Policy Archives - Wootcrisp
 

Category: Policy

I ask this question because it really does seem important for the public to understand why we are apparently gung-ho about not trying “better diplomacy” as a solution to the problem that “authorizing and supplying longer-range ATACMS missiles for use against Russia” is claimed to be solving? According to this random news article published less than an hour ago, we are not to see this as anything other than standard foreign policy horseplay, but this is coming from the same media that is lying the public through Israel’s evil genocide of the Palestinians and Lebanese. I’m seeing people on Tik Tok quoting Putin that he is nuclear serious about his choices of response, and that we are apparently calling his bluff. We are? This is the best move for us to make? Has anyone thought to try some ideas in eastern Europe and and the middle east that don’t scare the shit out of everyone?

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/us-permission-fire-missiles-russia-203206999.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATACMS

I was recently overgeneralizing to a friend about the overall value I find in a lot of brain imaging research, and I just now had a moment to privately dance to music in a way that made me want to clarify what I said to my friend about false positives and that dead fish fmri study. Of course there is lots of good brain imaging research. Certainly you can do things like modeling to reduce the uncertainty of any leading systemic detections that might be discovered in localized brain regions. Like using Bayesian priors based on meta analysis of a literature, to say this or that brain region is associated with this or that function. Yes, that’s true. But you also bring unmodeled priors to the table about what you’re trying to find with the research questions you’re asking. For example, doing instinguishable, though interesting, basic research, while a genocide in the Middle East conducted by our “ally” Israel, threatens to engulf the world in mass despotism that will certainly nullify the value of this interesting research. Almost as if it’s time for those concerned to revisit Chomsky1967 about the responsibility of intellectuals.

This is the song I had on loop while writing:

YouTube player

And Chomsky1967 spoon fed to you:

YouTube player

I consume a large amount of content about Israel’s war on civilization, but this interview smacked me upside the head reminding me about the barbaric practices occurring right this very second by Israel, the United States, and a cryptic network of vassal states in the middle east and within “the west”. The consequences for all humanity if we fail to address this issue rigourously, are far worse than mere nuclear war. As Orwell once said “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.” Imagine having to pretend you believe in all the weird shit that these “Judeo-Christian” Zionists implement as “law” that you must obey. Living under Sharia law would be a blessing compared to living under Israeli apartheid, and you don’t know what Israel has been up to lately if you believe otherwise.

YouTube player

What is the “intelligent” thing that is magically going to save us all from ourselves? Modeling! Have a look at the nascent “Campaign” tabletop game page that explains a bit more about this game. I think it is important for people to import real world information into their computer games, like Sim City, or Command and Conquer, or in this case the real life game called Illuminati. Follow that page for these video story updates:

It’s very difficult to answer this question. Take this article by Vitalik Buterin in 2021 as a starting point for your thoughts. Read to you by me:

YouTube player

So you see how complicated this is really.

Partly in the hope of selling my votecoin.com domain name at some point I occasionally take notes on its GitHub page. I can say confidently, that just the philosophical implications of the technical details of an idea like voting with cryptocurrency is enough to intimidate. It’s hard to remember what the exact plan related to it is really.

Lobotomism

| Leave a comment

Noun: Lobotomism – political ideology espousing the need to lobotomize most citizens, in the interest of stability. Where stable solutions for planetary systems, having billions of sentient individuals, are very difficult to find, reducing citizen complexity could mean the difference between having a model for some amount of time, and not having one.

Example application: resolving the tension between libraries and capitalism, by censoring the former.

See: lobotomy, capitalism, monarchism, eusociality, individuality.

Contrast with: “optimism” – a political ideology, that assumes the returns from superrational actions can dynamically find stable solutions, by having a sandbox for citizen activities that otherwise would warrant a good old fashioned round of lobotomies if everyone were to do them.

I think it is helpful to the global perspective needed to address climate change to actually see the increasing number of northern forest fires from the spaceship perspective. Looking down on these eruptions of flame could remind us of the consequences of thoughtless behaviours, in particular, the dangerous overheating you might expect from drunkenly red-lining any spaceship making its way through our universe.

Human beings face doom if they do not quickly reorganize society to improve their chances of survival. Inexplicably, business as usual—where we create, for example, arbitrary amounts of drones for personal amusement, deep-fakes to obliterate any definitive notions of accountability for what we may or may not have said and done, and a plethora of smaller and more exciting recording devices that, intentionally or not, record everything going on around them—is challenging our notions of “survival beyond 2030”. 

Given this state of affairs, it is infuriating that the public discourse has yet to realize that VR has all the answers. So, as an exasperated response to the numbing number of “How to survive/cope” articles I see all the time, e.g., [1][2], I thought I would explain why VR is providing the means to search for the right answers to many of society’s interminable problems. 

Simply stated, the problem is that we must somehow engage ~8 billion people with a role they can play in what Buckminster Fuller called the “operating manual for spaceship earth”. There is no formula for this, so it is easy for a society to start playing nihilistic language games based on the relativity of “solutions” to “our” problems. From here, Fuller tells us only that “you never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete”.

Well, in this case, the old model of societal decision making can be likened to an optimization process called “grid search”: we imagine a space of possibilities, and we expand this space to make an “informed” decision only when something in particular doesn’t seem to be working. Like how we collectively addressed the hole in the ozone layer through specific multinational agreements when it was clear how dangerous the situation was.  

Grid search is passé. Bayesian search theory (BST), changes everything, from how we look for lost nuclear submarines in the Atlantic, to making evidenced-based changes to how we teach professions as esteemed as radiology. The principles of BST can be understood simply using the toy game “Battleship”, where it is obvious that random firing is not the best way to play. It is much better to integrate what you know about the number and size of the ships you need to hit,  along with where you’ve already fired, in order to maximize the probability of a hit:

 

 

From Vsauce2 and a blog post.

We know from work like \textcite{Kahnmen1973, Holmes2014} that human beings often do not do the “optimal thing”, yet they also seem to “succeed” nonetheless. This is because there is always an ad-hoc “optimal” way to have arrived in a situation, but to give the term any kind of prospective meaning requires specifying a commitment to a goal in advance. BST methods tell us that this specification requires a kind of “imagination”. An ideal search must occasionally check out strange places—called “exclusion saccades” in vision research—as part of committing the searching agent to an imagination that makes some locally “non-optimal” decisions in order to find a more optimal global solution. 

The optimal global solution for human life in this moment requires that academia in particular unifies behind the outlandish goal of global adoption of virtual reality headsets. 

From Terrarium VR, and my own Virtual Explorations

The easiest way to get billions of people to commit to achieving something, while not moving around and causing so many problems, is with a seductive and self-reinforcing technology like VR, that can satisfy a range of goals by maximizing creative potential as well as the freedom to be totally uncreative. With this incredible tool, people can at least have the option of managing their habitat with surrogate devices and try to make a positive difference by learning about, and applying, principles of optimality with their neighbours in the process.