Pessimism

I was reading Marty Nemko's post where he uses a bunch of probabilities of things related to global warming and then multiplies to probabilities together to create a joint probability that action on global warming would be helpful. This joint probability turns out to be 0.2. I share Marty Nemko's skepticism of central planning,though I'd extend this to private bureaucracies as well as public ones, I think that global warming is a reality and that people who deny this are either practicing bad science or denial based on ideology or religion. The problem is that central planning may the only recourse we have against global warming and as Nemko would say it often works badly. This is sad because I think that burning much fossil fuel, acidifying the oceans, and raising the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere may be the most powerful legacy this generation leaves behind and we have only defective weapons to fight against it.

Interpretation of Animal Man

DC has revamped its lineup again, there by alienating a lot of fans. One title, however has garnered solid praise, Animal Man. In this book it has become apparent that Buddy Baker's daughter, Maxine, has become the focus of a mystical struggle involving three forces, the Red, the Green, and the Rot. The Rot is represented by the Hunters Three, grotesque undead monsters who were once human but now look like piles of entrails and suffer from cannibalistic hungers. They want to possess Maxine, turning her into a being like themselves but with greater power. What fascinates me is the correspondence between the Red, the Green, and the Rot and real ecological force. The Red, animal life, eats the Green, and various parasites eat both. Certainly, when both plants and animals die, their bodies must Rot so that the organic compounds they contain can be recycled into other life forms. While Rot is disgusting, it can only be seen as evil when it gets out of place and causes disease in living things. If this metaphor is truly being pursued in the comic book, readers will eventually see that while it must fought to keep it in it's proper place, the Rot is not intrinsically evil.

Crazy Ideas

There are many untrue sentences, for example "There's a unicorn in my front yard right now." but only a few seem like they would actually be uttered by crazy people. Several criteria for craziness.

1. Crazy people talk about serious things. No one is anxious about unicorns but toxins, conspiracies, religion, and human origins are all things that adults including crazy adults can be concerned with.

2. Crazy people live in a world centered around themselves more than sane people do. A crazy person would imagine Al Queda coming to their house to bump them off while a more sane person wouldn't expect Al Queda to be particularly concerned about them unless they had some pervious contact with that organization.

This self-centeredness means that the world of a crazy person is quite shrunken, aliens, gods, and mysterious government agencies are all concerned with them. Though a sane person might believe in all those entities, he would not expect to be of overriding concern to any of them.

This distinguishes a truly crazy person from an eccentric. An eccentric might be interested in the idea that the US government hid aliens and alien equipment in area 51 but he wouldn't worry about it that much. Like other people, his health, his job, and paying his bills would still prominent concerns in his life. He might even worry that he spends too much time on UFO stuff and realize that his personal interest in it was for the sake of entertainment.

Why People Dislike Conspiracy Theorists

One his blog, Overcoming Bias, economist Robin Hanson suggested that conspiracy theories are denigrated because the folks who offer them are the same type of person who would engage in conspiracies.

In fact despite public antipathy to conspiracy theories many are believed in by average people and these people are not shunned for these beliefs because they do not talk about them over and over again. As a self test, do you believe any of these?

1. Oil companies and the government have unrevealed technology for cheap, fuel efficient cars.

2. Global warming is a myth designed to funnel grant money to climatologists.

3. Global warming is a myth designed to cripple capitalism.

4. Trolley systems in American cities were destroyed so the General Motors could sell more cars.

5. Darwinian evolution has been disproven and is only taught as a Trojan horse for Naturalism and Atheism.

6. The US government either allowed or caused the man-made disaster on 9-11-01, to give George Bush an excuse for invading Iraq.

7. The CIA killed John F. Kennedy.

I would consider all of these to be conspiracy theories although I'm not sure all of them are wrong. The point is even if you believe these conspiracy theories, if you do not structure your life around them your belief will have little or no social cost. It's not conspiracy theories by themselves that are disliked, it's the autistic behavioral style of some conspiracy theorists.

The thing is, such a behavioral style, which is a personal problem for me, is often seen by others as tiresome. Conspiracy theories are actually fairly normal. It is not the theories but the behavioral style of some who hold them that is disliked and those people are not seen as bad, merely boring and strange.

A Silly Idea -- Mechanical Turk Magic System

In a computer game, to cast a spell you need merely to press a key. This is convenient but not very magical. In the real world, magic supposedly requires study and practice as well as a connection to certain cosmic forces. If was desirable to duplicate this in a massively multiplayer game you could have magicians prepare spells before use as in older editions of D&D.

What would happen behind the scenes is that during his preparations the magician would be essentially applying to be able to use the spell. His credentials would be checked either by programs or by other players.

A program could check to see if, for instance, the magician spent his time killing lower level players or defenseless creatures and deny him the use of good spells if he had behaved in this fashion. A program could also give him some sort of multiple choice quiz and deny him magic if he didn't pass it.

More intriguing would be use of human players to critique some sort of performance by the magician. In this case the magician would compose some kind of art work, probably not a strictly visual one and be able to use a spell if other players liked it. The players critiquing the art work would have to be paid some how, for instance by a temporary increase in power.

Would this be fun or simply annoying? I deon't really know.

The Craziest Things I'm Interested In.

I am slightly crazy about a lot of things. For instance, I become irrational guilty when my folks criticize my, frankly terrible, housekeeping. However, that kind of craziness is ultimately boring. The two craziest questions I'm interested in are the questions of what kind of objects can have minds and does consciousness need to be included in any logical account of fundamental physics? The trouble is I cannot truly understand the arguments made about either question.

At least the questions aren't really crazy although they are divorced from mundane reality. After all what does it mean that a rock could be conscious, when I have no way to detect that? Though they aren't truly crazy, they do skirt the edge of the abyss.

A Small Hack

I wrote this toy program to help my daughter with a science project. She ended up not using it but I think the output looks cool. It requires gruff, IMagick, and RMagick to run. Though it contains variables that have to be edited to alter the output, I think the names are clear enough that you can see what they do. The language is Ruby if that's not obvious. I apologize for the lack of indentation, I guess you lose formatting information when you cut and paste from TextEdit.


require 'rubygems'
require 'gruff'
if argv[0] == nil
number_of_runs = 100000
else
number_or_runs = argv[0]
flips_per_run = 10
bias_factor = 0
flips = Array.new(flips_per_run,0)
run_results = Array.new(flips_per_run + 1,0)
(1..number_of_runs).each do
flips.each_index do |i|
if (rand + bias_factor) > 0.5
flips[i] = 1
else
flips[i] = 0
end
end
run_results[flips.count(1)] = run_results[flips.count(1)] + 1
end

flips_per_run.downto(0) do |size|
run_results.each_index do |index|
if run_results[index] / (number_of_runs/flips_per_run)>= size then
print "*"
else
print " "
end
end
print "\n"
end
run_results.each_index{ |i| print run_results[i]," "}
print "\n"
g = Gruff::Line.new
g.title = "Data for " + number_of_runs.to_s + " Runs of " + flips_per_run.to_s + " Flips"
if flips_per_run < 50
label_hash = Hash.new
(0..flips_per_run).each { |i| label_hash[i] = i.to_s}
g.labels = label_hash
end
g.data("Number of runs with x heads",run_results)
g.write("penny_graph.png")
print "\n"