Brain Droppings Sunday January 11, 2009

1.This panel video featuring Bernie Madoff, chaired by the journalist author of the book "The Myth Of The Rational Market", posted on youtube dec 12th, 2008, epitomizes the word "surreal". Probably because it's length, it only has 7,000 views. But I suspect my readers will enjoy it (it is quite informative about the recent history of American markets on its own terms).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gclja-C2sOU

2.TGGP, as for the white guy angle, like I've posted before, my intuition of general mythologies concerning race hasn't gelled into substantially coherent structure yet, but I think that's the overall commonality of the bundle of viewpoints and issue positions that are associated with Ron Paul (and Ron Paul enthusiasm) -that it's a package tailored to appeal at a psychological and emotional level to American white guys and fellow travelers, and doesn't have much coherence or logic beyond that. Since at least the post civil rights era, those type of packages have also been bundled with plausible deniability about the salience of pointing that out (in fact, one is supposed to be perplexed or take umbrage) -that something is a white guy space.

Here I'm trying not to be subordinated into a nontransparent battle of ideologies (the power of the racial myth in being able to turn almost all of us from empiricists into (sometimes nontransparent) advocates and ideologues is really striking to me, and that combined with Koch's description of consciousness qualia as arising from majority votes of neurons (or ncc subconstituents, or whatever) has reopened my interest in the possibility of groups of humans having their own conscious qualia that arises).

Because it seems to me none of us individually have a rational interest in promoting the interest of a race transparently or not, just like we don't have an interest in voting -as individuals we should be free riding.

Also, I've meant to take a step back from race and do a trial survey of what the biggest mythologies currently are in the world. I'd have to concede religion is big, but I'm interested in the subset of biggest mythologies in the world of social science experts, and also the ones most irresistable to social science experts.

It might be reasonable to classify them as more robust/competitive mythologies -- since social scientists are better able to resist the lure away from empiricism/positivism from mythologies like the major fundamentalist religions that nevertheless manage to capture the worldviews of millions globally.

3. I'd like to see a positivist social science study of status without a normative and/or prescriptive framework.

4. To what degree are white women the refs in a "working the refs" model of victim competition.

5. I'm extremely interested in Professor Cass Sunstein's office as Czar of Regulation. It's a good idea, and in the often weakly empirical, weakly consequentialist world that is legal academia, I think Sunstein is on the side of the angels.

6.  At some point (probably in the '70s or '80s) most people seem to have become ironic, situationally flexible racialists. We both aware of the (mythological strand) that there's no such thing as race, and we're aware that expert utilization stylized racial norms is one of the best social technologies available for status challenges and advancement. Any hollwood director or presidential candidate worth their salt knows how to do it. At a microsocial level, it's a major separator between social winners and social losers, in my observation. Think Howard Stern vs. Michael Richards, Bill Clinton vs. Bill Bradley. Incidentally, with the Clintons vs. Obama, I think we also see that whether one looks socially intelligent or not may have a lot to do with the talent of one's competition. It's not necessarily that the Clintons were unintelligent or ungifted in the 2008 campaign, I think it's more that Obama  just have much better social intelligence/technology.

7. A man, a plan, an apparent reality. Immortality? Probably not, but that's my aspiration.

8. I should be a Becker-like rational self interest optimizer, preserving what Koch describes as my conscious, aware, qualia, turning the rest of apparent reality into von neumann probes/computonium. That's what I've gathered is my theoritic optimized strategy. Unfortunately I have to adjust it down quite a bit because of my lack of apparent abilities and resources to pull that off. My likely reality seems to be that I'll struggle to survive, die of something, get cryonically preserved, and then at some point that will be destroyed and information theoretic death will result.

9. The essence of wisdom: I'm thinking about expanding spheres where different types of wisdoms, decision theory models, and strategies apply. In terms of space/social networks: self, social circle, culture, world, universe. In terms of our linear, incrementalized experience of time: far past, near past, present, near future, far future.

10. My thoughts on the phrase "magic negro" and the famous arthur c. clarker phrase "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". I think that captures well individuals with the social intelligence to rise above the stigma that causes barriers to others who share their stigmatized trait. We could perhaps add to that "magic white person" for Eminem or a '90s Bill Clinton, "magic puerto rican" to Jennifer Lopez, and "Magic Austrian" to Arnold Schwarzennegar, for example.

11. A large part of genius is domain literacy. For example, Prof. Hanson presumably has unique triple domain expert literacy in physics, AI programming, and the social sciences. That could be a working scientific/analytical vocabulary of 30,000 terms/concepts or more.

12. I like how radically transparent government is becoming thanks to the internet and grassroots wiki and video sites. I haven't been to chang.org yet but I mean to check it out. I'm impressed that people can comment, including rudely, on the president's weekly youtube address on change.org. The IDF didn't allow that on their youtube channel, which I think is telling given my past posts on comments policies.

13. Carl Shulman, thanks for dropping by. I encourage you and Michael Vassar to open up the comments on your great blog (don't make them subject to preapproval, or require registration). It'll just slow down the development of ideas on your blog, in my opinion. Plus it's annoying.

Comments

[TGGP]

I saw part of that video linked to before at Mises.

The Ron Paul campaign seemed primarily to consist of opposition to the Federal Reserve (because he's weird) and the Iraq war. Are supporters of those less white or male? I'll certainly agree that moRons/Paultards tend to fall into an SWPL-like type, but I don't think it was that much more white & male than other GOP candidates. It seems to me that politics in general primarily interests white males (especially the more educated ones), with the GOP being "the party of white guys". That's probably why Steve Sailer still seems to identify as one despite his contempt for the party leaders. There isn't much of a "gender-gap" if you only look at married women and the GOP likely benefits from the greater religiosity of women, but my guess is that right-leaning women tend to be less assertive and just vote for the same candidates as their husbands. Despite his own religiosity (which prevented him from giving a straight answer on evolution), my perception was that Ron Paul's supporters tended to be less religious weirdos and young people. I did read that his base of support was actually less white than the other GOP candidates (of course that's not saying much, but it's part of my point about the oddness of you singling out Paul among the Republicans) and he was one of the few who went to Tavis Smiley's All-American Presidential Forum and the Univision debate.

I'd like to see a positivist social science study of status without a normative and/or prescriptive framework.
I recall in The Bell Curve they talk about using an index on social status which was apparently just descriptive. The folks that created it probably have some published writings on the study of status.

To what degree are white women the refs in a "working the refs" model of victim competition.
That's an interesting angle. They are more conscientious/empathetic. I've accused Mencius Moldbug, who prides himself on being a dangerous/subversive thinker, of being afraid to discuss gender issues. He skipped over that issue.

It's a good idea
The office itself or selecting Sunstein?

Bill Clinton vs. Bill Bradley
I don't remember the latter bungling in that area. But I don't remember much at all about him.

I like how radically transparent government is becoming
You're the only person I'm aware of who thinks that's happening. Most people focus on secret wiretapping, putting the black marker on passages the government doesn't want published (even if they're already openly available at government websites). It could be those people are wrong to focus on such things though.