SelfAdoration.com

With no over-arching theme, here are some links to articles I’ve seen this week that I think are interesting:

Looking for a reality show worth caring about? A Dutch entrepreneur is going to use a reality show to populate a human colony on Mars. The idea put me in mind of The Man Who Sold the Moon.

Are economists little more than tools for tyrants? (h/t @jamesdeantx – James Pruitt)

Is IQ a valid measure of anything? Kindasorta — if nothing changes. But when rigorous education penetrates into formerly underserved populations, the Flynn Effect kicks in: IQs go up. So: Will online education bring on a “super” Flynn Effect? I think this is a wonderful possibility, potentially a massive increase in intellectual capital — the only true capital in all of human wealth. If you paid a ton of money for a bullshit academic education, you might not be quite as happy as I am.

Finally, when you are stuck waiting your turn at some government office, take a moment to consider the logistical nightmares of the Roman Empire. Standford has created a geospatial network model of the Roman world:

Spanning one-ninth of the earth’s circumference across three continents, the Roman Empire ruled a quarter of humanity through complex networks of political power, military domination and economic exchange. These extensive connections were sustained by premodern transportation and communication technologies that relied on energy generated by human and animal bodies, winds, and currents.

Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity.

For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.

Taking account of seasonal variation and accommodating a wide range of modes and means of transport, ORBIS reveals (more…)

My second Spreecast was better and worse than the first.

It was worse because we got hit with a few technical gremlins, resulting in the videocast being split into two segments, which are embedded below.

But it was substantially better because I had my first live victim guest, Brian Brady from sunny San Diego, California.

Brian was one of the winners in the Tea Party’s victories last night, taking a seat on the San Diego County Republican Party’s Central Committee. He and I talked about his win last night and about the Tea Party’s prospects in office.

These were my notes for the broadcast, fleshed out to a fuller summary:

• Tea Party victories — Detailing last night’s wins, especially in Wisconsin and California
• Anti-Occupy Santa’s Lap? — Was part of what we saw last night a counter-reaction to the childish nonsense of the Occupy movement?
• Big reforms — What might the Tea Party accomplish in Washington? What could we hope that they might repeal?

• Commerce clause
• General welfare clause
• 16/17th Amendments
• Sovereign immunity

• Repeal business regulation
• Eliminate agencies and departments

• Cut, cut, cut — This is what I hope will be the governing philosophy of Tea Party candidates
• Cut spending
• Cut taxes
• Cut regulation
• Cut government staffing
• Cut government-owned real and chattel property — especially weapons
• Cut red tape

• The family business — It’s hard to say “no” to people you like
• Earnest men of good will — get sucked into sanctioning atrocious crimes
• Power corrupts — and absolute power corrupts absolutely

Here are some links to articles I have written in the past about achieving a gradual reduction in the size of government:

• A strategy for the Republican party that can actually win elections
• It’s not enough for the tea party movement to throw the bums out. To contain the federal government, we have to cut its powers.
• A rallying cry for the Tea Party rebellion: “You’re not the boss of me!”
• A real-estate professionals’ guide to anarchy in the USA

And here are today’s Spreecasts:

I’m doing this again Friday (more…)

Come Spree with me today at 11 am MST. I want to play with Spreecast.com to see what kind of talk radio video magic I can make. I have some Big Ideas I want to take up, but I’m also interested in talking to people about their ideas.

You’ll need to take yourself to the Spreecast link for Man Alive! — The Spreecast. If you create a free account, you can participate, either by text chat or by video. The videocast will stream live, and then it will be available by embed forevermore. Spreecast is a very cool service, putting shout-show style video into the hands of ordinary people.

Updated: Here is the finished Spreecast:

No one joined me live, alas, but 43 people watched at least some of the Spreecast in real time. I’ll do this again tomorrow, and I hope you will join me then.

The audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find the SelfAdoration.com podcast on iTunes.

I’ve been sitting on this article from the Wall Street Journal because I had feared it would go behind a paywall. It seems to have survived that fate, and it’s an interesting read — a discussion of the widespread, banal and pathetic cheating that ordinary people undertake in their everyday lives. The article exists to promote yet another EZ-reading non-fiction book, and so, of course, it takes absurdly extreme positions:

We tend to think that people are either honest or dishonest. In the age of Bernie Madoff and Mark McGwire, James Frey and John Edwards, we like to believe that most people are virtuous, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch.

Do you hold that view? My experience is that most people are lying in stupidly inconsequential ways virtually all the time. They will highlight their virtues and conceal their vices, but mostly what they do is try — and fail — to portray the person they seem to think the people around them are looking for.

Because you have been indoctrinated to despise the self, you might want to condemn these pandemic dumb-shows as being “selfish,” but it is the self that is being destroyed by these abominable displays. As a ransom for permission to exist at all, we imagine that other people are demanding that each one of us hold the self hostage: You are free make manifest any behavior except those actions you most want to take. We are liars and cheaters not in pursuit of our values but only in their despite. How sick is that?

This is right where I live, of course, and people who live this life of lies — that is to say, most people — do not enjoy my company. That’s sad all around, but there is no cure for it except for those folks to change their way of thinking. I’m willing to help with that process, but I cannot cause it to happen.

Meanwhile, for all of me, this is the most interesting part of the article:

There’s a joke about a man who loses his bike outside his synagogue and goes to his rabbi (more…)

A free-wheeling anthropological history of the idea of conservatism — the fanatical preservation of the status quo — illustrating why you will not be released from your self-imposed bondage by anyone but your self. In other words, a typically light-hearted exploration of existential egoism.

The audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find the SelfAdoration.com podcast on iTunes.

My first exposure to the Khan Academy was a John Stossel video in which a public school teacher was bragging that her students were actually excelling in math, now that she was no longer boring them with her ed-school-cultivated ignorance. She wasn’t smart enough to leap to the obvious conclusion — what do we need her for? — but presumably the taxpayers can do the math. If not, they can learn how for free on YouTube.

The Khan Academy makes this promise:

With over 3,200 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, we’re on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.

It’s fun to watch, in the Stossel video, as children do what they should do, as an expression of their nature as human beings: Revel in the process of learning new skills. But it goes for you, too. If you want to pick up where you left off in the maths, the Khan Academy has what you need. History? Art? The sciences? Dig in. They don’t have foreign languages, but now that this model exists, that can’t be far off. And you can work from any browser anywhere, as well as from your smartphone or tablet computer.

This is what human beings can and should do. Every excuse you can come up with for refusing to improve your mind — money, time, resources — is gone. Your choice now is to step up to the plate in the world-wide agora or get left forevermore behind. How cool is that?

One of our cats scratched me on the nose about a week ago and I ignored the wound until it turned into impetigo. Consequently, I’m not all that pleasant to gaze upon, just now. I thought about doing an audio-only podcast, but I’m well and truly messed up by the antibiotics, so I think I’m just going to pass this week. If perchance you heart is broken, I vow to make it up to you. And now I’m going to change my dressings and take a nap.

From this week’s videocast, a short discussion of the nature of groups and why they are most fundamentally anti-self, and that a person seeking the benefits of self-adoration must anticipate that most groups will strive to frustrate that objective.

Just a couple of topics this week.

The idea of dead-end teleologies is vital I think. If your philosophical claims about human behavior are in conflict with your actual everyday existential behavior, the intellectual error can cascade into a self-destructive cognitive dissonance.

In that segment of the video, I dismiss Artificial Intelligence as a Dancing Bear Theory — an invalid conflation of canned-human intelligence with an illusory “machine” intelligence. From my past, an argument that current Artificial Intelligence theory has not and probably will not achieve the claims made for it:

Every organism is aware of its environment to some degree, but there is no such thing as computing hardware or software that is aware in this way. Siri is not as smart as a helpful child. Siri is not even as smart as an amoeba. Siri is not aware of anything, ever, nor is any other piece of AI technology. This is a fundamental ontological misidentification, and it is the source of all the absurd claims made about Artificial Intelligence.

We also take up the idea of organizations in general and their built-in propensity to frustrate, punish or purge the sovereign self.

What dishes more fulfilling could we serve up on Mother’s Day? We close with an appeal to win the world by Splendorday, August 21st, 2013.

The audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find the SelfAdoration.com podcast on iTunes.

Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson is a classic of freedom-seeking economic writing. Starting with Frédéric Bastiat’s idea of the seen and the unseen, Hazlitt takes the reader through one economic fallacy after another. It’s a wonderful book, a priceless value, but it can be yours for free by clicking the link above.

I’m going to quote one chapter below, to give you a taste of Hazlitt’s thinking. This book was written in 1946, just after World War II. If the dollar amounts Hazlitt uses seem absurdly low to you, do be sure to Chapter 22 — The Mirage of Inflation.

 
From Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

Chapter 18 — Minimum Wage Laws

We have already seen some of the harmful results of arbitrary governmental efforts to raise the price of favored commodities. The same sort of harmful results follows efforts to raise wages through minimum wage laws. This ought not to be surprising; for a wage is, in fact, a price. It is unfortunate for clarity of economic thinking that the price of labor’s services should have received an entirely different name from other prices. This has prevented most people from recognizing that the same principles govern both.

Thinking has become so emotional and so politically biased on the subject of wages that in most discussions of them the plainest principles are ignored. People who would be among the first to deny that prosperity could be brought about by artificially boosting prices, people who would be among the first to point out that minimum price laws might be most harmful to the very industries they were designed to help, will nevertheless advocate minimum wage laws, and denounce opponents of them, without misgivings.

Yet it ought to be clear that a minimum wage law is, at best, a limited weapon for combating the evil of low wages, and that the possible good to be achieved by such a law can exceed the possible harm only in proportion as its aims are modest. The more ambitious such a law is, the larger the number of workers it attempts to cover, and the more it attempts to (more…)

Richard Nikoley, owner of premier paleo-blog FreeTheAnimal.com, totally gets Man Alive! In consequence, Richard’s review of the book is full of interesting insights.

Richard made a Skype video of the two of us talking about the book. I think the conversation is interesting, but I am an uncontrolled fidget, so I can be hard to watch at times. The electric guitar I use in my weekly videocasts does a lot to slow me down.

Richard’s discussion with me is also linked below as an audio podcast, of you can find it on iTunes.

This is the first of the Skype video interviews I plan to do. In this videocast, I talk with Brian Brady, a California Tea Party activist and Ron Paul supporter, about a wide range of strategies for achieving greater political liberty in the America we live in now.

If you want to talk to me, I want to talk to you. I’m interested in talking about just about anything, and, as you will see here, a free-ranging conversation among actual human beings, as opposed to TV talking heads, can be very interesting.

An audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find it on iTunes.

A short clip from this week’s videocast. This segment evangelizes your ego.

There is no subject on earth so obvious that an academic won’t study it — on someone else’s dime, of course.

In the weekly videocast a few weeks ago, I mentioned that dogs dream, jokingly suggesting that this could be some academic’s Ph.D. thesis.

Guess what? The world we live in is beyond satire:

Fido’s expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy’s head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends.

The findings?

“These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals”

Really? No kidding? Who knew…?

This week’s video and podcast are linked below. The headline summarizes the content fairly badly, but that’s your incentive to watch the video, ain’t it?

The audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find it on iTunes.