mircea_popescu: if you want to not be bothered with signing things - make a shit key and use that eg in an emacs module or as an output script or w/e

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform and when i provide you with a toilet, you'll stop pissing in the bath tub ?

mircea_popescu: dude that's a roundabout way of saying it.

mircea_popescu: better off making a test key and adding it to seals than this

mircea_popescu: ah like a testing thing.

mircea_popescu: what's a wild patch again ?

mircea_popescu: altogether not a bad summary of "eastern mysticism"

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-12-21#1587492 << this neatly dovetails into "brain is not a thinking machine". "if you exist in the space long enough, eventually brain will work to think about the space - but if you do not, sorry buster, "probability can not be larger than 3 because 3 is the largest it could be". ☝︎

mircea_popescu: the above problem not having a known solution, even if heuristic in nature, being a large part of why.

mircea_popescu: so far i'm opting out of the entire "systematic slavery" thing ; it is a private not public matter entirely opaque to they-who-aren-t-me, which makes me-as-slaveholder rather divine in nature.

mircea_popescu: and this is a problem of much more practical import than commonly realised. if slave is punished for things she "should have figured", how to you connect the lash count / severity of the punishment to the offense ?

mircea_popescu: you can make it in an hour! what were all these people thinking! clearly all languages but objective-c were wrong! false gods of a false reason!

mircea_popescu: i dunno alfie. lava - hot. behind it - glass. doesn't seem more of a leap than what is proposed for the original "cooking meat" discovery, which supposedly is why we're even here.

mircea_popescu: so she'll still frottage the shit out of teddybears as a 19yo because hey.

mircea_popescu: and to add amusement to this : of those who do discover it naturally, only a fraction figure out THE PROCESS. most arestuck repeating the exact procedure that they originally discovered.

mircea_popescu has personally taught a bunch of young women. about say one third discover it naturally ; but the rest do not.

mircea_popescu: you're discussing what amounts to a cartoon.

mircea_popescu: the problem being that no - circular motion is NOT linear ; much like a taylor sum is not an integral. yes they can be made arbitrarily close, sure, whatever.

mircea_popescu: ahahaha! ok this is sweet : "Now he's waist deep. Yes, you can describe all motion as a compound of linear and circular motion. For that matter, vectors treat all motion as combinations of linear motion."

mircea_popescu: s a macedonian not a greek and spoke greek like you speak french ; whereas MOST greek life happened in constantinople, a good third to a half of it ~under turkish rule~. so... whatevers, not quite so simple.)

mircea_popescu: (also it should prolly be pointed out that aristotle was not that much of a star of the greek world, if for no other reason then because he was born realtively late. he was a major star of ~scholastics~, and discussions of aristotle esp in translation are more a discussion of early christian europe than of "the greeks" - which incidentally are also a complex thing, alexander for instance, who caused hellenism, was nevertheles

mircea_popescu: when you go to school in 3rd grade or w/e the teacher tells you a line is "blablabla EXTENDS TO INFINITY"

mircea_popescu: should be pretty evident that a dimension defined in terms of divisibility is very fundamentally not the same thing as the latin notion of dimension-as-extensibility. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: well i was discussing a quote.

mircea_popescu: yes, but the proposal to discuss a space one may never walk into may be seen with the same eyes

mircea_popescu: there you go - i haven't translated, but at least discussion allowed us to build a sufficient basis so at least a meaningful summary could be devised.

mircea_popescu: here's the thing : structure of knowledge and content of knowledge are different concerns. dutch erroneously represents a problem with the content in terms of problem with structure.

mircea_popescu: a probability > 1

mircea_popescu: (contrary to common belief, supernumeray probabilities are a major problem in theoretical physics ; much of the nature of the problems aristotle was struggling with in his discussion of heavens)

mircea_popescu has better greek fu than dutch, which allows him a better emulated aristotle than dutch's, which is neither here nor there.

mircea_popescu: and aristotle could read this log, smile broadly at alf, and say "hey, suppose someone comes up with a superunitary probability ; and you disqualify it for you know, being out of the defined bounds. my my aren't you a circular logician just like me!"

mircea_popescu: now we understand each other. dutch can't be "wrong" about aristotle per se. it is a fact he didn't much understand what the other said ; and it is a fact that in the dutch system, dutch's observations stand, however vaguely greek flavoured they may be. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: suppose you excavate tomb in valley of queens ; suppose you find ~live~, talking, cogent queen in there. suppose you take her to the shelf of items, and give her a questionnaire. she is to select "dildo spatula or hat" for each present item.

mircea_popescu: because aristotle belongs to a dead language.

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform euclid was considerably more portable, ironically, because he was considerably more alphabetic. he eschewed ~most~ of the power of greek at his time, and ate the downside of sounding like a literal retard.

mircea_popescu: so then : in order to go from a string in greek to a string in english, one has to reconstruct the conceptual underpinnings, the "source code". and this is not trivial.

mircea_popescu: because no, words don't "have meanings". your meanings for ANY WORD are a function of ALL THE OTHER WORDS YOU KNOW. which is why my definitions regularily blow out english dictionaries, wikipedia and other sources of "wisdom" out of the water - i know more words, and in this knowledge i know all the words i know ~better~. infinitely and irreproducibly so. ☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎

mircea_popescu: now - translation operates not on the object code (ie, the string quoted, or a string quoted) but on the whole program : any string plus ~the totality~ of conceptual content of the brain that produced it.

mircea_popescu: and as to the problem of translation : source code and object code make together a thing. an item can not be said to be a program without either. their relationship is particular, you can go from one to the other, and ~to a very limited degree~ from the other to the one.

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform to be precise : i can't turn the greek string into an english string for you for the same reason you can't turn trb into lisp code for me. "but alf, it compiles! a lisp version must exist!" hurr. i don't propose "because you can't take object code and make me lisp source it follows no c sources existed" do i ?

mircea_popescu: let's approach this from a more hospitable angle. dutch makes the charge (unsourced, but it's sheer anglicanism) that the reason the greeks didn't build ironclads is that they (like the chinese, natch) despised manual labour.

mircea_popescu: this is pretty easy a criticism to make universally, "from you knowing x it follows that x exists ; but from you not knowing y nothing follows about y".

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes ; but coherence is also a very slippery thing. for one thing - the ask.fm cowsies are very coherent. bitcoin is ??

mircea_popescu: moreover - the real killer - this "catching up" needn't happen in any finite time. the atomists of athens never got the support coming their way ; it was a risible sect in the place and time.

mircea_popescu: eventually "actual" science caught up with them and backed them up and here we are - but in other cases it didn't! the recon squad that sees enemy fortifying and raises a flag and calls for reinforcement may get them, and create a turning point in the whole war. or may not get them, and create half a dozen fresh graves.

mircea_popescu: the original ether was a fine step in thsi direction.

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform imagine someone who actually went to the trouble of rescuing - from an intellectually powerful, epistemologically informed position - all the insanities of history. "witches weighing doesn't work because witches don't have a float mass"

mircea_popescu: so, yes : science, and i don't here mean, globalwarmism or pseudoevolutionism or lulzgametheory or such ; but - physics. astronomy, things of serious. these didn't develop methodically, in history, but exactly through a process of "try random batshit and it sometimes works".

mircea_popescu: trinque the problem with feyerabend isn't even that he's an asshole, or whatever else. the problem is, his criticism of methodological science actually stands ; contrary to what people like to believe galilei's stance was a lot less defensible than the church's at the time ; yes he won, and yes he's from our party, so fuck the church - but this political approach to the problem is weak specifically because it tries to go up t

mircea_popescu: (and if you're wondering - the hallucinatory perception of the other known objectively as "puppy love" is precisely an implementation of this principle. as it exists in all cultures [that i'm familiar with] it seems likely to be the definitionally human trait. man is the beast who, when confronted with a shortfall, dreams up a compensation.)

mircea_popescu: but in any case - alienation and self-realization stand in an inexact opposition - if for no other reason then because derealisation often appears as a viable alternative self-realisation. "i am a pretty special snowball" is exactly the self-realised derealized individual, satisfied with his own self image in a wholly imagined world. while by definition maximally alienated ; he also is maximally self-realized.

mircea_popescu: and basic numeracy is not perfectly adequate for being a ceo.

mircea_popescu: anyway, while the quoted article is remarkable in toto as a fine sample of what wikipedia is, intellectually, the "break all the mirrors" fatlogic reaction is not limited to wikitards.

mircea_popescu: firmly in what sense ? if the company is worth less than its parts, then this is a case of underutilization of capital goods. someone somewhere is starving because you decided to keep the warehouse empty.

mircea_popescu: "Asset stripping has presented itself to be a highly controversial topic within the financial world. The positives of asset stripping generally lie with the corporate raiders, who can slash the debts they may have whilst improving their net worth.[6] However, the general perspective of asset stripping is firmly negative."

mircea_popescu: or how about, here's a fine example of utter retardation : https://archive.is/jqzOg

mircea_popescu: ah. it is a failure mode ; the feedback is perceived by the i-subject as dolorous, and if there's too much of it the only way to rescue the ideology is to sever the feedback.