Intuition, Irrationality and the End of Civilization

I have an overwhelmingly strong intuition that if Trump is removed from office for any reason, good or bad, western civilization will have a substantial risk of collapsing in my lifetime.

Why, you might ask? Actually, you probably wouldn't ask since it's extremely likely you simply flat out reject that assertion. And you might as well reject it, because I can't defend it.

I can't defend it because it's intuition. An intuition that emerges from millions upon millions of factoids and associations swirling about my brain from 59 years of observing and contemplating, a large fraction of them conflicting, inconsistent and/or incomplete, but that nonetheless result in a very strong vector pointing at danger. How could I convey to you those associations and thoughts? I simply can't as there are orders of magnitude too many of them. Humans are wonderfully good at absorbing information quickly; we are very slow at communicating such information to others.

I could throw out various facts and conjectures supporting my assertion, but you can easily find opposing facts and argue opposite hypotheses. I know this, because those same opposing facts and opposite hypotheses are swirling around in my brain as well. It's not any one thing, or any handful of things that forms the basis of my fear, but rather the sum total of way too many things.

And fear it is, a strong enough fear that it pushes me well into an "ends justifies the means" sort of mentality where I wouldn't hesitate to do irrational, unethical and immoral things if it would save Trump and I could get away with it.

I would certainly make bogus arguments if it would help. I haven't done so posting or commenting on this blog, at least not intentionally and hopefully not extensively, because y'all are smart enough and informed enough that it won't help - you'll see right through the bogus arguments.

It's often very difficult to tell the difference between a statement based on intuition and a bogus statement. An intuitive statement simply can't have sufficient data to back it up while a bogus statement simply doesn't have sufficient data to back it up. Indeed, perhaps all statements based on intuition are bogus.

As an example, I'll rush in where angels fear to tread, and consider a statement from a different post: "Flynn is guilty of nothing except a process crime..." I intuit that to be probably fundamentally correct. However, it could also be completely bogus and false. But I can turn it into an absolutely true statement fairly easily: "I believe that Flynn is fundamentally guilty of nothing except a process crime." Yet, in a discussion group like this, I believe that the two statements should be interpreted the same - in other words, unless explicitly stated, everything is a belief or opinion.

What's interesting to me in a group with smart people like this is to see what other people think and why they think it. I'm fully aware there's not a chance I'm gonna change anyone's mind on much of anything, or to the extent that can happen at all, it'll be subtle and over thousands of interactions (to slowly add to other folks' brain state vectors). But I enjoy learning from y'all so I hope you stick around and keep the debates passionate, but (hopefully) respectful.

My Perspective on Misstatements

In the comment section of another post, Hey Skipper asked:

...what is the appropriate thing to do with regard to a serial liar like Harry?

Personally, I'm not all that concerned with people making misstatements and lies, intentional or unintentional. I usually either ignore them or point out that the statements seem to be untrue and then move on. I don't know anybody who has never stated something false for whatever reason in their entire life. And if anyone states something that's false, I still appreciate it being pointed out, since I can't possibly keep track of all the statements that could be made about all subjects.

But my strong preference is to leave the record intact. That's worth far more to me than having some "lies" eliminated (which, in fact, has no value at all to me).

One of the reasons I really like this group of commentators is because of your diverse set of opinions which gives me the opportunity to understand why people think what they do. I like everybody's participation, and perhaps especially Harry's. Why? Because his viewpoint is by far the most different than mine and I've learned a lot by studying what he's written - including, and perhaps especially, the false statements. He clearly believes what he writes and if you believe something, you may be mistaken, but you're not really lying, or it's a class of lie I can easily forgive.

I understand his perspective and those like him far better than if he was not a participant. That's one of the main reasons this blog was started and why I've maintained it all of these years. It's certainly NOT because I expect readers to suddenly see things my way.

I realize I've been a bit distracted (by divorce) over the last few months and the debates here have gotten a bit out of hand lately. I wish I could promise to do better in the near future, but unfortunately I can't make that promise (I don't want to lie! :-) and I have to hope than y'all can continue to participate and learn from each other. I will keep writing no matter what and my posting and commenting pace will probably pick up eventually.

I'm Back

A week or two ago I was finding the whole political thing so annoying that I decided to crawl into a (metaphorical) cave and ignore all news and social media until after the election. It's now after the election so I'M BACK!!!

First, I have to congratulate President-elect Clinton on her ... Wait! ... What? ... Trump won? ... Wow. Something must've happened while I was in my cave. Maybe I should look into that.

But anyway, I'll now catch up on all the great guys comments and get back to posting.

Clarification: Nothing Copyrighted at Great Guys

Just to be clear, nothing written at Great Guys, posts or comments, no matter how amazing or erudite, is either property or copyrightable. If you wanna think you own it or a copyright of it, please don't post it here.

If you do grab writing from here, it would be nice (and I would say courteous) to give attribution and/or a link, but, as far as I'm concerned, even that's not necessary.

New Format

Due to popular reader demand for various features, with great trepidation, I'm going to upgrade the blogger template for Great Guys tonight at approximately 8:00 PM PST.  Supposedly I can always go back to the older template, supposedly everything'll be backed up (and I'll back up everything by hand that I have reasonably easy access to), supposedly it won't lose any comments, supposedly we'll have access to more features, and supposedly it'll be better.  Blogger has been bugging me (and probably my co-bloggers too) to do this for about 5 years.

Just in case, if you have any pearls of wisdom in the comments that are critical to well-being of the human race, please make a copy of them (I'm not backing up comments - in theory, there's no need to).

This might be a long weekend.

Inaccessible Link Error Fixed?

So I think I fixed the problem with the template that was keeping people from clicking on comments buttons and other links that happened to be to the right of the Andertoons widget.

Andertoons

I've added Andertoons, one of my favorite cartoonists, to this blog's sidebar, so now you can stop by for your daily chuckle.

1,000

This is this blogs 1,000th published post.  It's also more or less the ten-year-anniversary of this blog (the first post was in September, 2003).

The name "Great Guys" was a joke among eight friends from college. The blog was started to help coordinate annual get-togethers and to provide a forum for continuing discussions from those get-togethers.  The get-togethers still happen every year.

At least one of the Great Guys never posted anything at all.  Three of us posted regularly for about a year.  Those were some interesting posts since the third regular poster was quite liberal, while Howard and I are, ummm, well, decidely less liberal/progressive/left-wing/statist/collectivist/etc. and too much less so for blogger #3 to continue so he dropped out.  That's unfortunate, because he provided balance to Howard's and my perspectives.

Averaging 2 posts per week for 10 years feels like decent output and decent staying power.  I'm likely to continue for several reasons:

• I enjoy the debates that many of my posts seem to stimulate
• It's a great way to keep in practice with writing and I find when I write proposals they go a lot faster and easier when I've been blogging
• It provides a way for me to organize my thoughts and think about things and I hope it does the same for at least some of my readers

I think Howard, who has become the infrequent co-blogger will probably continue at his current rate as well.

Well, at 1,000 posts per decade, I'm hoping to hit a 5,000 post (I'll be 94 then), but surely we'll see number 2,000 one day?

Many thanks to our loyal readers for all their support and feedback!

Changing Comment Settings

There's been a lot of anonymous spam lately.  Blogger usually knows it's spam, but somehow it gets through to the reader anyway.

I'm trying a different setting for comments that disallow anonymous comments.  I don't think I've ever had a anonymous non-spam comment.  My one test seems to still work.  Let me know if you can't comment (I'm pretty sure y'all have my email address).

Sorry about slow comment moderation

For some reason, blogger is identifying some of aog's and harry's comments as spam.  Unfortunately, I've been out of town a lot and have been slow to notice them in the "waiting for moderation" mailbox.

I apologize profusely for not keeping up with comments and appreciate all of your support.

Boy Am I Jetlagged

We're back safe and sound from London and France with no significant glitches in the entire trip.

The jetlag due to the 9 hour time difference is really bad though. It was bad going the other way too. I'm gettin' too old for that kind of travel.

I'm so jetlagged that I accidently clicked the 'Publish' button instead of the 'Save Draft' button on some notes I was making for a future post. So if your feed aggregator shows you a post titled 'I Shrugged', ignore it, it wasn't meant to be seen and I've since deleted it.

Oops.

Celepanic...

... or is that panibrate?

My company won two very important contracts in the last five days that more or less double the company's revenue for the coming year and lay the foundation for large future growth. We had been working on getting these contracts for several years.

So celebration is in order!

But I'm having a little trouble celebrating because I'm also very close to full scale panic. Where on earth am I going to be able to hire all the high quality people I need starting tomorrow? Unemployment ticked up and some people say we're in a recession, but I can tell you the number of available highly skilled roboticists in the San Diego area is very, very small.

In addition to the recruiting nightmare, I have oodles of system engineering to do for these new projects while keeping the current projects going as well.

This almost certainly signals a significant blogging break. Hopefully my co-blogger will pick of the slack...

Giving up on Trackbacks

For someone reason our posts weren't loading for me due to waiting for Haloscan, the provider of this blog's trackback service. Since no-one has linked a trackback in years, I've disabled trackbacks for now.

David's Secret Blog's Comment Feed

Since David has returned from his hiatus (thankfully), his global (as opposed to per-post) comments feed is:

http://davidssecretblog.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

Good Bye Good Friend

I've removed the Autorantic Virtual Moonbat from my sidebar. The moonbat was a dear friend who always put a smile on my face, but I've tired of his clutter on this blog's sidebar and the extra time it takes for the blog pages to come up. I figure I can always visit him (or her?) here, when I need my fix of automatically generated moonbattery.

Word Verification is Off

I've had complaints about blogger's captcha word verification for comments so I've disabled it for now. Perhaps the comment spam we've had in the past was a fluke.

Let's see what happens.