05-15-2016 | Mixed Results

On Taleb - Eric Falkenstein

Wiki Gem: Illegal Prime Numbers

[PDF] Lure of the Void - Nick Land

Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space - Sam Kriss

05-14-2015 | Fitness Landscapes (Slight Reprise)

The normal functioning of the world serves to hide our state of truly catastrophic dispossession. What is called "catastrophe" is no more than the forced suspension of this state, one of those rare moments when we regain some sort of presence in the world. Let the petroleum reserves run out earlier than expected; let the international flows that regulate the tempo of the metropolis be interrupted; let us suffer some great social disruption and some great "return to the savagery of the population," a "planetary threat," the "end of civilization!" Whatever. Any loss of control would be preferable to all the crisis management scenarios they envision.

When this comes, the specialists in sustainable development won't be the ones with the best advice. It's within the malfunction and short-circuits of the system that we find elements of a response whose logic would be to abolish the problems themselves. Among the signatory nations to the Kyoto Protocol, the only countries to have fulfilled their commitments, in spite of themselves, are Ukraine and Romania. Guess why. The most advanced experimentation with "organic" agriculture on a global level has taken place since 1989 on the island of Cuba. Guess why. And it's along the African highways, and nowhere else, that auto mechanics has been elevated to a form of popular art. Guess how.

What makes the crisis desirable is the fact that, in the crisis, the environment ceases to be the environment. We are forced to reestablish contact, albeit a potentially fatal one, with what's there, to rediscover the rhythms of reality. What surrounds us is no longer a landscape, a panorama, a theater, but something to inhabit, something we need to come to terms with, something we can learn from.

We won't let ourselves be led astray by the ones who've brought about this "catastrophe." Where the managers platonically discuss among themselves how they might decrease emissions without "breaking the bank," the only realistic option we can see is to "break the bank" as soon as possible, and, in the meantime, take advantages of every collapse in the system to increase our own strength.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection p. 81-82

05-05-2016 | Mars Taurus

Testimony of James Harris Simons - CNBC - (more here)

Uncanny Valley - Anna Weiner

Independence - Nick Land

Wiki Gem: Inedia

05-02-2016 | Incremental Certainty

In the 1980 presidential elections, candidate Ronald Reagan took a hard line on defense. In stern and urgent tones, he lashed out at the Soviet menace, calling for a vastly expanded military buildup. His opponent sought to use this stance to characterize Reagan as a warmonger, even a mad bomber. It was on of the weak spots in Reagan's public image.

At a certain point in the campaign, Reagan's handling of foreign and defense policy shifted noticeably. His tone became more reasoned and calm; the word peace began to appear more prominently in his speeches; references to "war" and the "arms race" faded. A new phrase emerged to cover his position on armaments, something bland and noncommital, but seemingly prudent: "a margin of safety."

What caused this change of tone and rhetoric? It was done in response to a key campaign advisor, Richard Wirthlin. The advice might have been based, as such advice usually has been, on pure political instinct, which may or may not have been persuasive with the candidate and his many other counselors. Politicians always work at the center of rumors, guesswork, hunches, tested savvy, gut feelings. But in this case, Wirthlin's advice was based on something else: numbers, lots of numbers. It arose from a barrage of public opinion polling all across the nation. Wirthlin commanded statistics. They gave his advice the appearance of something more than guesswork. It looked like science.

In the late 1960s, Wirthlin, a former economist at Brigham Young University in Utah, opened a market research firm in southern California called Decision Making Information. Like many such firms which measure consumer tastes, DMI easily moved into political polling, where Wirthlin was first hired on by Ronald Reagan to guide his gubernatorial campaign in California in 1970. DMI provided the usual services: voter surveys, sampling, simulations.

...

John Kennedy was the first national candidate to make important use of polling. That was in 1960; his hired pollster was Louis Harris, who then became an independent expert. By the late 1970s, every serious candidate for office in the United States who could afford the price was following Kennedy's lead; expensive polling along with lots of media exposure had become the prevailing campaign style. But by then, top figures in the business, like Wirthlin, had gone on to new heights of push-button statistical precision.

DMI had developed important connections. Its clients included government agencies like Heath and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Office of Education. In turn, the firm was tapped into nearly forty federal data banks that make their information publicly available. Wirthlin, with the aid of a large staff -- as many as 300 -- was able to mobilize this wealth of data through an intricate computer method called PINS, Political Information Service. He had put together the most ambitious electronic sampling and simulating service ever developed, a new standard for the profession. His telephone surveys -- which included automated, tape recorded polls -- were larger, more intense, more constant. He developed "tracking" techniques that involved nightly phone interviews with between 500 and 1000 randomly selected voters towards the end of the campaign.

Wirthlin's carefully prepared interviews and computer programs, which divided into 108 demographic categories, could nearly single out any item on the candidate's platform or person image -- "The nice guy factor," "the meanness factor," -- and rapidly assess the "trend line" fluctuations in specific voter groups, providing overnight reactions to a speech, debate, press conference or even an offhand remark. The same refined and prompt polling could be done to assess the progress of the opposition, and the campaign could be adjusted as the numbers dictated: more of this, less of that, push harder here, smile more, keep your left side to the camera.

The pollsters are available to anyone who can afford them, they have been used by groups of every political persuasion. But they obviously bias elections in favor of those who can spend the most on the best services.

After all, their marketing techniques do succeed in selling a lot of worthless merchandise the public never knew it wanted. More to the point: there exists a pollster, Richard Wirthlin, who succeeded in making Ronald Reagan president. Any technique that can make a winner out of such unlikely material is bound to look impressive to the rest of the field.

-Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information p. 188-190.

3-4-2016 | Lingering Questions

Google & Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff

The Air Force & the Flaw of Averages - Todd Rose

John Dee, Magick & Maths - New Scientist

Time & Black Holes - Carlo Rovelli

3-3-2016 | Rare Convergence

PDF: Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments

Three Salvoes in the Reproducibility Wars - Tom Stafford

IQ Heritability x Social Mobility - Matt Ridley

Exterminator - Nick Land

3-2-2016 | Yawning Voids

Implications of Human Super-Intelligence - Stephen Hsu

AI and the Detection Problem - George Musser

On the Bavarian Front Lines - Der Spiegel

On Incompetent Systems - John Naughton

3-1-2016 | Purifying Flame

Fire, Sex & Children Weakened the Human Race - Sententiae Antiquae

What You Should Know About Organized Ritual Abuse - Jasun Horsely

Reducing the Human Footprint - Edward O. Wilson

The Uselessness of Political Science - W M Briggs

1-28-2016 | Launch Codes

Mindset Inequality - Paul Graham

Parents Matter More Than Parenting - Boutwell & Khan

The Seduction of Easy Wars - Sebastian Bae

1-19-2016 | Inexorable Fate

The Great Game - Arthur C. Clarke

Unmaking England - Benjamin Schwarz

Rural Poverty & Urban Elites - Lauren Gurley

Data and Desire in Academic Life - Benjamin Haber

1-18-2015 | Exit Strategies

Wiki Gem: The Night-watchman State, aka Yung Minarchism

Last of the Monsters With Iron Teeth - Carcinisation

Maine's Growing "Unorganized Territory" - NYT

On the Black Box Society - Nicole Dewandre

1-15-2016 | Wrong Moves

"Those People Are Idiots!" as Idiot Reflex - Sean Blanda

Empires of Ambition Revisited - Rune Soup (original here)

The Seduction of Other People's Problems - Courtney Martin

Secrecy and U.S. Satellite Reconnaissance, 1958-1976 - NSArchive

"If any one, having seen God, understood what he saw, he did not see Him." - Pseudo-Denys

1-14-2016 | Fixed Points

The Big Bang Cannot Be What We Thought it Was - Paul J. Steinhardt

Watching the Universe in Real Time - Sarah Scoles

The Depth and Power of Smell - Elizabeth Preston

The Brutalist Zen of Jack Welch - HBR

1-13-2016 | Adverse Conditions

Wilhelm Reich: A Disappointed Utopian - Zachary Levine

Questions of Dimensionality - Carl Higdon

PDF: Knee Deep in Big Muddy - Barry M. Staw

Support vs. Actual Votes in 2016 - Monkey Cage

1-12-2016 | Rare Honesty

"You have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control. This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase." - George Friedman

Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio - Louise Wilson

Steps Towards Artificial Intelligence - Marvin Minsky

The Road to Turkdom - John Robb

Wiki Gem: Zersetzung

1-11-2016 | Cold Snaps

Do It Again Dept: "Gray Wars": Re-Packaging 5GW - Elkus

The Human Brain is a Piece of Shit - BRNSTRBTR

"I Had No Idea He Was Filming Me" - SBS

Quantifiable Prejudice - Jonathan Haidt

1-10-2015 | Stacked Decks

"The struggle is not to get off the grid. The fight is to somehow remain ambiguous on it since there is no escape." - John Stanton

How to Find a Parenting Effect - Brian Boutwell

"The Dollar Is Now Everyone's Problem" - M&B

Cosmological Infancy - Xenosystems

1-9-2016 | We Reconvene

A new year brings us a new Edge Question. Praise is superfluous, read it.

Machine Learning Approaches to Lie Detection - Christian Science Monitor

Voices, Identity, and Meaning-Making - Lancet

Wiki Gem: Cheating in Chess

1-3-2015 | Sunday Sermon

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel, or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”

Liu Cixin

12-23-2015 | Deep Capture

The network, as it stands now, is an extraordinary platform for enhanced social control. Very rapidly, and with no apparent remorse, the two largest governments on earth, that of the United States of America and the People's Republic of China have adopted essentially identical points of view. A robust social graph connecting government to everybody and the exhaustive data mining of society is both governments fundamental policy with respect to their different forms of what they both refer to, or think of, as stability maintenance. It is true of course that they have different theories of how to maintain stability for whom and why, but the technology of stability maintenance is becoming essentially identical.

From: "Innovation Under Austerity" - Eben Moglen