Notoriously, husbands tend to see their wives as hot, when they would never see some other woman of similar age as hot. If they are separated from their wife for a year or so, for example by divorce, the wife goggles fall off. Wife goggles appear to happen primarily to fathers. If the wife does not have children, then as she grows older, she rapidly becomes less attractive, as any …
Category: science
Prediction, Retrodiction, Warmism and the Demon Haunted Dark
We are far more impressed by a scientific theory that predicts, than a supposedly scientific theory that retrodicts, even though from the Bayesian point of view they are the same. Successful prediction tells us that this is an actual theory, rather than a slippery and ambiguous pile of vague fudge factors subject to post hoc reinterpretation. As you probably know, Global Warming models are 100% successful at precisely “predicting†(retrodicting) …
Recap on Warmism
I have been ignoring the issue of Global Warming for a while, because it is pretty much settled. Â Anyone who still believes in Warmism is stupid, crazy, or lying. Â Usually stupid. But, a short summary:
Exhaustion of the low hanging fruit, or moral decay?
Photolithography is limited by the wavelength of light. Â Below 160 nanometers, UV is not light, but ionizing radiation. Â So at some point, have to switch from photolithography to contact lithography, such as imprint lithography, or direct contact printing. Â But did they stop shrinking stuff before we reached that limit? That they are lying about it suggests moral decay, rather than exhaustion of the low hanging fruit. Current photolithography is stuck …
Darkness is the norm
Copper production shows three peaks: The Roman Empire in the west, the Song Dynasty, and modernity. The Roman Empire in the west and the Song Dynasty had about seven times the preceding and following level of copper production, thus while those civilizations were going concerns, they had far more production and wealth than the rest of the world put together. When the Roman Empire in the West fell, its GDP …
No real AI progress
AI is a hard problem, and even if we had a healthy society, we might still be stuck. That buildings are not getting taller and that fabs are not getting cheaper and not making smaller and smaller devices is social decay. That we are stuck on AI is more that it is high hanging fruit. According to Yudkowsky, we will have AI when computers have as much computing power as …
mens rea
I have been arguing that social decay is ending technological and scientific progress. In most areas it has strikingly slowed, in some areas, going backwards in the west, as we forget how to do what once we could do. Others, however, argue that technological and scientific progress is still running hot, or that if it has slowed, it is that we ran out of low hanging fruit. But a big …
Tall buildings and the social order
To make and keep the upper stories of a tall building habitable requires routine high technology. The lifts have to work, the water needs to be pumped, the toilets have let the poop down one hundred stories without shattering violence. It is not all that expensive. Current office space costs in the centers of major cities are so high that very tall buildings are immensely profitable. It is simply difficult …
Races and subspecies
Darwin defined race and subspecies to mean the same thing, a difference between kinds that is noticeable, but less than a species difference. He then proceeded to argue that there was no objective distinction between a race difference and species difference, that two very different races were the same degree of difference as two closely related species. And thus, that race is the origin of species. Over time, races may …
A creationist, an evolutionist, and a Darwinist were walking in the woods
They saw a patch of flowers. “Why are these flowers beautiful?†asked the creationist rhetorically. “OK†said the evolutionist, “Why?†“For the joy of God and man,†said the creationist. “No†said the evolutionist, “Beauty is subjective, in the observer, not in the flower, and nothing in nature has any purpose. It just is.†“No,†said the Darwinist. “These flowers must be pollinated by a creature that drinks nectar by …