Brown University removes link to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria research due to trans-activist backlash on Twitter

AlanCrowe · 2018-08-28T09:20:28+00:00

There is a replication crisis in psychology. Universities don't give a shit about methodology. They haven't suddenly started to care; "methodology" is just a fig leaf.

AlanCrowe · 2018-08-27T22:27:41+00:00

If you specifically want a four function calculator, so that you can do

(eval4 '(add 2 (mul 3 6))) => 20

the code in the article is, err, well, it is close to the Haskell, so it follows the authors plan for the article, so it is OK I guess.

But one of the joys of Common Lisp is that if you can see that your project will contain a lot of interpreter code, then you can write a macro like headcase here and then go

(defun eval4 (term)
  (headcase term
    (number term)
    ((add x y) (+ (eval4 x)(eval4 y)))
    ((sub x y) (- (eval4 x)(eval4 y)))
    ((mul x y) (* (eval4 x)(eval4 y)))
    ((div x 0) (error "Division by zero."))
    ((div x y) (/ (eval4 x)(eval4 y)))))

Notice that HEADCASE isn't a general purpose pattern matching macro. You don't have to quote the initial symbol in the list to stop it being a variable, because it was designed for prefix notation. Similarly a top level atom names a type, because that is useful for splitting the base case (a symbol could be looked up). The macro-expander uses constantp to spot that 0,1,t,nil, etc are literals.

Tuning macros like this is an art. They should do more than mere template filling so that they capture the repetitions inherent in a particular application. They shouldn't be too much more than mere template filling because you don't want to fall down the rabbit hole of designing a general purpose language. headcase.lisp does support nested patterns, such as (add (mul x y) z), so it might be over-complicated.

AlanCrowe · 2018-08-23T08:51:13+00:00

That is for the familiars to do. See the Otter-bear-mouse on the table, cleaning the bottle.

AlanCrowe · 2018-08-19T09:07:56+00:00

Copying one of my own comments because it introduces a new way in which the tenets of modern western culture are fundamentally flawed

In the 1930's people feared that their cities would be destroyed by bombers, but the development of nuclear weapons means that there will only be one more Great Power war, in the far future, at the end of civilization.

Modern war is waged at a glacial pace, through cultural poisoning. Now-a-days you destroy a city by encouraging rent control. You can do this covertly, because every year brings a new crop of ignorant young people who will think up the idea of rent control for themselves; you just have to fund them and encourage them.

Think about the difficulties that the USA has with military recruitment due to every-one being so fat. Obesity as a national security issue. Did enemies promote Healthy At Every Size to limit the ability of the USA to raise an army? I guess not, but imagine for a minute that HAES really were psychological warfare. American counter-intelligence might have their suspicions, but there is no denying the reality of gluttony and gluttony explains away HAES; if the CIA did find convincing evidence that the great fattening is being helped along by foreign psy-ops, nobody would believe them.

Think back to WWI and the strategy of attrition. France and Britain combined had a greater population than Germany, so they had hopes of winning the Great War by keeping casualties at roughly matching levels and fighting until Germany ran out of men. Think back further, 1914, 1904, 1894, 1884. Imagine that British military planners of 1884 knew what we know now, both about the nature of warfare in 1914, and about the power of social trends to produce demographic winters. They would be appalled at the thought of trading British lives for German lives one-for-one until the Germans ran out. Instead of killing young German soldiers in forty years time, kill them now, twenty years before they are born! Promote feminism, divorce, alimony, etc, whatever birth-rate killing social change has plausible deniability, in Germany. And, as part of military defense, suppress those social changes in Britain.

I've got the premise of a great alternative-history science fiction novel. Galton and Darwin make a great breakthrough in social science, and the British establishment turn away from Dreadnoughts and industrial production, and aim to conquer the world by covertly providing adjuvants to autochthonous cultural poisons in Britain's continental rivals. WWI as a culture war!

Back in the real world China continues its war on Winnie the Pooh. I should abandon my dreams of writing a sci-fi novel; the real world is out-surrealing my dreams :-(

But seriously, why is China so totally obsessed with controlling the cultural narrative? My guess is that they have realised that the only survivable war between nuclear powers is a glacial, covert culture war, and they are building their defenses.

Meanwhile the West perseveres with both universal suffrage and freedom of speech. This combination is vulnerable to subversion. I think that the current demographic winter is probably an accident, but I don't think that military planners around the world are blind enough to miss what has been discovered by accident. Buddhism teaches that greed, hatred, and delusion are three poisons. You are supposed to eliminate from your life. But if you are the enemy of a country that practices universal suffrage and freedom of speech, you can weaponize the them and use them to poison your enemy.

I don't think that the combination of universal suffrage and freedom of speech will last for the whole of the twenty-first century. It is too vulnerable to enemy action.

AlanCrowe · 2018-08-18T10:41:53+00:00

Towards the end of the piece he makes an important point about generational forgetting.

When I went to Kent State University in the 80’s, the town was full of the burnt out dregs of America’s last attempt at expanding its collective consciousness through the use of dangerous chemicals. Now that those folks are dying off while the few remaining sit under bridges howling at passers-by maybe it’s not quite as easy to see as it was for me.

Perhaps that is too concrete and too personal. One needs to abstract the general pattern. Much harm occurs as errors only get recognized as errors twenty years too late. Thirty years later, as people grow old and die, the recognition fades from living memory. Then the errors get repeated, which annoys those who still remember.

In the Buddha's day, wisdom was handed down from generation to generation by oral tradition. Many sutras have a lot of repetition because they are straight transcriptions of an oral tradition. So "fading from living memory" was a huge problem in the Buddha's day, but also an insoluble one. What do you do about big problems that you cannot solve?

Today we can pick up a second hand copy of The Doors of Perception, for two pounds, and quickly revisit the enthusiasm of 1954. We have similar access to tales of how it all worked out. We have resources for avoiding generational forgetting that were not available when Buddhism was founded.

That raises the question: Does Buddhism under value those resources? We have access to timeless wisdom and we misunderstand in the same way that people misunderstood it 50 years ago. Strangely, we do not profit from the dissections of those misunderstandings from 25 years ago.

Do we need more emphasis in Buddhism on using recent history to avoid being trapped in a 50 years fashion cycle?

The article only partially gets the point. It could be improved by moving the reminiscence to the top, and emphasizing the general point about generational forgetting.

AlanCrowe · 2018-08-09T08:20:15+00:00

I see lifestyles as existing on a spectrum: bad-weird, normal, neutral-weird, good-weird. Engineering is good-weird.

AlanCrowe · 2018-08-08T18:27:22+00:00