Geeks Dig Metaphors: Introduction
A metaphor is a glorious thing,
A diamond ring,
The first day of summer
A metaphor is a breath of fresh air,
A turn-on,
An aphrodisiacChicks dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig metaphors,
Sparks
Metaphors are scraps of resemblance that tie us down. Ted Nelson
Let’s talk about the Singularity.
The Singularity is the closest thing to a religion for a large number of people who self-identify as ‘geeks’ at the moment. It’s also an idea which has been widely publicised in the last couple of weeks with the Singularity Summit having acheived some mainstream media coverage. The Singularity also *matters*, because it’s something that is believed in, to a greater or lesser extent, by a large number of tech billionaires – people who have actual influence and power.
The Singularity is a term taken from a science fiction story, and has a variety of meanings – almost one for every ‘Singulatarian’, but roughly speaking they all believe that “The Unity of Nanoscience, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science” (to borrow from the title of a book I’m currently reading ) will lead to humanity becoming gods.
From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weiner
That’s not an exaggeration. The basic belief of Singulatarians is that at some point in the future, we will have enough knowledge of biology, computing and nanotech that we can make ourselves immortal, upload our minds to tiny nanotech computers which will then take over the entire universe, turning it into computronium. We would then become immortal omniscient gods in a virtual reality indistinguishable from the real thing, except that it would be geared entirely to our personal happiness. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
The timescale of this is, of course, disputed. At one end is Ray Kurzweil, stupid person and author of the moronic The Singularity Is Near, who argues due to his ability to draw a straight line that by the year 2010 “computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses and electronics woven into our clothing” (three months to go. I hope I can afford new glasses and clothes before Christmas) and that we will all become immortal gods within his lifetime. Kurzweil is regarded as one of the greatest futurists of our time, and billionaire technologists fawn on his every word.
At the other extreme is eccentric right-wing astrophysicist Frank Tipler, who also thinks this will happen, but believes it will take about fifteen billion years for us to become immortal, omniscient and omnipotent. Also, while Kurzweil bases his argument on drawing lines (and not even very accurate lines – I’m not usually a particular fan of P.Z. Myers, but I was very pleased to see that blog post from last year, because it saved me having to write the exact same thing), Tipler’s argument (in his fascinating The Physics Of Immortality (apparently out of print) and his frankly barking Physics of Christianity, but first put forward in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle , which is also the most sensible explanation) is based on known physics and makes testable predictions. However, unlike Kurzweil, Tipler also identifies the end result of his speculations with the Christian God, so he’s regarded as a crank, rather than an eminent futurist. (He *is* a crank, as anyone who reads his recent work, like this paper arguing that Obama is evil because of the existence of the luminiferous aether and the arguments put forward against abortion by the film Starship Troopers, will recognise, but he’s less so than Kurzweil). Tipler also argues that his Singularity will be an actual physical singularity – the universe will be condensed to a single point he calls the Omega Point.
Now, these ideas are actually inordinately appealing, to me at least. I like the idea of becoming an immortal, omniscient superintelligent superbeing living in a universe which exists solely for my pleasure. That sounds like a good thing to me. And I’m probably far more likely to want the Singularity to be true than the average person, because I’m not especially attached to my body. I’m balding, asthmatic, dyspraxic, overweight, have migraines and mild psoriasis, and have various sensory issues, the combination of which means that most of the time the closest i get to physical pleasure is ‘in less discomfort’. Upload my mind into a computer capable of processing text and music, and you’ve kept 95% of my joys in life while losing 100% of the unpleasantness. That seems like a good deal to me – especially if that computer can then simulate my mind in any body I want.
Unfortunately, I see three problems with the Singulatarian view – one technical, one poilitical, and one philosophical. All of these are surmountable, but there seems to be little evidence that any of them *will* be surmounted – or that any Singulatarians even consider these to be real problems.
This post is getting much, much longer than I thought it would, so I’m breaking it into several sections. I’m still writing the other sections as I post this, but they’ll be posted as I get them done. I won’t be replying to comments til they’re all complete.
What’s Your Heresy?
I was going to do a Batman post today, but I’ve got annoyed again, so you’ll have to wait.
Specifically, I got annoyed by this , something that’s been going round on the internet for a few days.
It calls itself The Periodic Table Of Irrational Nonsense, but it is itself nonsense at least as irrational as anything it attacks, and I’m *SICK* of this.
Before I go any further, let me make something clear: I am a scientific rationalist. I have had papers I co-authored published in more than one scientific discipline. I consider the scientific method the only reliable way of discovering knowledge that humanity has ever discovered. I am also a sceptic and, I believe, a clear-headed thinker.
But *as* a scientific, clear-headed, rational thinker, I consider that list to be utter, unadulterated, concentrated irrationality.
Because I can see two possible ways that list was put together:
Possibility a – The author has, himself, researched into all these categories, read all the relevant literature, looked at the arguments used by the most prominent advocates of those beliefs/hypotheses/ideas, checked their data, and somehow come to the conclusion that only those things that are attacked regularly by Ben Goldacre, Richard Dawkins and other prominent ‘skeptics’ are irrational nonsense or
Possibility b – He has chosen a list that, within the group of people he wishes to associate with, is completely uncontroversial, a list endorsed by the alpha males of his group, without actually thinking rationally about any of it.
There is quite a bit of evidence for possibility b. (In the next two paragraphs I’m using examples that my friend Gavin brought up in a discussion with me. I’d probably have used these examples anyway, but credit where due):
“Faith healing” supposedly works through the placebo effect. Double-blind clinical trials rely on the supposed efficacy of the placebo effect to have any validity. Either the placebo effect is real, in which case faith healing works, or (as I consider the evidence to show) it isn’t, and double-blind trials should be on there too.
“Memetics”, on the other hand, is just a set of Just-So stories, a supposed ‘science’ with no explanatory power, which makes no falsifiable predictions that are not trivially true without it, and which insists on treating a metaphor as having objective reality. Judged purely rationally, it should be right there snugly next to Scientology. Yet it’s strangely missing…
Other things that are strangely missing from there, but are irrational as hell, include meta-analyses, libertarianism and supporting illegal wars, all of which many of the ‘rational’ ‘skeptics’ (always spelled the American way, even though the creator of this image is British) on that person’s blogroll support. Those would certainly be on any list of the ‘irrational’ I put together…
And on the other hand, several of the things on there simply shouldn’t be. The obvious one is ‘conspiracy theories’. *ALL* conspiracy theories? Even the ones we know demonstrably to be true (such as Brown agreeing to stand down in the Labour leadership so long as Blair stood down in his favour eventually as Prime Minister)? So *no* conspiracies ever happen? We should probably get rid of the laws against conspiracy then, I suppose…
I’ve looked into *some* of the things on that list for myself – the majority I haven’t. Of those I have, some appear to me to have some truth, some appear to me to be almost certainly false, and some are in a grey area. I suspect that that would be true for anyone who looked into them *without the bias of trying to fit into a pre-approved ‘skeptic’ mould*.
So I’ve made a decision – I’m not going to believe in the ‘rationality’ of anyone who isn’t prepared to defend at least one of the things on that list as being reasonable. I won’t fall out with anyone over it, but I’m going to assume that anything you say is justified not by reason but by appeal to authority. (Of course some of you already get a pass on this – like Debi, who is a rational, sceptical, scientist but also a Buddhist – Buddhism’s on the list).
So what’s your heresy? What, out of that list of thoughtcrimes, do you think has some merit?
In my case, it’s vitamin megadoses.
I take a minimum of six grams of vitamin C every day, rising to much more whenever I’m even slightly ill. I take many other supplements, too, at much higher than the RDA. These ‘megadoses’ have improved my physical and mental health enormously. Having read many books co-authored by my uncle Dr Steve Hickey (here are two of them, both of which I proofread. That’s my Amazon affiliate link, but you can buy them without that) and, more importantly, checked the original papers he cites, I have come to the conclusion that there is an *overwhelming* body of evidence in favour of the hypothesis that many vitamins can have health benefits at levels far beyond those in the RDA.
To take the most egregious example, in the mid 1970s Prof Linus Pauling – possibly the most important scientist of the 20th century, and the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes – and Dr Ewan Cameron tried giving vitamin C in very large doses to terminal cancer patients. These patients outlived their expected lifespan by significant periods (in some cases people expected to live hours or days stayed alive for years on this treatment).
The Mayo Clinic, a ‘prestigious’ medical centre, claimed to have ‘proved’ that Cameron and Pauling’s research was flawed – they tried to replicate the tests and failed, and their publication effectively meant that any investigation of vitamin C’s role in cancer was laughed at as ‘pseudo-science’ for more than twenty years.
Except that the Mayo Clinic used oral doses while Pauling and Cameron used intravenous doses. And that the Mayo Clinic cut their trial short. And that before the Mayo Clinic cut their trial short there had been no deaths from cancer, but the death rate went up as soon as the vitamin C was withdrawn. There were methodological errors in the Mayo paper that would get someone a fail in GCSE Biology, let alone when dealing in serious oncology.
I could go into this much, much more, but I’m tired and too hot. But I’ll discuss in comments. But if you want me to discuss more of my reasoning here, first tell me: What’s *YOUR* heresy? And while you’re at it, what do you think *should* be on that list that isn’t (my big one would be ‘making lists of things and claiming those things are irrational nonsense, as if “irrational nonsense” was a property attached to them rather than an opinion’)?
Linkblogging For 28/04/10
Sorry for lack of actual content – proper posts tomorrow. For now, some links.
First of all, I don’t plan to discuss Brown’s ‘gaffe’ today, where he was polite to a bigot to her face and then grumbled about her behind her back, without realising his mic was still on. It’s the kind of thing that every single politician in Britain has done, and Brown just got caught. It was fun to joke about on Twitter, but it should not have dominated the news in the way it has. This, however, is important. This illustrates exactly why we need to change the rhetoric surrounding immigration. Meanwhile Justin at Chicken Yoghurt shows precisely how disgraceful it is that this disgusting hypocritical war criminal who has destroyed the lives of millions DARES to criticise someone else for bigotry.
(I must look into how you change party policy on immigration, in fact, and work towards getting ours changed. )
David Brothers says what I’ve been saying for a long time about ‘canon’
Laurie Penny reviews a couple of books on the way the Baby Boomers have destroyed their children’s lives.
Tom at It Took Seconds examines John Cage’s 4’33 and also links to this very thorough examination of the piece.
And a good piece from Language Log absolutely demolishing the fallacy that ‘men don’t listen’
Finally, if you’re using Spotify (and yes, unfortunately, the free software clients are still not up to much, so I’m still reliant on the proprietary client – one of only three non-free pieces of software on my machine, along with Inform 7 and the nonfree rar for unpacking cbr files) you can add me to the social whatsists and send me music or something. as well as seeing all my playlists in one place.
Linkblogging For 18/03/10
Shame about Alex Chilton. One of the greats gone…
Via Tez Burke, here’s a five-CD set of ‘toytown music’, that style of English baroque pop which combined piccolo trumpets and lyrics about toy soldiers and childhood. Follow the rapidshare links but also have a look at their notes. This contains all the usual suspects (The Move, The Idle Race, The Kinks, Keith West, The Bonzo Dog Band) and all the tracks you’d expect if you’ve got Nuggets II or any of the Ripples volumes (such as The Bitter Thoughts Of Little Jane by Timon, one of my all-time favourite tracks), along with enough less-well-known songs (including of all things a fantastic solo track by Gerry Marsden) that anyone who likes this sort of thing will have good stuff to listen to for days. The only problem is the appaling tagging on the MP3s.
Rich Johnston has some details about BBC Scotland’s ‘Doctor Who killer’. It’s called Bonnyroad (as in the start of Thomas The Rhymer), and is a collaboration between Grant Morrison, Stephen Fry and director Paul McGuigan. It sounds absolutely fascinating from the tiny amount of information we have…
DC have announced the art team for The Return Of Bruce Wayne (as well as confirming Frazer Irving as the artist for the next ‘arc’ in Batman & Robin) – it’s almost a Seven Soldiers reunion. This is A Good Thing.
A fascinating piece about the way memory is reconstructed after the fact, and what this means for designing user interfaces.
Big Finish have finally persuaded Tom Baker to do some stuff with them – Lis Sladen, Louise Jameson and Nick Courtney have all already said they want to get involved.
Marc Singer looks at Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner
And Gavin B has a great response to my Joseph Campbell post.
ABC (Andrew’s Book Club) 3 – 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brooks
Don’t worry, this isn’t only the third new-to-me book I read this year – between the last of these posts and this one I also read five other books I’d not read before (as well as usual rereads, comics etc) but I’m planning on submitting some writing to the series that they are connected to (part of the reason for reading them) so don’t want to review them here. I’ve also just picked up a few more books (it’s payday) so over the next couple of days expect posts on Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles and The People’s Manifesto by Mark Thomas.
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brook is one of the most interesting – and recommendable – pop-science books I’ve read in a long time (and I read a lot of pop-science books).
One of the things that worries me about the New Atheism and the Rationalist movement is its attitude to what Charles Fort referred to as Damned Data. A lot (by no means all) of the media representatives of this movement seem to regard disagreement with the current scientific consensus as being heresy – which seems to me to be a fundamentally unscientific attitude. (Richard Dawkins, for example, has condemned a creationist documentary that interviewed him under false pretences and re-edited the footage in ways he disagreed with, but he did exactly the same to Rupert Sheldrake. I happen to think that Sheldrake is wrong, but one should still use intellectually honest arguments, even against those who *are* wrong…)
(Which is not to say the majority of such disagreements aren’t cranks and quackery – they are. But some are very far from that. I *MUST* at some point get round to blogging about orthomolecular medicine, for example…)
Brooks, a consultant to New Scientist, takes the opposite – and to me, more scientific – approach here, by looking at anomalous results – the places where our theories and the data don’t quite match up.
Opening with a quote from Isaac Asimov – “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds most discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘that’s funny…’” – Brooks takes us on a tour through most of the major scientific disciplines and looks at what we *don’t* know. He divides this into thirteen ‘things that don’t make sense’ as follows:
The Missing Universe – he looks at ‘dark matter’, ‘dark energy’, and various not-yet-accepted physical theories that do away with these concepts.
The Pioneer Anomaly – the Pioneer probes, sent out in the 1970s, are now thousands of miles away from where the theory of Relativity says they should be.
Varying Constants – the growing evidence that the ‘universal constants’ used to be different.
Cold Fusion – the growing body of evidence that suggests Pons and Fleischmann found *something* – maybe not cold fusion, but *something* – in their career-ending experiments.
Life – why have we not yet been able to synthesise life from elementary chemicals?
Viking – the Viking probe found evidence of life on Mars – one of the experiments that it ran gave *exactly* the result predicted if there were living organisms in the Martian soil. This has never been followed up on.
The WOW! Signal – a brief (sub-second) signal that looks very much like the work of intelligent life, but has never been repeated.
A Giant Virus – a virus found in Bradford that appears to be an evolutionary ‘missing link’ (sorry for the term) between bacteria and viruses.
Death – why *do* we die? Can it be stopped?
Sex – why all the current evolutionary explanations for sex fall down.
Free Will – scientific evidence that it doesn’t exist, and what this might mean for society.
The Placebo Effect – the evidence that it’s much stronger than thought when it comes to depression and pain, but has *no effect whatsoever* when it comes to physical problems, and what this means for the current medical orthodoxy of double-blind placebo-controlled trials.
And most controversially of all, Homeopathy – he shows that there is a *tiny* bit of evidence that a *small* proportion of homeopathic ‘medicines’ might actually work, and some suggested physical mechanisms for this, even while clearly showing that most of it is the nonsense we all accept it to be.
Looking through this list, some of it is probably explicable by experimental error or outright fraud (my guess is that the evidence for homeopathy falls into that category), but at least some of these things will radically rewrite parts of our understanding of the universe.
But the good thing about this book is that even when he’s talking about these things, Brooks is *NOT* doing it in a new-agey, ‘there are things that science will never understand, wisdom of the ancients’ kind of way. He is motivated by an excitement in discovery, and in the scientific method. For him, the idea that there are things we don’t know, or things we’ve got wrong, is not a threat, and it’s better to waste time on a wild goose chase occasionally in order to find something genuinely revolutionary than to dismiss out-of-hand any anomalous data or wild hypotheses.
My guess is that at least seven or eight of the things talked about in this book will turn out to be wild-goose chases of that nature, but that among the others is an account of someone who in a century will be spoken of in the way we now speak of Einstein, Darwin or Newton (or at least Crick or Watson or Curie or Pauling).
This has fired up my imagination far more than most books of its ilk, and as long as you accept (as Brooks clearly states) that the stuff talked about in it is the very opposite of ‘established fact’, I can guarantee it will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in science.
PEP is here!
This is a ‘beta’/proof version – the authors have yet to give feedback (and there’s one article where I had to cut a handful of words and the author may change that before the final print version), but it’s finally done. Click the image to read it.
PEP! Issue 1
Quick Linkblogging For 05/01/10
(Still a day behind with posts, will catch up soon – lots happening in personal life)
Pillock wants to know how people would have dealt with rebooting Star Trek. (I’m almost certainly going to do this as part of Pop-Drama)
Jon Blum almost convinces me that the Welsh Series has something going for it, while Tim at the Hurting prefers phrases like ‘horribly structured’.
A low-methionine diet appears to help slow aging, even with normal calorie intake (shame my diet is so methionine-heavy then…)
According to Newsarse Bono Urges World To Follow China Model For Making Him Richer. The actual story this is based on is absolutely disgusting, of course…
Linkblogging for 02/01/10 (OK, so I was completely wrong about the whole palindrome thing…)
The closest I’ve come to a New Year’s Resolution this year (other than getting PEP! out not *too* late and trying to stay employed all year) is that I’m going to try to post *something* every single day. I’ve also decided to blog every single book I read (not reread or I’d post about nothing else, just books I’ve not read before) so I’ll be writing about Faction Paradox: City Of The Saved probably tonight (got it this morning).
For those who care about such things, BTW, my blog got 78,564 visits last year (not sure how many are unique, probably not all that many). The most popular post was my first Beatles Mono Review which has been viewed 3.349 times, astonishingly enough. The least popular was an eighteen-way tie between posts which have had one view each, mostly titled things like ‘quick question’ or ‘just to say’ and published in 2008.
Anyway, on to things other people have been writing. A lot of people have been writing about the end of the Welsh Series. James Graham gives a balanced view (even though we were arguing on Twitter yesterday, and I got the impression I annoyed him with some of my comments on Tennant/RTD, I could agree with a good chunk of this. I still think Logopolis is fantastic though). Jennie didn’t like it at all, while Andrew Ducker sums up the RTD years perfectly. Barry Sarll wasn’t hugely impressed, but Lytton Ewing was.
ETA and of course Millennium almost makes me wish I’d watched it, with a wonderful review…
(I didn’t watch it myself, and it doesn’t sound like I’d have enjoyed it much if I had, but I’m not going to say anything against the Welsh Series here – a lot of people did like it, and many of them are disappointed it’s ended. Let’s hope both they and I can enjoy the Moffat Show, though frankly I doubt it…)
For those who want more Doctor Who, I just discovered that a load of old episodes are on Youtube, legitimately. Of the ones there, my personal favourite is Edge Of Destruction, while Caves Of Androzani is widely considered the best Who ever. (The Twin Dilemma, also on there, is best avoided even though Colin Baker’s a favourite of mine…). This might not work in all countries, but I’m sure you all know about proxies and so forth…
Some people out there are talking about things other than Doctor Who, though, including the fact that a woman’s insurance has been revoked because while suffering from depression she put some photos on Facebook showing herself smiling…
LessWrong talks about the difference between what we want and what we feel compelled to do, and the neurochemistry behind this.
The Rejectionist uses Terminator:Salvation as a case study for improving novels.
And Gavin R may have found the source of a mistake in a Ladybird book he reviewed a while ago…
Linkblogging For 29/10/09
Just a few quick links today…
Ubuntu has released its latest version today, Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. Ubuntu isn’t my GNU/Linux distribution of choice, but it is far and away the best for people who’ve had little previous experience with GNU/Linux, so if you’ve been thinking of shelling out a few hundred quid for WIndows 7, and maybe having to buy a new computer to run it on, why not try downloading a totally free, better new OS instead?
Those of you who don’t read XTC’s MySpace blog really should. This week, Andy Partridge is interviewed about Collideascope, and briefly references Ditko and Kirby.
The Mindless Ones posted some Annocommentations for League: Century, but like the teases they are they took it down again. I have a cached copy, though. Mwahahaha etc. They do still have a pretty spot-on review of the last issue of Planetary though.
An interesting article on ‘doing your good deed for the day‘. Remind me sometime to explain how this ties in to my belief that almost all political blogging is counterproductive (I don’t do my own blogging to be productive – I do it to let off steam. If I want to make an actual difference I’ll go out and do actual campaigning, which I don’t do enough of).
And some Twain and Einstein adventures by Michael Kupperman…
(Tomorrow, if you’re lucky, a defence of libertarianism…)
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