Author Archives: danijel

About probabilities

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Every time some scientist starts talking about probability I get pissed off, and here’s why.

Let’s say they are talking about chances of Earth getting hit by an asteroid, or a supervolcano erupting, or a near-enough star going supernova, or whatever potentially cataclysmic event; their argument is always “events such as this happen every x millions of years, so the probability of it happening for every year is in the order of one in x millions”.

Oh, really?

Let’s see how a Yellowstone supervolcano works, and then you’ll see why I have a problem with probabilistics. You have a mantle plume that comes to the crust. A reservoir of magma under pressure forms, and when this pressure exceeds the resistance to pressure of the rock layer above, there is an explosive eruption which relieves the pressure. The dome collapses and you get an open lake of lava. After a while, the lava cools and forms a new dome. The magma chamber has relieved its pressure and will take a long time to fill, and even longer to build pressure to the point where it can mechanically compromise the hard layer of basaltic rock above. You basically have a period of several hundreds of thousands of years after an eruption where the probability of another eruption is literally zero, because the physics that would support it just isn’t there. It’s only in the last few percents of the supereruption cycle that you have any place for uncertainty, because you don’t know the pressure at which the basaltic rock will crack; the thickness, hardness and elasticity of the basaltic dome can vary between eruptions, and so you don’t really know the pressure at which it will pop, and you also don’t know the level of mechanical deformations it can manifest before it pops. So, if an eruption cycle is 650000 years, let’s say there’s place for probabilistics in the last 20% of that time, basically saying the cycle is 650000 years with the error margin of 20%, meaning it can pop 150000 years sooner or later. That’s the scientific approach to things. However, when they employ mathematicians to make press releases, and they say that the probability of it going off is 650 thousand to one for every year, that’s where I start whistling like an overheated boiler.  It’s actually never 650K to one, and if someone says that number you know you’re dealing with a non-scientist who was educated way beyond their intelligence. The probability of it going off is basically zero outside the uncertainty margin that deals with the last 20% of the time frame. As you get further in time, the probability of an eruption grows, but you can hardly state it in numeric terms; you can say that you are currently within the error margin of the original prediction, and you can refine your prediction based on, for instance, using seismic waves to measure the conditions within the magma chamber; how viscous, how unified/honeycombed it is, were there perceivable deformations in the lava dome, were there new hydrothermal events that can be attributed to the increased underground pressure. Was there new seismic activity combined with dome uplift and hydrothermal events? That kind of a thing can narrow your margins of error and increase confidence, but you never say it’s now x to one. That’s not how a physicist thinks, because you’re not dealing with a random event in a Monte Carlo situation, where you basically generate random numbers within a range and the probability of a hit is the size of the number pool to one for each random number generation. A volcano eruption is not a random event. It’s a pressure cooker. If it’s cold, the probability of an explosion is zero. If the release valves are working the probability of an explosion is zero. Only if the release valves are all closed, the structural strength of the vessel is uniform, the heat is on, there’s enough water inside, and the pressure is allowed to build to the point of exceeding the structural strength of the vessel, can there be any talk of the explosion at all, and only in the very last minutes of the process, when the uncertainties about the pressure overlap with the uncertainties about the structural strength of the vessel, can there be any place for probabilistics, and even then it’s not Monte Carlo probabilistics, because as time goes on the probability goes up exponentially because you get more pressure working against that structural strength. As you get closer to the outer extent of your initial margin of error, the probability of the event approaches the limit of 1.

You can already see that most other things work in similar ways, because if there are no asteroids of sufficient sizes on paths that can result in collision with Earth, what is the probability of an extinction-level event caused by an asteroid impact? In the early stages of the solar system formation the probabilities of such events were much higher, but by this point everything that had intersecting orbits already had the time to collide, and things have cleared up significantly. You can always have a completely random, unpredictable event such as a black hole or something as bad suddenly intersecting the solar system at high velocity and completely disrupting orbits of everything or even destabilizing the Sun, but unless you can see how often that happens to other solar systems in the Universe, you can’t develop a meaningful probabilistic analysis.

Also, how probable is a damaging supernova explosion in our stellar neighbourhood? If you are completely ignorant, you can take a certain radius from the Sun where you’re in danger, count all the stars that can go supernova within that sphere of space, say that the probability of a star going supernova is, let’s say one in four billion for every year, and multiply that by the number of stars on your shortlist. If you did that, then congratulations, you’re an idiot, and you are educated far beyond your intelligence, because the stars don’t just go supernova at random. There are conditions that have to be met. Either it’s a white dwarf that gradually leeches mass from another star, exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit and goes boom, or a very old star leaves the main sequence on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, so you have a very unstable giant star that starts acting funny, sort of like what Betelgeuse is doing now, and even then you get hundreds of years (or even thousands of years) of uncertainty margin before it goes. You also have a possibility of stellar collisions, either at random (which are incredibly rare), or you have a pair of stars that get closer with every orbit, leeching mass from each other and eventually the conditions are met for their cores to deform, extrude and join, making for a very big boom. Essentially, what that does is give you a way to narrow down your margins of uncertainty from billions of years to potentially hundreds of years, if you notice a star approaching the conditions necessary for it going supernova, which should not be that difficult where it actually matters, because if it’s too far to measure it isn’t dangerous, and the closer it is the more you tend to know about it. So, the less you know, the bigger the margin of uncertainty represented by your assessments of probability, and the greatest probability of getting the most useless assessment possible is what you get by hiring a mathematician to do it.

In defense of negativity

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It has been recently brought to my attention that I am a negative person – because I see this world as a negative phenomenon and I see all the “positive” efforts here as either outright delusion or as attempts at self-medication by focusing one’s attention at things that are opposite to this world. Basically, by doing good you fight the evil nature of this place and oppose it. If you live “in harmony with nature”, you’re basically choosing against transcendence, and surrendering to spiritual darkness and evil.

So, yes, I’m “negative”, and the fluffy bunnies from the “spiritual circles” should avoid me, lest they be contaminated by my nastiness. I don’t see why they should have a positive opinion of me, since I have a very negative opinion of them, and it is both fair and logically consistent that both sides be balanced in mutual contempt.

In my defense, I would say that I am in good company. Vedanta clearly states that only brahman is real, and everything else is an illusion (brahma sathyam jagat mithya), which is meant in a way that is properly translated, in context, as “brahman is hardware and all perceivable worlds are software”, because “illusion” in this context doesn’t mean something that is a fiction, but something that is a derived reality, a reality less real than a deeper reality that maintains it in itself. According to the Upanishads, brahman permeates the perceived world the way butter permeates milk, which is perfectly consistent with the concept that hardware permeates every aspect of the software that’s running on it, but, as Vedanta also states, every single thing in the world is “not that, not that” (neti, neti), meaning that brahman can’t be positively defined in terms of the world – it’s not the biggest thing in the world, not the greatest thing in the world, not in one thing more than in another, and yet nothing can exist apart from it and without it, and it’s the foundation and existence that supports all. Of brahman it can be said that it is unknowable (acintya) and without properties (nirguna), and yet it is sat-cit-ananda, reality-consciousness-bliss, which is in fact what we perceive, in a very densely filtered form, as points of meaning and purpose in the world – things that are real, blissful and conscious, things that are life and awareness and greatness, things we strive for, love and aspire to, but we are deluded if we think them to be of the world and attainable through the world. No – they are the dim aspects of the light beyond, the transcendental reality, consciousness and fulfillment that is brahman, the true light that manages to shine through even the darkest night that is this world.

So, yes, I think this world is the darkest night and evil, and if you find this to be negative, then I’m negative. However, I don’t see this world as darkness and evil because I am blind to the tiny specks of light that are present in this world, and which someone might find so desirable and fulfilling; no, I see it as a dark pit because I saw the true light and I know it. Don’t expect someone who saw the light of day to worship the glow bugs in the night; to me, this entire world is unimpressive, dull, boring and, as a whole, unworthy of either existence or my attention. I am not here because I like it, and I have sufficient perspective to see it for what it truly is. You might ask why I’m here, but you might not like the answer any better than you like my negative and abrasive person.

 

Global gold price manipulation

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Yesterday morning, Božo and I were discussing what the gold price is going to do in the immediate future. While we both agreed that it’s going to drop, our rationales were different. He said that the American stock market crash is imminent, and when that happens, lots of large players are going to pull reserves out of gold and silver ETFs in order to cover their margin calls. While I don’t dispute that, I sent him a very visual analysis of my thinking:

Basically, since June we had two events where someone dumped billions of dollars in gold futures and other paper assets onto the market in the deep black of the night, and intentionally triggered “stop loss” scripts across the market, creating an avalanche of selling which crushed the price, and since the price of paper and metal are united, this “someone” then bought billions of dollars worth of either very physical gold, or swapped short for long positions. Since the amounts are enormous, only huge banks are able to perform such blatant market manipulations for their clients, of course earning a percentage in the process.

What my annotated graph says is basically “there were two such large gold purchases in the recent past, and it looks like there’s going to be another imminently, probably during the weekend, like the last time”. Sure enough, within a few hours gold started dropping like a rock, and here’s what the graph looks now:

And then I hear the “experts” talking about how this or that “indicator” caused the gold to drop, like, people think the economy is better than expected or the inflation is not as bad as projected, and I think, you people are educated way beyond your intelligence, because the actual free market influences are obviously suppressed to the point where they don’t even register. It’s a game played by the big market manipulators and computer software doing the actual trading, and the only question is when the system will go beyond limits of its endurance and collapse entirely.

The thing that’s actually going on is that very big players apparently caught up to where I was two years ago and are now unwinding their other assets and going hugely into gold. Basically, the entire market is a pump-and-dump scam, and those who pumped and dumped are moving their profit into metal, because that’s the only thing that can survive the kind of crash that I see ahead.

Positive language

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I’m watching this:

… and I’m thinking, the Americans are always “leading”, they are “making progress”, and they are never having problems, they are having “challenges”, which is what one does if he’s in a dominant position; there are things challenging his dominance and “leadership”.

They never fail, they never lose, they never fuck up. There are no negative things out there, just “challenges” that will be “overcome” as “progress” is made in the course of their “leadership”.

What an incredibly arrogant and stupid people they are.

How does one know whether he’s been making progress or not before the war is actually over and one can retrospect? Why do you say problems are “challenges”, as if they are communicating personally with you? Is the fact that you will die if you jump off a tall building a “challenge”, or is it better to say it’s a limitation you need to work with? If it’s a challenge, it means you need to overcome it, but that’s a very dangerous position to have in politics; for instance, you can see a powerful sovereign country like Russia or China as a challenge, which will lead you into a mutually destructive conflict, or you can see it simply as a state of things – you have interests and goals, others do as well, and now you need to negotiate with them, haggle, make deals, cooperate in mutually beneficial ways. If others having any power is a “challenge”, what does that mean, that you have to work on making everybody else into a powerless slave before you’re happy, and you’ll see every instance of freedom, sovereignty and independence of others as a threat, a “challenge”, until you are universally seen as such a menace to others, they will join forces against you and destroy you like a mad dog that you are?

I knew a person who always stated he’s making progress, every day; always positive stuff going on, always learning new lessons, and some other bullshit. An unbiased bystander would see him and conclude he’s completely deluded, because his situation was stagnant at best and degrading desperately at worst, and there wasn’t a single positive thing about it whatsoever, and that was mostly because of his insistence that everything negative is actually positive. Sometimes progress is possible only after you admit you have failed – you did everything wrong, you deluded yourself and you are now facing a disaster, and it’s not that all the bad things necessarily happen for the best, they can happen because you’re a damn fool who made all the wrong calls, persisted on a wrong path and is now facing utter ruin in all respects. That’s the point where you can possibly save yourself if you repent, if you admit failure, and concede defeat, so that you can learn what you did wrong, and do better. If you claim you’re winning and making progress while you’re on a path towards your ruin, and you provoke other powers in their back yard, claiming you’re “challenging their excessive claims” and “answering their challenges”, all this “positivity” will increase the chances of your country becoming a glass parking lot.

America is an incredible country – founded on the principles of arrogance and Satanism, but thinking they are God’s chosen people for some reason. Even their most common variety of Christianity is based on shallow and selective thinking, and incredible self-serving arrogance.

Whom to believe?

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Last night I was thinking about why reputation destruction attempts are so rampant online, and why all political sides try to discredit the opponent instead of his arguments, and on the other hand some people act as if all arguments are on the order of “Rome is in Italy” where the person making the statement doesn’t matter. Of course the person making the statement matters; if you’re reading investment advice, Warren Buffet’s opinion is going to carry much more weight than the opinion of some random person on Reddit. That’s why it would be a problem if we had to read all opinions completely unsigned, divorced from the “brand” of the author, and then I thought – the weight we give to the information we read is a product of the weight of the argument itself, and the perceived weight of the person/entity making the argument.

You are going to take something much more seriously if it comes from a reputable source. Also, if a formerly reputable source abuses the trust invested in them by all the previously sound information they have been giving, and starts spreading propaganda, their “brand weight” is going to degrade and people aren’t going to put much trust in their opinions anymore. We saw that already with the news networks, which have degraded to the point where they are the least trustworthy sources out there, but also with corporations like Boeing, and, unfortunately, science – which has been corrupted so terribly by financial influences, policies that favor publishing questionable work often over publishing solid work infrequently, political influences and so on. Basically, I went from a position of treating scientific articles and publications as mostly rock solid in 1980s and 1990s, to a position where I now see them as obfuscated garbage until proven otherwise. This is unfortunate, because I already treated everything the governments are saying as deception until proven otherwise, I treated “news” as propaganda, lies and deception until proven otherwise, and I can also add science as something that’s manufactured on demand by industry and politics, and has no scientific value until proven otherwise. Essentially, my weighing of various “brands” has changed from positive to zero or negative, which leaves me with a very realistic conundrum: whom are we to believe, and are we actually better off with all those sources of (dis)information around, than we would be if it all stopped bombarding us with worthless, deceptive bullshit altogether? Basically, if Internet went down permanently, would that really be a bad thing? At least the liars would have their mouths shut finally, and deluded people would have to depart from their insane echo chambers, if not voluntarily, then because their Borg interconnection hardware stopped working, and Big Brother TV stopped broadcasting.

The painful thought that follows this is, whether people who got liberated from the brainwashing machine would actually bother to turn their brains on, or is it really their aversion to independent thought that created the addiction to the brainwashing machine in the first place? It’s not that people believe that Earth is flat in the 21st century due to lack of evidence; they believe in lies because truth doesn’t make them feel special and important enough. They believe in lies because they prefer it that way.