Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I wanted to write yet another essay on my opinions about intellectual property. They have become more clearly defined in my mind over time. Now, keep in mind, these opinions are based on a holistic view – if one were looking at the human race from the outside.

My first observation is that anti-piracy measures have cost us all millions of man-hours. the FBI warnings that can’t be skipped, all the thousands of hours developers have wasted on anti-piracy measures despite the fact that ultimately any media (music / movie / what have you) cannot be made pirate-proof because there is no closing the analog hole. Anti-piracy hurts the human race and the only reason it exists is there are some morons who can’t do the math and can only feel tall if they know someone else is short.

It also hurts us in other ways. To the extent that law enforcement and the CRJ wastes time on these frivolous claims by multimillion-or-billion-dollar-entities about people with almost no money, it’s wasting the time of those systems, and to the extent that they actually choose to punish piracy, it’s hurting people who have committed no real crime. It’s a sign of how deeply fucked up our world is that we would put someone in jail for stealing something that A: they couldn’t pay for and that B: that isn’t *gone* once it’s stolen. It shows that we let exactly the wrong people drive the bus.

My second observation is that piracy *helps us*. Now, I’m not speaking here of piracy done by people who could afford the content. They’re being asshats, screw them. Them as have the resources should pay for content – as I do, now that I do – so that content creators will have the resources to continue creating content.

I’m talking about the 12 year olds copying music, the people who barely manage to pay their bills pirating movies, things like that. In the first place, I made a argument a very long time ago that their piracy is just a form of de-facto librarying – humanity has certainly purchased enough licenses of this content that isn’t in use at any given point that you can think of what they’re doing as just using library copies in a more efficient way. but beyond that, they also help us all in several other ways.

First of all, exposure to ideas in movies, music, books, etc, makes people’s neural networks grow. Our brains physically change state when exposed to new input. So these people are helping themselves grow and become more intelligent and capable – or more SOMETHING anyway – which thusly is helping humanity as a whole have more people who are bigger and more complex. And, let’s face it, it’s not like these people were going to pay anyway. They don’t have the money. No one is losing any money, some people are just too awful to share.

Second of all, having a number of people who are familiar with the same books and movies and music gives us cultural references than enable us to communicate more clearly. So these people are aiding humanity as a whole’s ability to communicate.

Third of all, to the extent that these people enjoy their pirated content, they are adding to the net happiness of humanity as a whole.

I want to mention a few more things about intellectual property while I’m at it. First of all, you have to remember that intellectual property *existed before we found it* in potentia. As I’ve talked about before, any digital content is already sitting on the number line, existing in a abstract sense, before we do the work to concretely bring it into this world. Not only that, you can make infinite copies of any digital asset without reducing in any way the value or quality of the original. (In fact, as I discussed above, the original *gains* value when it becomes a cultural rosetta stone)

It’s also true that one number might well mean two different things depending on what codec you run it through. So you may find yourself (in a really odd world) in the bizarre position of, for example, having a digital image that’s identical to a MIDI file that contains a hook that already exists. As soon as you start thinking about the absurdity of, for example, someone claiming they own the number ‘2’, you start to comprehend the insanity of our system that allows someone to camp on any idea – when the same idea might have occured to many, many people. It’s a safe bet that across the universe musicians on millions of planets have landed on the same chord progressions as sounding good – once you start looking at infinity and eternity it becomes clear that we’re never the first to play these notes or think these things.

Intellectual property is a band-aid to try and make our already broken resource allocation system work for content creators. Personally I think – as I’ve discussed many other places – that it’s time to invent a new resource allocation system because ours is deeply flawed in ways that are reducing the net happiness of most of the users – and I do think it’s important to think of the needs of *all* the users in the system, not just the most mercenary.

Be very suspicious of any information that is tagged with instructions to make a copy of it. (This includes most religions). In general, useful truth does not need to be tagged with a engram making it a virus in order to be viral. Therefore you have to question the validity and value of information that is tagged with viral engrams, as well as the motives of the people who made it viral.

So, one of the things I occasionally feel resentment about is my desire to spend large numbers of hours exploring music combined with the recognition that the world almost certainly does not *need* these things (and the odds of me being better than anyone else at creating music are vanishingly small). One thing I have thought about is how my actions would be different if I *knew* the nature of the universe.

In particular, if I knew that I was in a single-person video game style simulation, I wouldn’t be concerned about the needs of the world and just what I could get away with.. I work more than I need to to support myself, partially to help out other people and partially to hone my skills in the hopes that I can participate in either the singularity or the mass automation in such a way as to help increase the general freedom of humanity.

But, I have to go with the assumption the reality that is presented to me is “real” and that the suffering of people is likewise real. On the other paw I am not willing to be completely selfless and give all my energy into things that advantage other people. So I try to balance out time to do the things I want to do (like exploring music and artificial neural networks) with things that the world will pay me to do because presumably it needs them done (system administration and a lot of not very exciting coding, mostly)

Some of the possibilities as to “what’s going on” that have occured to me

*) This whole thing could be a accidental side effect of some other system – our type of life inserts itself into entropy flow – we might even be moving from system to system, tapping different entropy flows, without us being aware of it.

*) This could be the work of a creator or creators. That might *also* be us, or it might be a seperate, distinct entity.

*) This might be a massive multiplayer simulation. In that case, it might be that the plot is driven by our decisions or it might be that the plot is on rails.

Unlike other people I have met I tend to think the people I talk to are not me, so I tend to think whatever we’re in has some sort of networking or multiple participants. I do wish sometimes that I knew what the most efficient choices to make were in order to optimize for reducing the suffering of others, and then could do cost-benefit analysis of the various actions I am taking in order to find some sort of optimized path forward that contains adequate time of me doing the things I want to do for my own reasons vs helping others.

One of the topics I do occasionally worry about is what if there just isn’t a objective reality? Since we know that our minds are easily powerful enough to generate a experience of reality being created out of whole cloth, this seems possible. It would explain how for some people the Jan 6 USA misadventure was a bunch of tourists on the lawn while for a bunch of other people it was a armed insurrection, for example. It could of course go a lot further than that. It’s a worrisome concept, because it can’t be disproven – but if there isn’t a objective reality I’d really like to reprogram the simulator so that *my* reality is more what I’d like to be doing.

So, I was having a conversation with a friend who pointed out that the US was dangerously close to a birthrate at which bad things would happen. I inquired further as to what they meant, because as far as I knew we were nowhere near a low enough birthrate to risk food production, power, technology, etc. It turned out what they were referring to was “the economy”.

This really underlines to me, not that I needed it underlined, how dumb our current patchwork quilt of rules surrounding resources is. Greta Thunberg had pointed out the folly of a system that exists to perpetually try and get higher and higher GDP – there *obviously must be a point* at which this will fail if GDP is tied to physical resources because physical resources available are a bounded resource.

Now, of course, our economy is doomed to failure for other reasons as well – it is tied to the idea that everyone must have a job and that simply isn’t realistic in the world of increasing mass automation, and it fails to recognize the value that many people who don’t have a official “job” bring to the overall picture.

However, if we were to chase the idea that we perpetually must have more children in order to continue to have GDP rise off a cliff, it would inevitably lead to the extinction of the human race. We have to come to understand that we must live in balance with the system we’re living off of, and we must find ways to live on nature’s interest rather than the principal.

This doesn’t necessarily have to mean losing quality of life. I still like best the idea of shaping a neurological operating system that enables us to experience vast riches by copying access to experiences from mind to mind – think of it as video games, only without the computer hardware. We might need some computer or technological help to pull this off – and we certainly will have to learn to build really trustworthy computer systems before we can do this, which will mean completely taking money out of the development of operating systems because money corrupts, in general, everything it touches, at least from a making-it-trustworthy point of view. It drives via competition it until it reaches a peak, and then it drives it into corruption and off a cliff. At least, that’s my current perspective – I gesture you to Windows 10, not to mention the state of the US health care system, as examples.

Anyway, my point remains. We *MUST* design a better resource allocation system or we must accept that humanity will be extinct within a century. Our current system will chase ever increasing GDP off a cliff.

We almost certainly are *above* the carrying capacity of the planet – we can see this in ever dwindling supplies of all sorts of key resources. We need to be reducing our population, and our current RAS will not encourage that. When people talk about how Americans are having less children because they “cannot afford them”, that sounds like *good* news to me

So, I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before or not, but it popped into my head last night and I thought I’d write about it some more in any case.

It’s generally taken for granted by most adherents to darwinism that the fitness function in play on Earth is whether or not a organism survives to reproduce.. and I have to admit, given the results of DNA tests this has a high degree of plausability, however it is easy to imagine a situation where it isn’t actually true, or it’s true but future incarnations of DNA sequences depend on fitness results beyond mere survival.

I am of course thinking about my kittens – often a kitten will ‘survive’ (which just requires coming home with a nonzero amount of coin in it’s little kitten pouch on it’s collar) but still be culled by the algorithm because it’s not good enough (for example, only the top 10% of kittens usually move on to the next generation, and there are also things (like asserting buy and sell at the same time) that will get a kitten cut.

If there were things like this in play on earth we might not be aware at them, both because it would be easy to develop both fake and real DNA (this is the assuming-the-operator-of-the-universe-is-Loki sort of thing) and also because we might have real DNA but still be living a iterative series of lives in which only the top few percent of each generation move on to the next simulation. And that’s before we even get into discussions about the multi-world interpretation and the possibility that we are wandering from universe to universe based on the decisions that we make.

A interesting idea to play with is how something like a genetic algorithm might interface with something like quantum immortality. Not a particularly *happy* idea, though – if no one can actually die, then the people who draw a bad hand genetically will end up worse and worse off.

So, the other day I called a friend I hadn’t talked to in a few years, and discovered I had again waited too late to call someone back. It’s not that they were dead (although I’ve had that happen too) – but the conversation went something like (me) Hi! (them) Hi, Buddy! (me) How are you doing? (them) The grass is in the chest (me) What did you say? (them) I see. It didn’t improve from there either. Dementia strikes again ;( If there was any connection between my statements and their responses I couldn’t find it.

In some ways I think it’s actually harder when someone is fading in that way than when they actually die. Because there’s this tantalizing ‘almost’ about the link, like there’s this sense that you’re just in a bad reception area and if you moved things would get better.

Another reminder to stay in better touch with the people I love 🙁

So, I ran across a tape of myself from my young adulthood, which I found kind of horrifying to listen to. I can’t decide if it was the pretentiousness or the privilege that bothered me more. I guess I would like to think I’ve grown up some since then – what a long strange trip it’s been.

I’ve often mused about how if I hadn’t been exposed to scary random violence as a child – which was in essence nobody’s fault, it was a case of mental illness – things might have ended up much better with one of my relationships – it wasn’t that they were all that violent, it was that I could not handle even the slightest whiff of violence because it resulted in bits of me replaying earlier traumas, as it were.

It does often bother me that the person who exposed me to random violence as a child is still triggered by things I did that I have already apologized for, but never considers that I might have problems with the things they did or that they could possibly owe me a apology. Then again, maybe 20 years from now I will think I was in the wrong in everything. I don’t know.

Listening to tapes from my childhood and young adulthood was .. sad, and weird, and hard. I guess I thought I’d do better than I have done, in relationships, in friendships, in life adventures. Of course, I still haven’t let go of the illusion that I will someday be a rock star. Just gotta climb one more mountain first. (Undoubtedly I am a much better musician than I was at the start of COVID, although whether I’m good enough to draw a crowd remains unknown. I have to sort out this paw injury issue and then shed for another 500 hours and then I’ll probably be ready to write and tape some more.

I do have a few fans.. which is interestingly different. I have a lot of friends I miss – there’s some irony here in that I often go missing for weeks or months at a time as I get interested in something and start chewing on it, but now that all of my friends are also doing that I find the holes in my life difficult. I do sometimes wonder how many people would even notice if I disappeared tomorrow. Then I remind myself I’m lucky that number isn’t zero, which it almost certainly isn’t.

So I guess I’m kind of in a Harry Chapin place – our story in the journey between heaven and hell, with half the time thinking what might have been, and the other half, just as well. I do hope post-COVID I do a better job of living my best life, with maybe a little bit less time writing code that won’t matter 5 years form now and a little more either writing code that *might*, writing music, or seeing friends. Love you all, miss you all. I’ve had entirely too many reminders in the past year that you never know when people are going to check out.

So, as I rant about conservatives, one thing that worries me is that I may be somewhat a victim of confirmation bias, or worse yet, input enhancement.

I’ve talked before about how every adhrent to every religion sees their religion validated in the world – and my theory that part of how this is achieved is by filtering out all the data that is obviously inconsistent with their beliefs. At times I worry – as one does – that the reason I see all this horrible behavior from conservatives is that I have come to expect it – and I’ve come to expect it because I’ve seen it, and I’ve got a self-reinforcing suboptimal setup for my input filters.

The challenge there, of course, is to expect something other than what I’ve seen.

So, I’ve been mulling over things that I wish my parents had told me – and of course, given that my memory is a swiss cheese, they probably *did* tell me some of these and I just don’t remember it.

Anyway, I figured I’d make a few blog posts on the topic over the next few years and see if anything good popped out.

#1: The important thing is not who you love or what you love, but that you love. Get involved, get engaged, be interested in your life. If your life isn’t interesting to you, adjust things until it is.

#2: You are the author of your own story, and you get to decide what kind of character you’re going to be. You don’t get to decide what happens to you – that’s something the universe will decide – and your ability to bend the universe is much much smaller than it’s ability to bend you because of the relative size of you and the universe. However, you do get to be whoever you want to be, and that’s important. Make sure you are the hero of your own story.

#3: If you stand upon the shoulders of giants, you can achieve wonders. This doesn’t mean that you need to get a education as sold at a ridiculously high price from the commercial education system, but it does mean you should learn from those who went before you. Libraries and the wikipedia are both free. Read and learn and try things and fail and get up and try again.

#4: The master has failed more times than the apprentice has tried.

#5: It is worth doing hard things. Dare to be a badass at something even though it costs you thousands of hours of hard work. You’ll like yourself better for it.

#6: My friend Cygnostik has a great quote – “Everybody is born unique, but so many die as copies.” I could also quote Enigma here – “Don’t accept average habits. Open your heart and push the limits.”. You are only here for a limited time, you are going to die as we all do. Try to make the time you’re here worth having come.

#7: Thus far, when I look back on my life, most of the things I regret are the things I *didn’t* do.

#8: One of the secrets of life is balance – in particular, balance between risk and reward. There are a lot of things that risk-averse people will tell you not to do that have significant rewards. On the other paw, there are also a lot of things where the risk outweighs the reward.

#9: Don’t do anything you don’t want to remember having done.

#10: Another song quote “You’ve got to do what you can to keep your love alive – try not to confuse it with what you do to survive.” Almost none of us are lucky enough to get paid to create the art we want to be creating, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t engage your creative side early and often.