From extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Fri Apr 30 12:44:36 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA21920; Fri, 30 Apr 93 12:44:29 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA12258; Fri, 30 Apr 93 12:44:14 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu (5.65/4.0) id ; Fri, 30 Apr 93 15:11:43 -0400 Message-Id: <9304301911.AA01117@churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: ExI-Daily@gnu.ai.mit.edu Date: Fri, 30 Apr 93 15:11:04 -0400 X-Original-Message-Id: <9304301911.AA01105@churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu> X-Original-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu From: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: Extropians Digest V93 #0233 X-Extropian-Date: Remailed on April 30, 373 P.N.O. [19:11:42 UTC] Reply-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: OR Extropians Digest Fri, 30 Apr 93 Volume 93 : Issue 0233 Today's Topics: PHIL: GS + Objectivism (+ Extropianism) = ? [2 msgs] PHIL: Metaphysics vs. Epistemology, Noumena vs. Phenomena [2 msgs] PHIL:Individualism [1 msgs] PUBS: SciAm [3 msgs] Particle Beam Weapons and Me--A Story [1 msgs] RAND, really "Reading harangues at adolescence" [2 msgs] Rand and whatnot [1 msgs] Subscription [1 msgs] Administrivia: This is the digested version of the Extropian mailing list. Please remember that this list is private; messages must not be forwarded without their author's permission. 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Approximate Size: 51642 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 30 Apr 93 09:11:28 CDT From: eder@hsvaic.boeing.com (Dani Eder) Subject: PUBS: SciAm I have a collection of Scientific American that reaches back to 1947, and I have read most the back issues, and continuously since 1975. Generally, the straight science articles are good, and I try and read the whole issue to stay informed on what is going on in the sciences (I also read Science News for the same reason). On the other hand, every so often they publish a social or political article with a definite axe to grind. It is usually the lead article of the issue when it appears, so it is easy to spot. In one case where I have personal knowledge, they published an article on how space-based lasers couldnt work, and thus SDI was a crock. At the time I was working with the Space-Based Laser group at Boeing (I was doing the launch vehicle concept to deliver the thing). The technical arguments that the author of the SciAm article (Tsipis was his name, I think) made were simply wrong. The problem was neither I nor any of the other people working on SBL could publicly reply, because the correct data was classified. I find it amusing that every so often SciAm does an article like this that claims something will never work. And shortly thereafter it does work. One article in this category was how long range ballistic missiles would never be useful (it was written in the late 40s). But on the whole, the science content is of high quality, and I recommend it if you have the time to read it. Dani Eder ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 07:13:05 -0700 (PDT) From: szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo) Subject: PHIL: GS + Objectivism (+ Extropianism) = ? Ray Cromwell: > First you're going to have to define what 'negentropy' means in the > context of a meme or an individual. Secondly, how do you measure it? Well, I'm working on that (see previous posts on benchmarks, self-rep robot model of memetics, etc.). Meanwhile, I invite others to propose their measures. I hope to come up with a theory that links information theory entropy, physical entropy, and memetics to form a general method of determining the value of a meme. (No small ambitions here. :-) > Finally, I make a counter claim. The notion of "minimum entropy" > is unmeasurable in the context you are describing Since entropy is a measurable physical variable, it is in principle measurable over the scope of the meme (eg the sum over the meme's hosts and vector media) as well as per individual. In practice, our measures may be indirect (benchmarks) or imprecise, but still far better than throwing up our hands and deciding that extropy is purely subjective, or a matter of defining our prior ideology as "progressive" as the Saint-Simeonons did. The Saint-Simeonans decided that entropy was the enemy, and progress the goal, long before extropians picked up the theme, but their preconceived political/economic ideology was very different, almost the opposite of ours. That they didn't empirically verify their claims of "progress" or negentropy, and their rejection of all previous accumulated wisdom (intellectual negentropy) of civilization led directly to Marxism, Socialism, etc. which has been the blight of the 20th century. I hope we continuously check our beliefs against the facts, so we can do much better. I am also very apprehensive that, like the Saint-Simeonans, we are so eager to dump overboard thousands of years of accumulated intellectual capital as "irrational" without even looking at its functionality or measuring its negentropy. To destroy something because we don't understand it is highly entropic. > If you can succeed in defining entropy in a socio-economic sense > (such as the amount of "order" that evolves in the society and > the resources it has control over), I claim that this > entropy will shrink faster in an individualist society than a collectivist > one. It depends. You have not given a rigorous definition of "individualist" or "collectivist" here. Both definitions seem to include the joint-stock corporation, for example. (If they don't your claim is false; the world is dominated by societies containing joint-stock corporations). I am *not* collectivist in any sense implying coercion. I am collectivist, or communitarian, in the sense that people working together in voluntary arrangements (corportations, families, universities, political parties, etc. etc.) are in most cases more effective than working alone, and there are many effective forms of voluntary interaction besides contract and market. A particular example that distinguishes my view from individualism (or hyper-individualism, as I've sometimes called it, since "individualism" simply defined as voluntarism I accept): I reject the "everbody should be a contractor" model promoted by some on this list. Contracting only works in certain kinds of situations; for many other kinds of interactions, economic and otherwise, it can be highly entropic. I see little negentropy in promoting the individual contractor as an ideal to pursue, accept that it may be an interesting source of ideas, a relatively unsearched part of k-space given the dominance of anti-market thought during the 20th century. So you see I occupy a unique position here that your map is not taking into account -- I reject coercion, but I also reject individualism in the forms of "every interaction should be a contract or market", "heirarchy is obsolete", "the family is obsolete", etc. which that often get promulgated in transhumanist circles, but may be quite entropic. So let's get beyond the individualist vs. collectivist dichotomy and recognize that there are many different shades of voluntarism, and mine is colored quite differently than many others called "extropia". and is far as I can empirically determine more negentropic. (If you don't like the labels I'm using, I welcome other definitions that correctly map the point of view I have here). > ...``invisibile hand'' or > ``spontaneous order'' arising to reduce entropy. This can arise from many different kinds of motivations and interactions, not just the abstract "rational self-interest" in a market. Often family, heirarchy, webs of trust, implicit reputation, reciprocal altruism, emotional bonds, etc. etc. etc. are more negentropic non-coercive interactions that markets or explicit contracts. > I interpret > collectivism as cooperation in which the individual's motives come not > from himself, but from the group. You can't demonstrate that your motivations "come from" yourself primarily, rather than from somebody else through you. I submit that every one of your motivations come from other people to a large degree, and this applies every bit as much to those you label "individualist" as to those you label as "collectivist". The very motivations of individualism come to us memetically via people like Rand and Nietchze and Heinlein; without them (and many others before and after) our motivations would be vastly different. The same is true of real-time interactions, for example those between ourselves on this list. > How does anarcho-capitalism exist without individualism? Via voluntary corporations, cooperatives, families, communes, churches, etc. in which individuals voluntary cooperate. Much of this cooperation is non-market, non-explicit-contract between individuals, but involves explicit contracts and markets at higher levels (eg between corporations). Nothing dogmatic here; there is still room for individually run businesses in the niches where that is most negentropic (and there are many niches where it more entropic, eg shared households and families). > communes which collectively own property and compete? These communes > would most likely be upstaged by smaller ones, Dang, I hadn't noticed that all the corportations with more than one employee had gone bankrupt. In fact, the much ballyhood trend towards smaller organizations has seesawed back and forth throughout history, and the current trend isn't remotely close to making the large corporation obsolete. The vast majority of the world's GNP is still generated by jointly owned or controlled organizations. Again, empirical fact is what's important here, not just stating our opinions and ideals. > Corporations behave like individuals in that they are > only run by a few of them. No, in some cases organizations are run by hundreds of thousands of people, often in a heirarchy or matrix structure with many informal exceptions. Sure, there is nominally one person in charge, but (s)he doens't do most of the work. Also, these people need to subserve their own "self-interest" to the interests of the company in order to do a good job (keep the corporation in business), which makes hash out of the "rational self-interest" model. There are also boards of directors, shareholder revolts, takeovers, etc. which muddy the scene. Many different kinds of interests and motivations. (At this abstract economic level of interaction, "rational self-interest" is *usually* but not always a reasonable approximation, but it often breaks down for other kinds of interactions, eg within a family). > This is false. Reputation markets haven't "failed", they've never been > really tried. The one that was created a few months ago by a list member > wasn't user friendly enough to use. Oh I see, it wasn't "really" tried because it didn't succeed. :-) Fact is, transaction costs and market volume play a very large role in getting these markets off the ground, and so user hostility is a central failure here. The informal reputation systems are more user-freindly at this scale. Similarly families, emotional bonds, and many other kinds of non-coercive interactions are more user-freindly than markets and explicit contracts in many situations. > Robin's ideas futures aren unlikely to work with play money either. Idea futures face major problems with market volume and transaction costs. Richard Sandor is having trouble right now generating interest in a related concept called "catastrophe futures" which could potentially greatly distribute insurance risk. There are just big learning curves for these kinds of things. I'd love to see transaction and learning costs come down so we can get these things going. In theory idea futures are a great idea, and I've thought of many ways to interface them with the stuff Richard Sandor et. al. are coming up with, so that real money enters the game. For example, there is a big concern about increased variability of weather, and thereby more extreme storms, due to global warming. This theory is on shaky grounds, but is nevertheless impacting hurricane insurance rates. A weather-variability idea future would pin this nicely. But if catastrophe futures (geared to actual payments on hurricane damage policy) can't even generate enough interest, the weather variability future itself will have trouble taking off. And this is still really high-level, big money, measurable stuff. Talking to freinds over beer, negotiating shared resources in a shared house, deciding whether to have kids with whom (like we have free will here! :-), etc. are vastly different tasks, often not even close to being amenable to specific market or contract solutions. For example, substituting a legal contract for the religious/emotional/ etc. institution of marraige is a joke. That's not to say that a prenuptial contract is not useful, but it's only one small tool for helping with one little part of a big task. >>[self-rep robot model of memetics] > What's the reference point on the scale? The self-rep robot model consists, briefly, of the robot, software which instructs it to reproduce, and virus software that diverts robots from reproduction to spreading the virus to nearby robots, and software that mixes both strategies. In this model, negentropy of a piece of software (meme) is proportional to the number of robots it controls. We are concerned about negentropy both in the short term (which may favor the virus) and the long term (which favors reproduction software if it hasn't been exterminated by viruses). Nick Szabo szabo@techbook.com ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 93 9:24:27 CDT From: derek@cs.wisc.edu (Derek Zahn) Subject: PHIL: Metaphysics vs. Epistemology, Noumena vs. Phenomena Thank you, Eric, for that stunning essay. Though it was not your intent, you said nearly as much as Korzybski has so far in 100 pages of _Science and Sanity_ (except for some subtleties such as separating out 'elementalism',.) I don't suppose you'd consider rewriting A.K. for the MTV generation.... In fact, as I expect to teach an introductory AI course someday, I am constantly on the lookout for material. I'd take the first half of your essay (as Rand is irrelevant to this point), illustrate it with some of the more egregious follies of AI, and force my students to read it (if that day arrives, I'll contact you for permission). AI is one of those places where the Aristotlean tradition still has serious followers (well, in the last half-decade or so more and more AI'ers have abandoned that ship). As was discussed here a few months ago, BTW, that belief in an A "perfect system of categories and deductions" also goes by the name "Objectivism" [see Lakoff's _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_, which surprisingly seems to be a rather nice complement to Korzybski, from what I've seen so far]. That Objectivism is a premise of Rand's (broader?) Objectivism. An even better complement is the first half of Winograd and Flores's _Understanding Computers and Cognition_ [the second half is great too, but since it deals specifically with computers isn't necessarily relevant to the more general issues being discussed here]. derek ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 93 12:16:27 EDT From: Xiao Zhou Subject: PHIL:Individualism ----------- >Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 02:35:19 -0700 (PDT) >From: szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo) >Subject: PHIL: GS + Objectivism (+ Extropianism) = ? >Extropianism seems to have borrowed individualism straight from Rand >and Nietchze; individualism has no necessary connection to negentropy >(just as technocracy has no necessary connection to the rest of GS). >I claim that individualism does *not* minimize entropy, >Nick Szabo Am I the only person who thinks that the word 'individualism' has been Orwellize point of uselessness? Its opponents have strawmanized it and its adherents have mystified it. Would this debate have any meaning in system terms - 'I am a componentist!' or 'You're a damn systemist!' I think the terms have come to have different meanings for persons on opposite sides of the issue. Maybe they alway ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 12:21:18 -0500 (EDT) From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: PHIL: GS + Objectivism (+ Extropianism) = ? Nick Szabo writes: > Ray Cromwell: > > First you're going to have to define what 'negentropy' means in the > > context of a meme or an individual. Secondly, how do you measure it? > > Well, I'm working on that (see previous posts on benchmarks, self-rep > robot model of memetics, etc.). Meanwhile, I invite others to propose > > > Finally, I make a counter claim. The notion of "minimum entropy" > > is unmeasurable in the context you are describing > > Since entropy is a measurable physical variable, it is in principle > measurable over the scope of the meme (eg the sum over the meme's > hosts and vector media) as well as per individual. In practice, our > measures may be indirect (benchmarks) or imprecise, but still far better > than throwing up our hands and deciding that extropy is purely That wasn't my point. I'm not saying you can't measure entropy or negentropy, I'm saying you can't state 'minimum entropy' or 'maximum negentropy' in something as complex as a social system consisting of billions of humans. As technophiles, extropians tend to over mathematicize some things. I doubt we'll ever have the capability of constructing a function F(i), where F is a polito-socio-economical system function, and which can be applied to an individual meme or person i. Economists tend to fall into the same trap, and they fail miserably. > > If you can succeed in defining entropy in a socio-economic sense > > (such as the amount of "order" that evolves in the society and > > the resources it has control over), I claim that this > > entropy will shrink faster in an individualist society than a collectivist > > one. > > in voluntary arrangements (corportations, families, universities, > political parties, etc. etc.) are in most cases more effective than > working alone, and there are many effective forms of voluntary interaction > besides contract and market. The market seems to be the only effective form for _large scale_ interaction_. Families and communities work because they are small and because they have two factors which control individual behavior, love, and peer pressure. Most people work for companies not because they feel some sort of loyalty to their fellow workers or the company, but because they are making money. The Japanese seem have succeeded in setting up a social system where loyalty and company spirit work, but to the detriment of the individual. The Japanese work some of the hardest schedules in the world, a lot of workers die or get sick from overwork. And suicide is quite normal. If becoming a slave is the way to achieve maximum negentropy, I hereby denounce negentropy as a goal. > So you see I occupy a unique position here that your map is not taking > into account -- I reject coercion, but I also reject individualism in > the forms of "every interaction should be a contract or market", > "heirarchy is obsolete", "the family is obsolete", etc. which > that often get promulgated in transhumanist circles, but may be quite > entropic. I don't think anyone here has condemned the family or small communities. In fact, I view extended families with great interest. In Asian American families, extended families build up a nice financial cushion for new members -- enough to give kids a good education and give them practical experience in the family business. Jewish culture seems to be similar in some respects. My only claim is that you can't base a world industrial economy off this model, in fact, you can't base anything bigger than a few city blocks off of it. > So let's get beyond the individualist vs. collectivist dichotomy and > recognize that there are many different shades of voluntarism, and mine > is colored quite differently than many others called "extropia". > and is far as I can empirically determine more negentropic. (If you > don't like the labels I'm using, I welcome other definitions that > correctly map the point of view I have here). In my opinion, you've taken what I consider to be scientific speculations on the list (questions like, how would a system work if firms were REALLY small, or if everyone is a contractor) and turned it into a generalization for which you can argue against. Let's get down to the fundamentals. Extropianism argues for a society free of coercion. Individuals are free to make firms of any size, including self-employment. I have seen no "extropianly correct" principle requiring survivalist individualism. Extropianism simply argues that a society where individuals are free to choose (whether they want to live in communes, or cardboard boxes) will have lower entropy than others. I don't think we can prove this yet, only make anecdotal arguments for it. > > ...``invisibile hand'' or > > ``spontaneous order'' arising to reduce entropy. > > This can arise from many different kinds of motivations and > interactions, not just the abstract "rational self-interest" > in a market. Often family, heirarchy, webs of trust, > implicit reputation, reciprocal altruism, emotional bonds, etc. > etc. etc. are more negentropic non-coercive interactions that > markets or explicit contracts. No one has argued against any of this on the list, atleast I have yet to see it. Extropians are human. They will value friendship, trust, good deeds, etc. The only thing I have seen argued on this list is the "try to limit commons" principle. Best friends have been torn apart over who gets to use the remote control. I don't understand what you're arguing unless you think elimination of self-employed workers or mass-industrial collectivism will lead to a decrease in negentropy. I would certainly disagree with this. And I'm not talking about coercion either, if every human in the world volunteered to be part of one "mega-corporation", it would be a certain disaster. > > I interpret > > collectivism as cooperation in which the individual's motives come not > > from himself, but from the group. > > You can't demonstrate that your motivations "come from" yourself > primarily, rather than from somebody else through you. I submit that > every one of your motivations come from other people to a large degree, > and this applies every bit as much to those you label "individualist" > as to those you label as "collectivist". The very motivations > of individualism come to us memetically via people like Rand and > Nietchze and Heinlein; without them (and many others before and after) our > motivations would be vastly different. The same is true of real-time > interactions, for example those between ourselves on this list. I disagree. My motivations for long life, to become wealthy, to study science, to receive pleasure, and to debate these things comes not from trying to impress others but from an innate _love_ for them. A collectivist will put the values of the group above his own personal needs or wishs. An individualist generally will not. > > How does anarcho-capitalism exist without individualism? > > Via voluntary corporations, cooperatives, families, communes, > churches, etc. in which individuals voluntary cooperate. Much of this > cooperation is non-market, non-explicit-contract between individuals, > but involves explicit contracts and markets at higher levels (eg > between corporations). Nothing dogmatic here; there is still room > for individually run businesses in the niches where that is most > negentropic (and there are many niches where it more entropic, eg > shared households and families). I still don't see how this factors out individualism. The only thing I am arguing with is the notion that you could run a large corporation based on trust/brother love/altruism alone. Do you think there is a maximize size of a group of individuals where trust/love/altruism brings diminishing returns and a market has to take over? > > communes which collectively own property and compete? These communes > > would most likely be upstaged by smaller ones, > > Dang, I hadn't noticed that all the corportations with more than > one employee had gone bankrupt. In fact, the much ballyhood trend > towards smaller organizations has seesawed back and forth throughout > history, and the current trend isn't remotely close to making the > large corporation obsolete. The vast majority of the world's > GNP is still generated by jointly owned or controlled organizations. > Again, empirical fact is what's important here, not just stating our > opinions and ideals. How about this empirical fact. Small clone dealers and manufacturers have effectly kicked IBM's collective ass in the personal computer market. If it wasn't for Apple's legal protection against Mac clones, they would have been drop kicked out of the market years ago. (Mac prices were incredibly high for the amount of hardware they had in them). The same thing has happened in just about any market that has a low barrier to entry. In other markets, like Aerospace, or Automobiles, individual participation is almost impossible unless you are Bill Gates times two. However, most of the world's big corporations are proped up by government, that's why they haven't become dinosaurs yet. Chrysler, GM, Macdonnell-Douglas, Lockheed, need I say more? > > Corporations behave like individuals in that they are > > only run by a few of them. > > No, in some cases organizations are run by hundreds of thousands > of people, often in a heirarchy or matrix structure with many > informal exceptions. Sure, there is nominally one person in > charge, but (s)he doens't do most of the work. Also, these > people need to subserve their own "self-interest" to the interests > of the company in order to do a good job (keep the corporation > in business), which makes hash out of the "rational self-interest" > model. There are also boards of directors, shareholder revolts, Huh? Self-interest demands doing a good job and keeping the corporation (your bread and butter) in business. Also, doing a superb job is also self-serving in that you get to feel good about yourself and your skills. Pride, Selfishness, exibitionism, these are the motors of individualism. I have yet to meet someone who was interested in giving up his own self-interest to save a company. ("yeah, I'll take a 50% pay cut, and work overtime for nothing, if the corporation surives. And you don't owe me anything in return. I don't expect any.") > > This is false. Reputation markets haven't "failed", they've never been > > really tried. The one that was created a few months ago by a list member > > wasn't user friendly enough to use. > > Oh I see, it wasn't "really" tried because it didn't succeed. :-) No, it didn't have a chance to succeed because it was never attempted. As in, the HEX exchange never even opened for trading, and it's user interface was too burdensome for making users take the time to use it. On the other hand, systems that I and several others have been working on are as easy as hitting a key in elm, and actually return a benefit to the user in that he gets a personalized version of the list to his preferences. Fact is, transaction costs and volume have nothing to do with it right now. It's still at the "make it painless" stage. [...] > >>[self-rep robot model of memetics] > > What's the reference point on the scale? > > The self-rep robot model consists, briefly, of the robot, software > which instructs it to reproduce, and virus software that diverts > robots from reproduction to spreading the virus to nearby robots, > and software that mixes both strategies. > > In this model, negentropy of a piece of software (meme) is proportional to > the number of robots it controls. We are concerned about negentropy > both in the short term (which may favor the virus) and the long term > (which favors reproduction software if it hasn't been exterminated > by viruses). How do you define "maximum negentropy" and how do you calculate whether something will approach it? I imagine some kind of hand-waving argument using the number of particles in the universe would work, but still, how do you calculate whether a given social situation actually maximizes negentropy. Humans are incredibly complex creatures, I can't see anyone plugging statistical values into an equation about a church/corporation and proving it minimizes entropy better than any other system (atleast until I get my asteroid brain). > Nick Szabo szabo@techbook.com > -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- EE/Math Student | politics is the implementation of faith. -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | - Zetetic Commentaries -- ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 11:56:17 -0400 (EDT) From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!esr@uunet.UU.NET (Eric S. Raymond) Subject: Rand and whatnot > Eric Raymond saith: > > I question the assertion of a GS "focus on communality". I don't think GS > > implies any position on the individualist/communalist axis. What is your > > evidence for believing otherwise? > > Well, the other meme-trees mentioned (Objectivist and Extropian) have > individualism as an axiom (or at least a fundamental theorem); anything that > doesnUt is *relatively* less individualist. Lack of an individualist axiom does not a communalist philosophy make. -- Eric S. Raymond ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 09:46:44 -0700 (PDT) From: Scott C DeLancey Subject: PUBS: SciAm > Just out of curiosity, what is the list opinion, in general, of _Scientific_ > American_ ? I find it pretty good, but every so often something really vapid > gets thru... Is there any hidden slant to this mag that I have yet to hear > of? And deep dark secrets? As one datum, their linguistics articles are absolutely unreliable. The editors clearly aren't familiar with the field, and are attracted to colorful new theories, many of which have dubious empirical support (see e.g. articles in the past few years by Colin Renfrew, Joseph Greenberg, and T. Gamilkredze). Without knowing anything at all about linguistics you can get an idea of the quality of stuff that they are willing to print by looking at the statistical argument in Greenberg and Ruhlen's article last fall (November, I think). I have heard the suggestion once or twice that their articles on archaeological topics also have a tendency to be a bit beyond the cutting edge (if you get my drift) but I can't verify this. Scott DeLancey ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 13:08:21 -0400 (EDT) From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!esr@uunet.UU.NET (Eric S. Raymond) Subject: PHIL: Metaphysics vs. Epistemology, Noumena vs. Phenomena Responding to my post on metaphysics vs. epistemology: > I would like to make a small point about the above. I agree with most > of what Eric is saying (although I disagree about the usefullness of GS). Why is that? GS is basically just a way of teaching Peircean operationalism and language analysis. Do you feel it's redundant, or that it does a poor job, or what? > Mathematics is not always pure deduction, in fact, a lot of mathematics > originated from empirical observations about numeric systems. I thought this would come up. I didn't think it would come up so quickly. *Sure* we often discover new mathematics by a sort of observation --- by playing mental games with the symbols until something pretty happens. That insight doesn't become mathematical *knowledge* until it's deductively linked to the premises of a formal system. The fact that mathematical discover often *feels* empirical is an interesting datum of creative psychology. But it's not in itself philosophically significant. > Afterwards Kurt Godel shattered this idea of "axiomatizing" all of mathematics > in his ground breaking paper. He did *not*, however, unseat formalism. He just replaced "mathematics as one big formal system" with "mathematics as a collection of mutually overlapping and possibly mutually inconsistent systems". Godel's result makes life *more* difficult for people who want to give mathematics its old noumenal priority back, not less. Now they're faced with the task of selecting one of several different axiom systems as the "perfect a priori system of categories". *And those systems are mutually inconsistent!* Is noumenal mathematics to include the Continuum Hypothesis or its negation? The Axiom of Choice or its negation? Zermelo-Frankel or Von-Neuman/Bernays set theory? > I would say that there is a middle ground between absolute empiricism > and absolute formalism. Yup. That's why, technically, we distinguish between empiricism (Hume/Locke et. al.) and operationalism (Peirce, Korzybski, Reichenbach, Popper, et. al). Operationalism demands that you ground reasoning in the empirical, but has no problem with the use of deductive universals as heuristics or aids to hypothesis formation. > (if requested, I'll post what I info I have about Bennett's discovery) Request request. -- Eric S. Raymond ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 13:40:43 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: RAND, really "Reading harangues at adolescence" X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission Lefty says: > I have had it plausibly argued to me that reading "Illuminatus!" in and of > itself constitutes and initiatory experience. I would tend to agree. > > BTW, I read "Illuminatus!" when I was nineteen or twenty. I could not read > it at a younger age than this: I got each volume within a week of initial > publication. The two or three months between volume 1 and volume 2 were > probably the longest of my life... I thought "Illuminatus" was a scream, but I can't say that it changed my life, or that I can even take it very seriously. Most of it just seemed amusing, libertarian in-crowd jokes and the like, or Hagbard accusing the U.S. Government of insanity. There were some kernels of truth in there, of course, but overall very little that I hadn't found better said elsewhere. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 14:16:55 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: Subscription X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission Derek Zahn says: > > I would like to subscribe to your publication. > > Just a question... has anybody self-organized into handling > these _Wired_-inspired queries about _Extropy_? I've been forwarding some of the queries on... .pm ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 14:30:29 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: PUBS: SciAm X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission Stanton McCandlish says: > Just out of curiosity, what is the list opinion, in general, of _Scientific_ > American_ ? I find it pretty good, but every so often something really vapid > gets thru... Is there any hidden slant to this mag that I have yet to hear > of? And deep dark secrets? Its a good general science magazine. They publish liberal social issues articles too often -- but those aren't nearly as significant as the value of getting early warning of scientific developments. I subscribe to Scientific American as well as to Science News. (For that matter, I get I really insane number of publications. Newspapers: The Wall Street Journal The New York Times Magazines (Pay): The New Yorker The Economist Science News Forbes Scientific American Vegetarian Times Consumer Reports American Rifleman Reason Magazines (Freebies): Open Systems Today InfoWorld Communications Week E.E. Times Sun World Sun Expert Anyone else as deranged as I am? ) Perry ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 11:32:10 -0800 From: lefty@apple.com (Lefty) Subject: RAND, really "Reading harangues at adolescence" >>I have had it plausibly argued to me that reading "Illuminatus!" in and of >>itself constitutes and initiatory experience. I would tend to agree. > ^^^^^^^^^^ >I would also tend to agree (and throw in Cosmic Trigger), but my curiosity >as to what *your* answer would be demands that I ask: > >Initiatory into what? A good question. Into the _conspiracy_, I suppose. Certainly it reinforced a number of pre-existing trends. I had studied Zen for a few years before I read "Illuminatus!" and had some practical experience with ceremonial magick, psychedelics, etc. I'd say that, most importantly, "Illuminatus!" gave me an immediate sense that I wasn't the only person who thought the way I did or saw cross-connections between the subjects I've mentioned above. It also gave me a much better appreciation of the concept of history-as-conspiracy. >>Lefty (lefty@apple.com) >>C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:. > >Hmmm... It looks like you may have had other initiatory experiences as well. Heh. I could tell you all about it, but then I'd have to kill you. -- Lefty (lefty@apple.com) C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 93 11:25:03 -0700 From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Subject: Particle Beam Weapons and Me--A Story Dani Elder writes: >In one case where I have personal knowledge, they published an >article on how space-based lasers couldnt work, and thus SDI was >a crock. At the time I was working with the Space-Based Laser >group at Boeing (I was doing the launch vehicle concept to >deliver the thing). The technical arguments that the author >of the SciAm article (Tsipis was his name, I think) made were >simply wrong. The problem was neither I nor any of the other >people working on SBL could publicly reply, because the correct >data was classified. I have an interesting story to tell about "Scientific American," Kosta Tsipis, and space-based weapons. In April 1979, Kosta Tsipis published the lead article (also known as the "technology policy" article) in "Sci Am," an article on "Particle Beam Weapons." Tsipis "proved" they could never be built with the following general reasoning (I don't have the article handly, so these numbers are rough guesses, to show the line of reasoning): - to melt a hole in an ICBM means depositing so many ergs per square centimeter of missile surface (to raise the aluminum to the melting or boiling point, easily calculable from energy deposition rates of proton beams, for example, and the well-known thermal properties of aluminum or titanium) - considering beam spread and the probable range (about 1000 km), the energy in the beam (total energy, not particle energy) must be very large. - Tsipis concluded that to deposit the necessary ergs/cm^2 at a 1000 km, a particle beam accelerator in orbit would need the energy, for just a single shot, of 20 tons of chemical high explosives, requiring years of space shuttle flights just to reload for one shot! A pretty devastating critique of particle beam weapons! Except for what he missed.... which is where I enter the picture. After I published the first papers in 1978-79 on how circuits could be disrupted by alpha particles from chip packaging materials (and cosmic rays, too, though this was a much less pressing problem), I got various invitations to speak. I was a research physicist for Intel at this time. One invitation came from Tom McGill, of the Caltech physics department, to speak for a day with a group of academic scientists at the "Materials Research Council" summer school program in La Jolla (San Diego). Chuck Seitz, also of Caltech and later famous for the "Hypercube" architecture, was also involved. The group met for several weeks at the Scripps Elementary School, with their families vacationing nearby, and planned government programs. I have very strong reasons to believe this group is part of, or is closely affiliated with, the hush-hush "Jasons": senior scientists who meet to develop defense-related science programs. I described to them a series of calculations and estimates I had made on the feasibility of disrupting satellites (including the DSCS and Navstar/GPS satellites) and even destroying ICBMs with particle beams. My key points: 1. Kosta Tsipis had dismissed PB weapons on the basis of *gross thermal damage* estimates, which was a plausible dismissal (holding a beam on a fast-moving target a thousand klicks away while trying to heat it to the melting point is indeed a challenge). Except it missed some key points. 2. The very same protons or other charged particles (I'll get to neutrons later) which are "heating up" the skin, in Tsipis' analysis, are also *penetrating" the target. (20-50 MeV protons have good penetrability and reasonable dE/dx energy deposition along the way). 3. Calculations showed that onboard computers could be disrupted with particle fluences (number of particles per unit area) 4-5 *orders of magnitude* lower than the numbers Tsipis derived! In other words, long before the missile melted, the innards would've been scrambled! (Hardly surprising, is it? I didn't think so, either, but Tsipis and other public policy pundits were blithley unaware--to be charitable--of other disruption mechanisms.) 4. What about error correction? I presented a computer-generated plot I'd made of numbers of uncorrectable errors (that is, errors beyond which ECC could not correct) as a function of particle fluence, for some given classes of devices. (I had helped Rockwell scientist Jim Pickel figure out it was cosmics that were knocking out each Global Positioning System satellite as soon as it reached orbit...the first 3 launches in late '77 to early '78 all had massive problems--OK on the ground, glitches as soon as orbit was achieved. As soon as Pickel saw my alpha paper in May, 1978, he frantically called. I used the GPS sensitivity figures in my La Jolla talk.) 5. The implications were clear: commercial ion-implant machines could provide the necessary total beam energy to disrupt any space-borne systems based on reasonable amounts of VLSI. In particular, the Soviets were quite good at building such accelerators (viz. their lead in magnetohydrodynamics) while the American were busy cramming their reconnaissance and communications satellites with rad-hard (but NOT "single event upset"-hard) components. I asked the assembled group if increased error rates had ever been seen when Sov. satellites were nearby...I was told to not pursue that line of speculation any further! (This was about the time some U.S. satellites were blinded by ground-based lasers...later diplomatically dismissed as "forest fires"!) 6. Neutral particle beams work the same way. Those based on neutral atoms (e.g., hydrogen) still deposit energy, since the electrons are lost in the first interactions with matter and thereafter look just like ordinary charged particles (e.g., protons), Neutrons are harder to analyze, but can still disrupt circuits through several effects, including neutron displacement damage and interactions with boron dopants in the silicon. 7. I also described the likely effects of neutron bomb blasts, concluding that well-placed low-yield neutron bombs would disable computers and other circuitry over a large radius, even when shielded against EMP (electromagnetic pulse effects). 8. I spent the entire day with these "Jasons" (I think), describing the implications and answering questions. A real rush! But the best was yet to come! Two weeks later I got a call inviting me to Washington, D.C. to speak at an emergency planning meeting on space radiation effects, entitled "Soft Errors in Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits" and sponsored by DARPA. This was held at the Naval Research Lab and featured both semi-classified ("don't talk about it") and classified portions. About ten speakers in all...I couldn't go to the classified sessions, of course. I repeated my calculations and predictions and others double-checked the numbers and confirmed that, yes, this single event upset mechanism (also known as "soft errors") would in fact dramatically alter the energy budget estimates for particle beam weapons. I also presented a scenario, backed up by some numbers, for how a dozen or so particle beam accelerators (the small ones, like the ion implanters I mentioned) could be orbited and arranged to simultaneously scramble/disable the U.S. fleet of DSCS ("Discus") satellites used to coordinate retaliatory strikes. This sent a hush through the audience and Chuck Guenzer of NRL asked me in the next break to avoid describing this scenario to anyone else! (I can speak freely now becaue it's been nearly 14 years, the Evil Empire is no more, and the technology has changed dramatically on all fronts.) (I should note that lasers are not involved at all. For various reasons, they may be better suited to space-based weaponry. I'm not so sure, though, because of the energy deposition requirements that still remain. Mechanical shock as the beam hits the ICBM or satellite is much more effective than melting, though.) In 1983 I was at the "Single Event Upset Workshop," held every year near TRW, Rockwell, etc., in the Redondo Beach area, and was told by a Los Alamos guy that Reagan's just announced SDI ("Star Wars") research program included particle beam weapons for just the reasons I had presented to them. He claimed I deserved much of the credit for keeping the particle beam portion alive in the face of attacks by Kosta Tsipis and others. (I feel nothing about this, morally, as I didn't make the choices to develop or deploy. Nor am I sure what the choices should've been. Or even what they finally were.) Well, that's my little story of my links to the Kosta Tsipis story. -Tim May, former advisor to the Military Industrial Complex -- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, smashing of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: in a state of flux! Waco Massacre + Big Brother Wiretap Chip = A Nazi Regime ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 Issue #0233 ****************************************