The Quantified Self

The movement to capture and share all the sublime and mundane aspects of myself; to become the quantified self, naturally evolves from the emergence of B3aST. When I chart in detail my comings and goings I track my observable behaviors. Sleep patterns and calorie intake. Bike rides and movies watched. Weight and cardiovascular condition. All these things add up just like my opinions and musings in this blog.

The miracle of living life in public frees me from any effort to cover my tracks. I can be emulated by the Omega machine 'in the future' if I live my life in public 'in the past'.

Letter to Fallows: A Three Party Game

Political evolution does not care what we think. This is not a two sided chess match - this is a three sided game with the Establicrats, the Establipublicans and the Teapublicans. The Establicrats coalition together with the Establipublicans cohort want closure on their terms and the Teapublicans want to burn down the church to save the church. Sure, the budget has been passed and the result of that vote was that 'one side' won and 'one side' lost on the terms current in the dept ceiling debate. No one would look the other way if this was a criminal or civil trial and the defendant filed an appeal with a higher court. In this case, the Supreme Court on the matter of the 14th amendment which I believe is the actual end game. The Teapublicans desire nothing more than a 5-4 vote against the establishment's 14th.


Our position - the Establicrats and Establipublican position - is to treat the Budget already enacted as causation of a Dept Ceiling adjustment in a later vote. The party out of power, since the 80's has treated this Budget ceiling vote as causation of a Dept Ceiling adjustment coupled to a brief show stopper debate correlated with the Budget - Ethel Merman appears on stage and belts out a show tune as the first act causes the second act. The show stopper is a featured highlight on CNN in the past.

The Teapublicans are taking Hume's side - they are pointing out the naturalistic fallacy of the Establishment. In Hume's example two clocks in two adjacent towns peel the hour slightly out of synch. Firstville's clock peels the hour five minutes prior the Secondville's clock. The two events are correlated since the first bell does not cause the second bell to ring. Similarly, the Teapublicans treat the Budget and the Dept Ceiling as merely correlated.

Credit to your numerous well-thought out policy positions. But this is the province of game theory not policy. The dinosaurs of the establishment do not notice the appearance of the rodent-like Teapublicans. But the comet has already landed off the Yucatan peninsula. Play on.
stand by our establishment president
kirk holden
-----end ---
[This is a comment I wrote to Chris Mooney at the Intersection blog. .]

The parking brake on my car was designed to stop my car from rolling down hill while it is parked. An adaptation – a change in my behavior – can change the utility of the parking brake into an emergency brake. If all the brake fluid leaks from my brake system I can change my policy about only using the parking brake for parking to a new behavior – using the parking brake as an emergency brake when not parking. Try it. You can adapt too.
What drives biological/cultural evolution? This is just inclusive fitness at work. See Hume for a better solution to your numerous objections about what ‘should’ or ‘ought’ to happen with politics and emergency brakes. I don’t like Darwin on my front porch either. But as my son the Biomedical Engineer says “Evolution doesn’t care what you think.”

Comment in The Intersection 27Jul2011

The Intersection 27Jul2011

kirk Says:
July 27th, 2011 at 11:24 am

------------ end comment ----------------

I have become officially neutral on the dept ceiling debate. There are three parties now. The Establicrats, the Establipublicans and the Teapublicans. The Establicrats coalition together with the Establipublicans cohort want closure on their terms and the Teapublicans want to burn down the church to save the church. Sure, the budget has been passed and the result of that vote was that one side won and one side lost on the terms current in the dept ceiling debate. No one would look the other way if this was a criminal or civil trial and the defendant filed an appeal with a higher court. In this case, the Supreme Court on the matter of the 14th amendment which I believe is the actual end game.

Our position - the Establicrats and Establipublican position - is to treat the Budget already enacted as causation of a Dept Ceiling adjustment in a later vote. The party out of power, since the 80's has treated this Budget ceiling vote as causation of a Dept Ceiling adjustment coupled to a brief show stopper debate coorelated with the Budget - Ethel Merman appears on stage and belts out a show tune as the first act causes the second act. The show stopper is a featured highlight on CNN. Over and over and over again.

The Teapublicans are taking Hume's side - they are pointing out the naturalistic fallacy of the Establishment. In Hume's example two clocks in two adjacent towns peel the hour slightly out of synch. Firstville's clock peels the hour five minutes prior the Secondville's clock. The two events are correlated since the first bell does not cause the second bell to ring. Similarly, the Teapublicans treat the Budget and the Dept Ceiling as merely correlated.

Credit to your numerous well-thought out policy positions. But this is the province of game theory not policy. The dinosaurs of the establishment do not notice the appearance of the rodent-like Teapublicans. But the comet has already landed off the Yucatan peninsula. Evolution does not care what you think.

-----end ---

[This is a comment I wrote to Chris Mooney at the Intersection blog. .]

The parking brake on my car was designed to stop my car from rolling down hill while it is parked. An adaptation – a change in my behavior – can change the utility of the parking brake into an emergency brake. If all the brake fluid leaks from my brake system I can change my policy about only using the parking brake for parking to a new behavior – using the parking brake as an emergency brake when not parking. Try it. You can adapt too.

What drives biological/cultural evolution? This is just inclusive fitness at work. See Hume for a better solution to your numerous objections about what ‘should’ or ‘ought’ to happen with politics and emergency brakes.
I don’t like Darwin on my front porch either. But as my son the Biomedical Engineer says “Evolution doesn’t care what you think.”

Comment in The Intersection: 26Jul2011

The Intersection 26Jul2011

kirk Says

"Most if not all deniers I talk to have a random collection of facts rather than a coherent theory/hypothesis/conjecture about the relevant facts. They ‘know’ (can report a knowable fact) about Gettysburg from a tour of Gettysburg where they absorbed some facts while they ‘know’ (mere belief or revealed wisdom) that the South shall rise again.The default position of these folks is that ‘everything happens for a reason’ and they pray for revealed reasons not discoverable reasons. The motivation to tie everything up in a bundle drives them to further lunacy regarding causes and conditions. Their mental machinery is constantly associating the ‘right’ reason we can coherently compare apples and suitcases – not even the wrong association of apples and oranges."

Remembering My Future

"The core function of memory is to imagine the future. Memory is not designed to perfectly replay past events; it is to flexibly construct future scenarios." -- Tali Sharot, The Optimism Bias, Time, June 6, 2011

When I hold a spoon in my hand I do not usually expect that it will turn into a fork while I hold it before my eyes. I can surely imagine the case where this might happen - I just did by stringing together a useful string of letters from a set of 96 symbols rank ordered in the ASCII code for English type. That is  ['0','1','2', ... ,'9'] U ['a','b','c',...'z','A','B','C',...,'Z'] U ['period', 'comma', ... ,'bang'] or the union of the sets 26 lower-case letters, the 26 upper-case letters, the 31 punctuation marks and the 10 numerals.

We both participated in a multiplexing between minds a shared meaning for my statement about spoons turning into forks. According to Steven Pinker, we all share minds in evolved primate brains which depend on conceptual semantics as a model for human thought which he calls the stuff of thought. From this construal, minds share through spoken or written language the common ground for the shared experience of the cosmic environment. Conceptual semantics rides on top of an admixture of mechanisms evolved over time to improve our guesses about what happens next.

The most common model for minds since Aristotle subdivided the mind include experience, memory and computational means for cognition. As the quote above indicates, we use memory primarily to make improved guesses over time about what happens next. So where does the mind come together in our brains to bootstrap memory, experience and cognition (computation)?

We are not born with innate concepts like written language in the same way that we experience spoken language. Most mammals, birds (a type of dinosaur) and insects have innate communication means. Birds sing and ants produce pheromones to communicate. But what is going on in the minds of the multiple hearers and readers?

Letter to Fallows: Texas Lightbulbs Redux

Nothing comes from one particular place anymore. Everything comes from everywhere now. I can focus on the proximal location of what caused my light bulb to come to me but I am really just focused on the last robot or human that touched my light bulb. My light bulb came on a boat and a truck that came from everywhere. My light bulb is offered for sale in a Walmart that came from everywhere. I buy the light bulb with money that comes from everywhere. I light up my kitchen table that came from everywhere. Even if I made my own light bulb, the the chain of custody of the electrons from the generating fuel to the power lines - comes from everywhere. The world is everywhere.

sbo finacially sane p
kirk holden

from James Fallows jfallows@gmail.com to Kirk Holden date Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 11:06 PM subject Re: Airplanes and Lightbulbs

Yes indeed. Will follow up.

All the Gods are Belong to Us

Blue Berry Flavor is Best

I do not believe that I can eat an entire 747 jumbo jet no matter how small each bite is and how much Diet Coke I have to wash it down. By the testimony of evidence, I can change my mind immediately after I down the last bite. The last bite falsifies my provisional belief (Popper) or starting hypothesis (Bayes). I would like to believe that all my beliefs are similarly based on observed facts about the world and my interaction with the world.

This is all there is.

The world and the stuff in the world are all built from the elements manufactured by second generation stars. That is, the inward pull of gravity versus the outward pressure of electromagnetic radiation in first generation stars - the stars that formed first - after the big bang 13.72BYA. The gravity crushed H and He atoms into carbon, nitrogen and the other elements that make up the planets in our solar system. The 747 comprises these elements, primarily Al, as I do. We are both natural objects in the natural world. This describes my belief in the natural world that I have checked with experts in the sciences and have in turn continuously improved my hypotheses about the natural world.

Sam Harris states that the minute Jesus descends from the clouds (can Jesus appear on a cloudless day?), we can begin collecting evidence for a Theory of Jesus. My unmotivated belief that Yeshua ben Yoseph did not die  - or for that matter never lived - is not a belief that I can possibly falsify absent the newly emerging Science of Jesus.

If I say that John has learned that Dewey defeated Truman or discovered that the moon is made of green cheese I am strictly wrong. If I say I think there is a Jesus or I heard that there is a Jesus I am at least justified in holding a provisional belief that these may be true pending my usual skeptical inquiry. Knowing, learning and discovering are called factive verbs. These are bounded by observable and reproducible facts about the world. I do not accept bald or unconditional belief. I usually say that I have provisional beliefs about the things that I have little or no supporting evidence for. I use factive verbs about places, people and events with a chain of evidence demonstrating a determined effort to plow through a sea of established fact. Theories embracing most of the facts are falsifiable. Beliefs about the supernatural world are not falsifiable. Beliefs about the 10000000 gods are not falsifiable. In fact, most statements about the gods have been disprove. There is not any more evidence for Yahweh than for Zeus or Odin. Science did not discover or learn that Odin was completely discredited because of discoverable news about Yahweh.

My Double Bromance

I have a provisional belief that no supernatural beings of any sort have any effects in the real world. If an episode of the TV show Supernatural unfolds around me I will change my provisional belief that no supernatural happenings have ever occurred to a new Theory of the Supernatural. I have waited 54 years for the evidence to emerge and I am happy to wait patiently for another half a century. Further, other people - all the other people - that regale me with stories about 'things that go bump in the night' often mis-use the language. These folks tell me that they have discovered facts about Jehovah. The fact that all ancient texts make conflicting claims is completely demonstrable.

A Jesus sighting is a positive exception to my Theory of Nature. That is, none of my rules of fact production about Jesus predict any fact finding about Jesus. Jesus on Doppler radar would be a real or positive presentation of a new fact. The belief statements about Jesus are negative exceptions to the Jesus Myth. None of the predictions from this theory have ever been observed. There should be a body of evidence about a divine Jesus but there is not.

I claim that I am an atheist because I have as yet not seen evidence of theos. The spirit in my spirituality is Yeat's Spiritus Mundi or Hobbs mortal spirit of Leviathan. When I jump into Barton Springs I experience sublime ecstasy and spiritual uplift. Gaia does this by cooling the clear water to 68degF so that I can feel the natural world in all its forms before 9am when the swim is free.

That's how this atheist rolls.

2 pounds of tender, bone-in Faith

Let's say for argument that faith is that package of chicken thighs I bought at HEB on Tuesday. Here is what I know about faith.

Faith is eternal because HEB chickens are eternal. I know this because every time I shop for chicken thighs at HEB there are chicken thighs for sale. Occasionally HEB will test my faith by not having my faith in stock. In such cases I prey for renewed faith - I ask the butcher for faith through Grace (the butcher's name) and in most cases my faith is restored.

My faith promises me satisfaction - and it delivers! My faith furnishes me with hope - more delicious meals than without faith. What is your brand of faith? Mine is better because some HEB stores are open 24 hours.

The Ordeal of the Ordeal of Change

In The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer continues his deconstruction of mass movements fueled by the true believer - that person willing to subjugate an empty, autonomous and free life to an ideology calling for revolution. The sense of belonging for each individual negates the real feeling of loss from an autonomous life - a life of post-modern isolation under the rubric "I am a free man."

"We are [discreet] sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove" [Author unknown]. Hoffer claims that we lose our sense of an individual self or free self when the communal sharing of villages and farms gives way to modern urban 'separateness'. Hoffer never veers into postmodernism but relies on the idea of well constructed tropes of Nationalism, Christian-ism, Islamism, Communism, and the other isms. These are not authentic solutions - these are the dreams of the intelligentsia which is inimical to the status quo and eager for sweeping change. The pundit class is not authentic because, according to Hoffer, after the initial impetus for disruptive change, the pundits will run to the front of the mob and claim the leadership as 'protectors of the one true faith". The true believer who joins the mass movement is guaranteed to be gob-smacked by the author of his manifesto.

The other point that Hoffer makes points to the roots of the mass movements embrace of change. In a completely static population - the society in the common configuration for all humans from 200,000 years ago to emergent civilizations 12,000 years ago - no one expects change or looks to change because, quite simply, there is no empirical evidence that change happens. It is just one damn thing after another with all the days, months, seasons and years blending together into a seamless Ground Hog day of experience. Not a lifetime of experience - a single day repeated from birth unto death. No slave anticipates change. No slave holder agitates for change.

Hoffer's example is the Democratic Greek city states in which 30,000 Free citizens of Athens depended on the slave labor of 200,000 non-citizens. The rulers had no interest in change. Plato's Republic was a bulwark against change, any conceivable change, because humans had taken control from the gods and we could never recover from that change. All change was deterioration according to Popper's The Open Society and its Enemy's. Hoffer emphasizes this point often. Change never comes from the top because the top does not want to go anywhere. Their condition may continuously improve because, see fig. 1, they get first crack at any new thing. But there is no motivation to share any good thing with the masses.

This is Hoffer's greatest contribution to my thinking - leaders that promise change are base liars. The established institutions of a civilization must preserve the civilization in its current state or budgets will be cut, the shrubbery will not be watered, and the guy in the corner office may lose his job. But here is the surprise (for me) in Hoffer's construal of events; the far away change of the slave society, the far distant change of the bureaucrat, or the 'around the corner' change of gradual prosperity give rise to mass movements only for immediate change. But more importantly the ideation of mass action comes from gradual improvements for a population.

This is key to Hoffer. Change smarts over and over again in the modern world. New technologies supplant old and individual productivity rises. The gradual change whets the appetite for continuous change but change feedback to the masses as seeds for revolution.

My current hypothesis regarding the rise of the Tea Party has changed much since reading The True Believer and The Ordeal of Change. I looked for small improvements PRIOR to the formation of the Tea Party and I believe I have found these sources of incremental, positive change per the Hofferian paradigm:

1. George W Bush tax cuts
2. George W Bush wars of choice
3. Barack Obama's health care plan

The Bush Tax Cuts were built to buy the vote of the tax payer. Remember how the tax break was delivered - each of us got a check in the mail. We were never shown that the percentage decrease in tax rates was lost in the noise. If this payment had been a tax credit instead of a rebate no voter would have noticed. If and when the tax rate increases we will not get a seperate bill for the new tax and it would not matter if we did. A mass movement once started does not notice that things get slightly worse. Mass movements start with small improvements in living conditions.

The Iraq War swept everyone up in Nationalistic fervor. We loved our tanks and Cruise Missiles and were taking charge of a world gone mad. We enjoyed the war because we felt gradual change toward a rebuilt client nation with proven reserves of petroleum. Afghanistan not so much. Let's face it, we ignored Afghanistan to death. The overall impression for a mass movement of patriots started when it got extremely popular to become a patriot. Everyone had a yellow ribbon magnet. The original hippies had all been punched in the face by the Tea Party hippies who were now on medicare. We got a shift toward a surveillance state that seemed like a good idea at the time. A mass movement win.

The notion of 'change around the corner' for healthcare is weak but I am leaving it here as a cud to chew on. I got nothing. Back to reading his Holiness, Sir Eric Hoffer.

Ordered Flesh

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am told that the most efficient producer of the ordered flesh of a chicken - a chicken egg - will soon be bested by biotechnology. Vat grown flesh is not ordered flesh though. The current state of synthetic protein resembles bologna or hot dog wiener. I stuttered my dissent - I was imagining that chicken DNA from chicken sex would always rule the roost. I yield the floor to my son the biomedical engineer; it will be too cheap and plentiful to matter where it came from.

The first thing that results is the mere taste of a thing or more likely the specific and universal 'tastes like chicken' polling of test subjects. Does vat grown protein in fact taste like chicken? Then we have all come out winners.

Z now

Z now

The Z now contains all things, all volition, all action, all speech, all thought, all being. Z is my position in the complex plane. I am at an instant Time = 0. I am at a place in the Mandelbrot Set - Z natural. I become Z next. The absolutely, optimally fit ensemble of dispositions.

The procession of all instances of Z over time and space is the Mandelbrot Set. Znext = (Znow)^2 + C. At any present interval - a unified or holistic specious present - will to power emerges. The motivation of the will or the intent is caring, the fruit of caring is action, livelihood and speech. Z is the ground of all being.

The Dream Now radiates from Z natural and I try to stay on this carrier frequency. The frequency of the Imagination Laser. The collective Dream Now of 7B mortal souls of the world-wide Leviathan. The zeitgeist of Spiritus Mundi.