Tuesday, January 17, 2017
being free is not about climbing the ladder, it's about throwing the ladder in the fireplace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bj0t8YHbL4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bj0t8YHbL4
at
23:09
currency = slavery.
property rights = feudalism.
capitalism = currency + property rights = slavery + feudalism.
property rights = feudalism.
capitalism = currency + property rights = slavery + feudalism.
at
22:59
"Organigram has said it does not know how the substance entered its crops
but is working with Health Canada to find out more, noting it is a
certified organic grower and does not use pesticides in its production
processes."
sounds like bullshit. three hypotheses:
1) big growers stamping out little growers. this is what regulation means. but, at least it suggests they're serious.
2) it's meant to justify regulation. i don't care, really, i'd just like them to hurry the process up. if i get convinced that this was a cynical ploy, i'm going to raise hell. but, again, it suggests some level of seriousness.
3) feet dragging.
but, they're accusing a grower that does not use pesticides of having a banned pesticide, and that does not pass the smell test; something is happening.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/medical-marijuana-recall-expanded-due-to-banned-pesticide-being-found/article33643174/
sounds like bullshit. three hypotheses:
1) big growers stamping out little growers. this is what regulation means. but, at least it suggests they're serious.
2) it's meant to justify regulation. i don't care, really, i'd just like them to hurry the process up. if i get convinced that this was a cynical ploy, i'm going to raise hell. but, again, it suggests some level of seriousness.
3) feet dragging.
but, they're accusing a grower that does not use pesticides of having a banned pesticide, and that does not pass the smell test; something is happening.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/medical-marijuana-recall-expanded-due-to-banned-pesticide-being-found/article33643174/
at
21:12
i don't look at the world and say "this makes a lot of sense; something must have built it.". i look at the world and say "this doesn't make any fucking sense at all, it couldn't possibly be created.".
but, even that is a fallacy. for, look at capitalism. the marxists, and then the existentialists, have clearly demonstrated the fundamental irrationality of capitalism and the society it created. but, it is a creation of an intelligent species.
or, at least we like to think we're intelligent. is capitalism proof that we really aren't?
the newtonian universe is dead. physics is irrational. evolution is chaotic. and, math is incoherent. we're truly hurtling nowhere, and not making any sense at all doing it.
just shut up and go have fun.
for me, this is fun - because i can imagine the look on your faces.
but, even that is a fallacy. for, look at capitalism. the marxists, and then the existentialists, have clearly demonstrated the fundamental irrationality of capitalism and the society it created. but, it is a creation of an intelligent species.
or, at least we like to think we're intelligent. is capitalism proof that we really aren't?
the newtonian universe is dead. physics is irrational. evolution is chaotic. and, math is incoherent. we're truly hurtling nowhere, and not making any sense at all doing it.
just shut up and go have fun.
for me, this is fun - because i can imagine the look on your faces.
at
20:00
i think that this may be a necessary consequence of donald trump: a lot of assholes are going to end up with busted up faces because they think it's ok to act in certain ways. and, they're going to deserve what they get. hopefully, he's going to get a good health care system in place to deal with all of the injuries that are coming to his supporters when these chickens come home to roost.
at
18:06
what kind of a fucking retard posts sexual advances on youtube comments?
just shut the fuck up. nobody cares what you're thinking. and, if you were standing in front of me, i'd beat the shit out of you for talking to me like that.
just shut the fuck up. nobody cares what you're thinking. and, if you were standing in front of me, i'd beat the shit out of you for talking to me like that.
at
17:57
feb 9, 2014
if evolutionary biologists wanted to be real scientists, they wouldn't begin with the assumption of natural selection. it really is teleological.
rather, they'd take genetic drift as a null hypothesis and then attempt to build evidence for natural selection on a case-by-case basis.
i'm sure they'd agree with me, in principle. it's just a matter of pointing it out, then making fun of them until it becomes institutionalized.
then, you wouldn't get biologists talking about the difficulties in determining what the "purpose" of an "adaptation" is; rather, you'd be asking them first to rigorously demonstrate that a specific trait is an adaptation in the first place, rather than the result of chance. that's how real science works - you need to demonstrate a relationship, not assume it as a consequence of a philosophical principle.
kzg
If by teleological you mean that biological entities strive to maintain themselves alive yea. But even that is marginal. Final causality requires some minimum predictability and necessity.
Jessica Amber Murray
i've noticed there's a kind of cognitive dissonance in their writings. they try and self-regulate themselves. if you press them on it, they'll present the standard line "evolution doesn't have a final cause", but you can tell they tend not to actually believe that - that they're waiting for the day that it can be shown that it's part of a plan. there's libraries of books of them arguing with themselves over this, leveling accusations of "orthogenesis" at each other.
in practice, they look at a trait and assume it has a cause, then try and determine what the cause is. but, i would suggest that most observable traits don't have a cause. two things that just pissed me off were:
1) an article exploring the difficulties in understanding why female spiders eat their mates. there's an assumption this is an adaptation, and has a cause. no. it needs to be determined this is an adaptation rather than genetic drift (or a mutation that may have a negative effect on survival)
2) they found old dna in spain that was lactose intolerant and deduced it couldn't have had to do with sunlight. again, that's jumping to the assumption of natural selection. selection, here, needs to be demonstrated. it's entirely reasonable that the mutation may have developed as an adaptation further north and drifted south. at the least, finding the lack of mutation in the south does not prove it could not have been sunlight dependent.
but if you read biology journals, the idea that every trait is an adaptation with a cause is just engrained. it's a philosophical position that takes priority over evidence, and demands evidence uphold it. whatever the merit, it's not science.
kzg
What youre pointing out is not necessarily new. It has often been leveled against biology as a hard science. Heck crackpot creations argue somewhat along that line. But alot of this has to do with the positivist assumption that all science is derived from physics, if not directly, at least in terms of epistemological criteria. Ergo, only efficient and material causality is properly scientific. But of course this is rather gratuitous (can that be explained under its own parameters?) and it led to a bunch of weird shit like phrenology. Evolutionary biology does not fall under the usual criteria of repeatability and mathematisation. Hence efficient causes cannot be isolated. For that to be possible, organic matter would have to function mechanically, that is, within uniform time, not the cumulative time (duration). So this is ingrained in the discipline's world view which, really, is essentially historical. Narratives tend to have some sort of teleological pull. Im ok with that.
Jessica Amber Murray
i know the line of argument you're thinking of, but it's not entirely what i'm saying. i'm just suggesting that they really ought to be more focused on proving relationships that they take for granted, and that they're not reduces to the substitution of a guiding belief system in place of really skeptical science. there's certainly a different set of challenges when working in biology, but i don't think they're incompatible with a general hypothesis testing approach. i mean, to suggest they are is to give up. i'd be shocked to hear a biologist suggest as much. they're certainly doing hypothesis testing, they're just doing it at too weak a level of inquiry.
you can still - i suggest you must - look at a trait and ask the question "is this an adaptation, or merely the result of chance?" in a meaningful sense, by studying all the things around the hypothetical adaptive process and coming up with an argument that this is really the case. they don't actually do that, though. in the best case scenario, they'll grudgingly admit that maybe it might just be chance if they can't figure out the adaptive benefit. but this is really backwards thinking.
where it's a problem is when it leads to wrong conclusions. one of those examples is with the female spiders eating their mates before they mate with them. it's specifically related to a solitary species that only comes into contact with a mate once or maybe twice in a life time. that is, females are eating their male mates before they mate even though the balance of probabilities is that it's the only chance they'll get to mate. this is behaviour that doesn't make any sense in terms of passing on genes. a slow consensus is developing that the spiders just lack impulse control. they see food, they eat it; they lack the faculties to analyze the consequences. it's consequently the result of one type of adaptation (impulsive eating) having a negative effect on a necessary biological function (mating). that's a chaotic development that will harm the long term health of the species, not an adaptation.
yet, leading up to this realization, there were many arguments that the behaviour was an adaptive trait to ensure the proper spread of genes. the female spider somehow determined that the male was a bad mate, and ate it in order to ensure it's genes weren't going to a bad mate. serious people argued this in serious places.
in order to take such an argument seriously, there's a lot of questions that need answers. how? but, it's the procedural approach that was the problem. it's sort of an extreme example; the shift in thinking would be a lot more enlightening with a more subtle example, where it's not so obvious. but this works better to make the argument for that very reason. so, they looked at an organism, they saw a trait and (regardless of it's absurdity) they assumed it was an adaptation for survival - leading to ridiculous conclusions that are being acknowledged as such. yet, if they began with the assumption of random gene flow (as a sort of background process, as noise) leading to random mutations (that may or may not lead to increased chances of survival), and then determined if there's enough evidence to reject that assumption and deduce an adaptation then they would have come to the right answer in the first place.
and, we can debate about what is a better null hypothesis, but beginning with randomness requires less assumptions and is more appealing for that reason.
nor is any biologist actually going to argue with me on the point. they'll gnash their teeth and say "you're right, but we take shortcuts because we're biased towards darwinian thought. if we were to formally study it, we should do it like you're saying". which is just admitting that they're being unscientific. if you look at a microbiologist or a geneticist, they all study more formally. it's only evolutionary biology, which is peculiarly deductive in it's approaches, that doesn't bother.
if they want to be real scientists, they must take the process more seriously and realize that selection is something that must be proven to arise from randomness on a case-by-case basis every single time, not a monolithic force that can be assumed to be working in nature at all times.
to be a little more specific, i'm talking about the third and fourth axioms of the modern evolutionary synthesis, that state that natural selection is the main driver of change and genetic drift is a secondary factor. this is generalizing in too far an extreme. it may be roughly true, but these are statements that require demonstration on a case by case basis, not a general statement that glosses over specific changes. holding to those assumptions has the potential to lead to bad conclusions; methodologically, it's not very scientific.
rather, i would reformulate it to genetic drift is a constant driver of change and selection depends on forces that must be demonstrated to both exist and lead to the resulting changes.
if evolutionary biologists wanted to be real scientists, they wouldn't begin with the assumption of natural selection. it really is teleological.
rather, they'd take genetic drift as a null hypothesis and then attempt to build evidence for natural selection on a case-by-case basis.
i'm sure they'd agree with me, in principle. it's just a matter of pointing it out, then making fun of them until it becomes institutionalized.
then, you wouldn't get biologists talking about the difficulties in determining what the "purpose" of an "adaptation" is; rather, you'd be asking them first to rigorously demonstrate that a specific trait is an adaptation in the first place, rather than the result of chance. that's how real science works - you need to demonstrate a relationship, not assume it as a consequence of a philosophical principle.
kzg
If by teleological you mean that biological entities strive to maintain themselves alive yea. But even that is marginal. Final causality requires some minimum predictability and necessity.
Jessica Amber Murray
i've noticed there's a kind of cognitive dissonance in their writings. they try and self-regulate themselves. if you press them on it, they'll present the standard line "evolution doesn't have a final cause", but you can tell they tend not to actually believe that - that they're waiting for the day that it can be shown that it's part of a plan. there's libraries of books of them arguing with themselves over this, leveling accusations of "orthogenesis" at each other.
in practice, they look at a trait and assume it has a cause, then try and determine what the cause is. but, i would suggest that most observable traits don't have a cause. two things that just pissed me off were:
1) an article exploring the difficulties in understanding why female spiders eat their mates. there's an assumption this is an adaptation, and has a cause. no. it needs to be determined this is an adaptation rather than genetic drift (or a mutation that may have a negative effect on survival)
2) they found old dna in spain that was lactose intolerant and deduced it couldn't have had to do with sunlight. again, that's jumping to the assumption of natural selection. selection, here, needs to be demonstrated. it's entirely reasonable that the mutation may have developed as an adaptation further north and drifted south. at the least, finding the lack of mutation in the south does not prove it could not have been sunlight dependent.
but if you read biology journals, the idea that every trait is an adaptation with a cause is just engrained. it's a philosophical position that takes priority over evidence, and demands evidence uphold it. whatever the merit, it's not science.
kzg
What youre pointing out is not necessarily new. It has often been leveled against biology as a hard science. Heck crackpot creations argue somewhat along that line. But alot of this has to do with the positivist assumption that all science is derived from physics, if not directly, at least in terms of epistemological criteria. Ergo, only efficient and material causality is properly scientific. But of course this is rather gratuitous (can that be explained under its own parameters?) and it led to a bunch of weird shit like phrenology. Evolutionary biology does not fall under the usual criteria of repeatability and mathematisation. Hence efficient causes cannot be isolated. For that to be possible, organic matter would have to function mechanically, that is, within uniform time, not the cumulative time (duration). So this is ingrained in the discipline's world view which, really, is essentially historical. Narratives tend to have some sort of teleological pull. Im ok with that.
Jessica Amber Murray
i know the line of argument you're thinking of, but it's not entirely what i'm saying. i'm just suggesting that they really ought to be more focused on proving relationships that they take for granted, and that they're not reduces to the substitution of a guiding belief system in place of really skeptical science. there's certainly a different set of challenges when working in biology, but i don't think they're incompatible with a general hypothesis testing approach. i mean, to suggest they are is to give up. i'd be shocked to hear a biologist suggest as much. they're certainly doing hypothesis testing, they're just doing it at too weak a level of inquiry.
you can still - i suggest you must - look at a trait and ask the question "is this an adaptation, or merely the result of chance?" in a meaningful sense, by studying all the things around the hypothetical adaptive process and coming up with an argument that this is really the case. they don't actually do that, though. in the best case scenario, they'll grudgingly admit that maybe it might just be chance if they can't figure out the adaptive benefit. but this is really backwards thinking.
where it's a problem is when it leads to wrong conclusions. one of those examples is with the female spiders eating their mates before they mate with them. it's specifically related to a solitary species that only comes into contact with a mate once or maybe twice in a life time. that is, females are eating their male mates before they mate even though the balance of probabilities is that it's the only chance they'll get to mate. this is behaviour that doesn't make any sense in terms of passing on genes. a slow consensus is developing that the spiders just lack impulse control. they see food, they eat it; they lack the faculties to analyze the consequences. it's consequently the result of one type of adaptation (impulsive eating) having a negative effect on a necessary biological function (mating). that's a chaotic development that will harm the long term health of the species, not an adaptation.
yet, leading up to this realization, there were many arguments that the behaviour was an adaptive trait to ensure the proper spread of genes. the female spider somehow determined that the male was a bad mate, and ate it in order to ensure it's genes weren't going to a bad mate. serious people argued this in serious places.
in order to take such an argument seriously, there's a lot of questions that need answers. how? but, it's the procedural approach that was the problem. it's sort of an extreme example; the shift in thinking would be a lot more enlightening with a more subtle example, where it's not so obvious. but this works better to make the argument for that very reason. so, they looked at an organism, they saw a trait and (regardless of it's absurdity) they assumed it was an adaptation for survival - leading to ridiculous conclusions that are being acknowledged as such. yet, if they began with the assumption of random gene flow (as a sort of background process, as noise) leading to random mutations (that may or may not lead to increased chances of survival), and then determined if there's enough evidence to reject that assumption and deduce an adaptation then they would have come to the right answer in the first place.
and, we can debate about what is a better null hypothesis, but beginning with randomness requires less assumptions and is more appealing for that reason.
nor is any biologist actually going to argue with me on the point. they'll gnash their teeth and say "you're right, but we take shortcuts because we're biased towards darwinian thought. if we were to formally study it, we should do it like you're saying". which is just admitting that they're being unscientific. if you look at a microbiologist or a geneticist, they all study more formally. it's only evolutionary biology, which is peculiarly deductive in it's approaches, that doesn't bother.
if they want to be real scientists, they must take the process more seriously and realize that selection is something that must be proven to arise from randomness on a case-by-case basis every single time, not a monolithic force that can be assumed to be working in nature at all times.
to be a little more specific, i'm talking about the third and fourth axioms of the modern evolutionary synthesis, that state that natural selection is the main driver of change and genetic drift is a secondary factor. this is generalizing in too far an extreme. it may be roughly true, but these are statements that require demonstration on a case by case basis, not a general statement that glosses over specific changes. holding to those assumptions has the potential to lead to bad conclusions; methodologically, it's not very scientific.
rather, i would reformulate it to genetic drift is a constant driver of change and selection depends on forces that must be demonstrated to both exist and lead to the resulting changes.
at
09:31
Jan 21, 2014
- Evolution can be explained by what we know about genetics, and what we see of animals and plants living in the wild.
ok.
- The variety of genes (alleles) carried in natural populations is a key factor in evolution.
ok. obviously, variation is necessary for selection, otherwise nothing can be selected.
- Natural selection is the main mechanism of change. Even a very slight advantage can be important, continued generation after generation. The struggle for existence of animals and plants in the wild causes natural selection. Only those who survive and reproduce pass their genes on to the next generation. We find the strength of natural selection in the wild was greater than even Darwin expected.
i don't particularly like the exact words used here, but ok. i would like to see a larger role attributed to randomness and a lesser role attributed to competition. i'll get to this in a moment...
- Evolution is gradual: natural selection occurs, and small genetic changes collect. Species only change little from one generation to the next. Big changes do occur, from time to time, but they are very rare.
for the most part, sure. i would further put forward the idea that those big changes are largely hybrid events, and suggest a "family graph" as an alternate model to a family tree.
- Genetic drift is usually less important than natural selection. It can be important in small populations.
this one, i have serious problems with. there's a huge list of "adaptations" that seem to be defined by random genetic drift rather than natural selection. note that my opposition to the way evolution is understood is that it hasn't entirely eliminated a deity, not that it has. it's still too religious, not not religious enough! vestigial traits are one example that seems to be better described using random genetic drift than natural selection. it's not that i deny competition as a force for evolution, it's that i think they have the primacy of things backwards: randomness defines most evolution, but natural selection can be important when competing over specific scarce resources (and situations of scarce resources would be the exception, rather than the rule, in biology).
- In palaeontology, we try to understand the changes in fossils through time. We think the same factors which act today also acted in the past.
ok - except when evidence exists otherwise. it's really an untenable assumption, when analyzed. but it's necessary - unless it can be demonstrated otherwise.
- As circumstances change, the rate of evolution may get faster or slower, but the causes are the same.
same thing as the last comment. that should be read simply as "the rate of evolution is not constant".
- Evolution can be explained by what we know about genetics, and what we see of animals and plants living in the wild.
ok.
- The variety of genes (alleles) carried in natural populations is a key factor in evolution.
ok. obviously, variation is necessary for selection, otherwise nothing can be selected.
- Natural selection is the main mechanism of change. Even a very slight advantage can be important, continued generation after generation. The struggle for existence of animals and plants in the wild causes natural selection. Only those who survive and reproduce pass their genes on to the next generation. We find the strength of natural selection in the wild was greater than even Darwin expected.
i don't particularly like the exact words used here, but ok. i would like to see a larger role attributed to randomness and a lesser role attributed to competition. i'll get to this in a moment...
- Evolution is gradual: natural selection occurs, and small genetic changes collect. Species only change little from one generation to the next. Big changes do occur, from time to time, but they are very rare.
for the most part, sure. i would further put forward the idea that those big changes are largely hybrid events, and suggest a "family graph" as an alternate model to a family tree.
- Genetic drift is usually less important than natural selection. It can be important in small populations.
this one, i have serious problems with. there's a huge list of "adaptations" that seem to be defined by random genetic drift rather than natural selection. note that my opposition to the way evolution is understood is that it hasn't entirely eliminated a deity, not that it has. it's still too religious, not not religious enough! vestigial traits are one example that seems to be better described using random genetic drift than natural selection. it's not that i deny competition as a force for evolution, it's that i think they have the primacy of things backwards: randomness defines most evolution, but natural selection can be important when competing over specific scarce resources (and situations of scarce resources would be the exception, rather than the rule, in biology).
- In palaeontology, we try to understand the changes in fossils through time. We think the same factors which act today also acted in the past.
ok - except when evidence exists otherwise. it's really an untenable assumption, when analyzed. but it's necessary - unless it can be demonstrated otherwise.
- As circumstances change, the rate of evolution may get faster or slower, but the causes are the same.
same thing as the last comment. that should be read simply as "the rate of evolution is not constant".
at
09:24
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
the hazards of long nails on your picking hand, which is also usually going to be your wiping hand...
i scratched my anus.
:(
i should do a psa for kids, so they know.
"remember kids: if you play classical guitar, always wears gloves while wiping in order to avoid scratching your anus."
what else is there to do besides stick a wad of toilet paper in there? so, now i'm going to have to walk around looking like i shit my pants for the next few hours.
jokes aside, it's got me wondering if there's like an e coli risk or something. i mean, opening up a hole in your anus so bacteria can crawl into your bloodstream can't be good news. i guess i just have to hope my neutrophils are populated, armed and ready for battle!
"unfortunately, we regret to inform you that jessica has perished due to complications resulting from a mild case of accidental anal scratching."
i should publicly apologize to my neutrophils for increasing their workload. i can only imagine what they're thinking....
"dude, where'd all this e coli come from"
"the fucking idiot scratched her anus."
"how?"
"classical guitar finger nails."
"she didn't know better than to wear gloves?"
"apparently not."
"what a fucking noob."
"there's a few over there, let's go phagosome 'em."
"i'm not hungry, i just had a bunch..."
"just fucking do it."
at
05:57
i scratched my anus.
:(
i should do a psa for kids, so they know.
"remember kids: if you play classical guitar, always wears gloves while wiping in order to avoid scratching your anus."
what else is there to do besides stick a wad of toilet paper in there? so, now i'm going to have to walk around looking like i shit my pants for the next few hours.
jokes aside, it's got me wondering if there's like an e coli risk or something. i mean, opening up a hole in your anus so bacteria can crawl into your bloodstream can't be good news. i guess i just have to hope my neutrophils are populated, armed and ready for battle!
"unfortunately, we regret to inform you that jessica has perished due to complications resulting from a mild case of accidental anal scratching."
i should publicly apologize to my neutrophils for increasing their workload. i can only imagine what they're thinking....
"dude, where'd all this e coli come from"
"the fucking idiot scratched her anus."
"how?"
"classical guitar finger nails."
"she didn't know better than to wear gloves?"
"apparently not."
"what a fucking noob."
"there's a few over there, let's go phagosome 'em."
"i'm not hungry, i just had a bunch..."
"just fucking do it."
at
04:00
and, yes - i think this is correct.
http://consequenceofsound.net/2011/02/the-white-stripes-musics-last-great-rock-band/
http://consequenceofsound.net/2011/02/the-white-stripes-musics-last-great-rock-band/
at
02:01
the last two were quick. the next one was huge, so huge that i stopped to jump ahead. two months, almost.
it's all in the details. hundreds of tracks; hundreds of guitar tracks. and that felt really, really good. it's going to feel really, really good again, too - soon.
this is a gigantic epic rock song that draws from the mod leanings of the entire rock era from the who right up to the white stripes and everything in between. headphones, please. no laptops, please.
it's all in the details. hundreds of tracks; hundreds of guitar tracks. and that felt really, really good. it's going to feel really, really good again, too - soon.
this is a gigantic epic rock song that draws from the mod leanings of the entire rock era from the who right up to the white stripes and everything in between. headphones, please. no laptops, please.
at
01:12
wasps (and hornets) are such insane creatures.
it's trying to kill a venomous spider in order to lay an egg inside of it, which will eat the spider as it matures.
the result presented here makes the behaviour seem like such wantonly pointless violence. ok, ok - maybe it's going after a competitor. but, surely there are less dangerous ways to lay some eggs...
it's stuff like this that makes you realize there's no way this shit was designed. this defies all reason. and there's thousands of similar examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQNgxJdqzm4
it's trying to kill a venomous spider in order to lay an egg inside of it, which will eat the spider as it matures.
the result presented here makes the behaviour seem like such wantonly pointless violence. ok, ok - maybe it's going after a competitor. but, surely there are less dangerous ways to lay some eggs...
it's stuff like this that makes you realize there's no way this shit was designed. this defies all reason. and there's thousands of similar examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQNgxJdqzm4
at
00:25
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