Experimental results

Amusingly enough, I passed for a ~theoretical~ physicist in my youthful years when [most everyone else's] "careers" (aka, complete and all describingⁱ life-packages) were "being decided". I suppose it goes to show just how inadequate Inca'sⁱⁱ weighing machine actually is.

As well befits a theoretician, since those days I've conducted a great many experiments, all of which for moderate costⁱⁱⁱ and with ultimately unastonishing results. Let's review a very select few, among the many captured quite publicly on this very sheet (themselves a very select few).

Hey, remember that time when I bankrolled euro-nazis into burning down the local community of peaceful gypsies ?

Lol. No, but really! Let's remember together :

cipslim : so.. what has happened with this project?

Mircea Popescu Exactly nothing.

It's not that Romania can't "absorb" the billions of the European Union, that's getting lost among the forest of the trees. The sad if ubiquitous fact of the matter is that in ten thousand young people who think themselves men you can not find three able to put a thousand dollars to some useful purpose. They may buy peanuts and beer to watch TV and comment politics, for ten or ten thousand or ten million if you wish. Or else... well... but what else is there to do ? And who's to do it ?

Not they. And so in every town, no people, cattle, and so in every heart, no person, just the painful absence, the empty place where in another time a person might have sat.

In the end, a very instructive experiment, I guess. There's nothing left to save here anymore than there's anything left to save in the US, and salt pilars for those fools who'd still look back.

Yeah, that's right, the kiddos of great danger and peril. You know how Eastern Europe is all awash in these very bloodthirsty and racist and so forth mobs of unleashed teenagers ? Heh.

The problems, you understand, aren't that I wrote them an ideology booklet which was the only item intellectually worth the mention that the whole movement has produced since about 1942 or so^iv. Saying such would be akin to saying that while quite passible swimmers, it's not clear we actually have an olympic team on our hands rather than merely a collection of dedicated professionals.

Yet the reality subiacent is nothing like that. The actual problems are more in the vein of getting any of the mentally ill children on the shoreline to spend more than half a minute at a time in the water, and if at all possible without throwing a complete conniption fit over the imposition of it. Yes some of them are "idiots", in the sense that they string about idle words into constructions of no practical relevancy, while the others are "engineers", in the sense that they string about idle numbers into constructions of no practical relevancy. This may be a difference you care about, even, but whether you care or do not care : some kiddos are overanxiously and with every muscle of their face tightened to straining vehehehery carefully trying out some water they safely isolated into their hat with a toe (engineering!) while some others are just bobbing their heads into rocks and liberally pouring sand into their pockets (for safety!). Whatever the case -- a swim team swimming is not what's going on there.

But remember that time I tore down the ancient, rotten model of justice to replace it with a better alternative ?

Well, in practice more like I opened up the rolls to "volunteers". Do you know what these volunteers were paid for their trouble ? 150 BTC. Yeah, that's right.^v

What did they produce as the best of their efforts, these themselves the best possible representatives of mankind ? Oh, they came up with -- and please make sure you're supine for this one -- the following legal reasoning (and I quote verbatim) :

since MP is the closest thing we have in this space to the Great Mommy State,
and since the reason that entity even exists in our minds is so as to pick up all loose ends wherever we may be,
we the best representatives of mankind etcetera by the true compass of our conscience as illuminated by our intelligence decide MP should just pay everyone's tab and be done with it.

No, I'm not kidding, that was exactly it. Leaving aside the idiocy of principle, these imbeciles actually drew up a mechanism for its application that was so ill thought-out it could have actually worked as a perpetual extraction engine!

To this day the ROTA category sits there, like a festering wound, and for a reason. It is where the notion that "people might decide for themselves" lies buried ; it is the proximate cause for all the later disenfranchisements. It cost a pretty penny, sure, but at least we established some facts for our trouble.

So people can't think, in the airy, creative, artistic manner required for penning their own Carticica.... Sad, but what can you do. And people can't reason, either, in the solid, predictable, reliable manner required for running their own legal system. Painful, but if it's the truth it's the truth. While either of these closes down a lobe of greatness nobody "in his right mind"^vi would ever want closed, what's left is still something, and that's what's life's going to have to be all about. Right ?

Well... as it happens, wrong. Have you noticed the underlining red thread through all of that ? Sure, the wanna-be nazi kids failed to make anything good! But, and this is the spot we're liable to miss under the ruckus of that sadness, but!!! they also failed to make anything at all! It's not simply that they hadn't anyone to creatively engage little old me in the intellectual sphere, so as the relationship'd look more like fucking than parenting. It's that they had no one capable of doing much at all!^vii

Being among engineers^viii I expect I don't have to explain that the "judges" could have failed horribly in their role without actually also managing to blow up their proposed implementation of that failure. Could have, sure, but didn't.

Which brings us to the current situation. Yes, people are willing to nod (or not nod! this is a meaningful difference!) along, maybe participate in some bike-shedding now and again. This much should be enough for anyone and for anything, right ? What more could possibly be asked of a body!^ix

What can you do, right ? I'd say that my faith in humanity is well shaken, if I actually could find through honest examination that at any point I actually had such a faith. But whatever, I'll try to get on the fan-chan a coupla times a week or something.

See you around!

1. It must be testament to a truly great exhaustion of spirit and for that matter vital force to be content (not happy, certainly, but content, absolutely) in retracing a prepackaged lifestory. Isn't boring, seriously now ?

   Congratulations of having watched forty seconds of this "your" film, you've made level 5, yeee, wait about looking on morosely for another minute you'll... um... make! let's call it make! level 6.... 'Tis all gravy 'till the level cap!

   I suppose in the end your eastern masters know you much better than you know yourself. But we digress. [↩]

2. My first impulse was to check in the thesaurus, see if it's there. Then that got overcome by the "no, it's not, I remember it isn't" signal, which produced the impulse to "well go put it in!" which was overcome by... why bother ?

   Whatever, some people who don't know what I mean flatter themselves with "being confused" and some other people that don't know what I mean flatter themselves with "I know what he means" and so following. The world is after all one large pile of coping mechanisms, so well stacked and intertwined as to having long evicted anything else from the composition. (A link might go here relating this point to that other article where I point out words have long lost all substance, much like coins so much passed from mouth to mouth they came to consist entirely of congealed intervening spittle and none at all of the original metal -- but after a brief minute's survey through the searches I discover I can't summon the interest.) [↩]

3. The true blessing of a large fortune is that it raises the cap on the curiosities you may satisfy for yourself. Basic things such as "I wonder how this girl would look in that fur", of course, but also more elaborately complex matters.

   You may be excused for thinking that "hey, how's a girl going to look in a fur -- exactly like a girl in a fur", intimating that there's some kind of variation, some difference to be encountered later on. The reason you're excused is your Eastern training, nothing else. It's an excusing in the way a chunk of tree is excused for not snoring even though the expression goes "sleeping like a log", no more. [↩]

4. Which, other than quite humiliating is also rather concerning seeing how in order to have a chance, however dubious, it'd better somehow produce hands quite as steady, eyes quite as clear. [↩]
5. And don't even fucking dare derp in my direction about how "oh, it wasn't worth as much then". Not worth as much according to whom the fuck ? I knew it was worth exactly as much then as now, I didn't discover all the shit you discovered last week apace with your dumb ass. I was writing in 2012 shit you'll discover in 2020! It's there, waiting patiently for you to "discover" very much "on your own" how shit goes, and then explain it "in your own words". 'Cuz there can be such a thing as your words even, dear reader. You are one capable of ownership over words! [↩]
6. Which is to say, finding himself (in a purely hallucinated manner) at that glorious imaginary place where no resistance of any medium can ever be encountered, and consequently "he can really get some thinking done". Boy howdy is our hero going to figure out all teh corrects. Just as soon as they're costless and he can take forever doing the figuring. Just you wait! [↩]
7. This, for the record, would seem cruelly unfair to the orcs involved, if they could like... read languages and things. Because they did things, you see! They oh-so-totally did things!

   They, for instance, forrr instance, organised a press conference! Where a bunch of dorks exactly identical to them (except wearing a differently colored party hat) didn't do their job of journalism, just like my dorks weren't doing their job of activism. See, but if they don't do their job together then it still counts for something, right ? 'Cause they cross-support each other, the fish shop doesn't have to sell any fish for just as long as the meat shop that doesn't sell any meat reliably sends its way all people looking for fish. Right ? [↩]

8. This is a skill, right ? Technical ability, it's a something, very fucking different from saying "being among princesses" or "being among unicorns". Yes ? [↩]
9. And yes, evidently the bar of what exactly constitutes "nothing at all" has been on a marked march upwards over the (scant few) years. The majestic Republic fighting for dear life with belaboured breath today (for just as long as all that fightin' doesn't require more standing up than a good WoW raid does) has a payment system and a log system and generally speaking feats of engineering that the Empire of idiots literally could not reproduce. (Yes, literally couldn't. They didn't reproduce Phuctor, did they. Why not ?)

   But the... well, sorta good, I guess, news for that empire is that... guess what ? It doesn't have to reproduce anything! It doesn't even have to be good, or anything even vaguely like that. All it has to do is come get the proverbial power cord one day. When it's had enough of these dern kids' ruckus. That'll be... good enough. Doesn't sound like all that much basis for independence, does it ?

   I think one point should probably be underscored, because it is the well documented habit of the lazy to bundle up things together in their quest to produce laziness justifications. That point is that the judgement of insufficiency is not a proper basis for pretending that the good parts were actually not good! (Or, as is more often in practice the case, "not worth the trouble".)

   The way a pothead usually reasons is,

   Well I got up, and then I got in the car, and it even started, and I drove down the highway, but then at the mall there were Jay and Silent Bob so instead of going to work I went and beers beeers beers with them. And the bastids down at work fired me anyway! Four out of five, man, but still not good enough for those corporate cocksuckers! I tell you man, getting out of bed or driving to work aren't worth it, man!

   This is not actually sound, let alone reasoning. It's true that the unwelcome burdens reality imposes on the special self-snowflake now and again consists of completeness requirements, meaning that you get no partial credit whatsoever, it's do or die. And it's further true that there exists such a thing as the "for want of a nail" problem*, as the man found out who, after managing to blow his S.MG crypto-consulting sweetheart deal then decided to not keep timetable on his work for a nascent ISP beset on all sides by the idiocy of the orc and the inequity of bare physics, and then upon being called to order decided to flippantly fuck over the whole thing. It's true that "small things", such as a hairpin to the eye, can have "disproportionate" consequences.

   It's true, it's true, it's all true. So what if it is ?

   For his going there, Bingoboingo towers far above all the others that didn't ; that once there he opted to take a walk through the DC like it were an amusement park rather than getting to the brass tacks and asking the really hard, the really tough questions in the vein of "So...like... if I get gear could you rack it for me ? What with ?" is unfortunate ; that he then opted to even look at it late rather than early is just as unfortunate. But these failures aren't to be used to package the one thing he did right into some kind of comfort-protecting ball of yarny nonsense.

   ---
   * Consider the excellent discussion of this point over at Fun hate facts about the bell curve, with James A. Donald. It's plainly said there that

   It follows from hyperexponential decay that if you select a subgroup from the population that meets some high standard, for example the entry requirements of a university course, or fails some low standard, for example performs an act that is both stupid and criminal, then the vast majority of those selected will only just meet the standard.

   but what this practically means is inconvenient and therefore "confusing" not to mention "unknown".

   Specifically, the sob story of every idiot in the slammer revolves around the fact that he barely met the standards for being locked up, and rather by bad fortune and unfriendly circumstance than any sort of substantial characteristic at that, so it's not "properly speaking" fair that he should be there in the first place ; and the "achievement" gargle of every cadet in the space programme or whatever similarly selected place revolves around how "they barely made it" (and is thereby rife for crediting their mom/god/St. Hilarodham rather than their own self and the lengthy string of complete & correct work they managed to produce).

   In other words, linear projection is always tempting, but never meaningful to any sort of interesting phenomenon. It's not meaningful for the very reason that the actual definition of "interesting" is "not amenable to linear interpolation". It's tempting for the exact same reason. [↩]