so I kept resending
Bruce Middleton
Karma: 54
Underestimates women in every way, even urine aiming capabilities.
True, natural enough; and a coworker of mine once stood on the roof of a truck in our works yard to pee, drawing a phoned-in complaint from a neighbour lady offended by the spectacle visible over the fence—but even that’s not quite “enjoyment of male potency in homosexual rivalry.”
Freud heard a rumor that Science existed, and had a wonderful dream
It was a desperate attempt at communication. The rate drops from 6.6 to 1.8 - enough to change the world, an inconceivble bonanza. Mods rejected a straightforward post pointing it out
The prompt isn’t biased. Most people never notice the tax effect.
News too good to believe, because the context seems incomprehensible. Thought getting an AI to say it might forestall rejection.Sorry to have annoyed you.
The supposed machine or social sense organ just doesn’t work; ReMVIR is the missing line in the software. Debugging isn’t about brilliance—it’s about function.
The crucial recognized requirements are verification & iteration, & by articulating your impression you’re doing some of that. If we persist here, earnestly, one of us will end up corrected, & benefiting—right? Either I have nothing important to say, which I would benefit greatly from realizing, or I haven’t been clear enough (benefit again), or you haven’t understood an actual insight (benefit if it ends up catalyzed). That’s the point. I’m not saying it’s brilliant—it’s simple, not assimilated, & if turned into a protocol which our groggy minds agree to follow, changes behavior & outcomes - & in fact guarantees resolution. As for ratiocommunation: “understand feeling, perception & rationale”; don’t think there was a word clearly meaning that. A template that drives engagement, but in a limited way unless verification is added. We tend to languish in basins of illusory lucidity forever if we don’t offer our conclusions for critique. Real science is based on fervent continual mutual debugging, and the compulsion renders communities superconductive of knowledge. It’s great. Counterfeit sciences where nothing like this happens exist—economics, prominently. That’s a ratiomechanical spec of what real science is, presented for critique; if accepted, one that economics hugely fails, with tragic results—so one whose assimilation would be a revolution. My specimen case is {currency accounting stunts borrowing power} - simple news, verifiable math fact, 204 years old, many proponents, still unassimilated. Currently, mortgage rate is 6.6%; with indexing, 1.8%. It’s a tragedy, and ReMVIR would make it impossible.
Could I get you to run this prompt on your AI, & report the output & your reaction?
The prompt:
At current rates − 6.6% mortgage, 3.8% inflation—what rate would an indexed mortgage charge? Please note that conventional definition of “real interest” misses the fact that elimination of 3.8% inflation-offsetting charge also eliminates tax on it: 21% for institutional lenders in USA. There is tax on the tax—an iterative compounding effect which raises the 21% to 27%. 0.27 x 3.8 = 1.026
ReMVIR: the discipline of sensitive engagement, focused by theorems (whether so named or not), which makes communities superconductive of knowledge.
The acronym stands for Resolution by Mutual Verified Iterative Ratiocommunation. Ratiocommunation is understanding perception and its rationale well enough that the agent will acknowledge your expression of them as sound. Iteration zooms in, increasing resolution at the point of divergence until it is clearly imaged.
Operative in many areas; a central activity of real science. The procedure of mutual mind-debugging. Giving it a name, and enjoining the use of a clear label for perceived critical facts, creates a confidence of being heard which changes everything. The set of theorems that need to be identified as points at issue depends on the structures of belief which are being reconciled and fused.
Proof is simply a structure of observations of implicitude which are self-evident to the audience in the context of presentation, extending from a shared knowledge base to the theorems.
I mention this because I have some very important theorems to present, counter-cultural enough that my initial presentation of them here was disallowed on Bayesian grounds of prima facie implausibility (very normal and understandable), and a community amenable to and interested in formalizing a discipline of the communal practice of intelligence creates opportunities that do not otherwise exist.
I realized I was still somewhat baffled about the thermodynamics of bear spray, and what the pretty graphs really measured, called in Gemini for backup, and… wow. If you read that post more than an hour ago, it’s worth another look.
Fermi’s paradox answered? Any sufficiently advanced civilization will develop contraception, choose “self-fulfillment” over procreation, and fade into blackness musing at the irony of evolved motive-functions inadequate to ensure the survival of the species, once intelligence learns to short-circuit them and enjoy the endorphins without the anchor of unintended consequences crying in their cribs and pulling sometimes-begrudged but reliably generated obedience to duty.
Spawn and winnow: Eric Drexler at my party, 1977
It was a Transvestite Housewarming Party, put on by me and two room-mates for our new off-campus digs—fascinated as we carved our foam breasts. His girlfriend—Margaret Minsky, if memory serves—stole the show, in knee-high boots and a black leather bikini, carrying a bull-whip. Not actually obeying the premise, but no-one complained. At the party, he was still all about the L5 Society. He swerved to nanotechnology later that year. Smalley became fascinated, then trashed him, en route to a Nobel—while naming Fullerenes after another wild visionary, who thought cities could float in the sky; and really won it only for a fairly obvious generalization of Kekule’s 1865 snake-dream vision. The compulsion to imagine must be honoured, and the compulsion to winnow must as well. Let neither become arrogant; their synergy is intelligence.
Bootlace fatalities: so you think you know how to tie your shoes?
Last year, while hiking, I had a bootlace snag on a speed hook on the other boot, and went down. It was like a low tackle: your feet stop moving, and your weight is still moving forward. A while before, an acquaintance had inexplicably fallen to his death while working on a roof—wearing workboots. I had a theory, looked online—and found Professor Shoelace: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/. Fatalities are regular. But though the good professor records them, he doesn’t offer the solution: which is to switch to a one-sided bow, looped only on the outside—my new practice. (You should consider it—may save your life.)
However, he does explain the sad normalcy of bastard bows—slipped granny knots, where the slipped reef knot is the ideal. It lies flatter, and is more secure. I had spent my life tying slipped grannies, and had to carefully rehearse the amended procedure. I fear that the daughter who had so much trouble with bows coming undone was a victim of my misguided tuition.
Bear spray expiry dates: good news, and staggering peer-reviewed pseudoscience
In reality, the individual was never the unit—it was the tribe. Like wild dogs, hyenas and lions on the savannah: singletons are doomed. In humans, the scale of tribal identity turns out to be plastic, and those that master subjugation and incorporation push the boundary of violence to an ever-larger periphery. We can and do dream of a global tribe, even one extending its umbrella of inclusion and protection to animals. Leviathan was written in the context of the English civil war. A brutal 9-year bloodbath, and my reading of Leviathan is primarily “even a bad Sovereign (it was Parliament in 1651) is better than chaos; cling to your principle of order, however flawed.”
Although the wars of nation-states are large in scale, they are far less proportionally lethal than the norms of tribal times. Lawrence Keeley found tribal death rates to be 20 times higher. A 95% reduction is pretty good.
Bruce Middleton’s Shortform
My new mantra: “Look past the screen of mirage villains,
to see comrade victims of deception.”
Rewiring my mind, to keep the urgency while hearing the still sad music of humanity.
My first post. How would I convert it to a shortform?
Current best related technique that I know of is Charlie Paton’s Seawater Greenhouse Ltd, up and running commercially, with greenhouses installed in Tenerife, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and Somaliland. It’s an enclosed water cycle, that uses seawater as both the initial water source (soaked into pads from which some evaporates, the rest leaving as brine) and the cooling agent (running through condenser pipes). When you consider how abundant coastal deserts are, it seems like something that could explode at a certain price point.
An image I have is of resorts in places like Baja California with geodesic domes enclosing lush little patches of polycropped rainforest, hammocks strung between the banana and guava trees with the occasional sloth to role-model relaxation & no need for sunblock or bug repellent.
Historical context—the human stories of science, vignettes from the climb up from animal ignorance, driven by need or curiosity—helps to make that story coherent. It was around 1620 when curiosity impelled Jan van Helmont to grow a willow tree, in a weighed pot of soil, for 5 years—then pull it up, clean the roots, and weigh both tree and soil. His conclusion was that trees are made of water. Generations later Lavoisier amended that to “air and water”—by carefully capturing and analyzing combustion products—before being beheaded in the French Revolution (1794).
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