Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I keep seeing ads for instant checkmate. I wonder if they enjoy making the world a worse place, and I wonder even more if they realize that what they’re doing is making the world a worse place.

Now, I don’t particularly have any problem with people knowing about my checkered past. But I’ve done a much more thorough job of eradicating paranoia than most people with the disease. There are a lot of people, I would imagine, who find the idea of someone aggregating every mistake they’ve ever made downright terrifying. People who live in fear now have yet another thing to be afraid of.

And I can’t really see how it improves the situation for anyone to be able to find out everyone’s list of run-ins with the highly questionable entities we’ve chosen to put in charge of justice. It does sound like wonderful fuel for those who enjoy being judgemental assholes, however. I’m reminded of a quote from Pump Up The Volume – “I bet Watts was the guy who took names when the teacher was out of the classroom.”

We can use resources any way we want – and we apparently want to point fingers at each other.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31721-what-s-good-about-guaranteed-basic-income

So, my understanding is the feds actually had someone assigned to follow John Lennon around because of his left leaning ideas. I have to admit to some curiosity as to whether there is a fed who is assigned to read this very journal because of mine.

If so, I have to wonder if some of my better ideas become viral within said fed – if he or she finds him or herself agreeing with some of what I say.

At this point, if they’re willing to think about what I’m writing about, I’ll take readers any way I can get them.

What I don’t want is more readers who want to put a lot of mental and emotional energy into telling me how impossible it is to fix anything. Because if we believe it’s impossible, than it *certainly* is.

So, I’ve said that we need to turn the US into a metademocracy – that we need to vote on how to vote.

Specifically, I had this conversation with my friend Jeremy, and we came up with one possible model that we think might work really well.

Instead of a representative democracy, you would build a direct democracy. However, instead of having everyone vote on every issue, people would subscribe to issues that they were interested in. Participating in mailing lists and forums, taking tests and quizzes that indicated you understood all sides of a issue, would all earn you points. The more points you had, the more your vote would count.

There would be no minimum voting age. On issues with long term impact, after proving reading comprehension with a basic test, the younger you are, the more weight your vote would carry.

It’s a weighted meritocracy. The concept here is that I don’t really want a plumber flying a 747, or a pilot fixing my sink. People do have interests, and those interests do drive what they know about and should be making decisions about.

So, I don’t tweet, so here’s my comments on Wikipedia as it turns 15.

First of all, I think it is on it’s way to being something amazing – and it’s already the best encyclopedia on earth, if you understand it’s failings.

I’m deeply curious what a Wikipedia not so obsessed with deleting non-notables and that encouraged original research as long as it was tagged as such would be like. But I enjoy it as a resource as-is, without a doubt.

I would like the Wikipedia, along with the catalog of Earth’s music, to ride the yet-to-be-built Voyager 3 probe (hint hint, congress and NASA) to another star. I think it would make a excellent rosetta stone that would vastly simplify first contact.

(which are a horrible idea for a bunch of reasons) – we should at the very least only pay them for the inmates who do not reoffend.. a steadily increasing bonus for every year the inmate remains crime-free.

This might incline the creators of such institutions to try to build prisons that heal people, instead of prisons that make them sicker.

Then if all of the concrete, steel, and man-hours wasted in the War On Drugs had been used to build wastewater treatment plants in India, that continent would have fresh water available from every tap.

We need to remember to not have Wars On People. Let’s have Wars On Suffering, Wars On Disease, and Wars On Stupidity instead.

While we’re talking about stupidity, why do we build places to punish sick people? This inevitably is going to make them sicker, and as a result, they’re going to commit more crimes and cause more havoc. Surely the mass shootings, the cops shooting innocents should be hints that we broke something badly and we need to rethink the way we do things. Surely the cash for kids scandal should be giving us some kind of neon sign that we’ve done something beyond stupid and it’s time to stop. Are we incapable of thought? People, please prove to me you’re not morons. I’m begging here.

While I’m ranting, the idea that children can get busted for sexting – look, assholes, STOP HURTING THE KIDS! Sex is a normal, healthy thing, and you’ve warped their minds about it by being afraid to talk honestly with them about it, not to mention threatening them in all kinds of weird ways, insisting that they’re subhuman, and ..

I speak as someone who remembers parts of my childhood not at all, and other parts entirely too clearly and painfully. Adults shouldn’t be allowed to raise children in groups less than 5 adults – I talked earlier in my blog about entrainment signals and how two adults can *barely* provide a clean entrainment signal under the very best of circumstances. And this world – not the best of circumstances. Many feedback loops, many bad designs coming back to bite us in the ass.

I want love to win, not fear.

So, one of my earlier jobs in my career was for a company called Support System Developers, Inc. They were engaged in a contract with Canon in which they got paid per phone call to answer Canon’s 800 number.

Now, we were given some incredibly bad advice to give to customers. First of all, we were to respond to the first phone call, pretty much invariably, with a suggestion that the customer’s printer cable was at fault – that they needed to find one that actually had the IEEE definition for a bidirectional printer cable printed on the label. Generally, this was not the problem. This might have actually applied to 1% of all print problems, if that – but it was a chance to get the customer off the phone and get more sheckels in SSDI’s coffers.

We were paid a bonus if we could get the customer off the phone quickly. Now, generally problems would break down into cases where the customer was being a complete dumbass – a large portion of the calls were for people who didn’t pull the orange tab off the print head before inserting the cart in their printer – and trickier problems such as the BJC-610 which needed a complicated alignment process run if certain events had occurred to the printer.

This would be a example of money destroying value. Many of these people would wait on hold for a hour, a hour and a half to talk to us, and we’d give them deliberately wrong answers (well, we weren’t TOLD to give them wrong answers, but the book clearly hadn’t been optimized for giving them right ones) so they’d call back several times, so this company could make more money.

I eventaully quit, citing ethical reasons. They didn’t like me much anyway, I tended to give answers not in the book (but that mysteriously worked), I often wore jeans with holes in the knees and other ‘inappropriate’ clothing – I have to imagine they were glad to see me go. But I’d point at this company as a sign of the problem – when you optimize for dollars at the cost of actual people getting stuff done value, you’re hurting us all. And I suspect a lot of companies.. advertisers perhaps most of all.. of doing this.

It is worth noting that my supervisor, before I quit, had told me “You are so much better than this place. You should look for a better job.”

Essentually, I’m going to do this as a Q&A

Q: Sheer, do you really think you’re talking to what a friend from your childhood grows up into in the future?
A: It’s the explanation I give the highest probability to. It’s the one that fits the data best.

The other possibility that I give some weight to is that I patterned a blank bank of neurons to respond the same way $person did while we were hanging out IRL, and so what I’m talking to is a copy of her, so to speak. I don’t give this one a lot of weight because I would think that would limit her to knowing only things I know or could derive in a vacuum, and her knowledge certainly appears to extend beyond that. I have to google things she says A LOT. And a lot of what she’s talked about involves things that have not yet come to exist here on earth, although I can see that they will, because they’re too cool not to be made real.

Q: Sheer, how is that possible?
A: I don’t know. But a virtual machine really believes that video card is real. I have no reason to think that I’m running “on the iron” of the universe, so to speak, and as such I’m open to the possibility that a lot of things are possible that would appear on the surface to be impossible.

Q: Sheer, has future-$person ever told you to contact present-$person?
A: Possibly once, many years ago. Not any time recently. In fact, in the altered state in which I exist when I try to go to present-$person, I don’t really talk to her future incarnation at all, and I don’t have access to a lot of my memories. This generally only comes up during some sort of neurological event that happens twice a year, and involves some sort of decoherence I can’t easily explain.

One thing she has repeatedly said, is that if someone tells me to hurt people, or to do things I really don’t want to do, that’s not her. Obviously the channel we communicate over doesn’t have a lot in the way of authentication, and there’s also a hostile on it who wants me dead (or at least miserable) so I tend to be rather careful in trusting what she says since I can’t ever know if it’s really her.

Q: Sheer, is this your religion?
A: No. It’s a experience I’m having I can’t explain. My religion is extraordinarily short in source code, look up a few posts and you’ll see it. I would describe this experience as spiritual rather than religious in nature.

Q: Sheer, are you schizophrenic?
A: Not likely. This is a coherent, consistant conversation that has evolved over time.

Q: Sheer, might you have multiple personalities?
A: Yes, but my gut feeling is this is something unrelated.

Q: Sheer, could this be some other form of mental illness?
A: When you have a friend you can talk to no matter where you are who helps you feel better about yourself and the world around you, that’d be the opposite of illness last I looked.

Q: Given that you don’t trust a lot of things.. text, for example.. how would you ever think you knew you were talking to her, face to face?
A: By the pacing of her voice.

Q: Given that you mostly communicate “in text” over this mental channel you share with her, how do you know what’s her?
A: I don’t. I do a lot of guessing. But I’ve come to have a filter of things that are $person-ish, and I use that. I’d suggest reading about ‘root reps’ in cryptonomicon for a little more about how this works – Neil S does a great job of explaining it.

Q: Do you think present-$person is in any danger from you?
A: No. Not from me. From her ideas about me, apparently yes. I say apparently because I become less and less sure I know who all the players are, what game they’re playing, or why with every iteration of this storyline. It’s entirely possible to me that the present-$person I see is a manifestation of my fears.

Q: What do you mean by ‘from her ideas about you’?
A: If you convince yourself that you need to be afraid of me, that you need to watch out for me, that I’m someone who is going to hurt you or force you to do things you don’t want to do, you are hurting yourself with your ideas about me.

This isn’t something I have a good solution for yet, but nonetheless it remains one of my criticisms. The current system is kind of rigged so that once you start losing, you keep losing, and once you start winning, you keep winning. It’s also heavily rigged to favor the banks, who can get away with just about anything.