Locklin on science

Contemporary people, particularly educated people seem to have a peculiar terror of rational thought. I witness this in large and small ways. Take for example, quantum computards. I meet people in my private life who will make some statement about how important dem quantum computards are and how they’re coming real soon now and how exciting it is that RSA won’t work soon. They always look like a toddler that shit their diaper when they recite the  wisdom of “experts,” expecting teacher to pat them on the head. Then the guy who has actually read the science papers, been to the Gordon conference and has even fooled around with KDP crystals (making genuine <tm> entangled photons), says, “well no” and crushes their tiny little schoolboy spirits. The confused cognitive dissonance that ensues used to be fun to look at; sort of like an old timey science fiction robot shorting out. Now it just annoys me. It doesn’t take a lot of reflection to know something about this subject stinks. Remembering where we were in the late 90s ought to suffice. Nothing has changed since then, despite legions of “experts” working on it. The only real difference is the marketing.  Yet even the people who work in physics think it’s important: they read “experts” telling them so -in popular news and magazines. This is, of course,  birdbrained: just as it was to ascribe importance to noodle theory because one of those grifters got a TV show.

This happened a lot through ronadeath: ludicrous Bubonic plague tier IFRs, people wearing masks in the restaurant, right data censoring on the IFR,  retarded epidemiological models, ventilators, fake news about overloaded hospitals, putting sick people in nursing homes where they infected and killed all the olds, the fact that it was aerosolized (and washing your hands or your mail or whatever was useless), “vaccine” failure, “vaccines” causing cardiovascular problems, vaccinating previously infected people, taking kids out of school, closing businesses down, disregarding treatments that work but weren’t as profitable as the bullshit they pushed on people. This is what people got outsourcing their thoughts to “experts” -a preposterous disaster. I managed to figure most of this stuff out myself. It required only a general knowledge of how infections work and grade school tier math involving ratios and the ability to exercise independent rational thought. You did have to read actual facts and figures rather than expert spins on them. You needed, say, to look at Pfizer’s data rather than listening to what some dunderhead told you about it. Pretty much everybody bought the militarized propaganda bullshit, nobody bothered thinking about this stuff despite being locked in their houses for two years with nothing better to do. They all outsourced their thoughts to the boob tube, the “experts” (who were all idiots, fools or malicious misinformation merchants) and the authorities, who look like this. Yes, you could have dismissed the whole thing as a pack of nonsense using physiognomy.

When I confronted intelligent, educated people about such issues: people whose entire self conception is wrapped around having a big brain, they caterwaul something like “how do you find the time for this.” Well, being locked up at home gave me a decent amount of time to think about such things. Regardless of how long it takes to figure things out in the middle of an apocalypse of hysteria (not very long): what good is being intelligent if you refuse to use your brain for anything beyond memorizing propaganda from the media? Remember 5 PR people per reporter: it’s worse now. It was much worse in ronatime; probably 50 or 100 PR people per reporter, accompanied by a mass hysteria.

I suspect some of these people don’t have internal monologues or if they do it’s a CNN/Marvel Comics joint broadcast, but it is of some importance we create filters for them. Better if we can find a way to activate their critical faculties which doesn’t involve hours of Socratic dialog.  I don’t consider meat puppets reciting propaganda at me to be fully formed members of the human race with a soul. Only people who think count as members of the human race, even if they come to inaccurate conclusions.  We have robots now who can fulfill the role of the ultimate redditor. Don’t need any more of those.

This kind of outsourcing your brain to experts is foreign to me. In post qualifiers time of grad school, we all rejoiced in having provably functioning brains by figuring things out for ourselves. Believe it or not, in the 1990s you couldn’t just google the answer to a question: you either had to walk to the library, look up an INSPEC reference and spend an hour digging in the stacks, or you could figure it out yourself. Mostly we chose the latter: it was quicker and more fun. Not just on physics matters: on everything. Nobody looked at youtube videos to figure out how to fix a wonky toilet, or determine the industrial and military potential of a country: you can figure such things out yourself with basic inputs. Most things in the world do submit to a small amount of rational thought. This is why we have nice things like stainless steel and Reed Solomon codes.

It’s unfortunate there is no Voight-Kampff type of test for sorting out rational humans from hylics who google or ask ChatGPT the answer to fill the vacuole between their ears. Tech interviews used to attempt this by asking how many golf balls you could fit in a 747; make the candidate think on his feet. Unfortunately there are only a couple of classes of obvious mathy problems like this, so at this point, the askers and askees both get the problems from the same books.  A reasonable approximation for this might be taking candidates and asking them to explain some societal sacred cow which is indisputably false, though this approach is probably illegal. Working out a problem as a team is probably still the best way, even if it screws over people with interview anxiety.

“I read it somewhere” is no excuse. The fact that you read it somewhere and uncritically shoved it into your noggin as if it were a F=MA or “this is how we calculate an eigenvalue” tier fact about it makes you a moron, whatever your level of education and faculty for rote learning. Your ability to put things in your brain and remember them isn’t useful if you put stupid things in your brain, which in current year is pretty much all contemporary things. That’s why people who are interested in the Future read old books. The old books contain overlooked ideas, forgotten ideas and where there is nonsense it is more easily dismissed than the latest propaganda all spectrum broadcast from the PR people. Antiquarianism is more futuristic than the current empire of lies and hysteria. An intelligent person who refuses to think is like a healthy person that doesn’t exercise; it’s a manifestation of laziness, cowardice or worse. Those who emote rather than think: you’re basically reduced to the level of animals. Aristotle said you are nature’s slaves.

In my early lab career I needed to fabricate this square yard plate of inch thick 304 steel into something useful by drilling lots of holes in it.  It was a bit beyond my skill: one of the holes was 2 feet in diameter, and 304 is bloody awful. After blowing up too many $20 mill cutters, we called in a real machinist. This was early 90s, so Pitt still had some cool mustache dudes who know how to do useful things like this. I don’t remember what his name was, or even how he accomplished all the big holes (boring bar with the big one), but I do remember he used to fuck with me. Just like in the good old days when I was an auto mechanic. His way of fucking with me was to tell me things which were obviously not true about setup of machine tools, flying saucers, women, eating hot dogs: whatever came to mind. Nothing dangerous; just the kind of thing guaranteed to blow up a milling cutter or getting mustard on my nose, or having a waitress slap me upside the head or what not.

Working class people do stuff like this all the time; little pranks -it breaks up the day. But the cool thing about this guy is he told me that most over educated people have this cognitive flaw; we’re credulous. We believe anything we’re told if it seems plausible, especially if we’re unsure of ourselves, which we mostly are. Nerds are learning machines; that’s why we get paid. Nerds don’t like thinking about stuff; they mostly shove things in their brains like fat people stuff themselves with doughnuts and pizza. Machinists are a bunch of working class dudes who don’t believe anything from this constant ribbing by their colleagues, and the fact that some of their colleagues are actual retards (note to academic/tech bros,  some of your colleagues are also actual retards: many such cases). They think and ask questions before they believe. “OK if I start with the cutter there, what will happen.” This is the essence of science and engineering.  Believing the guy telling you to put the cutter there just because he knows more shit than you is just setting you up for  a minor prank on  you.

The implications of this are immense; most nerds are insecure even within their intellectual realms. Tell them something technical, like the two years of “muh covid” baloney and they spin up their intellectual powers trying to understand the information put in front of them. No critical thinking is employed, they’re too busy trying to master the difficult material put in front of them, just like they did when they were a larval interlectual in skrewl.  It’s the same with any old marketing baloney. Many people believe the M2 architecture is faster than, say, my 2011 vintage Sandybridge stinkpad. Apple spent all that money on it, after all, it must have been a genius move for consumers who want computational horsepower, right? The nerd happily spreads his intellectual buttcheeks and spends all this time reading the wonders of the M2 as if it were actual information rather than marketing baloney (you know, disinformation). And of course every smart person knows about Moore’s law, so obviously it must be exponentially 13 years better than an I7 of 2011 vintage. M2 might be faster if you’re doing video codec crap, but it certainly isn’t for every day tasks. You know, like generic matrix multiply. That will make M2 weenies real mad; they are the smarties and Locklin is the dumbass right?

I blame Kebab if M2 results are actually faster here

I mean, feel free to check it yourself. There’s lots of anti-knowledge like this out there; propaganda or in the apparatchik parlance disinformation masquerading as information. People think Apple invested in this architecture for performance reasons because the propaganda tells them what a triumph it is. The reality is probably something like it’s easier for their developers to build to one architecture; ipotato and ipotatobook, and Apple gets to keep more value by not dealing with Intel, even though Intel’s chips are obviously better.

I often find myself completely alone in denouncing the most obvious and egregious impostures; nanotech, openAI, FTX, noodle theory, autonomous vehicles, quantum computing BS. When I do this, nerds are furiously googling up wikipedia articles trying to refute me because their self-conception involves being the smarty pants know it all who was a good little boy and studied hard qubit to make  teacher happy. When the market mean reverts and the line converges to reality rather than someone’s marketing to dorks, these nerds dutifully forget how wrong they were and move on to the next thing they’re going to be wrong about.

Putting aside the specific cases where I was right and all the sputtering  “well actchooally” nerds reading wikipedia articles were wrong. This dynamic of nerds falling for marketing hype and various crazes has dominated the directions of the last 60 years of research and engineering development. During the first decade of that timespan we got moon landings and integrated circuits, but compared to the period between 1900 (pre Wright brothers) and 1960 (post Sputnik), that ain’t shit. Worse; all the real progress stopped after the first decade: 1970 to present has been absolute shit. It has been shit in part because of this sort of credulity. Credulity begets crazes and makes such people the pawns of marketers who get free amplification from NPC nerds doing their science and technology ghost dance. We don’t live in a golden age of technology: we live in the age of propaganda and marketing. Virtually all visible technological development of the last 20 years is for the dissemination of propaganda and surveillance.

If a field has marketing associated with it: drug manufacture, tech, auto manufacture -the things you think you know are probably bullshit. We’ve established that the humble and relatively unimportant subject of machine learning contains  pervasive and amateurish marketing bullshit. You can probably find interesting things going on in subjects like Geology, petrochemicals or Archaeology with shields mostly down. For those who have to work in marketing infested areas, you need to be extremely bloody minded. Ask yourself how you could know if the claims are true, independent of someone making the claim. You absolutely must not listen to any experts without a complete “qui bono” analysis: you need to think through how the information in question got in front of your nose. There are no more “scientific americans” to do the vetting for you, and everything now published there and in other such legacy places is probably a lie. “Experts” are almost universally frauds.

The upside to all this is history has restarted and everything is up for grabs. The mass of bugmen LARPing as scientists, government welfare queens, bureaucrats, snitches, nerds and bums are weak: they’ve allied themselves with the other floundering Western “authorities” who are all-in on censorship: the precise opposite of the scientific process. Times like this are when things start to move and change. It’s not going to happen in existing large institutions, but it is going to happen.