technology and pop culture saturated the entire planet.

So, it’s the entire planet smartened up and in the US that smartening became an exploitable market. Where if you parents want to identify their kids as gifted and once identified, parents will spend 30-40 thousand dollars a year to send an identified gifted kid to a private school.

Parents will spend eight or ten or twelve thousand dollars on tutoring for the SAT or the ACT, obviously, parents who have this money. When I was in school, the average kid who took an AP class took an average of one and a third AP classes, whereas the average AP kid of my daughter’s generation took takes an average of seven AP classes.

The competition to get into elite schools is much more heated with either the Ivies having admission rates of about 5% compared to 20% when I was in high school. There’s more of what leads to an idea of a zero-sum situation, where there are a limited number of viciously competed for spots for elites.

That means that the 21st-century system of gifted with students who are identified early and nurtured and pushed and self-propelled along demanding academic paths with applying, on the average as a super competitive kid, to twelve or fourteen colleges now.

Probably, many of my daughter’s friends took a dozen or more AP classes. A lot of private school education. There is a lot of hustling to get into limited gifted education schools within financially strapped public school systems like the LA Public Schools.

So, education for the gifted now is viciously competitive, has a little bit of zero-sum about it, feels more Republican where the 20th century felt more democratic: that we’ll all learn together; we’ll all do everything together.

Things will turn out all right as we’re plugged into our communities. The stereotypical comprehensive high school of the mid-twentieth century can be pictured as being part of a nice little town.

There’s a movie, Pleasantville, that takes place in a pleasant little town in the mid-50s, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver; all these shows that had high school and smaller kids as important characters were set either in small towns or in suburbs and presented their families as being plugged into the community.

They function like the successors to it; it is a wonderful life. Everything works better when everybody watches out for everybody else, which leads to Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful slogan ‘It takes a village’.

But in the 21^st century, we shifted to something that feels more like Social Darwinism, where there are a limited number of up spots and elite colleges for gifted people in public schools and you have to compete for them, often brutally.

So, you need to identify your kid early; you need to see what you can do to make sure your kid is gifted early; you need to work with the kid to develop his or her talents. My kid didn’t know any better about working her ass off.

From kindergarten on, she took it for granted that she should be spending two or three or four or more hours a day on homework, which would have been unheard of in the 70s; where maybe a half an hour a day of homework, then most people had jobs, but they didn’t lead any place.

Jobs in an ice cream parlor or hostessing in a restaurant. Regular teen jobs that you worked at to get spending money. You interned at some lab or something too because it was part of your career path and because it added another notch to your college admissions packet.

So, anyway that’s enough of that, that was plenty.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 343 – Samaria’s and Judah’s God, Big Bang, Steady State, and IC (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: I have half-assedly worked on it, through 36 years with that stuff turning into what we have been calling IC or Information Cosmology, where the universe only looks big bangy, but it’s a structure that is older than it appears to be.

Go back to Steady State Theory in the fifties with Fred Hoyle and a couple of other people who suggested that, in places in the universe where there is not a lot of matter, the matter would spontaneously be created.

So, that when you had enough matter accumulating in previously under-mattered or underpopulated parts of the universe, that matter would eventually coalesce into galaxies. The universe was imagined in time.

It looked big bangy because it was always forming new galaxies that were pushing out. So, you always had new galaxies popping up and going through their life cycles. So, the principle of regularity, of non-specialness is a big principle in physics, that you are not in a special place in the universe.

Space that works under big bang; that if the universe is expanding uniformly from an initial singularity, like the surface of a balloon, which is the standard analogy, there is no favored place on the surface of a balloon.

It disregards the neck of a balloon. It’s an expanding ball. Everybody feels like they are in the centre of this expanding universe, but every point on the ball feels like the centre. There is no special place.

So, the Big Bang has no favored position in the universe in space. On the other hand, every moment in the Big Bang universe is a unique moment in time. No moment in time is like any other moment in time because you are on the surface of this expanding ball which acts like a clock.

You can tell how late it is in the universe, because of the size of the ball, gives you the age of the ball. In Steady State Theory, you always have new universes popping through, more galaxies popping into it, gradually popping into space in existence.

So, the universe may be expanding and may be expanding, but it’s expanding because new matter, and new space is always being created. So, as the universe expands, new stuff arises to fill the space between old stuff.

So, you got a universe in time and you can’t tell what time it is in the universe because every moment looks the same. But that’s not how the universe operates. There is no observational evidence to say that, “No, you don’t have new galaxies popping up in the spaces between old galaxies.”

However, I have the same idea because the universe is on a vast time scale. Imagine that the apparent age of the universe is proportional to the amount of information in the universe, you do have processes which cycle, not cycle within a solution to General Relativity.

There are solutions to a General Relativity universe that works from a similarity; it doesn’t have enough energy to keep expanding. It collapses back to a singularity and then expanse back outwards again.

So, it’s breathing, basically, going from zero space out to a bunch of space, then collapsing back to zero space. I’m not talking about that solution. I’m talking about a universe that has active information in the centre.

If that universe becomes irrelevant to information processing being done, that information can slide out of the centre to the outskirts where it’s in a stasis for several reasons. Then when it’s relevant again, it can be brought back into the active centre of the universe.

But in the active centre of the universe, it looks like it’s 13.8 billion years old, or much older than 13.8 billion years, but 13.8 billion Years apparent age of the universe is how much is a measure, how much information is currently active in the central arena of information processing of the universe. Alright, that’s enough of that.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 342 – Samaria’s and Judah’s God, Big Bang, Steady State, and IC (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, how has your philosophical view evolved? Because we’ve talked about, in previous sessions, growing up as Jewish and not questioning things, thinking of some of the stuff as not necessarily true.

Rick Rosner: The Jewish have much to do with my philosophy about the nature of the universe. I had various earlier philosophical views, but they weren’t sophisticated. They were little kid views.

Like on everything, I was nerdy and bad on the play-ground and bad at sports. I understood that this was fitting, but I didn’t like it because the Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal.

I understood that to mean – I was seven-years-old – but I took that to mean that I was good in school, but there had to be a countervailing bad thing. So, everybody much equaled out. So, like, my being good in the classroom was countervailed by being terrible socially.

Jacobsen: And you were the top kid at your school?

Rosner: When you are seven years old, nobody knows whether you were the top kid, nor should anybody know if you are the top kid, every kid is different, but this was the IQ era. Eventually, I found out I had the top IQ scores at my junior high, but that’s a ridiculous criterion.

But I took to art when other stuff went wrong; in gym class or whatever, though, that was probably a crutch. I should have kicked out from under myself earlier realized that regardless, I needed to make some social compromises or at least develop a more sophisticated understanding of how to get what I wanted socially.

Perhaps, I should have done that at an earlier age rather than defiantly being nerdy. I wasn’t trying to be nerdy, but I wasn’t trying to change myself drastically until high school, the last years of junior high.

But then it was ninth grade and by then it was much too late, or at least given how clueless I was, it was too late, because not only was my social taste naïve, I wanted all the things that dumb guys wanted, which was to have a cute girlfriend from amongst the group of university acknowledged, popularly cute girls.

Because I didn’t know better. That’s when you are young and socially dumb; that’s who you get crushes on. Anyway, at a young age, say six or eight, I remember asking myself the standard physiological question of “Why am I not seeing as somebody else?”

There is an answer to that, but I couldn’t answer it. I forget how completely I answered. I can probably think of that, but the answer to why you are you and not anybody else is because all the information in your brain pertains to you, all your sensory information, all your thoughts.

You are you because you live within your consciousness. Every person lives within his or her own consciousness and for you to be somebody else, then we would have to be that person. There is no escaping.

Everything you are comes from your perception of your own thinking and to get glimmers of somebody else, then you’ll have to be some supernatural movie phenomenon, where you start getting information piped in first from somebody else.

That doesn’t happen. From starting a few years before age ten, I was thinking about the structure of the universe, in the mid to late sixties, which is much of what we think of the structure of the universe now, which is the Big Bang Theory.

Until the early sixties, the Big Bang Theory competed with other theories for the predominant theory about how the universe works, probably with Big Bang Theory winning; it has the best physics and most observational evidence in favour of it, but the victory wasn’t definitive until nineteen sixty-four or sixty-five.

When background radiation was discovered, I started reading about how the universe was structured a few years after that. At age ten, I started writing little notes to myself on scraps of paper about my naïve and dumb thoughts about how the universe could have come to be in a Big Bang sense.

Or in a sense of coming to be at all, I didn’t have a problem with the Big Bang at age ten. Then was nerdy; I wanted to be more popular; I wanted to come up with a great big theory that would make me famous.

Then I figured that if I were famous, then I could be more popular and I could have a girlfriend that looks whatever a ten years old version of a girlfriend is, except I didn’t have a standard ten years old version of what a girlfriend is.

Being nerdy I run into adult material and naked ladies playing cards and other gentle porn and some porn that was less gentle. So, I was already horny, which is a sad thing to be at age ten because there is nothing you can do with it.

But in any case, that led to me wanting to get famous or thinking about the universe. So, I had all sorts of not good theories. That was one way to get famous, by solving the four colour theorem. That is, you will only need four colors to colour any two-dimensional map.

My theorizing was on the level of that its ninety degrees divide of the circle into the four parts, somehow that had something to do with the four colour theorem. That’s not even garbage; that’s little baby do-dos.

When about the origin of the universe, that, maybe, the entire universe did pop out from a single point as the naïve Big Bang Theory would have it, but, that, maybe, the entire universe may have popped into existence via being extruded, more or less, in another invisible dimension.

That the universe somehow went from non-existence to existence by the separation of the eliminations, though this was not the terminology used in my dumb 10-year-old head, but it popped out from nothing via going from a zero – with the zero thickness to some dimension that we don’t perceive to a non-zero thickness.

Somehow, that brings the universe into existence. Again, this is dumb, baby, pre-thinking. For a while, my friends and I tried to trisect the angle, which is a famous insoluble geometry problem. I don’t think it was a standard tool of an ancient Greek geometry of a compass and a straight edge.

I don’t think there is any way to try and perfectly trisect an angle. That has been long proven, but my friends and I tried to come up with a technique to do that for a couple days. My friends that were as nerdy as I was.

So, my philosophy on form, but at age ten and through the years after that, it was the Big Bang. As far as I can remember, my thinking would have been somehow contaminated with Steady State Theory.

But I was doing no super helpful thinking about that. I was probably doing some thinking that was prefatory to doing productive thinking about that stuff. I was taking physics in high school. Then eventually, college in a fairly half-ass way, so in a lazy way.

I was preparing to think about all this stuff. Then at age twenty and eleven months, I was sitting in the cafeteria in my dorm and eating red Jell-O. I was always trying to get bigger in those days. This was nineteen eighty-one. The late seventies, early eighty’s.

People were aspiring to be muscular as did I. Nobody was walking around trying to look like a superhero, but I wanted to look muscly and thinking that it would help me, get girlfriends. A girl or something.

So, I go to my first semester in college. I ate eight meals a day, the cafeteria was all you can eat, all you can eat; you show up and you present your ID. They allow you to go through the line as many times as you want.

So, I eat two breakfasts, three lunches, three dinners, trying to bulk up. So, I was in the cafeteria a lot. So, I was in college now. This is my third semester. I started the semester late because I had gone back to high school.

Anyway, I’m in the cafeteria, eating a bowl of red Jell-O cubes. I must have read an article or was looking at an article. I was thinking about an article that I had read previously in the library about the difference between short-term memory and long-term memory.

Thinking that there was a certain amount of bullshit in looking for structural theory, structural stuff in the brain architecture, to exploit short-term versus long-term memory, or you might be able to use geometrical arguments to explain why not everything that enters short-term memory can be retrieved via long-term memory.

The geometrical argument being that remembered memories are more central to thoughts and can be accessed via a variety of combinations of stimuli of related ideas and memories that the things in long-term memory are accessible from more angles with the angles being determined by the relationship amongst the things.

That the short terms memories aren’t always recallable later because there are fewer angles to them. It takes more of a specific context to get to making that short-term memory more retrievable on a long-term basis.

When the initial condition of the formation of that memory is no longer present, if you remember a thing a lot, there is a lot of different contexts; that memory becomes accessible in a lot of different contexts.

Something like, on an average day, the greatest accessibilities of some memories through third grade. I remembered when the books at the other end of the classroom, the words on their titles become blurry to me.

I remember that. I was becoming near-sighted. I can remember the teacher being blonde and hot. I remember drawing a naked lady then freaking out that I had a picture of a naked lady in my possession.

Then sticking it through the window of a car to get rid of it. But I can’t specifically recall a day in April in third grade; the context. I don’t have any context for retrieving memories from a specific, the memories from third grade…other than the ones that has some meaning to me biographically or remembered repeatedly that has more angle on.

I could tell you quite a bit about the night I lost my virginity because I reviewed that memory a lot of times. So, that memory or at least the memories of the memory because it’s probably overwritten to a certain extent, remembered it a gazillion times.

That memory is easily accessible because I accessed it a lot in different contexts. So, I can get at it. So, twenty years and eleven months, I’m thinking the information in your head should have geometry with the more easily retrievable stuff.

The more relevant information being at the centre of some structure. The less relevant, less retrievable information being on the outskirt, on the periphery. Then, eating my Jell-O, I had the thought that maybe the geometry of the universe is the geometry of information within awareness.

That was the beginning of my hardcore, philosophizing and thinking about physics without being necessarily fantastically diligent. There has been a lot of laziness; there has been a lot of doodling around; there has been a lot of wasted time, but the idea of the universe being made of information, of being a map of information within an awareness, the idea that the information can be mapped within its own space, all those related ideas are what I’ve come to believe.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Ask A Genius 341 – A Time to Stand, A Time to Bounce

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, what was your trajectory as a writer? What were the most difficult parts and how can you use that analysis to help others in their own writing?

Rick Rosner: In general, you could argue that I’ve been blocked as a writer for most of my life. Talking about Writer’s block is an excuse. It’s a complicated thing. It’s like some disease that may or may not exist and possibly because of laziness or perfectionism.

I haven’t written that much long form stuff, but I’ve found ways to do it. If you google around you can find about a million words that I have written or helped to write available to read on the internet.

A million words is ten or twelve pretty thick books with most of that output coming in the last three years via work with you and also twenty-six thousand tweets. Before that, I wrote about a hundred and ten thousand jokes and related bits of ephemera for T.V.

Thousands of those jokes made it to broadcast, but what’s happening with all of it. The commonality of most of this writing is that it’s twenty words at a time and I’m comfortable that I could pump out twenty words that I’m okay with.

Longer forms tend to take me much longer. I can’t dash stuff; I don’t often dash stuff off. The stuff you and I create is often you ask me a question or set up a hypothetical or we come up with a topic, then I talk and you transcribe.

Then it goes up and much of this material I don’t look at because that if I looked at it I will see its flaws. It would make me all crazy. So, I let it go. There’s a fight against imperfection that has certainly knocked down the levels of longer form stuff that I have written.

Working with you, I have sat down and written hundreds of thousands of words of longer form prose on a variety of topics, but I’m most comfortable with twenty words at a time. The spoken material that gets turned into written material or that gets turned into text; I can tip-toe away from without freaking out.

I still have a book that I’m pursuing and have managed to write one sixty-page proposal. That’s working with a co-author. I’m quite comfortable with collaboration. There are alpha males who are strong leaders. There are beta males who are followers. I’m kinda like an alpha minus male.

I can lead if I have to or if the situation is amenable to my leading. Like, I was a head bouncer at a huge bar in the 80s. This was a five-acre, two hundred thousand square foot beer garden in Boulder, Colorado.

I became the lead with a door staff of up to twenty bouncers at any one time. Twenty bouncers for when we had ten thousand customers on football Saturdays because it was down the hill from C.U., the University Colorado football stadium.

After the game, ten thousand people would spill into the gardens and that took staff of twenty or more bouncers to attempt to keep order. I could be the leader of the bouncers, even though I’m not a huge guy and even though my fighting skills are close too non-existent because I love catching fake IDs in the context of keeping underaged people out.

That was something that nobody else cared about. So, I was able to run around and make sure that we had a tight perimeter, which we did because it’s hard to control that much space. That many entrances.

Six or eight entrances plus a bunch of ways too. There was a creek you could cross through and hike up a hill. It was a mess, but I would also be able to cruise through the crowd and pick out underaged people who made it in one way or another.

One way to find the underaged people was to look for lame-o clumps of lame guys. Guys who I saw at the place week after week never picking up a woman, always there for that purpose. Like, there was the guy with the Robin Hood shirt, a shirt that had laces across the top.

That guy never scored, but if he was part of a cluster of similarly lame guys, I knew that if I looked at the center of that cluster I’d often find an underaged girl who hadn’t yet learned how to fend off lame guys.

So, I’d pluck her out of the cluster. I’d ask her to see ID. She wouldn’t have an ID. I’d kick her out. So, I had a love for this detective work: catching a fake ID. It’s the twenty-second mystery.

You’ve got ten or fifteen seconds at the most before you start pissing people off to determine whether an ID is real or fake. It’s like being Colombo fifteen seconds of the time and my love for that allowed me to be a good supervisor of the staff.

But it was only because I had a super eccentric interest in the fake IDs. The guys who were much more qualified. Bouncers are generally not interested in leadership. I worked with a bunch of guys.

Larry, who had gotten two Bronze Stars from Vietnam and who still had shrapnel coming out of his legs twelve Years after the war. Larry was there to hang out, maybe meet girls. There was no brawl that he could solve by walking into the middle of it.

Pushing people out of the way, Larry wasn’t interested in being head of that group. None of these tough guys were interested in being the head bouncer. The only reason that I became head bouncer is that catching a fake ID required some level of organization and administration.

So, it wasn’t that I have this leadership that would inevitably surface in any given situation. Writing for late night, I worked. The crew of late night writers are all men and women: tough. It takes a level of toughness to crank out hundreds of jokes a day under the gun.

With most of these jokes going unused because you only use the best jokes of all the jokes that are generated and also in an environment where, in a funny way, everybody makes fun of everybody else. Everybody’s freaking funny. A lot of funny people are best with other people.

It’s ‘give and take.’ It a little like junior high, but it is awesome. However, my skills don’t go into it because I’m not an alpha male and a lot of these people at my job are alpha males and alpha females.

I found myself towards the bottom of the pecking order and my skill does not extend to giving other people a bunch of jocular shit. But what I liked about the job and what I liked about a lot of the writing, in general, is the opportunity for collaboration; which is a true non-alpha male characteristic.

You and I have been working together for more than three years now. I’m happy with more than one point of view. More than one person generating ideas. I’ve learned to love collaboration. Let’s see what else. I imagine a bunch of stories that I will never write that could be good.

Now, I have to come up with some of them. Oh, like a screenplay, this could be an awesome screenplay of. I have a zillion ideas; none of them will come to fruition because I won’t write them, but say the story of somebody’s life told only in the crashes they’ve been in.

You don’t know much about the person but like, when I was four years old, I was in the back seat with my mom. 1964, my aunt who was a terrible driver caused a six-car chain reaction. Rear-ended somebody, super hard, my mom and I bounced off the front dash and back into the back seat.

So, you show that crash maybe minutes leading up to it the minutes afterward. I had double vision. I yelled out, “I can’t see. I can’t see you.” They rushed me to the hospital. If I’d been more articulate at four years old, they wouldn’t have had to fucking x-ray of my head.

So, I’m sad that I couldn’t express myself better and thus got my head x-rayed. The crashes I’ve had. I had a crash in high school at a ski resort where I was trying to be a cool guy. I borrowed the babysitter’s car to go skiing with my cool friends. Didn’t know how to drive on ice, went off the road, crashed into a tree.

Anyway, you can tell somebody a story, not all of it, but a lot of details about the person’s life in twenty crashes. Each of which is three to eight minutes long. It starts in 1964, which was the first crash.

Then it moves through now. Th n it moves into the future with some in 2032 with the guy now old, but not because in 2032 he is seventy-two, because seventy-two is the new forty-eight. The guy is in a crash of a self-driving car or in the crash of a dirigible.

Anyways, it would be a fun story. It’s nothing but crashes. The guy is saying on the phone leading up to the crash and what he says in talking to the people that participate, the other drivers after the crash. You get little snippets of the guy’s life over time. Everything goes around.

Anyway, I have a gazillion things like that. But because I lack writing discipline, most of those things won’t get written. Somebody comes to me. They know that I’m a decent writer.

Somebody who urged me to wrote a screenplay call Wing Dog. This thing that was written probably ten or eleven years ago. A casual guy who uses his dog as his wing man to help him meet women. The dog is a genius.

It turns out that the stray dog escaped from a secret government program. So, the dog is a genius. Anyway, it was a nice screenplay, but it would have been written if I hadn’t been recruited to collaborate.

The same guy recruited me to write a treatment, a pilot episode and a Bible, for a project called Growing Up X, which is about this kid. It’s like Boogie Nights told from the point of view of a kid in high school whose parents are in the porn industry.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] I got one minute.

Rosner: Okay. So, again, it was a good project. We came up with it. Most things don’t get made, but this thing got made except not with my participation. The guy sold it. It was made into a reality web series.

He found a porn family and he spent months with them showing their lives. So, that thing got made anyway. But anyway, my writing style is collaborative. The end.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Jamie Hayes, Paula J. Wilson and Nora Renick-Rinehart

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/23

I am a writer and executive administrator for Trusted Clothes, which is an ethical and sustainable fashion organization. The following is a series devoted in honor of the work done in collaboration with the Schroeckers and the Trusted Clothes team. Part 5 below, and 1 here, 2 here, 3 here and 4 here.

—

All of these things were serendipitous. All of the signs. Each pointed in one direction for the collection. Since Chicago’s fashion industry is decimated at this point, there aren’t a ton of mills here or fabric sales representatives. Horween is the last tannery left in Chicago.

The hides were designed by Paula J. Wilson, executed by Nora Renick-Rinehart, and then stitched by Klezar. What is the importance of this network of various individuals with different skill-sets to the overall production line for the final products?

We have this cult of artist or the designer. This idea that the person does everything themselves. Even if you’re amazingly talented and good at designing, printing, executing, and stitching, you’re one person. You can’t do everything. Art and design are always done in collaboration, whether people are transparent about that or not.

I am not a screen-printing expert. I am a good stitcher for a designer, but I am nothing like Klezar. I do as much as I can myself, especially at first to educate myself about a process, so that I can better communicate with the team. For example, I did do a few screen-prints on leather. However, there’s no way I could execute anything close to as wonderful as Paula and Nora. It takes years and years of practice to achieve their level of expertise.

A true collaboration becomes better than the sum of its parts. Everyone is pushing each other. Everyone is open to new ideas. Hopefully, what comes out takes you to a place you wouldn’t normally go with your own art work; I like to think that’s what happened with this art collection.

If people want to look more into things, they can look at the showroom/production space, the Department of Curiosities. What other work are you involved in at this point in time?

A couple of things. I am active in the Chicago Fair Trade. I am involved in advocacy work in Chicago. Also, I do technical design for other ethical design companies.

I am involved in Department of Curiosities. It’s the space that I share with another designer, Gerry Quinton. Recently, we designed and launched a line of slow fashion, and ethically made lingerie under the name Department of Curiosities.

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Morgan Wienberg, Little Footprints Big Steps International Development Organization

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/24

Morgan Wienberg is the Co-Founder, Coordinator, and Head of Haiti Operations for Little Footprints Big Steps International Development Organization. She was kind enough to take the time for an extensive interview with me. Please find part 10 below, and 1 here, 2 here, 3 here, 4 here, 5 here, 6 here, 7 here, 8 here, 9 here.

—

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Little Footprints Big Steps International Development Organization works from three components: child well-being and development, family and community involvement, and advocacy of child rights.[5] What are some modern examples of this – 5 years into its development?

Morgan Wienberg: Some children have been reunited for several years. We are focusing on education and medical care for the kids. That’s one clear example with child well-being and development. When speaking about family and community development, the community trainings as part of the working group for child protection. Community education regarding child abuse and sexual assault.

Also, education regarding abandonment once people give their children to orphanages. Some children have been reunited longer. We will invest in helping a parent start a small business or raise livestock. That does overlap into child wellbeing and development because the objective is to help that parent be able to care for the child.

In addition to it, that family can invest in their local economy, which can affect the whole community. When we talk abut advocacy, some examples include parents who try to reclaim their child from a corrupt orphanage. They find out that the child has been sold. We met one parent whose child died in the orphanage. We accompany those parents to take legal action and get an arrest warrant for the orphanage owner.

I have been involved in shutting several orphanages down. We have some of the kids involved in advocacy. When we have meetings with certain partners to educate international community about corrupt orphanages and the importance of family reunification, we have some of the youth that went through the phase of living in an abusive orphanage.

Now, they are with their families or in a state house. We have those children speak at the meetings or speak with partners, or on radios. We try to get them involved in that as well. In addition, other advocacy cases include kids who are sexually assaulted. We accompany them to the hospital for medical care. We try to arrange mental health care as well.

We have the child see a psychologist. We have them removed from the dangerous situation. We accompany them to the police system and to court if necessary.

2. Jacobsen: In a prior interview, you mentioned 600 orphanages were corrupt in Haiti. However, it is hard to track them. You posited more.

Wienberg: There are more.

(Laughs)

There are thousands of orphanages in Haiti. Social Services has tried to monitor them. However, when you talk about the entire Southern department, which is equivalent to a province or a state, there are only 7 social workers for the entire region who are with social services. Those 7 social workers don’t have contracts. They haven’t had contracts for the last 3 months.

They haven’t been paid. They go to work because of commitment to the kids. There are only 2 paid social workers at present for the entire region. They have one vehicle. How can they monitor those orphanages? They did try to do some statistics about it. Definitely, I believe there are more than 600.

3. Jacobsen: How many have you been involved in shutting down?

Wienberg: I have been involved in shutting down three orphanages, completely.

References

[David Truman]. (2016, March 9). Morgan. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWbgIF1NO5E.

[DevelopingPictures]. (2012, March 25). Sponsor a Child: Little Footprints Big Steps. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjzncB3HsmA.

[James Pierre]. (2016, April 5). Morgan Wienberg goes one-on-one with James Pierre. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1VMeKKTxkM.

[Morgan Wienberg]. (2014, June 3). Congratulations, FH Grad 2014!. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNQ7PB95aYA.

[Ryan Sheetz]. (2015, February 20). Little Footprints Big Steps. Retrieved fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9fdPx1srGI.

Bailey, G. (2013, December 31). Catch Yukoner Morgan Wienberg tomorrow on CBC’s Gracious Gifts. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/airplay/features/2013/12/31/catch-yukoner-morgan-wienberg-tomorrow-on-cbcs-gracious-gifts/.

Baker, R. (2016, March 4). PHOTOS Governor General recognizes exceptional Canadians in Vancouver. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/governor-general-recognizes-exceptional-canadians-in-vancouver-1.3476960.

Broadley, L. (2014, August 1). Meet the Yukoner reuniting Haitian ‘orphans’ with their families. Retrieved from http://globalnews.ca/news/1482839/one-yukoners-work-reuniting-haitian-orphans-with-their-families/.

Bruemmer, R. (2011, April 8). Haiti: Little Paul gets it done. Retrieved from http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/haiti+little+paul+gets+done/5214066/story.html.

CBC News. (2015, November 29). Morgan Wienberg awarded Meritorious Service Cross for work in Haiti. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/morgan-wienberg-awarded-meritorious-service-cross-for-work-in-haiti-1.3340295.

ca. (n.d.). 23-year-old receives Meritorious Service Cross Medal. Retrieved from http://canadaam.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=804018&playlistId=1.2769055&binId=1.815911&playlistPageNum=1&binPageNum=1.

ca Staff. (2016, February 8). 23-year-old awarded Meritorious Service Cross for work in Haiti. Retrieved from http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/23-year-old-awarded-meritorious-service-cross-for-work-in-haiti-1.2769013.

Dolphin, M. (2015, December 4). Yukoner’s work in Haiti draws governor general’s attention. Retrieved from http://www.yukon-news.com/life/yukoners-work-in-haiti-draws-governor-generals-attention/.

Gillmore, M. (2012, July 18). Helping to reunite families in Haiti. Retrieved from http://yukon-news.com/life/helping-to-reunite-families-in-haiti.

Gillmore, W. (2013, August 16). Wienberg gives New York a glimpse of Haiti. Retrieved from http://www.yukon-news.com/news/wienberg-gives-new-york-a-glimpse-of-haiti/.

Gjerstad, S. (2014, April 8). Morgan (22) vier livet sitt til å gjenforene barn med foreldrene sine på Haiti. Retrieved from http://www.tv2.no/a/5852686/.

Joannou, A. (2016, March 7). Governor general gives nod to Yukon’s champion of Haitian children. Retrieved from http://www.yukon-news.com/news/governor-general-gives-nod-to-yukons-champion-of-haitian-children/.

Langham, M. (2012, October 10). Just Like Us: An Interview with Morgan Wienberg of Little Footprints, Big Steps. Retrieved from http://aconspiracyofhope.blogspot.ca/2012/10/just-like-us-interview-with-morgan.html.

Little Footprints, Big Steps. (2016). Little Footprints, Big Steps. Retrieved from https://www.littlefootprintsbigsteps.com.

Neel, T. (2013, May 16). Reaching the Hearts of Children in Need. Retrieved from http://whatsupyukon.com/Lifestyle/making-a-difference/reaching-the-hearts-of-children-in-need/#sthash.YCSvg1aM.oVLAQE3j.dpbs.

Peacock, A. (2016, February 27). Haiti has her heart. http://www.kelownadailycourier.ca/news/local_news/article_beb828d0-ddcf-11e5-851b-8b09487f61ce.html?mode=story.

(2014, July 8). Joven canadiense decide gastar sus ahorros en rescatar niños de Haití. Retrieved from http://www.elpais.com.uy/vida-actual/joven-canadiense-reune-huerfanos-haitianos.html.

Rodgers, E. (2015, January 12). Meet the 22-Year-Old Who Skipped Out on College—to Offer a Helping Hand in Haiti. Retrieved from http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/01/12/meet-morgan-wienberg-little-foot-big-step.

Schott, B.Y. (2012, September 13). Making a Difference One Child at a Time. Retrieved from http://whatsupyukon.com/Lifestyle/making-a-difference/making-a-difference-one-child-at-a-time/#sthash.CeS656Xm.2r1eJsAW.dpbs.

Shiel, A. (2011, November 17). McGill students host third annual TEDxMcGill even. Retrieved from http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2011/11/mcgill-students-host-third-annual-tedxmcgill-event/.

Thompson, J. (2011, December 23). Helping Haiti for the holidays. Retrieved from http://yukon-news.com/life/helping-haiti-for-the-holidays.

Thompson, J. (August 12). Hope and hard lessons in Haiti. Retrieved from http://yukon-news.com/life/hope-and-hard-lessons-in-haiti.

Thomson Reuters. (2014, July 27). 22-year-old Yukoner reunites Haitian ‘orphans’ with parents. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/22-year-old-yukoner-reunites-haitian-orphans-with-parents-1.2719559.

Waddell, S. (2015, November 27). For decorated Yukoner, home is now Haiti. Retrieved from http://www.whitehorsestar.com/News/for-decorated-yukoner-home-is-now-haiti.

Whitehorse Star. (2016, March 2). Yukoners to receive honours from Governor General. Retrieved from http://www.whitehorsestar.com/News/yukoners-to-receive-honours-from-governor-general.

Wienberg, M. (2013, November 22). Age Is Not an Obstacle in Changing the World. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/morgan-wienberg/age-is-not-an-obstacle_b_4324563.html.

Wienberg, M. (2014, January 23). Courage of a Mother. Retrieved from http://whatsupyukon.com/Lifestyle/making-a-difference/courage-of-a-mother/#sthash.hy1QzF0S.ZA1StSZz.dpbs.

Woodcock, R. (2013, September 26). Back to School in Haiti. Retrieved from http://whatsupyukon.com/Lifestyle/making-a-difference/back-to-school-in-haiti/#sthash.TMqQNkLX.dpbs.

Yukon News. (2013, February 6). Incredible acts of kindness in Haiti. Retrieved from http://yukon-news.com/letters-opinions/incredible-acts-of-kindness-in-haiti.

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Jamie Hayes, Gerry, Meaning, Trusted Clothes, and Production Mode

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/23

—

Also, I am going to have a pop-up shop at the theWit Hotel in Chicago in the month of August, and a fashion show on August 25^th, showing both Production Mode and Department of Curiosities, at their rooftop space.

I’m launching the next Production Mode line in the Fall. I am involved with the League of Women Designers in Chicago. A lot of entrepreneurs designing and working in Chicago, who are thinking about the ethics of how things are produced in their lines.

You mentioned a shared value with Gerry. I suspect this for other collaborations as well. That leaves me to think, “What meaning or personal fulfillment does this work bring for you?”

So much personal fulfillment—that’s really key to me! I have worked in the fashion industry since 1999, but I actually left the field for a few years because I was missing that personal fulfillment. I had to do some soul searching. While I loved the process of design, designing and making clothing and expressing myself though style, I really needed to check in with myself and face what was going on in the industry.

First of all, the ethics–people and the earth need to be respected, and we need to curb our own consumption levels. Also, I needed to question some of the main tenets of the industry. It is common to make the consumer feel bad about themselves and then to think that they can solve body issues, self-image issues, through purchasing things, especially clothing, to make themselves feel better or to distract themselves from the ills in their lives.

I had to dig deeper and think, “What’s the social meaning of fashion? How can style be used in a positive way to build self-esteem, to help a person express their identity and culture – to find out who they are?”

My work post-graduate school has been guided by these questions and issues. That’s been key to me finding personal fulfillment in my work.

For me, fabric, color, textures, line and pattern bring me great joy. I hope to my clients as well. There’s joy in art and design. All of those things keep me going and bring me great personal satisfaction. I feel lucky to do something that I love that is in line with my values. Sadly, I think that’s a rare thing in our culture right now. I wish it weren’t the case, but I feel lucky to be situated here.

With regard to organizations/companies, and so on, like Trusted Clothes and Production Mode, what’s the importance of them to you?

It is to show an alternative to the mainstream. That it is possible to create and purchase ethically-made, well-designed clothing. Also, to get people in the industry to question how things are made, hopefully, to create a sea change.

I look forward to a future where there are no more ethical clothing or aggregator sites like Trusted Clothing. Ethical, sustainable manufacture should be the norm. Until it is, though, we definitely need to keep spreading the word and asking for change in the larger community.

Thank you for your time, Jamie.

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Jamie Hayes, Production Mode and the Chicagoan Horween Tannery

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/23

—

What makes Production Mode unique?

I think the proprietary/exclusive materials. Also, the level of transparency—that I share where the materials come from, who is making the garments, the fact that you can come into our studio and see firsthand how things are made. As well, I would say the quality of the fit. I consulted with a technical designer with many years of experience working with leather to refine the fit. A lot of time and energy spent on these patterns. The fit is good for ready-to-order, and then can be further refined for people that can come to Chicago for a fitting. That’s something a lot of designers don’t offer.

Your inaugural collection consisted of leather that was vegetable tanned from a unionized shop, Chicago’s Horween tannery. Why the Horween tannery for the inaugural collection?

For a couple reasons, one was a happy accident. I was discussing the custom print with Paula. She said, “What color should the base cloth be?” I referenced one of her paintings. She said, “Oh, a hide color.” I had a lightbulb moment. I said, “No, no, you should print it on hide!”

The search began for the best quality leather. Leather is touchy if you’re talking about “ethical” fashion. Some people say that because it is an animal dying in order to produce something it is not ethical. I respect and understand that.

Digging in deeper from there, I found one tannery left in Chicago. I was familiar with it from my former job as a handbag designer, but I hadn’t dug as deep as I did in this case. I researched vegetable tanning– artisanal, traditional way to tan leather that uses organic plant matter such as sticks, barks, and tree extracts. It is a 6-weeks process in contrast to chrome-tanning, which is a 6-hour process.

Chrome-tanning uses chromium, which is a heavy metal and highly carcinogenic. That choice became really clear for me. I didn’t want to use a material that is carcinogenic. That will end up in our waterways or landfills. Also, I learned that vegetable-tanned leather tends to age much better than chrome-tanned leather. So if you think how vintage leather goods get that great patina versus a scuffed, worn out look that is typical nowadays, that’s the difference between a vegetable tan and a chrome tan.

In terms of the quality, design, and aesthetic perspectives, thinking about the planet, the fact that the factory is unionized, it was an easy decision to go with Horween. In addition, it is wonderful. I can travel whenever I want and speak to my sales representative. Since it is a mile from my shop. All of the money stays within the local economy.

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Jamie Hayes, Living Wage, Sustainable Fashion, and Ethical Fashion

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/22

—

What is the importance of sustainable fashion to you?

The issues are similar. There’s overlap, but sustainability refers to the environment and issues affecting the planet. I come out of the labor movement. So, I am less educated about those issues, but even if you’re looking at it from a human perspective. Obviously, we are humans. We live on the planet. There are huge ramifications for everyone.

We are all connected. We should care about what is happening on the other side of the world. It is about human rights. We all deserve basic human rights, and beyond that, the ability to thrive and grow. From the human perspective, the pesticides that are used to grow our cotton, the petroleum that is used to create polyester, the dyes that are used to create the colors in the fabrics … all of these things affect the workers who are applying those pesticides or dyes. They go into our water supplies. It is about treating out world well. There is huge overlap between issues of sustainability and ethics.

My favorite term is slow fashion because this takes into account the quality of the product and the design. It’s coming out of and inspired by the slow food movement, the tenets of which are to know the provenance of this food or, in our case, the clothing. So, where do our clothes come from? What about the raw materials like the cotton, wool, poly, or leather? To have transparency about that, to appreciate and value the item, the experience around it, to slow down, buy less, buy higher quality. That’s important information to provide as a designer. Because, to be honest, you cannot do everything perfectly, especially as a small company. You might now know all of the labor conditions in a factory. The factory making your zippers or buttons, but you can choose the highest quality zipper. This can allow the garment to have as long a life as possible.

Sometimes, we have to think about competing issues and balance those all out. Slow fashion is the most honest way to do that as a designer in my opinion.

What was the inspiration for Production Mode – and its title?

(Laughs) Coming out of the labor movement, I have done a lot of neo-Marxist readings. I was thinking about means of production and the organization of work, and what brings people joy. I was thinking about that when I named the company.

But the inspiration goes way beyond that. At the end of the day, I am a designer. I love fashion. I think we need to make a lot of changes in the industry, but I love clothing as a means of self-expression. It brings me a lot of joy. I think it brings a lot of people on this planet a lot of joy. It’s an expression of who we are: our culture, identity, values. It doesn’t have to be a superficial, passive consumer experience. It could be tailored to fit your body exactly. That’s how it was used for generations—until recently, in fact.

Now, it is a disposable thing. It doesn’t have to be that way. One thing I always want to be a part of the company is the concept of artist collaboration. It stretches me as a designer. It makes sure there is something unique about the product and timeless.

For example, for the first line that I launched, I collaborated with an artist named Paula J. Wilson. She designed an all-over print for leather. Another artist, Nora Renick-Rinehart, executed the print and applied it to leather. It is not something seen often with leather. It is limited edition. It is designed by a well-known artist. So, there’s a whole story. I can trace the provenance of the materials, the print, the execution of the print, etc.

For the next line, which I’ll launch in the Fall of this year, the fabric is designed in collaboration with an artist named Nuria Montiel. It is executed by local weavers called the Weaving Mill in Chicago. They are located about a mile from my studio. I have two industrial dobby looms. It is a collaboration between the four of us to produce the fabric for the line. It can’t be found anywhere else. It was inspired by Nuria’s art work, influenced by the textiles of the Bauhaus movement, and Peruvian and Mexican textile traditions.

License

Copyright

2022-04-17

Jamie Hayes, Ethical and Sustainable Fashion in Chicago, Illinois Area

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/22

—

You argue for a living wage for workers. Why is it important for the sustainable and ethical fashion industry?

It is important across the board. I’m focused on fashion because that’s what I do for a living. It is important in a more global level as well. Fashion, clothing, and sewn products are some of the most labor intensive industries in the whole world. It is a ‘race-to-the-bottom’ industry.

Anyone interested in women’s rights, supporting those most easily exploited, eradicating poverty, would do well to look at the fashion industry because that’s the ‘bottom.’ We can find the easily exploited people there.

If these people can be paid well and treated fairly, we can do a lot to improve the rights of women and young girls, eradicate poverty, improve health outcomes, increase literacy, and so on. It is a huge issue. We need to be aware of it. In Chicago, the labor movement speaks of is $15/hour as the living wage.

So, we pay above that for our stitcher. That’s how we gauge that here, but it is different in each city and country based on the cost of living in that place.

To separate two ideas floating around in the conversation, the phrase “ethical and sustainable fashion,” but this belies two separate and related ideas. Ethical fashion on the one hand; sustainable fashion on the other hand. To start, what is the importance of ethical fashion to you?

For me, the importance is the human factor. Nobody should be dying to make our clothes. Even so, 2013 was the deadliest year on record in the fashion industry. If you look back historically, it is similar to the beginning of the 20^th century in the US with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. People die for fashion. That’s ridiculous.

What we’re speaking of when we say ethical fashion is really baseline, sadly. People should make a living wage. A wage that allows them to live on and support a family. To be frank, $15/hour in Chicago would not be enough in Chicago, but it’s better than the minimum wage in Chicago.

Secondly, people should work in a healthy and safe environment. Sadly, that’s not the case in a lot of the garment industry, especially that which is offshored.

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Jamie Hayes, Ethical and Sustainable Fashion in Chicago, Illinois Area

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/22

—

Tell us about yourself – family background, personal story, education, and previous professional capacities.

I started in the fashion industry in 1999 in St. Louis, working at a boutique after college, and sewing after my senior year in college because I wanted something hands-on and concrete. I was studying English literature and while I loved to read and write. It was abstract and alienating for me. My personality type doesn’t mesh with it.

It is nice, at the end of the day, to have a pile of work, see what you’ve accomplished, and in a concrete way. I moved to Chicago to get a second BA at Columbia College in Fashion Design. I was lucky. I got a job in the industry while I in school. It was at a handbag company called 1154 Lill Studio. The company was a real pioneer in mass customization.

As a result, we needed to make everything one-by-one, made-to-order, and with a quick turnaround time – three weeks. We made everything in-house first and then in the Chicago area. It was a lesson in production management and efficiency. I was seeing local manufacturers firsthand, which was rare. Everything was offshoring.

My consciousness was raised in working with contractors and realizing that a lot of people don’t get paid fairly, making friends with stitchers, and hearing their stories of immigration and exploitation in the sewing industry. So, I started asking questions and becoming conscientious.

100% Wool Felt Top and Vegetable Tanned Leather Skirt. Photo is by Jenni Hampshire.

I ended up getting a graduate degree. A Master’s degree at the University Chicago in Social Work. I focused on labor rights in the garment industry. I worked as a labor organizer for a few years in Chicago. Primarily, I was working with undocumented, Mexican population, frontline workers.

I was training on worker’s rights and helping to organize campaigns in the work place. However, I missed working with my hands—the colors and textures in fashion, the more direct creativity that world affords. Following this, I joined Chicago fair trade and became involved in that movement as a volunteer helping to pass a Sweatfree Ordinance in the city and county level in Chicago.

Also, I took on a lot of freelance work with fair trade companies. I worked for SERRV. They sent me to China. I did some work in Peru, in the Lima area. Also, I have done a lot of technical design for local companies in ethical and fair trade fashion. Finally, I launched my own line in January of 2015.

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Calistus Igwilo, Registration of the Atheist Society of Nigeria

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/21

Calistus Igwilo is the President of the Atheist Society of Nigeria, who was kind enough to give an extensive, exclusive interview with me. Here we talk about religious faith, atheism, and religion in Nigeria. Part 2 here, and 1 here.

—

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How momentous is the occasion of ASN registration?

Calistus Igwilo: Well, the day the news broke that we have been incorporated, it was in the evening, I was just speechless, I couldn’t describe what I felt, and it was the same for other 9 members of the board of trustees. But very quickly, it dawned on me that we have achieved something very great something capable of making a positive lasting change to Nigeria and I could see the enormous task ahead of us. I still don’t have words to describe the feeling that night, but that sense of accomplishment drove us to this present day.

Jacobsen: Also, it was registered as an official organization, which is a first for an organization of its kind. How else is this a momentous occasion for the atheist community in Nigeria?

Igwilo: First it has given the Atheists, Secularists, Humanists and Freethinkers a sense of community backed by the law, where they can actualize their common goals, it has given them a voice which hitherto was non-existent, many never believed that this day will come. ASN wants to engage with the Nigerian community to raise awareness on why public policies, scientific inquiries and education policies should not be based on religious beliefs but rather on sound reason, rationality and evidence. This will help liberate people from superstitions and myths and promote science and technology, it will also make Nigeria a saner, safer, more sustainable place for reason and freethought.

Jacobsen: What are some initiatives underway to normalize atheism, reduce superstition, and secularize public life in Nigeria more?

Igwilo: We have started campaigning against qualified professionals that use their authority to promote superstitious practices among vulnerable Nigerians which could lead to loss of lives. A case study is our petition against the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria about some medical doctors and healthcare professionals that refer patients to “faith healing homes” and some that support phantom miraculous healing testimonies in their places of worship giving credence to superstitious beliefs.

We also want to promote religious tolerance in Nigeria because Nigeria is grossly divided along religious lines which breeds suspicion and mistrust among the divide. Our solution is to educate the youths on various religions in Nigeria, this can be achieved by campaigning for the merging of all religious studies under a single subject of learning in secondary schools. We are making the case that Traditional Religious Knowledge, Islamic Religious Knowledge, Christian Religious Knowledge be taught as a single comparative subject of study, it will enable the students to critique religions and have an academic knowledge of various religions and help them develop critical thinking and reasoning. When they become adults, they will vote in people with rational and critical thinking into governance who will in turn make public policies that are not based on religious beliefs but on sound reason, rationality and evidence. It will be a very long drawn out campaign, we will lay the foundation now and sustain it.

Nigerian national assembly has passed some laws that breed hate and victimization against some minority citizens, we intend to mount campaign in due cause to call for repeal of those obnoxious laws that infringes on citizens fundamental human rights.

Jacobsen: How can people get involved or donate to the Atheist Society of Nigeria?

Igwilo: People can get involved with us by registering as members of Atheist Society of Nigeria though our membership registration portal on our website at www.atheist.org.ng.

We are a not-for-profit organisation and depend on donations and goodwill to carry out our programs and local development projects. We are open to donations and volunteering of time and skills to help implement our projects. For monetary donations, we have a bank account where we can receive donations, it can also be done online using credit or debit card. We also have a portal for volunteers registration on our website.

Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Calistus.

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Calistus Igwilo, the Atheist Society of Nigeria and Its Relevance

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/21

—

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Was there a family grounding in religious faith?

Calistus Igwilo: I was baptized a Catholic, couple of months after my birth, and was raised a Catholic until about age 13 when I joined my mum to attend a prayer ministry (Where they purport to see the vision and predict the future). And I eventually became a “visioner” at about age 15. Then about age 20, I became a “born again” Christian and was supposed to live above sin, to be holy even as Christ was holy, so I sincerely and honestly struggled to live above sin, I didn’t watch television at the time because I could see a sensual advert that will make me lust in my heart thereby committing sin. Prior to being born again, I masturbated a lot, but as a born again I tried very hard to resist masturbation and struggled for about 1 year until I lost it. So it dawned on me that I was a “sinner” and numerous attempt to repent proved abortive as those desires were real, therefore, I stopped going to church in other not to be a hypocrite. And when I accepted life the way it really was, I started to have doubts about religion but I was alone on that thought, there was no like minded person to share my doubts with.

Later, when I became independent and started living by myself, I asked myself some crucial questions: “all the things I know so far, who thought me?” My answer was mainly my parents, then I asked, “Who thought my parents” the answer was my grandparents. Then I asked the crucial question “What do these grand and great grandparents know? Are my not supposed to know more than them, since they did not have the level of education I have?” And that was how my journey into skepticism started, I resolved to reevaluate everything that I have been thought by my parents and choose for myself only things that made sense and conform to the knowledge I had gained thus far. I began to think for myself, I became responsible for my life and my actions, then I realized that the whole religious stuff lacks logical merit.

About that period, I met my first business partner Leoard F. Runyon Jr. who we formed a computer company together. He lived life the way life was without any recourse to a supernatural being or superstitions. We never discussed religion or talked about atheism, I do not know about atheism at the time, but for the first time in my life, I associated with people that live their lives very plainly without invoking God or religion for any task, they depend on their brain to make decisions. At that point, religion became irrelevant in my life and any thought of returning to it someday vanished. After few more years, I started looking for Nigerians like me, I couldn’t see any around me, so I took to the internet to search for Nigerian Atheists. Leo Igwe’s name was the prominent name that pops up each time I searched so I did him an email which he replied and informed me about an upcoming humanist convention in 2011 at Abuja. I attended that conference and met for the first time, Nigerian atheists, and that was the beginning of my association with atheists.

Jacobsen: Who were some influences in losing it or simply becoming an atheist?

Igwilo: The first influence was my personal experience. I have always tried to be sincere and honest to myself, so when I started struggling to keep up with religious teachings, I knew somehow that they weren’t tenable, then I became a “backslider” and because I don’t want to deceive myself claiming to be what is not tenable, I gave up on religion. The next influence was Leonard F. Runyon, my business partner, in whom I saw for the first time in my life how someone can live one’s life without the need for a God. Then when I a degree course in Biotechnology, everything fell into place, I had a rational explanation for the emergence of life and I applied that knowledge to every other supernatural belief. Life ceased to be mysterious to me and I never looked back since then. There was nothing to look back for anyway because I have traveled the road of religion and have studied the bible from page to page from cover to cover so there was nothing curious left there to go back to.

Jacobsen: What is the prevalence religion in Nigeria? What are the types that you’d typically find there?

Igwilo: The prevalent religions in Nigeria are Islam and Christianity, the traditional religion is steadily going extinct. Majority of northern Nigeria are Muslims while the majority of Eastern Nigeria are Christians, the western Nigeria are split between Muslims and Christians. So each region is dominated by their own common religion (Christian or Muslim) and they tolerate each other to a good extent except for some small part of northern Nigeria where sectarian crises arise once in a while.

Jacobsen: Why did you found the Atheist Society of Nigeria?

Igwilo: While I was doing my masters degree at the University of Nottingham, UK, I joined the University of Nottingham Atheists Secularists and Humanist (UNASH) association, it was my first experience of belonging to an atheist group, I also joined the Nottingham Secular Society an umbrella body for atheists and humanists living in Nottingham. I was elected to serve on the executive committee and was closely mentored by Dennis, the then President of Nottingham Secular Society and I gained some experience in running a secular society. So when I returned to Nigeria in 2013, I started Port Harcourt Secular Society with Timothy Hatcher under the suggestion of Becca Schwartz. The main reason was to create a community for Atheist, Humanist, Secularists and Freethinkers. By then there was a vibrant Nigerian Atheist group and Nigerian Humanist group on Facebook which serves as home for all atheists, humanists, and freethinkers. The need to organize so that we can engage with government, institutions, and societies led to us applying to be registered with Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), but our application suffered numerous setbacks, when we got some kind of nod to go ahead, we didn’t have the fund to see the process through as Port Harcourt Secular Society had very few members then. So we organized at the national level to register Humanist Society of Nigeria but it suffered a huge setback from the CAC, they always come up with a reason to have us start the application all over again, it’s been up to 2 years now and Nigerian Humanist Association hasn’t been incorporated. While at it, some group of Atheists who belong to a Facebook group called Proudly Atheist made a move, and quietly got initial approval after their lawyer threatened to sue CAC, so we rallied around the process and finally got it registered. This has given us the backing of the law, to engage our community.

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Child Labor is Often Slave Labor

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/20

I am a writer and executive administrator for Trusted Clothes, which is an ethical and sustainable fashion organization. The following is a series devoted in honor of the work done in collaboration with the Schroeckers and the Trusted Clothes team.

—

Child Labor and fashion victims

One of the major issues and ethical fashion is child labor. We can find this in millions and millions of children that are working, let alone in substandard conditions and pay, and often in what might most accurately be termed as slave labor.

Child labor persists in much of the developing world. Children are made slaves to the fashion industry in a literal sense rather than in the consumers’ sense. These children work hard hours even by adult standards from the developed world. They are abused, malnourished and violated- stripped off of their human rights.

The obvious answer is to help these children. We can help them with food, funding, and education. There are several organisations where we can get involved in helping these young children out of these conditions.

Indirectly, we can make better decisions in terms of our consumer choices and support relevant, trustworthy, non-profit/not-for-profit organizations. Consumer choices in terms of clothing, footwear, and any other purchases we make. It’s a necessary thing to do in the modern era.

The children need our help.

Children are some of the most powerless in the fashion garment industry production line and supply chains. And some of the most powerless in the world with each generation.

Imagine that this is your life or that your child was stripped of all possible dreams and hopes for the future because of poverty and having to work at such a young age. Imagine if your child was stripped of human rights and child rights.

To me, it seems not only a sense of children’s rights to not have to work. It seems to me like the right for children to have a childhood. A childhood with proper nutrition, education, love, care, and play. I don’t think children deserve to be working in these conditions, or at all working. It’s ridiculous.

Now, I ask you about child labor. Is deprivation of a childhood abuse? Is interference of regular school attendance abuse? Is this possibly mentally and emotionally harmful? Is it physically harmful to the children?

Do you think they actually have safe regulations for the kids? I don’t think so. I don’t think that these people have adequate provisions of any of these. I think that they have lost their childhood or are in the process of losing it, don’t attend school as they should.

We can see the rise of child slavery world wide. There are hundreds of millions of kids likely working in child labor. I mean, there are estimates that it’s around 200 million total. But how many can actually document properly? It’s a very difficult problem because these are violations of human and child rights by their very nature.

That means that the reportage on the number of them might not necessarily be accurate, and we would have good reason to think of these estimates as lower than the actual rate. I think it’s a travesty. I think this is morally outrageous that so many children are suffering in abominable ways throughout the world.

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 340 – Intelligence as Refuge and Strength

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: To take a step back, who are personal heroes for you although you have qualms with those terms?

Rick Rosner: Alright. Heroes, people I am interested in finding more about or reading more of their stuff.

Jacobsen: Like who?

Rosner: Like George Saunders, I would say is a hero. He is a guy who is trained as an engineer. Then became a writer who addresses a lot of issues of modern life that other people don’t quite get. The world is discovered.

And so, he has rightfully elevated into one of our great current writers. He’s also personally kind and available. He seems like a good guy. He is a great writer. Other writers I like, though their interests don’t always overlap with mine – I mean entirely overlap with mine, so they don’t always write about what I wish they would write about. Stevenson, Charles Straus, Doctorow, Kelly Oxford.

People I like finding more about include like Elvis. I like reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald, although he was a huge mess. A provocative mess. There’s a whole little cluster of women at Harvard at the beginning of the 20^th century who are responsible for much of our understanding of the structure of the universe.

They didn’t get the credit they deserved. Like Henrietta Swan Leavitt and her crew. What’s that lady, the one that discovered the elemental composition of stars? Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin.

She’s interesting, in that she came up with this huge discovery and is almost entirely absent from our collective scientific memory. Compared to people whose names are pretty much household names, like Hubble — who builds his work upon the work of these women.

I like reading about them, but there’s not too much more to read about him. Oh, you asked who is smarter than me, and…

Jacobsen: Who do you think is smarter than you? There is the Betts listing.

Rosner: Everything has to start with how goofy the idea is that you can write about that way. I benefited from the ranking, but you have similar problems as to when you ask, and worse problems is when you ask, “Who is the world’s strongest man?”

There are lots of different indices of strength. And, any measuring tool is arbitrary in whatever tasks one picks or emphasizes. I can tell you that I have the highest measured IQ of anybody who has ever written jokes for TV.

Jacobsen: In one interview, you said you had the highest IQ in the world.

Rosner: I have worked with plenty of people who are wildly smart, who are geniuses accordingly, not the loosest definition of genius but not the strictest definition of genius, too. You have to put things in context where I might be the funniest person currently alive within an IQ in the 190s.

I might be the smartest person alive writing jokes like specific contexts. It’s hard to judge. Anyway, you were saying that I am the smartest person. I have got a good argument that I have the highest IQ in the world.

Jacobsen: Second highest on the one listing. Dr. Katsioulis has the first. To your good argument for the highest, why? How?

Rosner: I’ve taken more than thirty tests to measure ultra-high IQ and have gotten the highest score ever earned on more than twenty of them. Nobody has that huge record of maxing out all of these high-end IQ tests.

The most that anybody else has done is two or three or five. Where they get the highest score ever, if anybody would even doubt it’s high, I would think that other people’s claim to their IQ’s generally rest on one or two good performances on an IQ test.

Mine rests on my performance across dozens of tests. And decades of messing around with these tests.

Jacobsen: And if you take the Betts listing, the one test that they do take into account to decide the score for number one was a nonverbal test by the Cerebrals Society. He scored 205 on an SD16.

It was a culture fair test. You scored 199 on SD16 on a verbal test.

Rosner: I would have to look at the whole deal. These high-end tests get re-normed a lot. So, as the people who make the test get more results and do more statistical work, it can change things. Most of these people aren’t psychometricians or statisticians.

Jacobsen: So, we can take this 199. Also, you scored four 198.1s all on tests by Betts from 2012. So, maybe, we can take a step back and that way you can speak more confidently.

Rosner: I mean the everything is arbitrary. I have practiced a lot because I have taken so many tests. What it takes to do those tests, I have to put in the work to do them. So, you could argue that there is a huge practice effect and a huge determination in the diligence.

I mean everything is arbitrary, again, in the same way, that if you have ever watched the world’s strongest man. You see a bunch of guys who weigh anyway from 280 to 400 pounds doing various things that take tremendous strength.

Lifting stone balls that are two feet in diameter, pushing 800-pound truck tires that are 10 feet in diameter end over end, racing while towing a semi that might go for 10,000 pounds, different people win different events.

There’s no world’s strongest man whose won that thing eight years in a row. I don’t think, maybe there is. His name is probably something Scandinavian-like. Guys from the Viking country seem to be into this and do well.

But, that you can claim that any one of those guys is absolutely the world’s strongest man, because the tasks are arbitrary. Then you have Olympic power holders who do things of strength and whole other sets of tightly judged measures of strength.

Then you have weird effects like the world’s strongest teenager. For a long time, there was a kid out of one of the Eastern Bloc countries. This kid turns out that he has like brutal scoliosis. So, that when he deadlifts, he grabs the bar and spine flexes.

His rib cage drops a couple of inches. So, his ribs are resting directly on his ileac crest of his pelvis. And so, he only has to get the bar like two inches off the ground, because his body flexes. So, I’ve heard that when he bench-presses, then you can put a basketball under his back because his spine is so curved.

So, that’s a weird way of not cheating but of leveraging one’s strength due to anatomical peculiarity. The measurement of IQ, of intelligence, has always been problematic. And also, this is similar to the world’s strongest man.

What the hell, it doesn’t matter. What matters, the world’s strongest man matters within the context of the show called The World’s Strongest Man. It matters within the context of like national pride, which you could already use as an important thing when it comes to powerlifting.

I’m saying that the idea that IQ doesn’t have a huge context of mattering, especially since IQ was designed in France by a guy as a tool to see what kids needed help with in school. He had IQ. He probably didn’t call it IQ, because that was probably a term coined in California.

But he came up with the idea of intelligence testing, on a five-point scale, where the ones and twos had learning difficulties, needed help, the fours and fives had advanced learning abilities and needed perhaps different educational resources too.

The threes are your average students who might be in a regular classroom. Then Terman gets ahold of the idea and probably comes up with an index of 100 being average, with differences measured on a scale of the standard deviation of 16.

He Americanized it; he tech-ed it up. Going from a one through five scale to a scale that gives you a two or three-digit score, which gives the illusion of much more precision.

Anyway, I can brag about my IQ and use it to try to get recognition and maybe eventually a book deal or employment, or somehow monetize it the way like Marilyn Vos Savant, who was known for having the highest IQ in the Guinness Book of World Records in the 80s.

She has monetized her IQ. She has probably six or seven million dollars over her lifetime.

Jacobsen: What’s the evidence for that claim?

Rosner: Because she has column in Parade Magazine for more than thirty years now. I am figuring if she gets 150 grand per year for the column, which, maybe she does, and she has published ten books.

If she is that active in giving speeches now, but she used to be part of the Speaker’s Bureau, the woman with the world’s highest IQ could come and talk to your group. Maybe, it will cost 15 or 20 grand.

So, I would say it’s not unreasonable to think that given all of her activity that she has made at least millions of dollars off a career that began with her being celebrated for her IQ.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 339 – Godspeed – God Willing Means God Fearing

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Cultural hypocrisies, some reasons for realism, and other for cynicism. Like the fear of God in the bedroom.

Rick Rosner: God-fearing but at the same time everyone is looking at porn. So, even if modern and without revealing anything, it still says, “Look at my sexy curves.” There’s temptation. So, the trends around fear of God and temptation to sexuality will prevail for the next few centuries, two or three hundred years.

People will start doing more extreme body modifications: (a) because they are antisocial or (b) for compensated jobs. If you are working in a space, you want a body that is engineerable to be able to work in space.

If you are working underwater, you want a body that works in the water. But the traditional human forms are so powerful, are so deeply wired into us, that it will take centuries for us to regularly abandon those forms as a matter of choice.

So, people will still look like people in the year twenty-two-something. Though, they won’t look much like people you see in Star Trek; there is going to be a lot more weirdness, but it won’t be the full body abandonment weirdness until the twenty-three or twenty-four hundreds.

Since architecture is a construct based on the human form, for the most part, we live in buildings that are scaled to us, scaled to typical human bodies. We can imagine that architecture will similarly assume different forms.

Like some science fiction deal suggested that the entire human population will go from roughly six-feet tall to three-feet tall because, at that size, if you shrunk every body by fifty-percent we would only weigh one-eighth of what we do now.

If it was an exact shrinkage, we would probably want to keep big heads because heads are good for processing information. So, it wouldn’t be a straight one-eighth. Anyway, three-feet tall people consume a lot fewer resources.

Anyway, that might be a good place to stop because I am going to start speaking unproductively.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 338 – Pain, Pain, Go Away, Come Back Another Day

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Jacobsen: What would a model of human thought and behavior look like with this information-based view of the universe framework?

Rick Rosner: When we are talking about human tendencies, abilities, cognitive tendencies, abilities, and so on, we need some foundations. So, before we even get to that, there is a framework for this characterizing of human cognitive, ability, behavior, consequences, the everything is the optimum framework is bad.

That we are surely aware of it because human cognition is much more complicated and numerous. The preferred framework is narrative when we are communicating and people for thousands of years have done that through stories, which I like to describe as human behavior moving.

People who are characters are more or less familiar in stories. People are dying for those stories. Of course, the stories on TV in the 70s, or in my mind at least, are fake and not helpful. Their legacy is constrained by even talk of the day.

The action in movies is brutal compared to the past. We have all shows on TV now compared to one or a few in the past. It can be frivolous in describing some characters, most pronounced in characters who are not recognized for their complexity, but still, today’s television is better.

Anyway, the narrative is the preferred framework for all these as opposes to equations, but, there is enough radio out there for telling stories. Most people prefer that over some silly mathematical characterization that gives a little insight into human cognition, in giving of evolutionary background or cultural support for some behaviors.

The cognition behind those behaviors. But the narratives simplify things. Humans have a pretty good ability not to screw up, but when people do try to become realistic about what humans are, someone gives optical statements about human beings.

It becomes human beings as basically bad or all good because of circumstances or innate capacities. We will make umbrella statements. If we do, it would be that humans have a certain level of churning out one area of cognition.

We are talking about humans who have some average level of violability or tendencies to yield to pressure. This is determined by evolution and cultural pressure. In some cases, it is a game theoretic deal.

How much money will it take to get somebody to slap on his screen? Who doesn’t know it’s coming? All those people would have an average level of resistance to an average price. Most people would yield to the temptation to be bad for the money.

So, human beings’ resistances are worth a certain amount of money. So, we have a money equivalent to think of yourself as a good person. So, most people won’t organize to strip something out of a kid’s hands for five or ten bucks, probably not even twenty.

But at fifty, there may be some takers. At one hundred, probably, even more, where once at one thousand, you would probably get 80 to 90% of people. So, there game theoretic accelerations, what framework is there?

There is a money equivalent to feeling good about yourself. The feeling is that you are a good person, “I wouldn’t do that.” But at some point, the money equivalent of actual money is worth more than any good feelings someone might lose by slapping the ice cream, say, out of a kid’s hands.

You probably still have a bad dynamic because of the number of cultural norms that behavior activation is based on evolution, culture, and some influences on the ability to think. There is a thing in high school football that coaches like to use, which is the two-minutes hang.

You make all the players hang for bars for two minutes; it’s supposed to be a test of will and power. In that case, it gives theoretic desire to grow tough versus an example of the ability to focus your will as discomfort and pain rise.

So, that in the two-minutes hang situation: what percentage of players will be able to clearly take it for two minutes? You want to do a good job. It is the ability to focus versus wrecking your ability to focus, may be similar to holding breathe.

Jacobsen: The feeling of pain and discomfort. The role, from your own perspective – as I am on the fence, of free will is in resistance to them. That it can be explained bottom up by a physics, but that narrative and personal feelings and certain reflections can be helpful in explanation of the world.

In your view, narrative descriptions of experience are heuristics, for what physics can alternately explain, but not practically explain given cognitive limitations or computational constraints of human beings. This ties back into a framework of consciousness in an information-based world.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: Some aren’t reasonable?

Rosner: What do you mean when you say we have different explanations between narrative descriptions and others?

Jacobsen: You can explain things hierarchically from the bottom up, where you have physics on the bottom explaining chemistry on up. Then you have the stories, the narratives that are simpler descriptions.

Rosner: So, you are saying we haven’t built up from physics within reasonable expectations up to human behaviors?

Jacobsen: You’ve noted that you don’t believe in freedom of the will. So, if our mind could explain the fundamental physical actions up into higher order structures such as beings, you could explain them completely.

Rosner: Let’s start by saying, a lot of science will say everything mentioned out of physics. There is already modeling of the world in CG, where there is only CG. More and more lately, you can create stuff with actual physics equivalences.

Like waves and things, because the system is going to represent basic physics phenomena as if in the real world, there will be computer generated phenomena by making computer general. It could create life-like phenomena.

Physics in behavior. Life-like phenomena can come out of that, the sciences, chemistry, becomes one word: physics. Things in the world including chemical principles can be boiled down to the consequences of physical interaction, and biology is traced back to the bottom in physics with the hope that everything eventually will be vulnerable to description through the basic physical interactions of the universe.

Jacobsen: So, in that sense, our narratives of the willing of something through the pain and discomfort is simply a narrative perspective on what can also be explained mechanically. It may not be reasonable or necessary, but then it can be predictable – so no freedom of the will to you.

Rosner: You are able to deploy the other part of the brain. It’s cognitive landscape, moment to moment, compels each subsequent part of the landscape, what you are thinking or feeling in every moment determines what you next think or feel.

It is subject to certain orders of limitation or acceleration, what you are thinking or feeling doesn’t determine everything you are thinking or feeling in a subsequent problem. If you are thinking about the subsequent problem, somebody could slap you in the head, scrambling your processes.

Most people in most circumstances would be scrambled by that, what you’re thinking or feeling plus your environment recreate sensory information. All those things working together determine what next you think or feel and what you next do as a consequence of those thoughts and feelings, which are themselves thoughts.

People with some experience as a football player for several years are going to possibly practice to practice better focus than an amateur or someone who has only been doing the footballing for a couple weeks.

The person who’s experienced will have little processes that will allow for focus and the ability to deploy more fabulous forces to allow that person to aim or end more successfully better than a rookie.

Jacobsen: There are two frameworks there. These two frameworks are apparently disparate but are associated directly or directly in contact to the nearest overlaying. One, the scaled physics-chemistry-biology-psychology framework, but then all grounded in physics.

The other one is narrative. Each has their merits. The narrative one describes by saying, “Rick turned to the left,” or, “Rick turned to the right,” or, “Rick took a drink of the coffee.”

And those apparent choices are paired with descriptions of observing of the choices of another person. They come from the bottom, the scaling up model of physics or psychology. So, really, they’re both valid because it’s easier to tell a narrative structure for a complicated organism than it is to describe all particle interactions.

Rosner: It is really a description of the world. It is more efficient in a way we can understand because we’re understanding people by their narrative and drives; we understand each other to a grading term of basic human drives.

There is a principle that no matter how weird somebody is you can distill their accent, their thought. In fact, some base set of drives system in common with the rest humanity, even people that were monsters.

When they do something that is monstrous, generally, they base their actions, their monstrous actions, on a common drive; the desire that we all have. The 9/11 hijackers, when they find out who the guys were, they are always nerds.

Not much in a way of social success, no girlfriends, they work over there in something like engineering, have an Arabic background and are socially awkward because it is not the same culture; we’ve seen a lot of action of shooting guys.

All of that stuff can be traced back to the angry nerd bottom that went bad. They are bad guys. We can talk about badness. We are able to talk about people in terms of the will, to some extensive substantial characterization of people.

People’s willpower can be boiled down to psychological forces which boiled down to biological forces which boiled down to chemical forces which boiled down to physical forces.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 337 – When the Presidenting Gets Tough, the Tough Twitter

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the relationship between Watergate and Trump?

Rick Rosner: In a nutshell, it looks probable that this will get worse than Watergate because Trump’s support is holding up. During Watergate, it was possible to get Nixon out. The Republican leadership went to Nixon and said that the country’s lost confidence in you.

Nixon agreed with that assessment and left office, but Trump is not somebody to do that and he continues to have the support of three-eighths of the country. So, it’s a crisis that may not break for quite a while.

It’s got a certain stability, which may allow it to get worse and worse before there’s any resolution. Plus, like Trump says stupid shit; he tweets stupid shit every day. Nixon had some of the political savvy to not make his position worse every single day of the week.

So, it’s made me wonder. It is one of those situations where people will soon start asking themselves, “Is it time for us to start taking personal action to protect ourselves?” But that seems like an overreaction because most of all this stuff is taking place on Twitter and among a few people in Washington.

It’s not like Germany in the ‘30s when people were getting attacked on the street, but it still, if you’re not an idiot, feels different from any other point of politics during our lives. We’ve had some weird points. We had the weird political limbo of Bush versus Gore after the election in 2000.

We’ve already had the weirdness of Trump and losing the popular vote by 2.8 million votes still not admitting it. I mean, there are extra dimensions to the weirdness because Trump has been doing weird shit since he got elected and even before.

It’s possible to think that this isn’t a weird moment because it’s more Trump, but it’s a point of political peril. It doesn’t seem like it will break for months and months. And he got rid of Sean Spicer, the Press Secretary.

The new guy who’s not the Press Secretary will be running the communications offices is slick and well-spoken and that guy might be better at running a communications office than whoever was in charge before and because of his slickness might even increase Trump’s popularity, even in the middle of Trump being consistently terrible at his job and at optics.

So, anyway, we’re in trouble. It looks like the trouble is going to go on for months and months to come. That’s it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 336 – AIs Wants and Types

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is going on with AI and if/when it’s eventually developed more and more what will it want, if we can use that phrasing?

Rick Rosner: You and I coincidentally both read the same essay, which attacked the science-fiction views of robots running amok trying to kill humanity and taking over the work. This essay rightfully did that, but then it didn’t get into specifics.

It went off in a different direction or the guy started talking about a novel that he’s written, which has some AI in it. So, we could talk about what AI might want and let’s dispense with the mid-future like more than 50-100 years from now, more than 80 years from now.

There will be a point at which AI could be given human-like abilities and one of the reasons that it would be given those abilities is because humans like companions and human-like interfaces and companions already do that to an extent.

We can talk with Siri and Alexa and all that junk, and within right around the end of the century we should be able to build pretty decent robot girlfriends, robot butler’s, robot advisors, that at least understand what humans want and to some extent can be made to at least simulate those wants in themselves.

It could be for the purposes of being a sassy girlfriend, but the deal by that time, I predict, is that we will have a good mathematical model of consciousness, which will allow us to reasonably accurately predict the different ways in which AIs that have been built to be human-like might behave and misbehave.

Given that model, there will be regulations about the prudent construction of AI. So, you don’t have an AI that’s been built to run amok; of course, there are all the assholes who do that anyway. Those AIs that have been programmed to act in human ways and in malicious ways, whether human or not.

That will be an issue to deal with. But what you won’t get, I don’t think, is mission creep, which is the way that almost all malevolent AIs in science fiction turn bad; it’s robots or AIs being made to be our servants, but then they start thinking about their duties and in more wide-ranging or more general ways.

They start following chains of reason to the point where they decide that the real problem with preserving the Earth is humans. Then they decide to kill all humans, which is pretty much Skynet and dozens of other science fiction things.

But the AIs that we’ll be building for most of this century won’t have that much mission creep. Then the AIs with the intellectual potential, the mental potential to do that level of reasoning, by the time we’re able to build those, we’ll have enough of a mathematical understanding of the mental landscape of what we’re building that we can pretty much engineer AIs that don’t have dangerous levels of mission creep.

So, you’ve got two areas of non-threat; you’ve got AIs that are built after the end of the century that is highly sophisticated and powerful but have been prudently engineered. So, no threat there or little threat there.

Then you have AIs built during this century that aren’t powerful enough to be a threat, then you have a two non-threats. Then the threat is AIs built by assholes in order to cause mischief or worse. That’s a medium to the low level threat on a level of terrorism today, which is bad, but it’s not freaking World War II bad.

So, then you have one major threat that we haven’t talked about which is piggybacked AI, which will be for the next 100 years or more; the most powerful form of AI, which is to whatever tech we have in terms of information processing in conjunction with people who are good at using that tech and eventually merging with that tech.

So, it’s not robots on there, but it’ll be people; rich people, smart people using whatever AI exists to obtain further advantages over other people by being able to think faster, being able to find patterns faster and deeper, and engaging in a normal human competition with increasing advantages via AI.

And so, of the four forms of AI that can cause problems, that one is probably the one I’d worry about the most.

Jacobsen: When you talk about prudently engineered AI in the next 80 years or so, the mathematical model of consciousness as an information processing complex will likely include a moral system akin to a tighter, more precise, and well-defined Golden Rule, which trims potentially harmful choices to people and other living things on the part of AI systems however sophisticated.

Rosner: I mean you’ve got the other who will be able to mathematically implement some things along the lines of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics when it becomes necessary. We won’t have that mathematical model say for another ten, twenty, or thirty years possibly.

We won’t need the model to control AI or predict possible glitches in AI for decades after that. But yes, I don’t know if you’ll build the Golden Rule. My buddy says there will be a trillion AI in the world by 2100.

Most of that AI won’t be sophisticated enough or conscious enough to be set out into the world meeting the Golden Rule standards, where it’s deeply embedded in there. Most AIs won’t be philosophers, but there will be some people who will want AI companions.

Some artists will strive to make AI as human as possible, but most AIs will be engineered for some specific sets of tasks and won’t be that deep. Although, you can picture a point, say 140 years from now or 150 years from now, where it’s cheap to build conscious AIs.

So, there may be some sloppy work and some abuse where you build AIs that have a full complement of feelings, even where it’s not necessary because its slapping a sophisticated AI consciousness into a system that might cost the equivalent of five of today’s dollars.

So, yes, that crap is going to be going on. You’d want a bunch of sophisticated controls either engineered into the AI itself or else roving AI sniffers that’ll look for AIs that are overpowered that could go bad; overpowered and under control.

I mean this is all part of a landscape that in some ways will be a hyper version of today’s landscape with hacker wars and cybercrime, sponsored by all sorts of entities from private A-holes to governments. One form of AI that’s already messing stuff up is almost too banal or banal.

However, the disruption caused by automation taking jobs. It’s not as bad as it’s going to be. We’re already suffering from it, but that’s not the threat by AI that people talk about when they talk about the risk of robots taking over which leads to what you noticed which is… go ahead.

Jacobsen: I watched a panel of middle-aged white, smart people who specialize in some form of AI or who’ve done some thinking on AI, or panicking about it more properly. The demographics being middle-aged white dudes. There is a hype.

So, I feel as though it’s mostly North American phenomena, barring Demis Hassabis and a couple others. It’s white or Caucasian men in the 35 to 55 range and if that’s a thing for any particular reason, but it does seem like it’s a thing, for whatever reason.

Rosner: For one thing, those are the guys who are most qualified to think about it. They’re the early adaptors; they’re the guys who they’ve been successful in the world of tech. People like them to talk about tech issues.

The “I’ve decided it’s prudent at this point to start talking about the possible risks of AI.” And I agree with them. I’m a middle-aged white guy though not as successful as those guys. I agree that it’s prudent.

I predicted that we will have good controls with an understanding in place by the time we need it, but that’s a guess. We won’t get those controls. That understanding, unless, we start working on it now.

So, I agree it did make sense to start thinking about what the issues are. However, remote they are; they’re fairly remote, but those guys, I mean, the cost of making of a mistake that turns over the world to malevolent AI is obviously the entire world.

So, even if it’s a remote possibility, you got to a look at it as a similar threat that that looks, if not remote, it looks like it’s it won’t become a threat for many years in the future. It won’t become a threat for many years.

Nanotechnology, where people have been worried for decades about the grey goo, where you make a little teeny molecular machine, a tiny little automaton, that eats whatever’s in its path to make more copies of itself.

Then all these copies eventually infect the world turning the entire world into these little machines that in swarms resemble the grey goo. We don’t know whether that’s a reasonable possibility, but, I mean, there are no steps in the imaginary process that don’t seem completely impossible.

I mean there are no steps in the process that seem completely impossible. So, that’s something that we will have to investigate and guard against; though at this point in history, it’s remote because we don’t have the tech yet.

It might turn out upon analysis to be an unlikely occurrence, but the cost of that occurrence which is again the death of everything on the planet makes it merit serious investigation.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 335 – Science and Religion (5)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/29

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: However, if you look at consciousness, this is kind of the second principle that I see that consciousness probably is technical but as principles or attributes, consciousness is an attribute of large-scale information sharing within the system.

For our system to exist, it has to have a large degree of self-consistency and self-consistency requires a large sharing of information because you can’t be consistent with what you don’t have information about.

You have to constantly keep the rest of each part of itself against the condition as a part of self-consistency that is finding it, the universe has constantly defined itself very precisely in order to impose self-consistency on itself and a consciousness is a necessary adjunct in this large-scale sharing of information.

Then it is unavoidable if in large-scale self-consistent systems. In the end, that implies the hands of the creator because we can’t create worlds. We can, at some point, have the technical wherewithal to create simulated worlds with simulated thinking beings if we want to.

We can also create a self-consistent world where all the self-consistency is supposedly outside and there is no large-scale information sharing. That’s kind of what happens with computers. We build the computers. They process information linearly.

They don’t police themselves for the most part. Computers aren’t conscious, but the existence of large created systems like computers implies that they are part of a larger world in which there are beings that are conscious.

Sub-consciousness may be an unavoidable aspect of existence and that still does not imply a creator in many instances. Most instances do imply the existence of consciousnesses of unlimited extent and power.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A functionally unlimited number of them. It’s for all intents and purposes. It’s for all intents and purposes unlimited.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 334 – Science and Religion (4)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/28

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Others I see pertaining to things that not only non-contradictory things can exist and non-contradiction becomes stronger with the more information you have in the system, and that the system was loaded with information is fuzzy.

You have all sorts of things that in ways are dictated more or less by quantum mechanics, where they can exist or not exist.

They are kind of on the cusp of being in existence till you see that they do or don’t contradict the rest of the information in the system and the more information you have in the system the more you have to be contradicted and the more things kind of have to come in line with the rest of the information that exists, so it’s a fuzzy kind of system of rules and existences that gets tired and tired the more information you have which means more space, more time for matter because all those things reflect the amount of information in the system and then so I mean that still doesn’t allow for a creator or a religious point of view.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 333 – Science and Religion (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/27

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: We’ve been under that program, strongly. It was probably the most scientific laws in one era. If you ask most scientists if they believe in the idea of a unified explanation for the entire universe, you’d probably get two thirds or more believing in it.

A unified physical explanation under the current theoretical support. Our current theoretical and experimental support for that point of view, but there is no room for a creator or an active being. I mean there are various versions of creation that try to make some kind of compromise with modern Big Bang unification physics including, God doesn’t act in the world today.

The world acts on its own, but God considers everything in motion, but beyond an unsatisfying compromise like that, then God has been squeezed out. However, you and I have been talking about IC for years now. I see it superimposes as a unifying set of principles and that they count for what goes on, so those principles don’t necessarily hard-edged, or those principles are fuzzy at edges.

They become more hard-edged. They reveal the principles of existence. That they really are the principles that we’re talking about.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 332 – Science and Religion (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/26

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The concepts of infinity, dynamics, relativity, and the quantum theory played and play big roles in science, so should in the interpretation of the theology too.

Rick Rosner: The previous theories just extended from us out to infinity pretty much with a universal rotation. It was right there. The big and universal theories are going to start crashing into religious doctrines, which tends to be universal and many of the tendencies of science keep pushing humanity away from the centre of creation with the biggest push or shove against humanity that we are at the specially created centre is the evolution, which comes up in the eighteen fifties.

It did come up before that, but it didn’t come up persuadable until Darwin and the other guy whose name I always forget as the guy who kind of co-published with Darwin, but Darwin’s version of evolution caught on and in one hundred and sixty years. You have a Big Bang Theory, for now, which postulates a world without any special agencies.

I mean originally in science nobody has the idea till the seventeen hundreds of the Unified Field or anything like that. That is one set of fairly compact equations or physical explanations that account for everything. You don’t start to get Unified Field Theories until maybe the second half of the nineteen century, where there are four equations

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 331 – Science and Religion (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/25

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One of the main conflicts over time has been religion and theology, which comes from religion, and changes in the scientific framework of looking at the world, which is a refinement of the way you’re looking at the natural world. Often, that conflict has led to a diminishment in the religious authority on the say of what the real world is or looks like.

Rick Rosner: Okay, the authority depends on what set of beliefs you give yourself, over to the huge percentage of Americans who prefer to believe in some fully Christian point of view. Science doesn’t hold this way, except for a sense of uneasiness, but you’re just wrong given its science that’s generated so much in the world.

You’re denying the parts you don’t find convenient but, I mean historically. It goes like this: I think in the beginning there was no religion or science, but religion got there first in terms of laws in that people believed it’s easier to construct the system of beliefs that don’t have to account for the entire world, don’t have to be a full-on match between – well, I put myself in kind of a sac here – but with religion you can make a set of stories about the world that whatever aspects of the world you need.

It doesn’t have any kind of rigorous logic and the religious institution, churches come with leverage over people’s lives and beliefs, and have all sorts of authority in various ways and then when people start doing the experimental, the Greeks and the Romans were not, they didn’t embrace it.

They didn’t thoroughly embrace the program of experimental science. They did science. But it was part of an overall philosophical push that science will be used to fully understand and explain the world, so there were little outbreaks of science but they didn’t as far as I know thoroughly conflict with religion, but then, later on, you start as a religion that’s been in place with the policies for over a millennium when you have persons like Copernicus and Galileo starting, and so there are doctrines that are now fairly locked up.

Copernicus and Galileo came up with stuff that kind of rub the doctrine the wrong way, the people who advocate with power who advocate for these doctrines the wrong way. Their religions have had twelve hundred years to become fleshed out and with twelve hundred years to be fleshed out so you can imagine a younger version of Christianity not having a problem with the earth going around the sun.

I mean there is nothing inherently un-Christian about that it doesn’t have to conflict with Creation. God made the world and the Sun that we orbit around for us. He created Humanity. I don’t think there is the level of conflict that we’ve seen in the past few hundred years between religion and science because science didn’t fully encroach upon the world, and science wasn’t seen or embraced as a program fully explaining everything until I don’t know, sixteen hundred, seventeen hundred, eighteen hundred, I don’t know.

Yet people who would argue that Newton was more religious than scientific and he believed that he was doing God’s work by doing science, that God wanted us to understand the world and that was part of working on his behalf almost like God helps people who help themselves.

I knew he was one of the first guys. People that come up with the scientific theories have little scientific theories. But his really in a way wasn’t, it was fairly concrete and made concrete predictions about the entire universe.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 330 – No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/24

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: The primal thought was the search of the generations of people and how it was interrupted. And to see the level of interruption is a real tough job for someone. There are many prejudges and almost constantly, year by year, a group of people like German Jews, and European Jews faced in the 1920s.

After more than six million being slaughtered, and 5 times more were forced away from their homeland, the story doesn’t end here. The genocide in Lebanon in Africa is another story for this story, with killing and expelling people from their countries in the 70s.

And Syria, maybe not the best country in the world but was functioning well, and now with the civil war going, we can see how Hell on Earth looks like, and Iraq, after few mall wars against Iran, now it has 10 thousand of killed people under their name because of the dictation.

So, if you zoom out and take a look at these countries alongside the Spanish Inquisition, you will see that all of these countries that are in Africa and the Middle East were well-functioning countries, and pretty stable for a long period of time, and all of a sudden, something appears where the whole nation is wiped, pushed away from the land and what else not. And here in America, we are playing under a different politic that reflects on the world.

We are not expecting the future to be against us, but as it seems it will be. What will happen with the disruption of the happenings in the world in the next three to five decades will be nothing compared to what we have seen in the past years.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Most people won’t be prepared for the change.

Rosner: What most people can do when facing the future humans, is that they can die, like every person in the world. IF you don’t get ended by the disruption, you will simply get older and older and die out of old age. That’s how things work.

Old generations get wiped out, New ones come and are getting better at accepting the future and making the most out of it, and that’s just the way this world works. That’s all.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 329 – The Worst President

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/23

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: At the moment, we are talking while not recording about Trump and his skills. What is Trump good at?

Rick Rosner: The major thing that he is best at, is being bad at doing what he does. He is good at showing the people that it was not what America actually needed. A modest person with solid knowledge of history, empathy for the people and lacking self-control won’t do it.

If you have any doubts, take some great president, or even take a good one, and compare the results. Let’s take Lincoln, as he is considered a great president. In a war where over 60,000 Americans lost their lives, he was the leader of the country.

And despite this, he is known for his deep feelings and humanity, he always tried to hold the American Union together even when it was crumbling after the war, and his humor after all. When you take a glance at FDR who managed to successfully take America out of depression, which was one of the most miserable times for the States, fast forward from the World War II, and all while his legs were mechanical with braces – he could make the change!

Take Teddy Roosevelt who has a great intellectual curiosity, red a vast number of books, and wrote fifty books all in the name of the natural world. Trump slowly fades from every great, or even good president, and the image of him feels low after reading this. He does not have any skill, and he is a pure experiment on the chair.

It is positive to see that Trump is always doing something without even possessing some of the skills that the other presidents had, and it’s good to see that he can function like that. But it seems like everything that Trump does is doing destructive things to the country.

He is the best gest case that the country could have as the people can see how he does and can get rid of him even before the four years are completed.

This may end up with a more dangerous scenario because if Trump finishes the mandate before the four years are passed, it will come down to putting Pence, an even more risky potential candidate for the role which has some crazy ideas in the Oval Office.

A better place to put Trump while still having him do something high in the country should be somewhere where balance is not the strong side, and that can be used in his advantage.

Even this place isn’t one hundred percent certain that it will be a good fit, but it isn’t certain that it isn’t, which means that maybe there is a chance for Trump to prosper with his skills after all.

This was all accomplished via the same and similar behavior that has been going on with our country for a long time now, slowing down their interests, keeping them under control and bad acting over the countries.

The same happened with the Second World War where we backed down from the conflicts that were happening in the world, especially Europe; we backed down from the field and decided to enter it after the war had already started.

Two and a half years after the war had begun, we got in to negotiate after Hitler already had taken a big part of Europe and had made his decisions on what he wants to do with it. After entering and negotiating on the Europe field, we were more than effective, and we proved that we are the world’s most powerful nation.

Another thing that is worth mentioning at this time is the shutting down of the North Korean nuclear program after they kept itching and bragging that their nuclear power was outstanding and their nuclear weapons are extraordinary and powerful.

The interesting thing here is that there are two crazy people on top of the top 3 nations in the world. One has the most powerful army while the other one has nuclear weapons which we might believe are shut down, but are they really?

I’d prefer Obama, Hilary or even George W. Bush to use their diplomatic skills against Kim Jong Hong and calm this tension a little bit down. But Donald Trump, as crazy as he could be, has been trying something else, and has an Ace up his sleeve.

He has been flattering the China leader for some time now, and his plan is obvious – to have two helping hands against the North Korea that will strike from a different side. This is rather funny as having the best army in the world you shouldn’t be acting as a baby requesting for a babysitter, but there are some hidden intentions behind this I reckon.

This thing is good as the main quest is to scare the bad courtiers and to let them know that they should back off, but it is not a 100% completed quest. I should mention another good thing about Trump and what he does as a president, and I already touched this theme earlier; he makes the Republicans less efficient in their intentions, and their harmful ideas against the country are no longer as effective as they were in the past.

On the other hand, this, and even more, should be done by someone more organized and better in the cerebral thinking, but let’s put half a point on Trump’s expense and as I mentioned before, it is the test case of what we really need sitting in the president’s seat, which will form a clear picture with the help of Trump doing all what he does.

And several small mistakes have been made in terms of his ego rising and him abandoning the golf club, thinking he should rage as much as he want and double his dos, all because he is a president of America. And on top of that add promotion of the books that his daughters wrote and promoting Arolago while using the government’s resources speaks for itself.

This is the whole picture, but there is another think that will make Trump good that just came to my mind. When compared to the other competitor for the worst president in the United States of America, Warren Harding, was listening to what the people had to say, while on the other hand, the current president Trump.

On seventy years and with extra weight, having obesity or whatever you want to call it, is always being the target of angry critiques, that he is losing weight by giving speeches only, and he encourages on pursuing the perfect song to implement in his speeches, and when you combine all of this and the negative talks on him together with the weight problem, there is a possibility that he will get light-hit in his head and leave chair without finishing to serve his term as he will be unhealthy from physical and mental point of view. This is one of the things Trump is good at, and hopefully he will get discouraged because he is acting like a baby, which will lead to leaving the Oval room.

This is basically everything I have, and I hope I have it all on a list as it will be a useful list. Well one more thing is that the Democrats are as disorganized as they could ever be, and with this opportunity to rise, Trump may be the one to enlighten them and give them a paved way of where they should walk in order to come up with the good inaudible news that America is waiting on.

The mid-terms that they did in 2010 or 2014 should be used as an example so Trump may have the opportunity to walk away as a winner in some field after all, and it is to stimulate the efficiency of the Republicans part after all.

And when you think through it, it’s not easy at all to give a positive thinking when all of this is under the command of the government and it is a task that should be handled by the president, so we are giving Trump a credit for what he is supposed to do. Here are the several reasons why Trump is good at what he is doing, and why he should stick around.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 328 – The Future

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What were we talking about? Ah yes, the future and comprehending about short, mid, and long-term.

Rick Rosner: Yes, it was about the near, what is in the middle, and what is here to come.

Jacobsen: We were talking about the short, mid and long-term future, and what is here to come. We were speaking about our time expectations. Along the way, I’ve noted something which you may find humiliating, and it’s about the Erosion of the Theory of Spirituality.

Rosner: I’d like to call it the Fantastic Future, but I am afraid to say that humans will have little to no joy in the upcoming years. You can say it in other words as it is the story about humans and humanity regarding their existence in different forms. Let’s begin with outlining the near future as it is what every human expects at this time.

These devices and technologies are here to aid us with our perception and our behaviour towards the world. When we are addressing to the mid-future, this is one of the most interesting ones and the strangest of them all.

This period offers us technologies and abilities that we haven’t experienced before. This will most definitely change the relationship between humans and machines, and humans and humans overall in a funny way.

This will gradually increase the search for new ways of completing regular tasks, while constantly moving back and forward in time using the traditional, already proven correct ways, simply because they are already proven to be working and they are well-defined and friendly in our lives.

After this, the long-term future follows, where we use outdated, well proven systems that we are certain they work. They are bonding together with the other forms of existence that we’ve developed throughout the near and mid future, but are slowly fading due to the changes that we’ve made over the decades, as they are easy to adopt and pretty useful. Because the new ways are connected with technology, being a human being as we are now or in the near-future will be considered as outdated.

One thing is for sure, the human communities will always be there, no matter how far in the future we manage to survive.

I want to make a point that we will have a pool of options, but will only follow one path, a path that this human now doesn’t want to live like. Another way into looking these three, the near, the mid and the far future is up to the personal way of seeing them.

The far future is a little bit out of the reach of our eyes and imagination, therefore we can’t clearly see how it will be, as we don’t know the path that the near and mid future is going to take. One thing is for certain – the future will be more informative than always, with a big data of information available, where we will rely on it for our evaluation.

The computers will play a major part in the world, and most probably out in Space, and people will have more and more knowledge in computing as the days go by. Here, we will have to use the Moore’s law, where the cost of the computing will get cut in half in the next 18 or 24 months.

This is yet to be seen as we have no idea what kind of computing will be available in the next decade or so. This is closely connected to the size of the computing and the Moore’s law of things getting double smaller. However, certain magazines state that computing cannot get smaller, and with the atomic limitation that we have, we already have several more generations to come and work on reaching that level of computing.

But will it stop there? One thing is certain, that quantum computing beats and will soon overshadow non-quantum computing in every way. And while the limitation that Moore’s law has set on the way the computing will go in the future we are talking about, there is a chance of a curve that can change it all, and it all comes down that we are still unable to predict how far actually the future can be to tell this information for certain.

The data processing and information bombarding alongside computing will be a huge part of our future, and it will be a lot different than the computing we are experiencing at the moment.

But the tables and sheets that we are seeing now will stay here, in the past – it will be able to produce real time models of the numbers included in the data in just few seconds. This means, the data can be used for quick access of information, and will be beneficial for making money, making crucial decisions on tie, and will most definitely help them with their lifestyle and movement in life.

This will most certainly affect the life of the people living at that time as there will be rapid changes in the entity, which will be part of the world in the future. When we look back in the past, Greg Bayer has a novel called Blood Music from the 90s that I enjoy reading, and it talks about nano-bots that will infect an engineer and the reaction of the body as an effect after this infection. It is the same feeling as Supermen, where he is holding the city in a bottle in his hand, and in one point, after he gets used to the effect, he becomes the guardian of the city in the bottle.

However, this novel revolves differently than my opinion, and there the guardian evolves faster than it should, while we are yet to begin the changes that will happen. This is all I have in mind for the time being. If I add something more it will only interfere with what I’ve already said.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 327 – Comedy Change

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/21

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How has comedy changed for now compared to the past? How will this change the future of comedy as well?

Rick Rosner: Well, I mean the biggest change applies to all information and media and entertainment and it’s just the sheer volume and variety available. I read someplace that people in the 17th century, 18th century maybe only had two books in their houses; the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress.

Similarly somebody on a farm; how many jokes would that person hear a hundred years ago in the course of a week? Two? Maybe goes to town, hears a couple jokes? Three? I don’t know. Now the average joke consumer, say somebody who watches late-night TV is going to see at least twenty-five jokes a night, somebody goes on Twitter looking for jokes can read hundreds a day, will see The Good Place comes back tonight; it’s the sitcom set in heaven, you watch a sitcom and a decent sitcom will give you 40 jokes in 22 minutes, just people today have heard a gazillion jokes, people also have more information about which we can joke than Johnny Carson could joke about in the 1970s.

Carson’s writers wrote off the teletype, they had an AP news feed that was this automatic typewriter the go [mimics typewriter sound], it would spit out a big roll of paper with the stories of the day and those guys would see those stories and they would… largely, guys, I don’t know how many women worked on the Tonight Show writing staff, but it was less than half a dozen or fewer than that. But anyway, they were writing off 20 stories they got from the news maybe somebody brought in newspapers but the number of different things that could be joked about or smaller because people have less information.

So, what the future holds is more volume, I mean Twitter has empowered thousands of people who wouldn’t otherwise be writing jokes to be writing jokes and the other social media encourages other forms of humor. So, you’ll have more people doing, you’ll have faster delivery and you’ll have a greater informational basis for the jokes.

Also, there’s been an erosion of taboos where I don’t know how much farther it can go but you can joke about anything, where in the past you had to watch what you joked about because some things were improper. Now you can joke about anything, any subject you can manage to think of to joke about. Now with taboos gone and everything permitted everything’s been kind of colonized or exploited for jokes and it’s tough to come up with new areas. That’s about it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 326 – Divinity and Human Exaltation

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What were we talking about? Ah yes, the future and comprehending the short, mid, and long-term.

Rick Rosner: Yes, it was about the near, what is in the middle, and what is here to come.

Jacobsen: We were talking about the short, mid and long-term future, and what is here to come. We were speaking about our time expectations. Along the way, I’ve noted something which some may find humiliating; it’s about the ‘Erosion of the Assumption of Divinity.’

Rick Rosner: I’d like to call it, the ‘End of Human Exaltation and the Human Experience,’ but I am afraid to say that humans will have little to no joy in the upcoming years. You can say it in other words as it is the story about humans and humanity regarding their existence in different forms. Let’s begin with outlining the near future as it is what every human expects at this time.

This is regarding the next 50-100 years, or basically the whole 21^stCentury and we are talking about the technologies and devices that will have a major impact on the humanity, their way of living and existing. These devices and technologies are here to aid us with our perception and our behaviour towards the world. When we are addressing to the mid-future, this is one of the most interesting ones and the strangest of them all. This period offers us technologies and abilities that we haven’t experienced before.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 325 – The Feynman Thing (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/19

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Now it’s possible we could reach a limit to three hundred years from now where the earth is wrapped up in a big ball of information processing entities that are coming together and bubbling apart like a lava lamp and that might be the pinnacle of what a civilization can achieve but I doubt that too, I think in some ways civilization keeps going and becoming more powerful.

On the other hand that’s hard to conceive because in a universe that is it least fourteen billion years old and possibly according to our theory like a gazillion times older than that, yes you’ll have, you should have the civilization that is tens of millions of years old and more and I don’t know how you have civilizations that just keep getting more sophisticated on a ten million years scale, so it may be that yeah that civilizations reach a point where they require some stability and don’t continue to rejigger themselves, that’s highly possible but I find it highly not possible that the stopping point is at anything like the world we have now. We haven’t reached any of the limits of, we’re still making big strides in understanding the brain which I think means that we’re eventually going to understand consciousness and computation and an information-based universe and we’re not at the limits of the worst laws in any of its form.

We will hit the limits of Moore’s Law in some of its forms within the next ten or fifteen years that we will probably be stymied when it comes to, you can’t go smaller than atoms for instance as information storage device or you may be can if you go quantum but still you’re going to run into some fairly daunting physical limits in terms of miniaturization for that aspect of Moore’s Law, but even so we’re still, there will be ways to dance around the limitations of the various Moore’s laws and.

We’re nowhere near having the computational power that we’ll have when we do start hitting those fairly hard limits. So we’re going to be rejigged. How long the rejiggering goes on it is an open question but let’s say that we have a future of celebrating the change that will go for thousands of years at least.

So you can, some people speculate about a future of inside a Dyson’s sphere which is a completely built out solar system where all the planets have been dismantled and turned into the shell that rides or surrounds a star to absorb all the rate of solar heat the solar radiation are using computation and then releases it as wasting and that maybe some, probably won’t be what happens because we’re trying to imagine the future from a very ignorant point in time but I can imagine that there will be a fairly built out completely built out future sometimes thousands of years in the future that may be stable for a long time. But I don’t think we reach that point for many, many, for at least several tens of centuries. That’s it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 324 – The Feynman Thing (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/18

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: That Feynman thing that he said in a speech about the future of science which there are three possible futures.

Science figures out everything within or almost everything within a reasonably short time frame say a few centuries or number two science continues to make steady progress, never gets to the point where it gives us an understanding of everything, we learn more and more but it turns out that you can’t understand everything or three science it’s the law and we reached we reached the limit of what can be understood via science which equals what can be understood period and your question postulate a number three situation that turns out that you have a limited ability to understand and gain power over creation.

And so that we rise to a certain level of technology and then we stay there and for as much of the future as we can imagine and that could be a thing, much science fiction takes place in that world because it’s easier to imagine like things space opera which is a casual term for Star Wars is the best-known space.

Opera, it’s human civilization as we know it now extended to cover a big chunk of the galaxy, but it’s humans being humans but on a larger spatial and temporal scale, but what humans want the forms humans to have the forms other species have are all basically human and humans do what they’ve always done which is fight wars, build civilizations they just do it on a bunch of planets instead of just one and that’s what you get, maybe you don’t even get that because Star Wars depends on faster than light travel you can’t have an empire if you can’t travel faster than light because the time required just makes it completely undoable but I don’t think that’s what will happen I think we have enough of an understanding of the potential of future technology to know that at the very least, the lives that we’re living now will be completely transformed.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 323 – Mating Strategies (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/17

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: But there will always be a novelty. It won’t signify much. You know, fashion exists to perpetuate itself via novelty. Sometimes it reflects a something maybe important about the culture, the way that fashion has shifted to allow for heavier people, the way that body consciousness in fashion has shifted in America and the rest of the world over the past 20 years to accommodate people who are on average much heavier than they were in the ‘70s.

But you know, fashion is fashion. It shifts around to give people an excuse to buy new stuff. And I’ve read arguments that say that trends in fashion have been replaced by an omnivorousness in fashion where anything that worked in the past can now be, you know, seen as fashion now, that somebody could dress as they dressed 20, 25 years ago, walk down the street without drawing any attention because we now live in an era of anythingness.

It may be due to increased, just you know, just increased information, that if you can see all of the fashion, all of the history of fashion laid out in front of you just by clicking around on the internet, then there’s less, you know, era-wise or now wise enforcement of fashion rules, because people have more information.

Similarly, in terms of competing for mates, there may be more of an anything goes because people have more information. And more access to all sorts of different people via social media. So you asked… who’s going to be successful in the future at sexual—at attracting mates?

One new, I don’t know if it’s new, but it certainly, more important now than in the past, is people who accept all body types. People don’t apply rigorously, the rigorous physical standards of sexual attractiveness of the past will do well now and into the future in which you know, we’re growing more accepting of people as they are now. That is the… when I was growing up, might get in the weeds here but… you know, not that—throughout most of the 20^th century, there were severe constraints on who was allowed to have sex.

Married people were allowed to have sex. People who took themselves out of the realm of social approval, of course, could have sex, which meant like prostitutes. There was a huge prostitution culture in the US in the first half of the 20^th century. But beyond that, people weren’t supposed to have sex.

You had to, I mean there were times when people had sex, like World War II, standards were—nobody, it wasn’t overt, standards weren’t overtly low, sexual prohibitions weren’t overtly lowered but people, you know, about to go off to maybe die, yeah, there was a lot of people hooking up before they went off to battle and such.

There was still urgency. But there were still huge prohibitions on sex outside of wedlock. Now that you know, most of that is eroded. And eroding along with that are standards about who’s attractive. Rigid standards of sexual fitness. And people who are able to see the beauty in everyone are going to—and who want to have sex with people are going to be offered greater opportunities.

That’s about it.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 322 – Mating Strategies (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What niches in the future will be exaggerated, as some niches are more exaggerated now?

Rick Rosner: You mean what niches will be—what niches—what roles will offer certain people chances of sexual success the way the job role offered people success for 100 years?

Jacobsen: Yes, also the characteristics or factors that comprise them. For instance, the modern LA version of the big booty with the Kardashians, for example.

Rosner: Well, I mean, I can tell you with regard to fashion, which is not to say body styles, but if you look at the history of fashion, some new part of the body is always being revealed or emphasized. In the ‘80s, leg holes kept getting higher and higher.

Instead of going straight across, at the lower thigh, they kept creeping upward until eventually, you had thongs, so more and more of the upper thigh and butt was revealed. In various times in history, we’ve had side boob eras.

So yeah, we right now are in an era that emphasizes the butt. So we can assume that trends in what we reveal about what we focus on in the body will continue to—there will be, the parts of the body that we focus on will continue to change. There won’t always be the emphasis on a single body part that we have now.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 321 – Mating Strategies (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: I think that what you see in terms of partnership choices in the future may reflect mating strategies. When you have… today and for the past few decades, when you have unusual mating arrangements, like people in a three-way mating arrangement or a four-way. It’s, it’s sensational, it’s something you’d say on—goodbye.

It’s something you’d see in an HBO like sex documentary. It’s seen as fascinating or titillating. But in the future, I think differing you know, mating arrangements other than two people closely bonded for a period of time will become more common. Partially because it’s… there’s more support for you know, alternate lifestyles, due to increased information via the internet and social media. Increased tolerance. And to say increased tolerance…

And these, the gender fluidity was something that was you know, largely unheard of a decade or two ago. That person could change their minds about who they are sexual. I think, well, just people didn’t know that that was a thing and to the extent that they did know it was a thing was like, like an oh come on thing, really, how much more are we going to have to deal with in terms of new, like, genders or gender orientations.

And as time goes on, people will grow to be more at home than just with tolerant attitudes. Expansive attitudes. But in terms of mate selection, alternate or non-traditional partners—nontraditional joining of people may in itself be a sexual… a strategy to, maybe a sexual strategy that you know, in relationships where a woman is in love with more than one guy or is in love with a woman and a guy.

A guy is in love with two women. Those things may turn out to be, for some people, ways to have relationships where perhaps one or more of the people in the relationship felt closed out of partnerships in the past. Either due to personal preferences or due to just not being able to find a niche to be successful in, not being able to find a way to be sexually successful.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 320 – Markets, Mothers, and Climate Change (6)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/14

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Also there are pushes to do two things that build on the worst aspects of faith, religious faith. One, an attempt at reversion to literalist interpretation propped up. You can name many in your country. Another one is the use of non-literalist metaphor, allegorical interpretations of religious scripture… that just happen to align with the political and social… interests of far-Right wing ideological movements.

Rick Rosner: Yeah there is a log segment of the population on both sides; though I would tend to think it is more on the right… that have less and less… well… more and more excuse un-ethical behavior of their segment of society. They arm themselves with miss-information about what their opponents are doing, and this miss-information presents the opponents as so evil that… this type of aggressive Trump voting Christian thinks that whatever they do in being assholes is excused because their enemy is so horrible.

Jacobsen: Like the… you can build conditionals that have a whole host of premises in them. If you are pro-choice then you are a baby killer, as well as I do there a huge number of premises that are shoved into their heads through continual marketing campaigns.

Rosner: So there are two things going on that have created this. One is… right wind media, for the most part, clever right wing branding, which the Democrats never thought they needed to engage in because of democrats always a naively think that the facts will win out and common sense will win out. Jerry Mandering… super polarised both in people holding elective office and in the population. The more polarised we are, the more each side demonizes the other. The next major chance we get to reduce… Jerry Mandering based polarisation is in 2020, the US has a census every 10 years ending in zero. Congressional districts are supposed to be redrawn based on the results of each census. The Republicans kicked ass in 2010, they manipulated the district redrawing to fuck over the Democrats… the last seven years of politics have been especially retched largely because of the Republicans winning the redistricting battle of 2010. Which the Democrats didn’t even really know they were fighting. But, the Democrats will know, they do know that they need to do better in 2020. We may get… every few months a redistricting case… or a lawsuit makes it to a higher court and… we may get better district in 2020. Or a 5:4 Supreme Court may say fuck you to redistricting… but we got a shot in 2020.

Jacobsen: That’s all good.

Rosner: Except me may accept buying a duplex up near you in Canada.

Jacobsen: I look forward to seeing ya.

Rosner: Okay, you can scout out properties.

Jacobsen: They are not that expensive depending on what you get. If I was… let’s say… I’m an engaged dude, baby, on the way… so I am thinking two and a half on the way. 1500 bucks for a decent place. For a one-room place for a single person, like a bachelor suite can be from 650 to 1050.

Rosner: You can’t do anything in L.A for that. Might be able to live in somebody’s garage. I have known people to do that. Anyway, what you are looking for is a duplex where they had a drug deal that died and wasn’t found for about a month so the smell is not good. That is usually the best bargain. Based on an urban legend on a Corvette that’s for sale for $300.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 319 – Markets, Mothers, and Climate Change (5)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/13

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So… bell curves of smartness and dumbness…

Rick Rosner: It’s like smoking.

Jacobsen: Acceptance of climate change… are moving further and further apart in terms of the level of overlappingness?

Rosner: Yeah I mean… nobody is a complete… nobody would deny that smoking is bad for you now.

Jacobsen: Camel might disagree.

Rosner: Well nobody without and economic interest. But even those guys admit it. You have to be like pretty much a schmuck to still be smoking.

Jacobsen: Evil to be pushing it on people. Remember, the United States Agencies pushed it on demographics that were not smoking in particular. Pregnant women were a targeted demographic.

Rosner: I didn’t know that.

Jacobsen: That is a huge crime. Same way…

Rosner: The people who committed that crime are all dead now. Half of them probably from smoking.

Jacobsen: Quite likely. As well as a targeted campaigns in a field called the psychology of nagging where… there was a demographic that was not buying things… that demographic being children; so if you can’t get kids to buy things because they have no money, and you can’t target ads to them… directly, what you can do is target ads to them to get to the parents indirectly, to nag the parents so that the kids will nag parents to buy things for those kids. That is a crime less severe but… insidious as well in terms of… hurting the morals of the country.

Rosner: Yeah well I remember being taught how to resist advertising in elementary school. They taught us the different forms of advertising. I think that is one more thing that has been squeezed out of the curriculum… along with art and music and P.E. There is just not enough money to teach anybody anything anymore.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 318 – Markets, Mothers, and Climate Change (4)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/12

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the main source of the inability to make sustainable changes in that state?

Rick Rosner: Well one thing is that L.A is where people go to make their dreams of a life in entertainment and other fields… come true. Southern California has been a dream destination; a place to go to re-invent yourself… for 100 years and more. It is where the Oakies were. It is a nice place; the climate is nice when it is not 110. It’s… L.A is full of famous people which is exciting and the chance that you might get famous yourself. It is socially liberal which… for most people are nice. Especially if you are someone who has moved to re-invent him or herself. L.A is a really great place to live, except for trying to get from one place to another. I have been here since ’89 and… I have seen L.A go from where you can expect to get to anywhere within 30 minutes to where you can expect to get anywhere within an hour and a half if you are clever.

Jacobsen: Another part of this conversation before taping; was the haze around where I live in British Columbia because of the fires up North of British Columbia… Canada… running down and making things quite warm and… actually having air quality warnings for… quote… not doing strenuous activity, unquote. We have… issues here too, but they are related to climate change. Climate change or global warming is a consistent issue which…America has a huge responsibility globally to make some very drastic, sustainable transitions… in the next few years or decade or two.

Rosner: Well one thing is becoming increasingly clear; that is if you are still denying climate change, you are more and more of an idiot. There is some point in history where you might have been able to make reasonable arguments that climate change was not a big deal. But that point was maybe ten years ago, and the window for not being an idiot has closed. If you are still arguing that it doesn’t exist and that there is no reason to get so worked up over it… then yeah, you are a stone schmuck.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 317 – Markets, Mothers, and Climate Change (3)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/11

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Same yesterday. A couple of weeks ago it was up over 110 for a few days. Yeah statistically you might expect to get days like that every few years, but… if it is an every few year thing. The most famous freeway in L.A is probably the 405. I believe it is six lanes in each direction now.

You just… you can’t add any more lanes. Adding more lanes, by the time you add the lane; because it takes a year… traffic has to expand to fill the lane so it is as miserable as it was before. I try not to drive the 405 at all, but I was in a traffic jam; I have been consistently in traffic jams on a 9pm on a Sunday evening.

The best place to live, the most desirable place to live is the west side; Santa Monica, Venice… but if you have to get from the west side to… places where production goes on if you are in the entertainment industry, like Sony… I don’t know, Warner Brothers… your commute… well my wife gets up at 4.45am to be on the road by 6.30am… because then she will have a chance of the stretch of the 405 being okay. But if the temperature keeps being nasty… if there are water wars, because there is a limited supply of water and it is going to get worse and worse across the southwestern states.

Everybody feeds off the Colorado River, which is insufficient. If commutes keep getting worse and worse… I don’t think the entertainment industry people are going to want to make L.A their headquarters indefinitely. I was thinking 50 years from now; L.A will not be the entertainment capital. It will move north to maybe Silicone valley… maybe Seattle, maybe Vancouver. A lot of productions are up in Vancouver now but that’s an economic thing as much as anything else. It is not because the temperatures are cooler but… 50 years might be optimistic. L.A might start turning more and more to shit… within 20 years.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 316 – Markets, Mothers, and Climate Change (2)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/10

[Beginning of recorded material]

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 315 – Markets, Mothers, and Climate Change (1)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking off tape about housing markets, your mother in law, and climate change.

Rick Rosner: Yeah sorry, my wife is helping her mom sell her house, to pay for her care in senior living. Which means the mortgages are paid off and everything there will be a chunk of capital that needs to be invested… to pay for her mom’s care for the rest of her life. One of the possibilities we are looking at is… buying a duplex or something in L.A. Getting the rent from the duplex to help pay for Carol’s mom.

I have started to be a little scared about buying L.A real estate, even though we are in the middle of a housing shortage. Because… I don’t know how long L.A will be an attractive city. My wife and I are in our 50’s. So we may end up owning the investment property 20 years from now when we are old and retired and… I don’t know if L.A will still be a cool city to live in 20 years from now. Because of congestion and because of climate change where… I know that there are… you can’t tell on a day to day basis, you can’t tell the difference between statistical fluctuation and temperature, and long-term changes in overall climate. But this summer has been brutal, it was like 106 today.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 314 – Constructivist and Essentialist Consciousness (8)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: But it’s in terms of how much of that happens per thought it’s going to be much less than in an essentialist universe because the constructivist universe can handle more than one thought with its current structure, which means that perhaps the time scale for thoughts versus the apparent age of the universe. you can cram in a bunch of thoughts within the apparent age of the universe just based on different parts of the universe lighting up so the time scale of thought if the universe is thinking is knocked down from say forty billion years per thought to I don’t know, four billion years per thought you know, a billion years. I don’t know it’s knocked way down because you can I don’t know a hundred million years because the existing structure can ninety-nine percent handle changes of thought because it’s what parts of it are lighting up in an existing flexible and changing structure rather than the whole structure having to be replaced.

Maybe, you can cram in a bunch of thoughts within the apparent age of the universe just based on different parts of the universe lighting up so the time scale of thought if the universe is thinking is knocked down from say forty billion years per thought to I don’t know, four billion years per thought you know, a billion years. I don’t know it’s knocked way down because you can I don’t know a hundred million years because the existing structure can ninety-nine percent handle changes of thought because it’s what parts of it are lighting up in an existing flexible and changing structure rather than the whole structure has to be replaced.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 313 – Constructivist and Essentialist Consciousness (7)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/07

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: So you don’t have to replace the entire active universe with a whole other active universe to change your mind to have a new thought instead most of the universe can hang around and just be lit up in a different pattern and yeah you’ll have a long-term changes to the structure of the universe if there are the aspects of the universe that just aren’t used much those or don’t interact much those are going to, relative to the rest of the universe again are going to collapse and be pushed to the side.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 312 – Constructivist and Essentialist Consciousness (6)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/06

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: We’ve thought that this requires an entire reshuffling of the contents of the universe. That the current active universe, all its contents are pushed to the side and then other parts of the universe that have been sitting on the sidelines rotate in to constitute the new thought, and so it means then in the wider universe if the universe is actually thinking what I thought might take twenty or thirty or fifty billion years for the action of the universe to play out for galaxies and then for stars to form and for them to go through their life cycles and then for the galaxies to burn out and then to fall away to be replaced by new active galaxies expressing a new thought.

But that’s an essentialist structure that you have these parts of the universe that embodied the thought and then they have to each be shunted aside for the new parts of the new thought. But under a constructivist construction, the various parts of the universe don’t individually, like each galaxy or each star or whatever, embody some module that is a self-contained representation or expression or whatever of a concept or an emotion or whatever you want but the contents of the by-products of information processing are manifested in combinations of neurons or stellar galactic structures for flying that metaphor of the universe as a whole.

[End of recorded material]

License

Copyright

2022-04-16

Ask A Genius 311 – Constructivist and Essentialist Consciousness (5)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/05

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Language is your brain picking out the right words for a situation or formulating a sentence and this whole thing is this constructivist versus the essentialist, the essentialist is that you run it just as a lot of plug-in modules that can be turned on and off. There’s the mad module; there’s the melancholy module; there’s the module for the concept or the word orange and those things just get flipped on or off.

That seems like a more primitive an idea of how thought works and one that is seems to be being contradicted increasingly the more we find out so this has implications for our theory informational cosmology, which I’ve been thinking of it in an essentialist way that if the state of the universe if we have a little universe and are based on if we each have a little universe or informational universe based on the information being processed in our heads and if the wider universe is processing things in a conscious way that each thought requires its own spatial set up and for a thought to change for you to go from thinking one thing to thinking another like you’re driving down the street and you’re thinking about dinner and then some a hole like cut you off in traffic your thinking is going to change almost entirely.

[End of recorded material]

License

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: