Science

(Not the Hakeem Jeffries part ;-/..the low probability of all that exists..from the animals and plants ..and I mean yeah..humans)

Though sans the math. Thanks I am saving this -I meant to do that calculation at some point and then I didn’t. Melvin Vopson is interesting. His work is kinda cool. But then he had a weirdly Discovery Institute flavored thing that is maybe trolling? It didn’t fit with ..he had all this cool work.

I have been vaguely glancing at some qphys and it is confusing. (Btw apparently Schroedinger was a pedophile…his wiki page is pretty vomitous).

Then I saw something by Carlos Rovelli over the week-end that gave me a sense of relief. He seems cool in general:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli

This! Isn’t this the intuitive understanding of reality? Why would you need a mind or observer?

If there is a multiverse, I am convinced that we are in one of the worst. Otoh that means the rest don’t suck this much. On the third hand that means like the pacificist from 3-body, I’d want to tell all the other verses, “Hey don’t let us in. We are crazy and destroying this beautiful planet with misconceptions about everything and elect Trump and consider Musk a genius and should generally be this loutcast planet at the very least if possibly not the entire universe”. If there is intelligent life out there, clearly we earthlings would be shunned and quarantined based on factory farming, mass extinction, war, religion, inequality, our multitudes of ecological crises (of which climate change is just one of the most urgent), overpopulation, resource overexploitation, slavery, rape and mass incarceration alone. Or worse, it is all like us. At which point, the whole universe should be banned from everything else as this like Omelas building douchebag universe. Including me of course. I would rather stay in this shit than go and corrupt everything else that doesn’t suck that is out there oblivious to us.

It makes sense in a way. I am in the lowest percentile in hard science and I have wasted more time on entertainment than hard science and my life sucks, but I am less confused and surprised than most by the state of the world.

The largely imaginary success offered by junk fueled economies aside, I am way more typical than the hard scientists whose output matches the input going into such an expensive species.

I don’t mean btw that hard science is all that is real. But the other real stuff is corrupted, shut down even faster or exploited even faster (journalism, social science, activism, politics, literature, philosophy etc).

If humans have all this science and tech of a type but no concept of anything less superficial you would have a world that roughly looks like this one and it wouldn’t really matter that much if these largely interchangeable and shallow pseudo elites had a sort of superficial diversity or not.

That is sometimes the sole piece of identity that is easily accessible.

I have been thinking that memory is identity. Not just episodic memory which is relatively easy compared to semantic memory. Mine is lousy because I never trained it well. It explains a lot actually.

I saw this years ago (its pop, but the rare piece where I go, that really makes sense):

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/let-their-words-do-the-talking/201712/looped-linear-thinking

If insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results, you can see why a stagnant, ahistorical global society like this stuck trying to repeat its greatest hits is going nuts. And why a ball of id like Trump succeeds (in accelerating destruction with public support, but then that is his goal) where expertise and knowledge fail.

I was also really struck by this piece:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-algorithms-a-little-memory-outweighs-a-lot-of-time-20250521/

I am trying to work out why everything sucks so much and I was reading Adam Becker’s books and Sam Miller MacDonald’s book.
It really makes sense that these lousy chatbots have the “smeared out voice of the internet”, as Becker puts it. If you are stuck interacting with such a thing after lousy human interactions, it would erode your sense of self.

That is why I think strong human semantic memory is the only real fix aside from real world action to pushback and kickout drivel.