The sexy problem, formalized

As an intro, consider this discussion :

spyked http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-30#1718769 <-- afaik ubb ran a "digitalization" program for library. but they prolly won't make those public, eh?
a111 Logged on 2017-09-30 19:14 mircea_popescu: sorry asciilifeform . all i have are my own notes, which are as all hand notes useless without hte backing of the library of origin (in this case, the universitary library of cluj). teh interwebs dun seem to have a "here's the list of trotsky letters".
mircea_popescu here's the problem of ourdemocracy : if people are allowed to misperceive they "have choices" and feed this hallucination out of the field of choices they do not have, you end up with the sexy problem, whereby linear cost encounters unreasonably power-law distributed benefit.
mircea_popescu so yes, they digitized the "sexy" parts.
mircea_popescu you take my meaning ?
spyked yeah, thought this is probably the case

Now consider the following formalization : suppose there is a field of items F, indefinitely-discretizableⁱ, and suppose further there is a group of agents G.

If any one agent A from the group G perceives he is at liberty to use a partial discretization of F (ie, not a function), then F will be lostⁱⁱ through interaction with this A. Evidently this is a problem, in that depending what A of G you pick to draw your plans, you could end up with unusable plans. The problem also has an equally evident solution, at least in theory. In practice it is a little difficult to implement, however, mostly because idiot As (ie, the sort of A that'd gladly draw you unusable plans for full pay) instinctively raise upⁱⁱⁱ to try and obstruct it.

If any number of agents A₁..A_i from G perceive that they are at liberty to use a partial discretization of F, you don't simply get a number of reiterations of the problem above. In fact, you get a whole bevy of entirely novel problems!

As far as the subgroup A₁..A_i itself is concerned, you get the celebrated Problem of Ideal Social Systems, ie that socialists can't meaningfully talk to one another^iv.

As far as any method to resolve the A problem above that relied on some sort of divergence between A and some measure of G is concerned^v, you're now in trouble, because the very measure of G can very well be corrupted, especially if a large enough^vi i is involved.

None of these are the sexy problem yet, however. There's a ways to go yet, decaywise.

If the problem of hallucinated liberty goes on unchecked so that a significant^vii number of agents from G perceive that they are at liberty to use a patial discretization of F, then you start to encounter the power-law distribution^viii : rather than some sort of quality, the principal predictor of success becomes recognition, and so you trade Bach for Spears and so on. That B manages an extremely fine description of F becomes relatively unimportant under the pressure of S managing a much louder rendition of those parts of F the "liberal"^ix agents among G even know about. By ignoring her ignorance, S sings the common parts loud enough, and so, as Neznaika once aptly observed, the trombone is the best instrument. Is there even such a thing as music without a guitar ?

And now we're finally ready to encounter the sexy problem. If the sons of the sort of idiots that ruined music take up "computer engineering" as a profession because they buy into scam-spam^x campaigns about how "there's a terrible dearth of computer engineers" and "computer-engineering pays well" when they're young^xi, they in due time become "disabused" with the cold reality of the matter, which is to say they do intuit that they've been kept in the dark and fed shit throughout, but can't conceptualize this intuition to themselves^xii. Instead, they decide they "want to work on important problems", and through some effort manage to unearth an F. What now ?

Well, now they're stuck somehow arbitraging the complexity of F with the "power laws that rule all around them". What can they do ?

If your guess is "they'll do a half-ass, buggy, half-way implementation of some portion of F and then abandon it", you're exactly right. But they'll also misperceive all the various other F's buried under crap by previous MMM^xiii cases as "already solved", and so guess why you get "everything" solved an infinite number of times that can't be used, and yet perfectly apt to be "solved" again, in the same manner to the same result ?

There you go, the sexy problem, the necessary result of permitting arbitrary misstatements of freedom to take hold.

1. Which means, allowing an infinity of bijective functions relating arbitrary portions of it to an arbitrary index (ie, finite ordered set). [↩]
2. In the manner a car drawn after plans drawn up by a person who never realised cars also contain an engine box will not in fact run, no matter how well the plans are followed [↩]
3. This would be a fine example among the endless supply available. Consider the man's dogged defense of his idiocy throughout the thread, and ask the following important question : have I, whatever my name may be, ever put as much effort into defending truth as this idiot put into obstructing implementation ? [↩]
4. In this context, as in all others, socialist denotes idiot. In this context, unlike any other, "ideal" is used in the socialist sense thereof, which in practice works out as "convenient idiocy" or very close thereby. [↩]
5. Ie, if you used "crackpot" as a heuristic. [↩]
6. "Large enough" may in practice work out as a very small fraction of the aleph of G. Consider that ancient observation that the realpolitik of a totalitarian system is based on little else than "what is the largest group which can be stirred to act cohesively", irrespective of how tiny that group actually is and you're starting to see the gap. [↩]
7. This is some-kind of supermajority, its exact nature unclear. [↩]
8. Very very far from being a universal characteristic of "humans" or "social groups" and so forth, the zipf curve aka the power law is entirely the signature of large acretions of unintelligent agents. Only if you believe humans are necessarily stupid can you claim power laws are specific to humans or normal in sociology. On the planet I live on they're abnormal, even though they may be common. [↩]
9. Here the term is used in the New World sense of "fucked in the head", as opposed to the European traditional sense of "opposed to economic tariffs or protective legislation in practice ; and to any kind of self-protection of the stupid lazy in the ideal". [↩]
10. If you think Marc Anderssen, Paul Graham and the rest of that foul camp are anything but con men supporting themselves on massive outsourced spam campaigns, you've got serious mental issues, of the kind that usually result in getting the spamming outsourced to you. [↩]
11. Which they do, not just because youth is inept by nature, and not just because of the charged genetics bestowed upon them by their parents, the idiots, but also because by now the rot is so advanced rational approaches require resources well outside of what's commonly available. [↩]
12. Because the expert thieves that stole their future from them when they were but wee tykes also stole the having been stolen from. The poor victims will go through life not merely unable to express what happened to them, not to anyone nor to themselves, at great personal cost, but deliberately crippled in this manner and for this very purpose.

    To put the matter in visceral terms, imagine that the subhuman Africans were actually white people, and therefore intellectually competent. If they weren't simpleminded children, they'd do female genital mutilation right, the way it's done in the US : tell the little girl that nothing ever happened, that she's not missing any parts, that all girls are like that! Proof that you can get a little girl to believe such nonsense is readily available -- after all they've managed to convince pretty much every last ESL tard that "growing up" and "empowering oneself" means "transforming from borderline to narcisist". If you can get tweeny girls to believe "all men are narcissists" and "women are born borderline" and "female liberation is turning from borderline to narcissist" and "the glass ceiling is the proof of there being still some women left that haven't managed the transform yet" you can get them to believe anything. As you certainly can -- they trust you!

    This is quite exactly your situation, they told you some different Santa stories and you believed them, and by now you've not even a vague memory of the missing parts. Not as they were back in those early days, let alone as they would have been had they a chance to grow up with you, as well they would have and should have had.

    But hey, it's more civilised that way, amirite ? Do you feel civilised yet ? [↩]

13. Male Mental Mutilation, the white bois' direct equivalent of black girls' FMG. [↩]