Monthly Archives: March 2016

How does prejudice happen?

blind2

It is important I did not start with the question ‘what is prejudice?’  It would be like asking ‘what is glare?’ of a blind person.  Inevitably the conversation would revert to ‘how does glare happen?’  So let’s start at the beginning.

Prejudice is a process, not a state.  It’s a slight of hand.  A trick.   More specifically prejudice is a projection.  It starts as people from one culture are exposed to psychopaths from another.

The exposure may or may not be direct.  Non-psychopaths or empaths can be trapped for a lifetime by their own conscience.  These are called proto-psychopaths.  In this situation the trapped conscience demands only obedience to a puppeteer of it’s owner.  This is important because many generations of proto-psychopaths can perpetuate long since stale prejudices.

Psychopaths love to bring up, point out, and otherwise insight prejudice.  It presents opportunities to take control of the minds of proto-psychopaths and the naive to human potential for evil.  Derisive thinking is inherently emotional thinking, and strong emotional reactions drown out the conscience’s signals of risk.

Think of is this way.  A conscionable nudge, or a gut feeling about the nearby proximity of a psychopath, will be imperceptible in a crowded subway car of emotions about past psychopaths.  So by reacting to another societies evil of the past, you deny your own ability to navigate both your own present and your future.  All this time later the psychopath, who neither you or the persons who trained your prejudices may have ever met, is still manipulating you.

The only way to restore your risk manager, or your conscience, is to forgive them.  Don’t forget, that’s foolhardy.  Accept those psychopaths for what they are, a sporadically born, genetically bound, subset of human behavior.   A group of people who can not cooperate, but only compete.  Also forgive the obedient proto-psychopath, who may not have not the social means or the EQ to break free from the emotional noise of prejudice on their own.

If you really do forgive them, if you accept their limitations, you have been freed.  Not just in some relativistic artsy or spiritual kind of way, but in a plain practical way.  Forgiveness is a weapon.  The distracting noise is gone.  You can now see the people in your society and in others society for what they really are.  You can diffuse and even obliterate emotional attacks meant to silence and darken your heart.  You can trace hate to it’s source, and NOW you can really end the cycle.

What is prejudice?  It’s a failure to forgive.

Economics of complexity

legal-complexity

“The chief cause of problems is solutions.”  –Eric Svareid
(shamelessly stolen)

The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.” –Sun Tzu

Looking at the world through a caloric lens, complexity increases economic cost.  To further explore this please see this talk by Dr. Joseph Tainter.  Please keep the volume control handy as there are audio anomalies.  It is long but well worth your time.

This is important because it deals with what collapse looks like.  Rome didn’t collapse as some sort of surprise or in a vacuum.  It suffered from growing and unsustainable complexity.  Civgene can provide the ‘why’ for this problem.  Why did complexity occur?  The most obvious answer is corruption.  Why does corruption continuously increase?  Civgene indicates increasing proportions of psychopaths.  Rent seeking correlates to a genetic pool that grows over the life of a civilization and then collapses once that civilization dies.

As corruption increases complexity, economy of scale multipliers provide diminishing returns.  Further as rent seeker revenues fall, they add complexity simply for the sole purpose of seeking additional loopholes to graft from.  The only mechanism for ending corruption created by adding complexity is adding yet more complexity in the form of additional laws.

If you are familiar with legal distribution you can see where this is going.  There needs to be a way to reduce this complexity to spare limited resources.  No historical law making process can provide this.  The video lays out the need for a new kind of legal mechanism, to cope with the real problem behind complexity.

A growing pool of rent seekers grafted onto the core of the system.  The law making rent seekers find marginal problems to combat in public, while their real goal is to seek new revenue from the hidden effects and loopholes of the new law.   Instead we should reduce complexity by distributing laws.  This should create competition for programs that have grown pointlessly bloated solving small scale locally addressable problems.  Naturally reducing the jurisdiction of laws should be under a populist control, since the vast majority of the population are still good economic actors, with the desire to protect the system from the graft at the center in a selfless way.  So while overall “the process of increasing complexity is inexorable”, we don’t need to make things more complex than necessary for the time.

Dr. Tainter calls political ideology a faith. He is correct!  All politics are based at least in part on faith, because testing political theories on humans is impossible (without an epic immoral cost).  Faiths are critical to reason and therefore civilization, but without recognition of the risks of cult that faith brings, they are simply a collar to click a leash onto.

He does equate logic to ethics saying “Everything the Roman emperors did was a logical response to circumstances.”  While explicitly true this is not complete.  This again proves logic is NOT a panacea.  Sociopath stage psychopaths are perfectly logical, to their own needs.  Markets need to be protected to provide good data to build sound logic on.  Reason (the logical mind + the metamind) is available reliably only from the public, away from the center of power.  The public and their subconscious risk management are needed to keep destructive needless complexity from harming those markets.  Logic and subsequently reason can’t accomplish good law without good data.  Unchecked, complexity and graft slowly smothers true cost.

Civgene presents simple effective solutions to AI

terminator

There is growing concern that AI or artificial intelligence will ruthlessly enslave humanity.  These fears are real, and on the current path, very justified.

Some background.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2016/mar/16/artificial-intelligence-we-should-be-more-afraid-of-computers-than-we-are-video


Lets separate this in to it’s two separate threats.

The first threat is that AI achieves intelligence with no counterpart either in the human or computer world, and then decides humanity is no longer useful or worthwhile.  Some know this is as the singularity.

This may be solvable by hard wiring a conscience in a very similar fashion as described by civgene.  An emotional metamind with mandatory emotional recall.  With a distracting and sometimes painful compulsion to also consider a rationally inaccessible risk calculation created passively and involuntarily.  Initially populated both by parental type training, and real world experience, but constantly creating further compound emotion associations to signal danger in both a useful and intrusive way.  In a word, digital empathy.

The second and more immediate threat, that automation will obsolete the vast majority of human thinking or skilled jobs but unlike the industrial revolution those people will become unemployable.

This is a problem that has already been solved.  Psychopaths are natural centrist statists.  Centralizing power both because they want to become the master of all other people(and the other people become slaves), but also because they regard empathy as a myth, a fraud, and an erratic defect.  Much like a purely rational super intelligent AI might view the whole of humanity.

That centrism comes at a price. a large and growing graft proportional to the growing proportion of psychopaths in a particular civilization (they eventually collapse it)  Legal distribution, designed to add risk to centrisim for the sake of itself does so by using democracy to override bluntly wasteful laws.  Laws can be intentionally wasteful, diverting economy of scale to increased power for a few, or UNINTENTIONALLY wasteful, like forcing people to work a longer work week than the economy needs, in turn creating a glut of labor and enslaving the people that can get jobs.

This of course varies case to case as most law and economics, but that’s the beauty of distributing one law at a time.  A distributed law responds to public calls of no confidence with new segmented market data.   (A lack of uncontaminated market data being the most cited failing of persistent socialism/communism.)  It is the solution to socialism meant as a temporary repair to an ailing people, but becoming de-facto permanent rule as a tool of oppression. (a 40 hour work week was a blessing 100 years ago, and now is a curse) It is a populist relief valve against too much power on the statist side of the intentionally hidden axis on the political compass.

The problem is arbitrary labor force hourly requirements creating a glut of labor.  The present state is slavery or obsolescence, but cooperation and prosperity can return if law speeds up to match the recent blinding speed of technology.

Please see the background page for more information on the civgene theories and legal distribution.

Interesting technical challenges

coincidence

Please don’t panic, civgene is having no technical problems whatsoever.

OK that was a lie.  It was up and down for a couple of weeks but now it’s back up and stronger in

  • security
  • redundancy
  • resilience
  • speed

Specifically in

  • mirroring
  • dns
  • backups
  • web
  • email

This was not part of the plan, but that’s not to say it’s not better for it.   Civgene is now truly redundant.  Please consider becoming a mirror and bringing the site closer to becoming independently anti-fragile.