asciilifeform: the details
asciilifeform: and i sincerely hope they do.
asciilifeform: except you don't have a rotor or stator as such, they're dynamically 'moving' via phase shifting
mircea_popescu: "if you're willing to pay for ten million of these, i can prove to you that in any conceivable situation no less than 3 will be useful to your purpose"
asciilifeform: for another, spilled to various folks in periphery of academwot
ben_vulpes: as a guy who's cobbled together the odd machine or two, the notion that you can have a million little bits cooperating to give you the power of a purpose-designed driveshaft one moment and slither through a keyhole the next strikes me as wankery of the first degree.
mircea_popescu: so how would they ask ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: afaik the only place the required - non-negotiably - tech exists - is in my skullcase.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i think what was being contemplated was more akin to a synthetic amoeba than a mechanical sheep.
ben_vulpes: especially and in particular the underwater stuff.
gabriel_laddel: none took the time to test it out
gabriel_laddel: ^ ascii, I've mentioned this idea to 3 people - all reject it on grounds of "it can't be that easy, my school had all sorts people working on these problems and they never thought of it"
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes or make more of them
asciilifeform: until then it's makework
ben_vulpes: you still have to program the meta layer.
asciilifeform: when somebody so much as asks, i'll believe there's life in 'robotics';
mircea_popescu: afaik the woman's idea was "hey, what if we made robots capable of altering their own geometry, that way they won't have to be pre-programmed"
asciilifeform: for the cost of a length of copper cable.
asciilifeform: y'know, the one where you can have arbitrary jointless articulation without precision parts, lubrication, or freely moving parts at all
asciilifeform: wake me up when a roboticists asks me for the waveguide motor
asciilifeform: (at the very minimum - of being a snore)
asciilifeform: i.e. if you can get printed there, you're suspect
asciilifeform: same problem as aids test meaning here, that i'm much more interested in the folks left bugling in the dark
mircea_popescu: MUCH better than the buffett out. "i leave my money to bil lgates"
asciilifeform: it has same problem as the aids test
ben_vulpes: asciilifeform: this is not the war you grew up idolizing. it's war, which means it's going to be horrible and unpleasant for all involved.
mircea_popescu: but now that i did look, it seems clearly that the thing works.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yup. which is why i had a vague positive idea about it. never bothered looking.
asciilifeform: which means that these folks weren't total islands
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: iirc the way it worked (works? i think, still exists?) is via a kind of secret wot
mircea_popescu: Norman Manea << another fine example.
asciilifeform: yes but how many respectable -after- the prize and not before
mircea_popescu: anyway, for 500k, enough respectable names there.
asciilifeform: just that none of the folks involved, afaik, coughed up anything i'd miss if it were thermonuked
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform btw, what's the objection to macarthur prizes ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i had to refuse the client
asciilifeform: cribbed from public domain libs, quite unrelated to the actual project, passed off as 'new'
asciilifeform: and that the same happened again after he fired the first set and replaced entire staff ?
asciilifeform: did i ever tell the tale of how i was once about to do a little consulting for an engineering prof, and discovered that the code that implemented 'his' algo was plagiarized wholesale by his students?
ben_vulpes: <asciilifeform> if someone sent me 100k (magically, tax-free) i'd do... what? take 3 mo. off, spend the next 9 looking for next gig ? << good grief your burn rate, man.
ben_vulpes: mircea_popescu: sets the tone, you know?
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel why the fuck would he do that.
gabriel_laddel: He presented someone else's program as his own. They didn't check, being fuckwits, but eventually found out.
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel thgat the adults are not going ot be happy.
ben_vulpes: <mircea_popescu> and blondy in black dress over there's almost hawt. << reminds me of the intro line newcomers to pdx-burningman were subjected to without fail for years, presumably if the political correctness mob hasn't gotten to them yet still are: "are you hot?"
mircea_popescu: which is the better way to get a windfall anyway.
gabriel_laddel: the 'adults' are not going to be happy about you writing a program that converts all books in libgen.info + all papers you can get of school networks into a useful format via a combination of OCR and heuristic hackery
asciilifeform: if they dole it out month at a time - it's a fucking -job-
gabriel_laddel: it seems to me the model is to find smart, angry people, fund them and then when things go to shit, stand behind them and keep them out of trouble.
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: i didn't think the thiel thing could get -more- snoreworthy
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform kids. they'll find something to do.
gabriel_laddel: they dole it out a month at a time
asciilifeform: i thought that was the point
gabriel_laddel: well, in truth the Thiel fellowship doesn't even give it all away at once
mircea_popescu: ah, i a) didn't actually need the money ; b) wasn't really about the money per se anyway
gabriel_laddel: 2 years to play with Mathematics sounds wonderfully useful to me.
asciilifeform: if someone sent me 100k (magically, tax-free) i'd do... what? take 3 mo. off, spend the next 9 looking for next gig ?
gabriel_laddel: the neat people in the Thiel fellowship are the mathematics kids, who are sort of the odd ones out
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the u.s. military technical term for this is 'self-licking icecream cone'
mircea_popescu: wait, there's 40 people a year right ?
mircea_popescu: "Fifty-eight organizations and startups have been founded by fellows, employing over 200 people, and creating new technologies that are being deployed around the world."
gabriel_laddel: "If we show up at the border with That We're going straight to prison!"
mircea_popescu: and blondy in black dress over there's almost hawt.
gabriel_laddel: but yes, there are a lot of indians, which I didn't previously notice
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: these are the only folks for whom there isn't already $maxint in handouts
mircea_popescu: "About Rin Im Cathe(rin)e Ray." not bad.
asciilifeform: or some other kind of game meant here ?
decimation: maybe someone should make a bitbet for the date of the appearance of an official usg 'game'
asciilifeform: except afaik they do 'get to eat' instead of 'walk free'
decimation: another variant: all the prisoners play 'WoW' - upon gaining some princely sum of gold they can be freed
asciilifeform: decimation: aha, that'd be the point
decimation: plus the prisioners would be occupied with something, instead of scheming how to spray bodily fluids on whoever happens by the slot
mircea_popescu: 1:1024*2 for theft.
asciilifeform: i came up with this based on the more well-known 'schrodinger jail'
asciilifeform: in that the occasional escaped maniac is outweighed by the folks who will sit for decades flipping digits
asciilifeform: can always open the lock, no ?
asciilifeform: i can picture that if mircea_popescu ever opens a jail, all of the cages will open from the inside with a 32-bit combination lock. nobody will 'have to' sit in this jail
mircea_popescu: decimation in fairness, most do. these are the rare exceptions not the bulk. recall orwell's "jew makes a dollar a day" thing
asciilifeform: (he takes a strange fixation with the gypsies)
asciilifeform: described in, among other places, orlov's
mircea_popescu: decimation well, some of those were built out of begging, some out of scrap metal theft, some out of who knows what.
mircea_popescu: meanwhile these dudes fuck on tiger fur.
mircea_popescu: always good for a culture shock for usians, because somehow they think starbucks is luxury.
mircea_popescu: yes. and you should see the insides, furs and shit. it's really very azn
mircea_popescu: decimation would it now ? seems more a function of where htey were born, if they heard of plumbing or not.
decimation: it might not tell you who to hire next, but it would explain why nobody in the city you are visiting has heard of plumbing
mircea_popescu: see the pics / whatevs.
asciilifeform: what 'work' means in the gypsy palace, i haven't any notion
mircea_popescu: no these are literally palaces.
decimation: someone had to shape the mud into huts
mircea_popescu: but barefoot girl in the mud aside : she probably had parents, who similarly had to work to keep the lights on.
mircea_popescu: took some ppls to see the enchanted gypsy palaces in turda (romania). which, you know, are pretty elaborate.
mircea_popescu: did i ever tell you about the naked gypsy girl ?
asciilifeform: plenty of folks do - simply that most of them don't write oddball os
asciilifeform: i've no reason to doubt the fact of it
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this is true in that, technically, i could cough up tomorrow's lottery number and play and then 'not have to' and no physical law prevents it
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=01-03-2015#1037164 << the important point here is that causes not purposes.
mircea_popescu: my point being, your have to is weak. not to any personal effect, but it does ruin our theory.
asciilifeform: just then << 'peak stalin'
asciilifeform: (or, if very talented, beat another fella into digging your share)
mircea_popescu: just then ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform no, that's not it. if i were in prison, would i HAVE TO be in prison to keep the lights on ?
asciilifeform: iirc i described the kinds of thing i do for living..
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the "have to". if you were writing software it'd be a magic variabler.
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel i dunno, i dun tend to spy on people writing code that much, i'm prolly the most ignorant in the room on that score.
decimation: but essentially ends up with the 'classical' theory, which is 'this statistical thing that tends to pop out reliably on these tests'
gabriel_laddel: monkey @ lisp term ?! << outside of that, have you ever seen any program written as "fluidly"? Which comes back to the original discussion of "what is intelligence"
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: to keep the lights on
mircea_popescu: or just teachin' the controversy
mircea_popescu: so then im in his place ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'his place' - thinking man who found, by accident or otherwise, an escape hatch from arbeit macht frei
asciilifeform: see also link to classic thread re: 'cranks' coming 'untethered'
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel it occurs to me the templeos guy is kinda high iq
gabriel_laddel: http://youtu.be/xzTH_ZqaFKI?t=9m57s << neat, working software, with the foundations built by high IQ individuals
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: no, but it does go into the subject of stupidity
decimation: almost hysterically in denial about that possibility, will snap too far in the other direction. It is possible to face all the facts on ethnic and race differences in intelligence and not run screaming from the room: That is the essential message.”
decimation: from the book: “In any case, you are not going to learn tomorrow that all the cognitive differences between races are 100 percent genetic in origin, because the scientific state of knowledge, unfinished as it is, already gives ample evidence that environment is part of the story. But the evidence eventually may become unequivocal that genes are also part of the story. We are worried that the elite wisdom on this issue, for years
mircea_popescu: it advances at random to a random degree, is the thing.
asciilifeform: they'll test.
asciilifeform: check back in 10,000 years when the cockroaches replace us
asciilifeform: ^ i had a physical, testable hypothesis
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: as i gather, intelligence is only slightly heritable, but stupidity - is very
decimation: one datapoint "“The NLSY, administered in 1980 to by far the largest sample (6,502 whites, 3,022 blacks) in a national study, found a difference of 1.21 standard deviations on the AFQT.”"
mircea_popescu: but the whole thing strikes me like an attempt to establish a link between female beauty and hair color.
asciilifeform: visit a university library; 'bell curve' is a little brick, the 'refutations' - a book case and climbing
mircea_popescu: ftr, i dun actually credit the race/intelligence theory. not that i have strong feelings either way
asciilifeform: almost impenetrable by the idly curious
asciilifeform: instead they had to declare murry a public enemy and 'hitler'
asciilifeform: the conclusions of which, interestingly, none of the establishment types bothered to attack directly
mircea_popescu: how did the ets do ?
decimation: oh, murray also co-authored 'the bell curve'
asciilifeform: adjunct to blue & red already in the pharmacy we know
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform basically they yearn to be women.
asciilifeform: i, (in my mental card catalogue, naturally) call this 'the green pill'
asciilifeform: and openly profess to wish for a pill that would 'turn them catholic' or whatnot
asciilifeform: one of the mega-lulz re: 'paleoconservatives' is that most of these folks (that i've had the fortune of reading) struggle with a mental bug - they yearn to roll back to some known-good state where various old-school religions were still strong, but don't personally subscribe to them
decimation: one of murray's books advanced the idea that the ruling us elite were cutting asunder all social mores and strictures that bound the masses
decimation: generally, my understanding is that 'paleoconservatives' want to wind us society back to something resembling the 'cis-democracy' in that moldbug peice
mircea_popescu: 1. Any rule applied uniformly over a group with a view to some purpose will result in measurable contradiction of the purpose before it results in measurable achievement of the purpose.
gabriel_laddel: the US is fucking insane
mircea_popescu: 3. The Law of Net Harm: The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.
mircea_popescu: 2. The Law of Unintended Rewards: Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer.
mircea_popescu: 1. The Law of Imperfect Selection: Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons.
mircea_popescu: in that cesspool they can't be anything but louts.
asciilifeform: murray put his hands firmly on the 'third rail' in usa
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: try to see the pattern here
gabriel_laddel: asciilifeform: so wait, would visiting e.g., Schwartz qualify for "stepping into the sewer"
assbot: Charles Murray (political scientist) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ... ( http://bit.ly/1BNZ33v )
asciilifeform: they're mainstream 'guiding lights', albeit - in the degenerate anglo world, with a 'minus' sign
gabriel_laddel: asciilifeform: this is, as far as I can tell, roughly the equivalent of reading your blog.
mircea_popescu: "but honey, you can't marry this guy. his parents have no library in the house!"
mircea_popescu: anyway, back to the intelligence vs education thing. i wish i had words to express my meaning in intelligible english. let's try by saying that a good mark of one's education is what sort of thing he fills his space with.
gabriel_laddel: debating on the /same side/?!?!?!
gabriel_laddel: 10:37 - who is that with Thiel, could it be the evil racist Charles Murray?
asciilifeform: that is, to exhaust the resources of folks tasked with arranging mircea_popescu losing it
asciilifeform confesses that he wondered if the purpose of that bet was not necessarily to win, but to soften a target
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform no, i meant the berkshire bet.
asciilifeform: unless i catastrophically misunderstand, ^ the bears inevitably get the coin unless a fully bitcoinized supply chain materializes for mircea_popescu and others to use
mircea_popescu: anyway, whatever would happen would come as a surprise to everyone, including in no particular order : a) the people running btc-usd exchanges ; b) you ; c) the friendly usg log reader delegate ; d) isabelle boring or w/e her name is ; etc
mircea_popescu: so far my bitcoins are getting sent to the btc bears lol.
asciilifeform: this is more along the lines of the mircea_popescu article where 'buffett is not actually rich because his dollars can't be sent to isis'
mircea_popescu: what you describe is a what, 3 sigma event ? there's not a plan in place for two sigma events even. banal shit like "they used plane as rocket"
asciilifeform: would the folks who can zero his bank balance by pressing a button, let btc climb to 100k usd ?
mircea_popescu: for instance i said null hypothesis as part of a deal with my brain to allow me to continue to exist.
mircea_popescu: that's a null hypothesis.
asciilifeform: that precludes certain things, and requires others
mircea_popescu: we're at the "known for a long time" hurdle yet.
asciilifeform: which is that herr thiel is operating on an understanding with the folks who allow him to exist
assbot: Logged on 01-03-2015 06:10:30; asciilifeform: which was known for a rather long time prior to becoming an industrial product
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=01-03-2015#1037147 << if memory serves industrial productness was no part of the discussion.
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel there are two threads here. one is "thiel is dumb". this is not being entertained. the other is, "thiel's uneducated". this is my position.
gabriel_laddel: asciilifeform: if he was spewing trendisms he'd be /supporting/ the MOOCs
ben_vulpes: oh and dealing with the output of people who "like it".
mircea_popescu: the very fucking point of academia is to sail away.
mircea_popescu: well... because it's "universal". once no kid's left behind, the boat's not sailing anywhere.
ben_vulpes goes to buy a bottle of wine to fuel the ruby rage
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel actually moocs are the superlative american college.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes it's pretty "disruptive" alright, huh. "what are we disrupting ?" "the moral fiber of society"
gabriel_laddel: Youtube doesn't have grep, and I'm not going to troll through all these videos to find the one I'm thinking of. In any case, in one of them he states that "scientists have been replaced with baccarats" and that "MOOCs are not going anywhere"
ben_vulpes: <asciilifeform> i'd guess that many folks can't even think about this subject without their brain melting from rage << a good eighth of my time is spent talking smart young guys down out of a shartup-inspired rage attack
mircea_popescu: whether most women in x population are more like californians or saudis has nothing to do wit ha cunt being a cunt.
asciilifeform: for the structural reason of preferring their familiar private kitchens to a sewer hatchway
mircea_popescu: but not for any structural reason, is the important point.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform what's the matter with it, you writing with different letters or something ?
asciilifeform: nope. and you can take that to the bank
gabriel_laddel: lemme find the video
mircea_popescu gleefully notices how alf is now using the "you yourself" device.
mircea_popescu: "the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant."
mircea_popescu: thiel the nubile savage.
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel or what they are. or how to look for them. essentially he's a girl that'd like to fuck but never heard of clothes, or make-up or going out.
assbot: Logged on 01-03-2015 06:09:13; decimation: in the sense that some crank comes up with an idea that happens to be right, rather than the result of some carefully arranged program of research
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=01-03-2015#1037142 << this is necessarily true, it directly flows from the definitions of the words you use.
asciilifeform: i'm not certain that it is possible to give him a heuristic good enough that he can ditch 'r-strategy' and go with 'k-strategy', to use the zoologist's terms
mircea_popescu: people with money they don't know what to do with are the very definition of schmuckdom
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i suspect the idea wasn't that, but to educate thiel so he's less of a schmuck.
assbot: Logged on 01-03-2015 06:05:50; gabriel_laddel: "measuring the fucking crystals" << "MPEX is just a bitcoin security exchange, just like any other bitoin security exchange"
mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=01-03-2015#1037139 << of course. meanwhile the last attempt by some other kids to pretend this is the case just imploded ?
asciilifeform: i'd guess that many folks can't even think about this subject without their brain melting from rage
asciilifeform: and then talk to thiel
gabriel_laddel: 4) perhaps the fault lies with those attempting to peruse basic science, for not giving him a heuristic
asciilifeform: but then he'd actually need a proper heuristic for choosing his 'soldiers'
gabriel_laddel: A summary of my points. 1) there are some people attempting to fund basic science 2) I don't agree with all of their funding decisions 3) this isn't the first instance of this occuring in history
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i did try to convince the fella.
mircea_popescu: this is the very stuff of life, following our flights of fancy.
mircea_popescu: but the proposition that one shouldn't or understandably wouldn't for it may turn out to be just fancy... that's nonsense.
decimation: so did the swiss patent office 'organize' to advance physics by paying einstein in exchange for clerk-serfdom?
asciilifeform: 50k for the might-work calorimetric variant
asciilifeform: (can you name, off the top of your head, a single person who was given the prize - which is intended to set promising young thinkers free from workslavery) who amounted to anything ?
gabriel_laddel: I'm not saying that I beneficiary agree with Thiel's funding decisions, but I am pointing out that there are people attempting to fund basic science, and that there are two specific people I've cited who can be vetted for their contributions.
asciilifeform: and he is, in that sense, continuing the tradition of the equally boring 'mcarthur prize'
asciilifeform: thus far i know of no particular reason why thiel picked the folks he did
asciilifeform: in that sense, the ubiquitous state lottery is also 'organized effort'
assbot: Logged on 28-02-2015 04:19:51; mircea_popescu: if you ask the slut, often enough it's because "he's the only one that asked, and i was getting bored"
gabriel_laddel: 'you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had', thiel could reply, quoting mr bush << http://log.bitcoin-assets.com//?date=28-02-2015#1035968
gabriel_laddel: and organized effords have existed in the past
asciilifeform: 'you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had', thiel could reply, quoting mr bush
gabriel_laddel: she is doing category theory and physics research.
assbot: math is art | "Discovery is the privilege of the child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else." — Grothendieck ... ( http://bit.ly/1DF4iA9 )
asciilifeform: e.g., boolean algebra in the lifetime of g. boole.