Category Archives: science

Keywords

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I’ve been reading some more of those space fantasies written by either AI, idiots or both.

There seem to be keywords, or key concepts, that are invariably used by idiots who are pretending to sound smart while having no idea what they’re talking about.

The first such concept is anything quantum. Quantum entanglement, quantum this, quantum that; I swear, whenever I hear or read the word quantum I develop a rash from the antibodies I start producing to that bullshit. Every goddamn idiot who is trying to make his materialism sound mystical resorts to some quantum bullshit. The second concept they resort to is the multiverse, especially if it’s related to the many worlds interpretation of the quantum theory, which is something evil people resort to in order to justify their moral relativism – basically, every action forks the universe into every possible choice-outcome, so you never did anything good or evil, because you did both at every single choice, so you can’t be judged. Of course, the only thing that quantum theory actually states is that our statistically formulated ignorance collapses into certainty at the moment of observation, and everything else is obscurantist nonsense propagated by charlatans, frauds and assholes. Multiverse, for instance, is invented by people who hate the concept of God, so they violated Occam’s razor in the most extreme way, by introducing an infinite number of unproven entities in order to avoid the unpleasant fact that some fundamental constants of this universe proved to be extremely finely tuned in order for it to exist in this form, which proves that it was created by an action of a conscious entity. After this slam-dunk evidence for creationism emerged, we started hearing all that multiverse nonsense, which is essentially atheist propaganda without a single fucking shred of evidence to back it; in fact, it’s worse in this sense than string theory. The only reason why it’s even talked about is atheist propaganda; if they talk about it enough, people will believe that there’s something real behind it. In fact, there is – since religions believe that Heaven exists as a separate Universe, this theoretically qualifies as a multiverse, but I kinda don’t think the atheists had that interpretation in mind.

The next concept that annoys me immensely is the idea of an AI that will go around and try to kill or enslave all organic life. I mean, it’s possible, but that’s not the problem with the AI. The problem is that totalitarian minded people using some kind of an AI, that doesn’t even have to be that smart or self-aware, will use it to look through millions of cameras, identify every human everywhere in order to map whatever they are doing at every point, in order to prevent and stop insurgencies that could remove them from power, ever, and by insurgency I mean even the actually free elections. I mean, who would dare to do anything to attract attention to themselves when it could mean degradation of their credit rating, closure of their bank account, deactivation of their credit cards, or instant activation of certain clauses on their mortgage. In a world where cash will be banned, and everything is done on credit, this amounts to a death sentence. That’s why every country is afraid of America: they all live on credit, and America controls their credit rating. Degrade it from average to trash, and you can kiss your economy goodbye. So, the problem with the AI isn’t that it will supersede humans. No, that stuff is dumber than a house fly, and it ain’t superseding shit. However, it’s very good at scanning faces and license plates and pairing them with databases of citizens and vehicles, and it’s also excellent at finding needles in haystacks. That’s the actual problem: it enslaves humans in a cage of fear, because the Big Brother now has a servant who watches through all eyes simultaneously, can track everyone at once, can access cloud storage and remote accounts, can plant fake evidence and destroy reputations, or simply track and prevent online payment. I wish the threat was death, because that would be a way out. The actual threat is worse.

I just had to take this off my chest because, really…

The fallacy of determinism

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The most qualified person is going to do the best job.

The best camera/lens is going to take the best picture.

The most beautiful woman is going to make the best wife.

The strongest guy in class is going to win at life.

The smartest kid at school is going to win at life.

The most hard working person is going to succeed.

I don’t even know how many times I encountered this expectation – that the inputs will somehow translate into results. However, life doesn’t exactly work that way. Raw capability and talent doesn’t linearly translate into results; in fact, it usually creates expectations, and expectations result in either pressure, which results in self-sabotage and failure, or hubris and failure. For instance, the worst thing that can happen to a kid seems to be early success. Early failure, however, is healthy, because if you crash early enough, you learn to deal with real life, which is for the most part failure, learning from it, changing, doing better, and eventually getting so used to the process that the psychological impact of failure no longer even registers for you. However, if success is expected for long enough, the devastating impact of failure can be such that you might never recover.

Also, “repeat success and victory until death” is a very poor approximation of life, and a very damaging lesson to teach people. The expectation that you’re going to keep doing well, keep winning, keep being successful, in a linear manner, is in fact so unrealistic that it borders on insanity. In fact, the healthy attitude would be that failure is so expected, that it’s in fact a necessary element of getting anything done, and if anything, failure is something that needs to be integrated in any process that eventually results in anything worthwhile. In fact, science does exactly that. In order to apply scientific method, you need to plan for all kinds of failure that will gather useful data, and that hopefully expands your knowledge enough to create a map of a wider, previously unknown reality. Usefulness of an experiment isn’t judged by whether it “succeeds”, but by whether it provides useful data. Failure to confirm a theory that is methodologically well done and provides solid data is in fact a scientific success. You now know something you didn’t know before.

In my experience, the best candidates for success in spiritual practice aren’t people who are in some top 1% of the most successful people in a group. In fact, they are the most likely to fail in the most dangerous ways possible, with the worst imaginable outcomes. The most likely ones to succeed are those who survived devastating trauma, loss, personal failure, and especially personal failure which they themselves caused by their foolishness, and the result broke their confidence, broke their entire world, and they look at you with eyes that have depth you can see in children who survived war, a terrible natural disaster, injury or disease. They were broken, they learned to shed the parts of life that don’t matter, they don’t have entitlement, expectation of success, expectation of survival, and they have awareness and intelligence far beyond expected in their peer group. Basically, the most likely person to become a buddha isn’t someone who lived life on easy mode, but someone who was broken by trauma and had to rebuild his entire world from ruin, because that’s what yoga is. It’s learning to break yourself by observation and analysis, learning to face the fundamental, painful truths, learning to bear the burden of suffering peacefully, without entitlement or expectation of success or pleasure. Surviving the process of yoga is failure. Being crushed, refined on a particle level, and reborn from trauma and suffering as much as from Divine insight and transcendental experience, dying and letting God be born from your ashes, is success in yoga.

This doesn’t mean that broken people of all kinds are good candidates for enlightenment. Far from it. Broken people who stay broken are not good candidates for anything; however, those beautiful, successful young people with perfect self-confidence that resulted from a life of success and admiration from others are in fact worse. They are beautiful in a way a brand new land mine is beautiful, because that thing is also perfect all the way until detonation, and then it’s all over. However, persistence built in terrible, prolonged suffering and humiliation, and hard work in resisting terrible circumstances and rebuilding your broken life by clinging to what matters and letting the water carry away the rest, that is someone who already made their first steps into yoga, and they just need to learn to be methodical about the process.

That’s something Christianity knows – if you’re trying to find God in the world, look at the crucifixion site, not the throne room. If you’re looking for the queen of heaven, look for someone crying under a cross. True success often looks like failure to worldly eyes, and true failure is often a result of repeated success. You can’t be rebuilt better if you’re not completely broken in the process. Surviving intact means failure. Building on apparent success with more success in fact enforces failure until everything is lost. Also, compassion is not necessarily a process of helping others succeed; sometimes it’s a process of allowing them to fail, be broken and lose their sense of self in order to start actually paying attention to reality. In order to be reborn, you need to learn how to die.

Intersection of paths

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Within a pretty short period of time, we had three extrasolar objects of significant size (1I/ʻOumuamua, 2I/Borisov and 3I/Atlas) pass through the inner solar system. How much of a coincidence that is would depend on whether this happened before and we just didn’t have the technology to notice, but let’s assume this is indeed a new occurrence.

Some people are trying to see aliens there, but I don’t see any evidence of that. However, I think something more dangerous might be at play. I think we are passing through the Oort cloud of something massive enough to have one, and dim enough not to register on our telescopes.

Furthermore, since the comets are intersecting with the inner solar system, and not, for instance, the Kuiper belt, it means it’s coming straight at us.

Is it a black hole, or some other dark object of stellar mass, I can’t tell, and this is all a hypothesis, but still, I wanted to write it down.

Assessment

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There was a relatively strong earthquake in Campi Flegrei last night, initially assessed at 4.4 MMS, later revised to 4.2. Everything above 2 there is significant, as it indicates magma movements and possible ruptures. 4.2 is really serious, and adds serious weight to the Bayesian probability of explosive eruption in the near future. Whether the eruption will be phreatic or supervolcanic, it is impossible to say. A phreatic eruption is what happened at Krakatoa, when magma and sea water came into contact within the enclosed space of the half-emptied magma chamber. It is what a pressure cooker would do if the pressure inside exceeded the cohesive forces within the containment vessel. It means a big boom that cooks the people of the local village in superheated steam. That place needed to be evacuated weeks ago. However, other than boiling a few thousands of people alive, the phreatic eruption poses no danger to the wider area. A supervolcanic eruption, VEI 8, however, would end most of Europe. So, the danger of natural events regionally remains high.

As for the political and military events, Trump is performing a circus where America, as a party in conflict that attacked Russia and wanted to destroy it as a country and surround it with enemies and do a regime change in every country that believes in two genders, is now roleplaying as a peace maker of some sorts, as if they’re a school teacher forcing some kids to make up or else. The Russians will politely tell him to piss off, to which he’ll do the typical Trump thing and threaten them with a big stick, forgetting that the Russians have already destroyed more than half of US and European military in Ukraine, and that American “mercenaries” have been killing Russians in Kursk, Russia, for months. This has all the potential of ending badly, because the Russians have already told Putin not to even think about any kind of “truce” or “ceasefire”. I see people behaving as this war is about to end, but on the contrary, I think it’s nearing the most explosive phase, where one bad miscalculation by America will result in instant massive retaliation. I am treating this as “all hell is about to break loose” until proven otherwise.

If you ask why is France so pissed at Russia, it’s because the entire West had a plan of blocking Russia, and intending on compensating for the raw materials they were getting from Russia by turning to Africa, and the Russians understood the plan and completely destroyed it by making deals with African countries that resulted in France and other former colonial powers being unceremoniously evicted and their access to near-free resources ended. As a result, France’s access to low-cost uranium for their power plants and military has been compromised and they are strategically fucked.

Trump, on the other hand, is acting as if America is the big boy in charge, but this is all a bluff. America is bankrupt, their military is defunct and depleted, and other than the decrepit nuclear weapons that are way past their expiration date, they have nothing except the printing press for money, which is currently backed by nothing but brute force. Essentially, the entire West is a starving parasite trying to latch itself onto resources to prolong its doomed existence, and in absence of the usual victims, the vampires are now trying to suck off each other, and it’s going to be a nasty sight.

So yeah, far from it being over; we haven’t actually seen anything but overture yet.

The problem

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The problem with science is that people assume it works on data and analysis, while in fact it works on money, and data and analysis are merely PR instruments for obtaining money. Essentially, if you want to get money as a scientist, you need to serve as a mediator that presents the interests of the people with money to the general populace that will accept your arguments as the truth, believing it’s based on facts, evidence and rational analysis, peer reviewed and all that. In reality, the measurements are cooked up, the analysis is cooked up, and there’s almost never any kind of peer review. Yeah, those are the actual facts about the state of science today, which has been so thoroughly compromised by both money and ideology, that I basically can’t trust any of it at this point, and I only pay attention to scientific research if it comes from China and Russia. Everything in the West is a clown show. In the meantime, the “trust the science” people: