Because of rationalization, prediction is a good test of theories. One can always with sufficient cleverness find a hundred and one explanations of past events that fit your model. Wrong predictions indicate indicate false models, and right predictions indicate true models, but retrodiction is always suspiciously accurate. Correct retrodiction is sometimes valid evidence for the truth of a model when it makes sense out of phenomena that were formerly arbitrary, …
Category: science
The namefag problem
In today’s environment, it is impossible to speak the truth under one’s official name, and dangerous to speak the truth even under any durable and widely used identity. Therefore, people who post under names tend to be unreliable. Hence the term “namefagâ€. If someone posts under his true name, he is a “namefag†– probably unreliable and lying. Even someone who posts under a durable pseudonym is apt show excessive …
Natural Selection is reactionary
Vox Day has been campaigning against evolution, arguing that like Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, it is fake science, demon worshiping religion dressed in the sacerdotal lab coats of science. Vox is a great man, and I am a huge admirer of his. He had the courage, doubtless strengthened by his faith in God, to take on the enemy and show that the enemy can bleed. He should be an inspiration …
Paternity, war and conquest.
Competition with no limits and no rules is the war of all against all, is predation, every other creature except for close kin being obstacles or raw materials. Humans organize so that competition is channeled into productive activities, rather than massively negative sum activities. But how do we organize this? This is what we call order, and political order is also order in the thermodynamic sense, in that a functional …
Open letter to Linus
When an open source project goes social justice it dies. It suffers the same transformation we see in entertainment intellectual properties like Star Wars. Identify a respected institution. kill it. gut it. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect When a stem activity, such as open source, goes social justice, then its job gets redefined as showing that women, blacks, and Muslims are capable of stem by …
Evolution
Evolution is on topic for reaction, for the nature of women makes sense and is explicable in terms of Darwinian evolution, in terms of evolutionary psychology. You can also explain it as the curse of Eve, but if you explain it as the curse of Eve, it is rather arbitrary. Why did God curse women that way, and not some other way? (Answer, because we are risen killer apes, not …
Barnacling
Leftists have a word “entryismâ€, which they use when privately talking amongst themselves. They never plainly state what entryism is, but if you are part of the in group, it becomes obvious that they are talking in code. If the chans got hold of some emails about “entryismâ€, would probably interpret it as referring to satanic rituals involving sex with children. I don’t know what “pizza†means in the pizzagate …
Technological decline
As societies enter a dark age, military technologies are apt to be the last to be lost, and in the recovery from a dark age, the first to advance. In dark ages, art declines, great buildings decline, ordinary people’s living standards decline, people harrow the ground with stones tied to bits of wood instead of iron plows, but weapons technology usually goes right on improving. Our art is crap, we …
China passes the US
The most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is a fifty year old plane firing seventy year old cannons scoured from museums and looted from ancient forgotten overseas arms depots. Some people may say that the most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is nukes, but after all these years, who knows if they work any more? We can no longer make tritium, we …
The science is settled
A little while ago I saw cited yet another Harvard study supposedly proving that women CEOs are just as good as men, except better, not withstanding the fact that anyone can see that women in charge are profoundly disruptive and destructive, that women can no more run a large group than they can chop wood with an axe, pilot a plane, do science, or clear a path through the jungle …