Higgs vs. Epistemology

Higgs boson helps me learn about learning. Also I find a connection to hypocrisy in the latter part of the second section, which is primarily about my experiment regarding intuition.

It's hard, so let's give up. (Via.)

"For the rest of us, I suspect, the Higgs belongs in the same category as various other parts of modern physics: It is yet more evidence that the human mind, to the extent that it was designed by natural selection to truly comprehend anything at all, was designed to comprehend the macroscopic world, not the microscopic world."

From earlier,

"Wait, what does that mean? You mean if the Higgs boson disappeared, then the other particles would exist but wouldn't have mass?"

You understand a thing when you can play 'what if' and win. A lay article can therefore be written by simply listing all the answers to the game. So what, was my brain not designed by evolution? I don't seem to suffer from the handicaps I'm supposed to suffer from.




Reading between the lines, it would seem that Wright was told that the Higgs is the reason for energy-mass equivalence. Checking this assumption, and having to do more inference, I found that the Higgs is the reason certain particles have rest mass. (So, falsified.)

"Using the Higgs mechanism they found that the carriers of the weak interaction, the W and Z bosons, have large masses, whereas the corresponding carriers of the electromagnetic force have no mass."

Remembering that Wright disavows that this is correct,

"Higgs is like "molasses" that, by resisting the movement of all those non-Higgs particles, gives them mass."

Backwards. The laws of physics are better understood as a list of things particles cannot do. It transfers to them rest mass, therefore they can't travel at light speed. Everything else can, so it does.

Turns out, further down Wikipedia does explicitly state the scientific conclusion.

"the Higgs field, the proposed origin of all rest mass"

At least this shows they're consistent; though Wright's point may hold for La Wik too.




Returning to my proposal about a game of what-if, I'll state a couple hypotheses. If the Higgs field did not exist, all particles would travel at light speed. As light speed particles ignore time or equivalently see a two-dimensional universe, it would be a boring universe.
More importantly, the electroweak field would have seen no symmetry breaking, which is an even more radical departure from fact, though I can't say what specifically. The W, Z, and photons would all be more similar, with far-reaching consequences.

I will further hypothesize that W and Z bosons are excitations of the weak field, which inevitably also excites the Higgs field at the same place.




Higgs as Experiment Fodder for Intuition

I have previously made predictions about the Higgs.

"You shouldn't need a particle to couple particles to space - it would mean the Higgs either was recursive or has no position."

In other words, one of Wright's points is correct, I wrongly attributed bad science journalism to bad science. That said, I still caught the bad reasoning.

Because I found the causal link, I believe that my beliefs about the Higgs were a result of my beliefs about gravitation and space curvature.

Which means I'm deriving new truths without conscious effort.

This is consistent with my observations of others. I have been able to predict actions based on professed ideology. I have larger implication or inferential distance than average, which means I can consciously appreciate the connection between ideas that many subject cannot - however, they still act consistently with those ideas at these out-of-logical-eyeshot distances.

Which is a problem when the ideas are false.




A note for anyone wanting to replicate the experiment: some beliefs are taken more seriously than others, and only serious beliefs activate the subconscious inferential system.

In other words, there are at least two classes of hypocrisy. There's the kind where it does affect their beliefs and they say it doesn't, and the kind where it doesn't affect their beliefs and they say it does.

For example, you can catch unwary Christians in contradictions of fact about evolution.
If I bring up the evolution without priming them on Christianity, then ask them about Christianity, they'll claim their beliefs about Christianity don't affect their beliefs about evolution. (If I or something else primes them on Christianity and then I ask them about evolution, they'll go all sophistic, following the lead of their favourite politicians and/or preachers, trying to dodge the facts.)

A Christian who is also a paid evolutionary biologist will say their beliefs about evolution are consistent with Christianity, but they'll be different from the unwary Christian above; instead they will have beliefs consistent with their less religious colleagues.

I can only predict actions based on the former hypocrisy. The first is epistemic hypocrisy; they claim to learn and conclude differently than they do. The second is ontological hypocrisy; they claim they believe things they essentially don't. The first says it is raining but that's not why they believe the ground is wet. The second says it is raining but they don't believe the ground is wet.

Juxtaposition IV: Historian Tone and Atmosphere

Real history doesn't tell a clean political narrative.

I think this (via) is great, but it must be incomplete, because it tells a political tale. And frankly, I'm just bored of that kind of the tone.



This is different. Sadly not well compartmentalized - there's some horse shoeing, and some well-founded speculation on the industrial revolution, and to hear it I have to max my volume. But, looking at these next to each other, the difference is surprisingly stark.
I guess pure academics suck at presentation?



Note the main thrust of the first, that which he so strenuously strives to convince you of, is simply taken for granted by the second. Renaissance? The industrial revolution began in part 2000 years ago, when farriers first recognized themselves and plied their trade.

Democracy is the Opposite of Itself

Having written that you can find democracy, or freedom, but never both, I now look for indications I could be wrong.

Alan Macfarlane defines what he means by democracy. (Pathway.)

"Voting is a little bit of it, but it is the end product. [...]
In general it means a freedom to discuss, to talk about what you want to talk about. To act and to participate in running your own life. To form into organizations. And generally to take control of your life."

I must admit, by this definition, we live in a highly democratic society.

You may have noticed it is monotonically becoming less democratic, and has been since about 1830. Possibly since 1651, though I don't have good data about these periods. (Specifically I don't have enough to check for contradictions.) However, Macfarlane himself has furnished me with information showing that the democratic culture in England, as judged by this definition, goes back almost a thousand years. It seems he read Gregory Clark and was even able to extend the thesis.

Predictably, I blame voting. My proof holds - voting makes it legal to change discussion, self-direction, and association to be illegal, and every year more of these things indeed become illegal. Most recently, the freedom of American to associate with medical insurance companies has been outlawed, and they may no longer run this part of their life.

This may not seem to sit well with my belief that voting doesn't do anything. My habit of choosing words carefully saved me here - though I wish I'd remembered it in the article about voting. Voting does nothing for the voters, but it still makes changing the laws legal. Supposedly POTUS can change the healthcare laws because the administration was voted in.

Rest assured, the laws would have been changed anyway, though perhaps not exactly when they were. For example, when were the immigration laws changed? Where was the SCOTUS decision on that? There's a recent, mostly trivial case, decided apparently a couple weeks ago. Mass immigration started in what, the seventies, ramping up in the late nineties? Point is, decades ago.

Find the people who made that decision, and you've found the actual president of USG. They have a names and addresses, though I can all but guarantee no journalist knows them.

"Though only a part is voting for someone who acts as your representative." 

I'd much rather pay for a representative, because then I'd be able to fire them. Notice that I cannot dissolve the position in a democracy. Even though it has become obvious that presidents don't do anything, I cannot vote to not have a president. Who's really in charge here? Moreover, I don't even have a de-facto power to vote him out, because I don't own a voting bloc.

At least with a paid representative, I can withdraw my consent, as signalled by the withdrawal of the cash.

Platonic Calculations and the Business of Giving Assumptions

Given certain assumptions, there are certain logically inevitable conclusions that you can calculate. I realized I should ask myself, where do the axioms of Peano arithmetic come from in the first place? Who's business is it to dole them out?

Page 80. (Via.)

"I also emphasize that, when I insert the Platonic output of a computation as a latent node in a causal diagram, I am not making a philosophical claim about computations having Platonic existence. I am just trying to produce a good approximation of reality that is faithful in its predictions and useful in its advice."

Technically speaking to solve the problem you not only need the givens, but need to assume or be given the rules of logic themselves.

Isn't 678 * 987 equal to 669,186 regardless of how well the calculators are constructed, regardless of electronic glitches or damage in transit?

The normal thing to say is that it is equal to 669,186 regardless of any facts about the physical world. My answer is that logic and arithmetic are facts about the physical world. Arithmetic works because it ultimately describes physics, which means physics described it long before we did.




If the calculator doesn't display 669,186 I can conclude it is broken. There's the calculation it is doing and then the calculation it is (platonically?) supposed to be doing, and they're different.
Imagine I dump 987 piles of sand into one sandbox, each exactly 678 grains. If my subsequent fully vetted count isn't nearly 670,000, then either I'm not creating an analogue of multiplication, or multiplication doesn't work the way I think it does. For the former, my experiment design is broken, because physics doesn't work the way I think it does. For the latter, multiplication doesn't work the way I think it does, which means my understanding of physics is broken. Either way, not the sand's fault.

Thing is, in such a world, would it have ever occurred to me that the answer might be nearly 670,000? I submit: no. Even if it occurs to you that your world might be fundamentally different, it is impossible to work out how.

Verification: try describe a world where A=A is false. A!=A. What does a thing look like when it doesn't look like itself? If that works, maybe you can tell me what multiplication might have looked like if it wasn't what we've got. Or, what an alternate world would have instead of multiplication. If you try to tell me these things are platonically impossible, then I'll ask you how it knows it is supposed to be impossible. What stops it?

Things like this are probably impossible to prove. It questions questioning itself; it tries to verify verification. You need some framework to hang arguments off of, and here I am wondering how to get a grasp of the framework. A hand, trying to grab itself.




Which itself interests me. If I'm trying to make a hand grasp itself, how do I get the answer 'no' at all? Shouldn't my brain just crash?

Juxtaposition III: Elites,. Identity and Values

Pax 1:

"It's immoral to sell things like sugary sodas and tabloid journalism to rubes who are too ignorant to know they shouldn't want it."

Pax 2:

"If you give people what they want, and what they want is frowned upon by elitists who know better, this happens."

Schut:

"If you grew up on anti-depressants, can you ever know 'the real you'? http://on.wsj.com/OMbZNs"

Via Soto:

"Rousseau was also the unwitting founder of the psychology of the Real Me, that is to say of the inner core of each of us that remains immaculate and without sin, however the external person actually behaves."

If I were to write a post about how the 'real you' actually works, would it help? (Error for reference.) Summary: the real you is what you'd do absent having to appear respectable; alternately satisfying your real values. Social restrictions are singled out because they're arbitrary, unlike e.g. physical restrictions like having to eat.




The third includes narcissism.

"While I have normal jealousy, and issues with deception, raising someone else's kid isn't a big deal for me. They don't have my genes, so what? They'll have my ideas. I think this attitude is primarily genetic." There's some responses in the thread.


Spandrell:

"No, dear. Liberals don’t come from liberals’ babies. They come from yours."

I freely admit I have a liberal neurology. It is at least helpful for figuring out the deep causes of liberal actions.

Child Morality by Counter-Example

Update: called it.


This post is for anyone who thinks they need to hit their kids to make them behave. Or, less extreme, that they need legal authority over them, or even that they need society to back them up in unilaterally imposing rules on them.




I was punished exactly once by my parents and exactly twice by my school. Both school instances were due to me throwing a snowball at a tree. (Unless you count a stern talking-to, I don't.)

As for the one time being sent to my room, my mother asked me to do something and then I didn't, deliberately provoking her in front of guests. I was hoping she'd punish me and then she did. Later, she conditionally apologized for even that, and I tried to communicate that I'd done it on purpose without actually admitting outright it was essentially a cold calculation. (This is not the only time 'authorities' apologized to me after reacting to my semi-conscious provocation.)

I care deeply about morality. I make a point of not only not lying, but not deceiving, except in self-defence. (Though admittedly this is partly because it's a challenge.) By all means, point out what I'm doing wrong or might be doing wrong, because if it is something I haven't noticed, I'd like to stop.

Verification: was my school lax, or was I considered a good kid? Not using my parents because the situation is complicated and I bet you don't care.

On a few occasions exploited my reputation as one of the good kids to get away with breaking the rules and being tattled on. I specifically chose things I'd seen others get punished for. While amusing, I sadly can't do that anymore due to my no-deception experiment.




Which conclusion do you prefer: I'm some moral genius who doesn't need moral instruction, or are you simply wrong about how children learn morality?

If moral authorities should be able to hit their lessers to make them behave, then apparently I should be able to hit you to make you behave.

I'm okay with either.
I'm tired of the bullshit justifications for having it both ways.




Of note because in the past people always choose exactly the wrong moment to listen to me: once you start hitting your kids, it's hard to stop because the process is self-reinforcing. As I was only ever hit by other kids, I'm not sure exactly why, perhaps they acclimatize to the level of punishment. Though it seems to me that kids are so naturally obedient that if you send the message, "You won't behave unless I hit you; it's for your own good," and then you stop hitting them, they'll obediently stop behaving in support of that notion.

Update:

"Once these sacred relations become a society’s moral constitution, as in our “One Nation Under God,” they cannot be undone without risking collapse of the public order that secures personal welfare."

I read this as saying not-God morality isn't impossible, however God morality crowds out other kinds, which means once you have God morality, even if a better alternative is developed, swapping it out isn't a decision to be made lightly. Similarly, swapping out hitting morality isn't to be done lightly. However, if you have a clean slate....

Another Anarchist Psychology

I'd really like to find a philosophy or group I can get behind without reservation. Can't. They're all hypocritical, which means self-condemning. That and I just think they're evil. Even standard anarchy needs substantial repair. Were I monarch of America with America's megalomania, I'd end up declaring war on everyone, including every other internal faction.

Priority one is the the search for something I can support, but a very close priority two is figuring out how to live cheek-by-jowl with so much that I think the world would be better off without. Quite aside from the moral aspects, even America's monarch-equivalent doesn't have the power to rid the world of the things they wish to rid it of, and anyway I don't want to find or design a philosophy that only works for the top 0.1% of 0.1% of the powerful. (Not because it might be evil, I just find it lacks aesthetically.)

The key is that all these hypocritical groups most likely think the world would be better off without me. Priority one and two merge. The philosophy I can support is one that suggests I should be left alone, and travelling back through the mirror, that means that I leave everyone else alone, unless they won't let me.

Take this alone and you're already hip-deep in a thick mixture of anarchy, property, and freedom. Making me not an anarchist means showing me how the above plausible alternatives aren't giving back less than their opportunity costs. And aren't just kinda evil.

There's also hearty chunks of physical violence. If there were no other considerations, this would justify unlimited retaliation against anyone who doesn't let me leave them alone.

On the Resistance Against Imposed Taxes, and

I found one of my psychological foundations for being an anarchist, as in, not simply anti-schooling. It hit me when I read this, (via, emphasis mine):

"Thus, because in the Reign of Charles the First, resistance to Taxes imposed by the authority of the King alone was justifiable, and the contrary doctrine of having taken the names Passive Obedience and Non–Resistance, those terms became odious; therefore in the Reign of George the Third, resistance to Taxes imposed, by the King, Lords and Commons, upon America while not represented in Parliament, is justifiable also;"

Rulers impose taxes. That is, Hutchinson straight up admits that the subjects are physically forced to obey, entirely at the discretion of [insert ruler]. According to Hutchinson and fellow adherents to his philosophy, the King has his right because his stick is bigger than yours.

What has always bothered me is that Hutchinson thinks the 'Rebellion' is Wrong when it argues back using the same terms the King argues, force of arms.

The Rebellion and similar groups simply wish to put to the test the King's claim to right; does he have the bigger stick? What in fact happens if the Rebellion doesn't simply roll over when he voices his demands? Certainly I can see why King wishes not to have it tested, and thus why the King forwards a moral argument against it, but having put this King's reaction in the same plain terms Hutchinson puts the Rebellion's actions, it becomes plain that neither have the high ground. Sadly, it bothering me is a good indication it bothers basically nobody else.




Moldbug's summary of the period says England should have utterly crushed the colonies, just as America utterly crushed Iraq. However, just as the army was subsequently sabotaged in Iraq, Whig forces in England sabotaged the fight against the colonies.

The King in fact had a bigger stick, but could not impose taxes regardless.

Extrapolating the trend line, soon such a war could be fought and won without killing anyone at all. However, there's still a question of the exact mechanics of Whig sabotage. Just as prewar Hitler could get away with vigilante violence, perhaps Whig sabotage only works if the army is half on their side to begin with, and has no chance against determined opposition.