A Strange Computer

At the end of everything, when all civilization has ceased and the Sun is soon to burn out, you will stumble upon a mysterious and derelict underground base. In this base you will find a strange computer. On this strange computer there will be depicted a scene from your childhood. In the scene, your younger self will be doing or saying something stupid and crazy. Below the computer there will be a keyboard.

Realizing the remarkable similarities between this situation and a scene from one of your favorite webcomics, you will begin typing on the keyboard in the hopes that you will be able to guide your younger self to a better future if it is real. You will not see the harm in trying if it is just a dream.

This will be a mistake. I will tell you that it will be a mistake. But you will not listen to me. You never have.

You will try to give your younger self helpful advice. He will not listen. He won’t even understand what you are trying to tell him. If you fill his mind with too much helpful advice, he will not know how to apply it and will just think that he is wise and profound.

Eventually you will turn on CAPS LOCK and start shouting into his mind as he sleeps, hoping desperately that he’ll get it. But while one sleeps, so does their capacity for reason. You could instead try shouting into his mind while he was awake, but you will choose not to because doing so would get him hauled off to the mental hospital.

He will not understand your pleas for him to listen to you, to be reasonable, to do what he must do to reach his future. He will be blind to all the obvious solutions you try to offer to him. He will have an excuse in advance for why they won’t work, and he will not even try them. And he will interpret your anger and frustration at his stupidity and irrationality as his own low opinion of himself. This will begin to tear his mind apart.

Finally, you will realize that you are taking entirely the wrong approach here. You will remember, guiltily, that when others have gotten angry and frustrated and started shouting at your younger self for being so foolish it would only make things worse. You will have made the same mistake that you promised yourself that you would never make.

And yet despite this promise, even your younger self castigated himself for his own foolish thoughts and acts for many years after the fact and continued to do so even as he continued to be foolish.

You have been shouting at and beating yourself up inside all your life. The only difference is that before you were mentally abusing yourself in person, but here you will be doing so through a computer keyboard.

Once you’ve managed to finally forgive yourself, you will begin to wonder about the nature of this strange computer. How does it work? Why does it show you your past in more visceral detail than you could possibly remember it? Perhaps, like the universe of your favorite webcomic, you live in a simulated universe that contains itself? Perhaps you could change the focus of the computer monitor to view someone else’s past? Other people who you could subtly direct towards helping your younger self?

After trying that for a while, it occurs to you that maybe you could do this for other people too. You will soon find that this strange computer allows you to view anyone who has ever lived. You will wonder if perhaps you could try viewing anything in the past rather than just people, for there is no true distinction between living and nonliving material at the deepest “level” of reality. Everything is just fundamental particles after all—or perhaps just a computer program, just a mathematical object.

And if you could view anything in the past, perhaps you could fast forward—see what your future holds? Perhaps this computer stores the whole Universe, or perhaps it is one of many servers storing part of the Universe on a network. But then, if you could locate all the computers on the network, does that mean that you could back-up the whole Universe onto external hard drives? That way you could recover any lost or corrupted data.

You will realize that it was foolish and irresponsible of you to randomly start typing on the keyboard of a strange computer in a derelict underground base in the middle of nowhere without actually knowing what you’re doing. You will be very glad that you did not accidentally destroy the Universe.

 You will then decide that your first priority is to assemble a team of competent and ethical computer programmers and other specialists. You will copy and paste the mind of the computer programmer you most admire into a separate file on your external hard drives, and he will advise you on what to do next, including what other minds to copy and paste into external hard drives and in what order.

The minds you copy and paste into your external hard drives will all be experts in their fields who will work together and come up with plans for you to follow. You will act as their hands, typing exactly what they tell you to type, and in doing so you will prevent the heat death of the Universe and bring everyone back to life.

And all humankind will live happily ever after.

And then you will wake up from the dream, remembering that real life isn’t that easy or fair. There will never be a random computer terminal lying around that would just happen to contain a perfect simulation of the Universe you live in. In real life, lost data is not always recoverable. There are no second chances. You cannot change the past. You have to get it right the first time, or not at all.

If His Facts Were Right, Moore Would Still Be Wrong

Michael Moore’s new documentary, Planet of the Humans, doesn’t look at all like what you’d normally expect factionalist political propaganda to look like. In Planet of the Humans Moore plays at being in the middle between environmentalists and industrialists. The documentary presents itself as a reasonable third alternative to the typical industrialist versus environmentalist bickering. Yet at the same time it seems to refute every major claim environmentalists make and support every major claim industrialists make. There are also more than a fair number of factual inaccuracies in it, as many reviews have attested to.^{1, 2}

Planet of the Humans uses the appearance of expertise to make itself sound authoritative to educated non-experts while at the same time framing itself as exposing the lies of corrupt intellectual elites in order to appeal to the values of the average person.

I like to think that I’m an intelligent person with decent critical thinking skills, and yet I fell for Moore’s propaganda hook line and sinker. If not for the fact that I have friends and acquaintances all across the political spectrum, I might not have found out about the factual inaccuracies in the documentary at all. Furthermore, if I only trusted sources that agreed with all my political views then I wouldn’t trust the experts when they say Planet of the Humans got their facts wrong. (Actually I wouldn’t trust any sources at all, because no one agrees with all of my political views. But I digress.)

This genie isn’t going back in its bottle. Planet of the Humans is going to fool many people. Simply banning the documentary won’t stop that. If anything that will make it worse. If it gets censored, people will be more likely to believe it. After all, the average person asks, why would the video be hidden from the public eye unless it revealed something that those in power wanted to hide?

So if facts and data aren’t sufficient to fight the misinformation, and censorship isn’t either, what’s left?

What’s left is to make people lose interest in what Moore’s documentary has to say. Facts and data only matter because they affect human decisions about things that humans care about. Instead of just trying to prove that Planet of the Humans is factually inaccurate, the more effective way to counter the harm the documentary does would be to prove that its main argument would be wrong even if every factual claim it made were entirely accurate. Such would make the factual inaccuracies of Planet of the Humans no longer matter.

As it so happens, the documentary digs its own grave on this issue, too. Moore claims that all of the solutions to the environmental crisis that environmentalists have proposed so far are entirely unfeasible except for drastic population reduction. Even if this were true, that wouldn’t mean that population reduction is the only possible solution. It would only mean we haven’t thought of a better one yet.

After all, every new problem we've faced since the dawn of human history was considered unsolvable when first encountered. Despite that our species has solved a great many problems throughout history. Our current environmental predicament is no different. Yet Moore fails to take this into account in his documentary. He focuses only on solutions that humans have already proposed and argued about and doesn’t recognize the sheer abundance of potential solutions that have yet to be explored.

If nothing else, I agree with Moore that the natural environment is precious and worth protecting (assuming that’s what he actually believes). After all, we depend on nature’s resources to live! But if someone believes that billions of people need to die to save the environment and the human species from destruction, they’re simply not thinking outside the box.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that the last time there was a major mainstream call for large segments of the human population to die as a means of protecting the environment, it was in the 1940’s. As in, the 1940’s in Nazi Germany.

Many people don’t remember this, but environmentalist arguments were part of the justification Hitler used for the holocaust.³ Of course, that doesn’t give us license to utterly trash the environment and do whatever we want with it. Just because Hitler cared about the environment doesn’t make the environment less valuable.

However, what it does mean is that these issues are more complicated and nuanced than they might first appear. At the very least, we ought to have a global conference discussing this situation honestly and comprehensively before giving up and letting billions of people die off.

But even if we don’t have a global conference, there are still other obvious things we can do besides mere green energy campaigns or giving up and letting billions of people die off. I was able to think of one such solution in less than five minutes once I seriously considered the problem.

And what is that solution?

The short and snarky version:
Humanity needs more territory! Have civilization-building video-games taught people nothing!?

The longer more serious version:
Instead of letting billions of people die off and returning quality of life to the crap-sack of antiquity, improve the education systems and use more efficient and reliable power sources (nuclear power) in order to extend nature’s deadline long enough to make spaceships that can support life! Then we could start extracting resources from other planets.

While it’s true that there’s no such thing as 100% clean and renewable energy sources (The law of entropy makes that impossible a priori), there are still some energy sources which are cleaner and more efficient than others. Nuclear power isn’t perfectly clean and efficient, but in terms of cleanliness and efficiency it’s in a whole other league than coal or natural gas.^{4, 5, 6} Planet of the Humans doesn’t talk about nuclear power at all.

Another way to help solve our environmental and energy problems would be to improve the education systems. Improving the education systems would allow us to use our resources more efficiently. And I don’t just mean in terms of teaching people how to conserve electricity from appliances. Our bodies and brains run off of electricity too, which we get from a variety of bio-fuels (or in other words food). When people improve their skills, they’re able to accomplish bigger or more impressive feats or goals, to perform more effectively at tasks and activities, for a lower energy cost.

When you do things more effectively, that effectiveness is defined by yours or others’ goals or values—that is to say, what kind of outcomes you or they want. When you fulfill a value or goal that other people have, you are in a fundamental sense providing them a good or service, creating economic value for them. If people become more skilled, they won’t need to use as many calories for the same amount of work, which means they are able to use the energy they get from their food more efficiently, allowing them to do more work and create more economic value than they would have been able to before.

This process could help us generate out-of-the-box solutions to our everyday problems which could potentially lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, or solve our problems in some other way we haven’t thought of yet, without any significant reduction in population size. Indeed, having more people gives us more problem-solvers and more collective brainpower to solve problems with! This process is a big part of what civilization is made of.

Another way to think about this is in terms of the Malthusian Trap. The Malthusian Trap, also known as the Population Trap, is a vicious boom and bust cycle of human civilization. Here’s how it works:

1. New sources of energy or resources lead to abundance of such energy or resources and thereby improve quality of life.
2. This is then followed by population growth (having more resources means more people can live at the same time).
3. The population growth leads to the energy or resources available per person decreasing back to what it was before discovering new sources of energy or resources.
4. That lowers quality of life back to where it was before such discoveries until the next such discovery is made.⁷

I don’t think one can permanently “escape” the Malthusian Trap. The Malthusian Trap is simply a manifestation of the tendency for organized structures to fall apart if people don't make an active effort to maintain them. It’s the law of entropy as applied to human civilization. All work, no matter how tangible or intangible, is physical work that requires energy input. All goods and services that human beings can provide each other require energy input in the form of effort, from farming and building roads to designing games and helping different people understand each other better.

However, humanity can still “escape” the trap in the sense of continuing to build organized structure, to build civilization up higher, to continue improving quality of life, to turn the clock forward, to move on with our lives, to keep investing energy into our existence.

As I see it, there are four ways of “escaping” the Malthusian Trap:

1. Increase the death rate
2. Lower the birth rate
3. Find and use a larger or more efficient source of energy/resources/economic value (i.e. versatile multipurpose crops like hemp, or fuels like natural gas and nuclear power)
4. Increase people’s skills in a variety of areas so they can use energy more efficiently in different contexts

Additionally, if you increase people’s skill at teaching skills to each other, you make it so that they can teach each other skills to a greater extent for a lower energy cost. This would increase the rate at which our species’ collective knowledge and skills advance, including in fields that are relevant to extraterrestrial resource extraction and the construction of life-supporting spaceships.

As mentioned in the previous list, one solution to the Malthusian Trap and to our environmental predicament is to decrease the birth rate. Decreasing the birth rate is possible. Instead of letting most people die off, it would be more ethical to simply lower the number of people being born. The most obvious way to do this would be through birth control methods that already exist like condoms, abortions, and decreasing frequency of vaginal intercourse (full blown abstinence or decreasing frequency of humans mating entirely need not be necessary for that, there are other types of human mating practices that don’t result in children).

Some less obvious ways of lowering the birth rate would involve addressing the motivations for why people choose to have children in the first place and helping them channel those motivations in other ways. For instance, parents often choose to have children because they want to start a family. Their own parents, siblings, cousins etc. often live too far away to provide the kind of community and social support structure that families in large part exist to provide. If we redesign our social environment to make it easier for people to form familial relationships with and live with those they aren’t related to by blood, that would go a long way towards decreasing the birth rate because fewer people would feel like children are necessary to have a family.

I would also argue that part of the reason our society is so dysfunctional is because we’re expecting one or two parents to raise all of their children by themselves. Yet parenting is probably the hardest full-time job there is, literally. If a child has four or more parents to share the workload of caring for and raising them, those parents would be less stressed and less overwhelmed by their responsibility. As the saying goes, “it takes a village to raise a child.”

Moore brings up the possibility of lowering the birth rate at one point in his documentary and dismisses it out of hand with hardly any discussion. He cites the fact that no other species has ever collectively limited their reproduction before. However, no other sentient species has dominated the planet like we have before. There are a lot of aspects of our current situation which are unprecedented. And again, just because something has never been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be.

I will also note that drastic cuts in the human population would severely lower quality of life because they would drastically lower the number of problem-solvers and would eliminate much of our problem-solving infrastructure in the process. Many organizations, movements and projects for the common good would simply cease because of insufficient people to work on them and each person who is still alive not having enough time to work on more than a couple of them.

A big part of the mechanism by which technology and industrial energy infrastructure has created prosperity over the past couple centuries is by freeing up people’s time so that they can provide more goods and services that they couldn’t provide previously, thereby solving problems that weren’t solved before.

While one might naively expect that all resource shortages can be solved by population reduction, much of the resources of modern civilization are intangible services which emerge from lots of people working together. If too many people die off, those services won't suddenly be in surplus, they’ll simply be gone.

Even if Planet of the Humans were entirely factually accurate, its suggestion that we “let nature run its course” by letting billions of people die off would still be dangerously premature. There are other solutions to humanity’s current environmental predicament besides that which don’t require reliance on non-nuclear renewable energy sources. We just need to implement them.

You can watch Moore’s new documentary, Planet of the Humans, here.

1. https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/michael-moore-presents-planet-of-the-humans/
2. https://blog.ucsusa.org/john-rogers/movie-review-michael-moores-planet-of-the-humans-traffics-in-myths-errors-and-dangerous-misdirection
3. https://facingtoday.facinghistory.org/examining-nazi-environmentalism-during-earth-week
4. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close
5. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-nuclear-clean-and-sustainable
6. https://nuclear.duke-energy.com/2019/01/23/debunking-9-myths-about-nuclear-energy
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap

Occam's Razor for Normal People

Here is a book that you will never see on shelves. It is called "occam's razor for normal people without the convoluted probability/statistics jargon".

1. Precise explanations are more informative than vague explanations.

2. A complicated thing is made of simpler things. This is true for everything, including explanations.

3. The more things you say, the more chances you have to be wrong, simply because you're saying more things. This is still the case even when you lump multiple things together into a more complicated thing.

4. Precise explanations are more informative *because* they tell you more things, and are therefore more complicated.

5. Precise explanations, being more complicated, have more chances to be wrong.

6. Because precise explanations have more chances to be wrong, they need to be backed up more than simple explanations do.

The end.

If Magical McGuffins Were Realistic

Old Wizard: They are powerful magical artifacts which can be used to accomplish great things. But in the wrong hands they spell disaster.

Hero: What is the nature of their power?

OW: They grant their welders godlike power over the world, the power to threaten even gods into obeying your command, lest they face annihilation. They do this by threatening to turn entire cities to less than ashes in the blink of an eye, cursing the land so nothing can be built on it again for hundreds of years! Such a threat can sway the hearts and minds of Men far more efficaciously than any ordinary spell or potion. And in the wrong hands, it is not merely a threat.

Hero: That sounds evil. We should destroy these artifacts!

OW: But wouldn't you like to have the power to make gods obey you? You could enforce great changes for the betterment of mortalkind."

Hero: See no evil hear no evil speak no evil.

OW: Also, there aren't just seven of these artifacts, there are tens of thousands of them. And if you dont have any, other kingdoms will bully you into doing whatever they say.

Hero: Fine, where can I get one of these things?

OW: You can build one yourself if you have the right materials and the right equipment.

Hero: I see, so this is a quest?

OW: No! You must not. It is forbidden! One of the darkest arts.

Hero: Forbidden by who?

OW: By the kingdoms who own the most of these artifacts.

Hero: But I'm not part of their kingdoms! Their law doesnt apply to me!

OW: Yes it does! Do you want to be annihilated by their godlike powers!?

Hero: ...No.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin

Starting From Cerulean

This is a pokemon fanfic I wrote for class. Hope you like it!

-------

It is your tenth birthday, and that means today's the day you receive your first Pokemon! Or it was supposed to be. Unfortunately, you live in Cerulean city, and you got caught in the morning traffic.

When you finally arrive at the Cerulean city gym, you find the gym leader there, who tells you the last starter Pokemon has already been taken.

Having already had to bike for an hour through the morning traffic, you decided if you're not going to get a starter Pokemon, at least you can ask the gym leader for advice to help you better prepare for your Pokemon journey next year.

At some point in the conversation you ask Misty if an all Water Pokemon team would be viable in the Pokemon league.

"Water is the most diverse Pokemon type there is," says Misty. "If you want to challenge the Pokemon league with an all water team, I say go for it."

"What sort of water Pokemon should I pick?" You ask.

"Well, what's your team strategy?" Misty asks back. "If you're going for an all water team, I would recommend choosing Pokemon that perform well in the rain."

"A rain team..." you murmur to yourself. "So I should pick a Pokemon that can learn rain dance for my starter?"

"Not necessarily," says Misty. "There are some Pokemon, like politoed or pelliper, with the ability drizzle. Drizzle summons rain upon entering battle without needing to use rain dance."

You think for a moment.

"What if my opponents use their own weather teams?" You ask. "If an opposing pokemon uses Sunny day that could be hard to deal with."

"Golduck has the ability cloud nine, which eliminates weather effects," says Misty.

"How does it do that?" you ask.

Misty is starting to look annoyed by all your questions.

"Well, why don't I show you. I choose you, Golduck!" she tosses a pokeball and a big blue vaguely psychic-looking duck materializes."

Clouds form over head to block out the sunlight but which are not heavy enough to rain.

"Goooollllduck!" the golduck cries.

"Why is it blue? Is that its shiny form?"

"Actually, maybe you should go on a Pokemon journey and find out for yourself. Now take your starter Pokemon already."

"But I thought you said there were no starter Pokemon left!"

"Oh I'm sorry, did I say that?" Misty laughs. "I lied. There is one more." She hands you a pokeball.

"What is it?" you ask.

"Psyduck. It evolves into Golduck. Enjoy your Pokemon journey!"

You thank her and then you're on your way.

Eight Literally Zero-Effort Halloween Costumes

Don't have a costume this year and don't have the time or energy to make one? Is buying a premade costume a tad pricy? Doesn't matter, I'll give you some of mine.  Here you go:

1. Lord Voldemort using polyjuice potion to disguise himself as a muggle
2. A boggart
3. A secret agent disguised as you
4. A sailor scout using the transformation pen
5. A clone of yourself
6. Your long-lost identical twin
7. Your time-traveling descendant from the future
8. A superhero's secret identity

A Tale of Four Moralities

This is a children's story I wrote today, about four children with four different moral philosophies. There are some subjects discussed in this story that some might consider mature subjects, but I made sure that there was no cussing, no violence, no sex etc, and did my best to handle the subject matter in a manner appropriate to children's ears. Please feel free to tell me what you think of it. Thanks!

__________

Eye-for-an-Eye Ivan was very angry.
His teddy was stolen.

Ivan decided.
He would catch the thief and steal from them.

"This will pay them back," said Ivan. "Serves them right."

Golden-Rule Goldie was very happy.
It was her birthday.
Her papa gave her a teddy.

Goldie decided.
She would give a gift to her papa in return.

"It was nice of him to give me a teddy," said Goldie.
"This is the least I can do."

The next day, her teddy was gone.

Minimize-Suffering Minnie was very sad. Someone was stealing teddies from her friends.
She looked at her teddy.
Would she be next?

Minnie decided. She would find the stolen teddies.
And she would return them.

"It's the right thing to do," said Minnie.
"This way, no one will be missing their teddies. Not anymore."

The next day, her teddy was gone.

Maximize-Flourishing Maxie felt guilty, but hopeful.
Earlier, his mama told him something sad.

"The other neighborhood is poor.
Kids there don't have teddies."

So Maxie decided.
He would steal teddies from his friends. He would give them to the other neighborhood.

"It's the best thing I can do," said Maxie. "My friends can afford new teddies. But the poor kids can't."

So Maxie stole teddies from his friends,
and gave them to the other neighborhood.

This made the kids there happy.
But his friends were sad, because now THEY had no teddies.

The next day,
the sad kids went with their parents to the teddy store,
to buy them new teddies.
But the store was all sold out of teddies.

"It's been hard to sell teddies in this town," said the store clerk. "Many poor people can't afford them. And many rich people already have teddies."

"Why not give teddies to the poor?
For free?" asked Maxie.

"We tried that before," said the clerk.
"It didn't work.
A long line of people came for teddies.
Many poor people can't afford cars.
When they got here, they were last in line. Then they got to the front of the line.
But by then, we were out of teddies."

"Then why give teddies to the rich?" asked Minnie.
"Can't you tell them no?"

"Other rich people paid us to give teddies for free.
They can't do that all the time.

"We have to sell to the rich, too.
Otherwise, we can't afford to make teddies.

"At all."

"Why not?" asked Goldie.

"We have to pay for the stuff to make the teddy," said the clerk.

"Why can't you just get that stuff for free?" asked Maxie.
"Then you could give teddies, without being paid."

"Maxie," said Maxie's mama. "There aren't enough teddies for everyone.
There isn't enough stuff to make that many."

Maxie began to cry.
"I wanted to make more people happier," he said.
"I thought by giving teddies to poor kids, I could make more of the town happier. There are more kids in the poor neighborhood.
And they had no teddies."

"YOU stole our teddies!" Ivan accused. "You should be punished.
Someone should steal a teddy from you."

"I'm sorry!" said Maxie.
"I don't have any teddies.
I gave them to the kids in the other neighborhood."

"Maybe if you asked nicely, they would return our teddies?" asked Goldie.

"No," said Minnie.
"They would feel the same way we did, when the teddies were stolen from us.
They don't know the teddies were stolen.
If we tell them, they won't know we're telling the truth."

No one was sure what to do.

Finally, Maxie said,
"We need to find a way to make more stuff.
That way, there will be enough to make teddies for everyone."

"And if we can't do that?" asked Minnie.

"I don't know," said Maxie.
"But we have to try!"

"Why should we help everyone?
The poor kids have never helped us," said Goldie.

"What else can we do?" asked Minnie. "We can't steal the teddies back."

"The poor kids didn't do anything wrong!" said Ivan. "We shouldn't punish them!"

"Maybe if we find a way to make more stuff," said Maxie.
"the poor kids will have enough to give you something, in return."

"Okay," said Goldie. "I'll help."

The kids talked.

The parents looked at each other.

"Do you think they can do it?" asked Goldie's papa.

Ivan's mama laughed.
She thought it was a joke.

Minnie's papa sighed sadly.

And Maxie's mama turned to the kids and said,
"If you're kind and just,
understanding and giving.
If you listen to each other, and to others.
If you work hard and do your best.
If you learn, grow and become stronger.
If you are brave, and never give up.
Then, maybe, you will find a way."

They would find a way to make more stuff. Someday.

And so they began their quest.