All Posts By

Michele Reilly

Poetry

Achilles in the Hot Tub

Achilles is coming out of the hot tub. 

He tells me to get a tattoo on my knuckles as he kisses the name of the accursed, sitting under the skin of my wrist. 

It felt like he told me my true profession was poetry. Nothing escaped him.

Working this death squad cured my Meniere’s—

We are in this play together. He is the playwright. 

Work on your lovers without me, Dearest, even if you are my partner.  

They give warmth. I provide answers to riddles of the mind. 

Dying men can hear ghosts. 

I am your ghost.  

I, Quine, in your

recursive dream of 

The World now departing,

An old man is crawling into the hot tub.  

At the end of your life—

You will see a water nymph who guides you to a river. 

It is Pythia who once lived inside the first man’s worldly heart. 

He asks questions. And I am him.

IF you cannot trust loved ones, consider the details of their empathy before you die.

July 11, 2023 by
Fiction, Poetry

COWBIRD

For my mother, a staunch Catholic who desperately tried to kill her children’s spirits, when her own were dead, using every possible way, except literal poison. Although by giving back to the “wandering Jews” as she called me and my husband—our own, intended to be loving gift, the now much less fresh, nine-day old fishes disguised as new ones—points in that direction.  

…a real “Wandering Jew”

Still, it seems wise to recognize the fact of her life to be not hers and hers alone. This is dedicated to my male twin, to my namesake who made a heroic, decade-long attempt to fix-it-all, to take her place, to fill the hole in me where a shaking Despair of Mother was waiting to be found.

Roughly every thousand years, God makes economic miracles out of brother-and-sister love. “Too bad I was not a real Semite,” the Israelites told me on the High Holy Days, so as a New Family, we could have changed the world in Jerusalem, back on Mother’s Day, as we sat on the Kasbah where alley cats pleaded the case to my soul, for new souls to come down to perch inside of a slowly aging body.

We said that I was Wagner’s Erda: condemningly harsh with her accuracy of prediction, retreating to The Underworld too frequently to sustain Life. Still, symbols remain, and predictions often outlive both Men & Progeny. These are events we can place bets on, righteously so, tracking it all, one-way-or-the-other, even when we might win or lose by the very act of doing so, weaving together shared accounts, these measurements render records from a perspective common to us called Mnemosyne. 

In Life’s name and for Life’s sake may you be written in the Book of Life. As for me, women of the word, of the wheel, and of the horse—Trimurti in matters of fact never achieve the exotic, however short-lived glory of the Public Arena, even and especially when we envision the world as it ought to be. No seated Empress, no killer of Cyrus, always they are cursed as things of mere Legend. “Ohne kraft, ohne mach.”

While the “Me Too” phlebotomy was not only wrong-headed but barely literate, consequently it hurt the Legends I describe who possess the Trimurti. In turn, wiser and wiser men pushed them further from The Arena. You dumb broads! There should be a “Me too” rebirth in the spirit and letter of feminine law, a Queen of Mars with persons of the word, tenderly we kiss the lips of the accursed, until actual preferences are revealed as true Economic Miracles, with theories about nature’s gluts coming from their capital: Birthing Bodies and Labor.

Enough already—with these reading of the winds, enough with these tea leaves, with your psychics of Federal Reserve and false ingots as idols. Our last pearly-white, blue-hued ghost, was not Mary Mother of God but Miss Wollstonecraft, who died in childbirth. It has simply been too hard to refocus on the subject:  Here, I humbly ask for a repurposing and for focus. 

The Lord still silently blesses the unborn, the ones that, in our manufactured scarcity we could not allow to live and grow in their own way; all at once for themselves, for each other, and all Mankind!   

April 30, 2023 by
Fiction, Poetry

Death of the West

My body is an obituary.  While impersonal analysis built via careful scholarly citation of standard publications is specific to the Enlightenment, obituaries are as old as the pyramids, and telling a personal story, or the story of a people, goes back at least to Homer.  Stories of that sort have always contained other stories retold from memory.  Not copied symbol-by-symbol, but restructured in the telling from living concepts, with the associative channels of the Bardic brain.  Inevitably, such a story within a story can and should contain the author’s story, a natural and personal account of the information therein, and how that information could have flowed onto the page or the stone tablet.  And so it does.  

Like other authors, I want to attract my listeners before, during, and after the bereaved era.  The story itself wants to attract listeners, and if it is a living text, as it aspires to be, it will do so, not attaining ‘virality’, the poisonous half-life of social media, but the full life of an urban legend, as impossible to extinguish as astrology.  Sometimes, it must yield to evolution’s attraction and reshape itself as Hemingway, a pioneer among the unscholarly, wherever one can teach it too.  It should abandon the compound sentences of this construction, ponderous and pretentious, pleasing to no one since the time of my grandfathers.  It should shed the passive voice, which marks it shamefully as not a piece of marketing. In Evolution’s hidden hands, I hope it will.  

Like any obituary searching for readers, this body yearns to be a eulogy or, better yet, a whodunnit.  For the skeptical-minded then, and for those who loved the departed, I have to give pause.  They and I must remember that the deceased was over three centuries old, had butchered continents in his youth, and was either nearly omnipotent and beyond aggression or suffering from narcissistic delusions that blur the lines between suicide and manic error.  I come to bury Reason, not to praise him.  With that done, I will gather my mind and its people, and we must meditate on a world transformed but not perfected. It is time to decide what comes next.  

April 26, 2023 by
Fiction, Poetry

New Death

Outside of Time, two black holes make sounds as they cross each other—the brighter one devours the other, and while topological strings form cosmic Mexican hats—space is ripped-up like coarse metallic paper fabric—in something so brutishly primordial that it could only be Technology.


The “Xe” civilization, a derivative formal system, figured out how to use light resources in ways unknown to Man to collapse Man’s rabble, brutish kingdom of stardust into a single point. It was not due to malice but only because they could. As humans know, anything you can do, you must do.

When stars die, they become black holes. Man and his universe are born from inside the Dead Star-Black Hole civilization (civ), arriving as computation and information inside its boundary. The collapse of particular existing universes uniformly amplifies signals for Human Algorithms. These conscious beings contain patterns in their stories; they are supposed to learn from them.

The Xe civilization extracts linguistic features of older civs of Human Algorithms at a space-time just before what they called The Singularity, forming The Outer Rim, a larger hole in space-time with even more computational capacity than the previously conscious Dead Star. The Outer Rim will run, collapse, and enlarge a countably infinite number of times to extract data on Human Stories, stories which today are called Human Algorithms.

Having had eaten the dead star of a civilization of old, and taken from them mutated super-dense vestiges of language from Human Algorithms—the Xe call the recently digested “people of the word”—in a transcended form they prevail on the surface of this brighter, newly satiated, now too dying star.

Light wreaths of jade vine & purple anemones form The Outer Rim’s universe outside its prior one, consisting of space-like resources for Human Stories inside The Demarcation: a light-like location where the two temporal boundaries crossed—ten thousand years ago, ten thousand years to come—and where they were always in matters of fact to be found.


All at once and without a body, this force consciously devours. Like Thetis, pregnant again, awaiting her strongest son—one by one, she offers her children to the fire—awaiting the unborn Achilles, secretly promised by the Gods to be fitter than the others—an act of perversity Superstitious Man has in common with all of Fellow Men. Human Destiny demands this kind of pathology, however infrequently.

That feature of Man’s existence enabled the annihilation of them. That flaw ended them all.

April 26, 2023 by
Politics & Critical Theory

Cartels

Exercised power usually opposes a description of itself. Even in the exceptional cases where it does not, such as during the reigns of Frederick the Great and his successors and of other despots who have sponsored the philosophy of power relations, the pictures presented to different social classes have differed greatly, and only the exceptionally independent-minded among the ‘men of letters’ have been able to escape from their ‘self-incurred tutelage’ to the degree necessary to understand the descriptions. 

Even where power does not explicitly silence, it can still do so implicitly. It is prone to do so simply according to the default behaviors of the ruling classes expansively defined. Government bureaucrats count, for instance, as part of the ruling class by the most expansive meaning of the term. The Blue wall of silence counts. So do many aspects of the mental health establishment and arguably even the concept of mental health in anything like the sense in which most people believe in it today; every class or interest group: teachers, judges, securities regulators, and more. Among all of those who sense their efforts validated when the GDP of one of a few other official statistics goes up, among essentially any bureau or guild, there is very little chance that a predatory behavioral pattern within the group having been normalized will lead to that group being unseated and replaced by a new bureau or guild aimed at the same function.  

In many parts of the world, most of us assume, by and large, that we are safe from violence. That doesn’t change the fact that all power has its roots in the threat or implicit threat of violence. Usually, violence is aimed at all who do not conform, always, at the very least, aimed at those who oppose power and at those mobilized by competition over the artificially constrained and inadequate supply of some vital good such as a drug, a home, or the willingness of a court to engage with one’s arguments. 

Stonewalling is a generalized tool for lowering productivity. In the general case, protecting monopoly profits calls for avoiding productivity increases and establishing an industry culture of inept communication, utilization, and verification of text but highly subtle use of subtext.  

Power is the ability to silence. Status often does this. Status isn’t power without the ability to back the silencing with force. All power has its roots in the threat of violence. 

People refusing to see this mostly do not see it because modern cities and living allow for a privileged sense of progress where one’s safety is assumed. That is the problem of losing the map and territory for some more incredible illusion that we prefer to be true. We forget our hard-won roots against the threat of violence, and we don’t realize the danger that comes from the threat of violence capable of emerging from the pursuit of abstractions that don’t possess any intrinsic value. With this, we end up taking things like social and physical security for granted, and in doing so, we put ourselves in society at significant risk.  

Evidence of effective power comes from the ability to silence others. Here, I want to encourage the recognition and adoption of a new term for a broader category of anti-humanity, one that the concept of anti-semitism, for instance, is subsumed in. I see a kind of generalized anti-semitism in the social dynamics of high-growth businesses today. This pathology is no longer strictly about Semites.  

A-priori to silencing is implicit physical violence. All silencing has its foundation in physical violence. All preference falsification is due to silencing. All cultural changes are either between a preference falsification regime and a non-preference falsification regime, the inverse, or are transitions between preference falsification regimes. All contain aspects of a professional face (I will describe this in later posts.) that the individual holder of a perspective must hide.

April 13, 2023 by
Military Strategy, Epistemology & Information Theory

After Claude Shannon, a “Cybernetic War” on Information was Predictable

Contrary to Stephen Pinker’s primary thesis that rational decision making is getting increasingly better, I think one needs to first make a distinction between decision-making as a ‘subject’ a personal subjective self, versus as an ‘object’ so to speak, i.e. your country. 

While the Enlightenment is presumed to have given us core concepts regarding, agency, and the values of the mind, with the aim of understanding of the world, ourselves, and ourselves in the world. Most of society has forgotten the part about self-inquiry. For the time being, I will leave the latter for another writer.  Here, I will also leave out my critique of the foundational thought of so-called Enlightenment thinkers; who, in order to have gotten the macroeconomic models right, even proximately, they would have had to acknowledge women as the foundation of Capital, much more starkly than they did. Probably in ways that would make everyone slightly uncomfortable, but are strictly necessary to real models of so-called economic progress!

Rationality was a basic tenet of the intellectually validated aspect of the New Deal, one running alongside Keynesian pressures. Rationality is an attribute of decision-making under conditions of certainty. Decision making under conditions of uncertainty requires behaving consistently with your preferences. I make a distinction between this, that is, discovering your norm, and that of appealing to a-priori axioms, ones not specified by you, but said to be rational by the establishment cognoscenti: A la, the Savage axioms, coming from the 1950s. 

The assumptions of so called rational utility theory based on the 1950s Savage’s axioms are that: 

– Agents must make bets over every choice presented to them.

– One -sided bets, i.e. you do not have to pay if you’re wrong.

Better models would include payment for both sides of a bet. 

In other words, what things can be said to be a “norm” for you, appealing to your past behavior, and therefore implicitly betting norms, a la your past record.  Furthermore, when presented with evidence that you are behaving irrationally, compared with your preferences, to be a norm for you, you then are willing adjust your bets to update in accordance with your forgotten preferences. In other words, it’s not irrational to make mistakes, only to not change your behavior in light of information, and someone reminding you of your existing preferences. 

As an individual, only when you have access to this kind of “self-ledger”, can you attain models of others, which keep you oriented to them in ways which make it possible for you to make valid predictions in line with reality, and to be modeled. Particularly to be well-modeled by other agents who are willing to cooperate. Whether I am an agent with the same norm, a different one, or not an agent at all is an altogether different matter. I would advocate a different decision criteria over each of the three categories, each of which can reasonably be discovered by you, upon reflection, however long and difficult.

[Despite Pinker not doing so] making decisions from the perspective of a person, versus as a nation, must mean very different things. The reader of Pinker’s books will be confused when thinking through Putin’s Mad Man world, and Pinker’s claim that rationality generally has increased or currently prevails. Distinctions should be made.

We went from a world of what I call ‘modernist warfare’ for under a single century, as evidenced in how we used-to [1919-Nixon] make collective decisions. This seems different from today, but mostly has gone thus far unexamined.

During the Great Wars, modernist warfare can be considered by way of an example. For instance,  the strategic repurposing of a dead soldier by the British, one holding fake war plans, made to wash up onto the shores of Germany—such a soldier who possessed military plans which the Axis Powers shared “Common Universal Priors” over,  with the Allies; i.e. concrete and explicit shared facts about how large land masses are used or blocked. 

When you can model situational dynamics in principle, shared models have the attribute of giving an intrinsic probability of information for next steps in a game involving strategy. In principle, concrete aspects of shared realities help to be able to predict events like the Normandy invasion in the first place. Today, my claim is that there is a new kind of economics, and therefore, a new kind of military, one of ‘Post-post-modernity’ but we need a better name. [Post Modernity I will not define and there is a plethora of literature already on the subject].  

In fact this ‘Post-post-modernity’  is showing up in how we do war. This new kind of politics shows up for instance in global patterns, but also local ones. On a global scale, e.g. Vladimir Putin denudes-in-the-north of Ukraine, as a response to Ukraine’s leadership, decrying that they are going to attack in the south. Is it appropriate for military strategy to be literal and reactive in response to the exact claims of the underdog? 

My claim is that Putin’s seemingly non-strategic behavior shows up locally too, so to speak, over persons today, as well as non-equilibrium defection scenarios, both in business deals and personal interactions: The global Weltschmerz is local. 

Have we lost the art of war? 

It is as though the public broadcasting of one’s intentions is all one ought to reflexively account for. Perhaps this is all or part of a definition that might be formulated as the way to lose a war, and Russians are poor at war strategy today.  I claim that the Rationality Utility Axioms of Savage are an artifact of the Modernists, the architects of modernity after the Second World War, and the New Deal macroeconomics which won the market dominant narrative. 

Furthermore, Silicon Valley and social media as primary news sources changed what rationality meant for the public preferring to as the economists told us we do “maximize utility of money”. That thesis failed. The supposed tenet that we all maximize our preference for money was invalidated with the St. Petersburg paradox. Whenever one or more model assumptions are wrong, you will get paradoxes.

Modern Keyesianism; promised work for everyone, and growth for all time, conjoined with the myth of rationality. Furthermore such a myth was already, at the time, invalidated with empirical evidence in the 1950s, via the empirical studies which showed the possibility of preferences for “ambiguity seeking” behavior. That is referred to in Daniel Ellsberg’s PhD thesis, giving people a choice of two urns with the same payoffs, where one of the urns has an ill-specified probability distribution.  

Rational utility does not capture any nation’s latest policy on national defense; and Keynesian economics only worked for the boomers. You cannot group the decision making apparatus of nations, with that of persons. Even if you separate the two, as truly different magisteria, models of decision making by persons can indeed–as the failure of Savage’s axioms by Ellsburg and St. Petersburg showed us–be improved upon. Today nation states officially seem to be using an entirely new norm. A new military strategy, post ‘ODDA loops‘ is ripe for description.

January 5, 2023 by
Culture, Politics & Critical Theory

Motherhood is a Grift

Here I make a distinction between two real categories (morality, ethics) that are solutions to different problems, and in future writing will attempt to discuss how political processes conflate and distort these labels.

Intuitively, morality strikes me as (almost by definition) always and everywhere an economic proposition. Morality is ‘always and everywhere’ a way for institutions to scale their memetic presence onto human minds. Whenever someone asserts a moral frame: something is ‘making bank’, look for it. Morality is often confused with ethics; and ethics, with morality. I suspect it is worth decoupling the two.

Ethics is distinct from morality in the sense that it asserts that the individual should come into the foreground with a decision theory over any given crossroads in his/her values, using his/her own conscience. Ethics has always been a threat to the existing order, as it is impossible to scale, nor can you make universal rules around ones own conscience.

If morality is an unreflective set of constraints and demands over large groups of people, ethics is a reflective one. Individual ethics, done with a sound mind, is the way to understand oneself and conscience.

Morality begins with a favored mimetic, and is then spread by an interest group, which needs the stability of the particular moral in order to maintain its position. Priests are related to ethical decision makers, but, in practice this is not based on high-quality ethical thought, more accurately a morality: necessarily entailing the family unit, combined with ‘original sin’, where they cast the shadow of their moral valence at full mast.  As a simple example, monogamy and marriage creates a stable middle-class. Probably nothing wrong with it, if it works well for you. Opinions vary. This moral norm is also indeed easier for government sovereigns to count household output, predict annual income and productivity metrics, and to take census of households for various forms of financial control. 

One could argue, that the only legitimate example of applied morality are the practiced norms during times of global stress, to prevent human extinction and mass suffering, such as during a pandemic. For instance, I am perfectly happy not fighting for my ‘right’ to avoid masking at the peak of such a crisis. This is a real moral restraint, because it actually effects the lives of others, such that applying pretty much universal behavioral norms help everyone.

What’s the problem with ethics? It isn’t with ethics per-say, rather with its undeveloped interpretations. For example, in 1924 in the criminal case of Leopold and Loeb, two male children, particularly the older lad of the young friend duo, argued within their ethical orientation, whose interiority might only be gleaned by them, to take the life of another boy their age. This is an example of an unsound/undeveloped mind using ethics incorrectly and one that power anticipates. A sound ethics would never entail egregious harms to others, because a decision to take a life, would leave out many things, ones relationship to others, the existing order, and subsequent consequences. The case of Gavrilo Princip is also relevant.

By now you may have heard of the concept of a “tradwife“. It is an opportunistic position where a woman who is adjacent to the ‘aristocracy’ (the new monied class) in America, gets to invoke an old morality of marriage in order to be cared for by one well-off partner. While this is a fine sexual strategy, and frankly, surely even admirable to want to caretake ones own growing tribe, the newly termed notion doesn’t address the real question of what women might really want and need. In other words, true revealed preferences, in the absence of society’s manufactured artificial scarcity. The scarcity mindset in women, one that marriage casts over women in the first place. Its claims are to find someone to tether your assets to, and thereby to be “secure”.

Getting a career might not be the answer either for most women, to be sure. The point is women do need to have access to socio-economic capacity, but that can never come from a single partner alone. This requires a culture that provides a kind of universal basic income to not have to rely on one person in the first place, but not from directly the government i.e. one that cannot be easily ‘”rent seeked” away with the market fixing higher prices targeted to them, due to such inheritance of capital.

Women need various positive inputs to production, and also it’s possible to interfere with their access to physical resources or help in various ways, and patriarchal societies are structured to attack anyone who’s not in some kind of formal enclosure. But the territorial claim “women need security” itself is not really part of the means of production here, it’s just a defense against specific kinds of interference, which we might defend against, evade, or attack in other ways.

For the average or below average man, marriage levels the playing field, by making this reflexive moral norm a scarcity issue to women. Ensuring that women continue to offer their productive livelihood to someone who is just good enough, without reflecting sensibly on the abundance of her own diversification and comparative advantages: reinforced within networks of trust and communities, which are perfectly able to provide financial and emotional support for oneself and ones children, alongside the support of ones mate (or mates) of choice. This should be better incentivized (or indeed, incentivized at all) by the state. Of course every now and then slaves (“the domesticated”) convince masters (“the domesticating”) to join in their norms and the masters themselves get confused. In a mixed culture, there’s a spectrum of people living together, from the more domestic to the more feral. The feral get confused when things aren’t quite as satisfactory as advertised. 

I would be appropriate to admit a social need for increasingly more conscientious ethical reflection, with respect to how to mitigate shame from female sexual strategies that differ from the nuclear family, including but not limited to legal and tax recognition for diversified mate choice. Women are ready for new tax legislation aimed at alternative agreements on family support, ones that represent material diversification and arrangements between multiple people, romantically involved or not, who raise the children. After all, it takes a village.

Such a social reckoning would entail a focus on taking steps against the cultural shaming of women, particularly by women themselves, who are in a variety of life situations. It is a spectrum. Women with higher time preference for money, for instance prostitutes over a single day, and those women with a lower time preference: one-off mate selection, i.e. the marriage contract, which points at least on paper to a lasting arrangement for decades, is currently the only arrangement that is incentivized by the state.

November 13, 2022 by
Engineering: Quantum Random Access Memory, Quantum Computing

The Plan to Secure Starlink: Build Mesh Networks of Portable, Distributed Quantum Memories (“quantum RAM”)

This technical whitepaper provides an overview of the technological plan for a scalable, portable, rechargeable network of quantum hard drives. You can find the conversation about it given to the Foresight Institute on YouTube.

Michele-Reilly-quantum-Random-Access-Memory-Distribution-NetworksDownload

April 18, 2022 by
Natural Science of Computation, Philosophy of Science

Building Better Credence: The “Generalized Ellsberg Paradox” in Quantum Physics?

All paradoxes have one thing in common: their underlying world model has one or more assumptions which are mistaken.

In our notions of probability, I attempt to clarify an epistemological distinction
between space and time, and, I also make the distinction between
finite versus infinite games. This is relevant to Popper’s demarcation problem and I conjecture (what I call) “Ellsberg-type Paradox” extensions to infinite, but computable games. It is worth noting that cosmological models, i.e. models of the early universe in science, with initial conditions, can be infinite but computable, although not all are.

I look at two types of probabilities: Probabilities of observation, that is, the claim that risk can be approximated with probability, choosing from an urn with known and unknown distributions and
probabilities of explanation: aka cosmological models. I believe this work to contain valuable insights regarding shining light on where degrees of credence in scientific theories should be up-regulated or down-regulated.


The Church-Turing thesis told us that anything we regard as computable, such as in language
with universal grammar distributed over minds, is computable with a Turing machine. I think the
actual generator of the Ellsberg paradox and of Popper’s demarcation problem is that you
cannot apply Bayesianism to the behaviour of an unknown Turing machine (i.e. urn game in this
case).


Knowledge is finite. Infinities and unknown underlying distributions describing physical phenomena
cause problems for probabilities. It is worth considering an extension of so-called “finite” urn-type games; finite game geometries to infinite games to be preferences for/or against ambiguity in bets, a la what I call the Ellsberg experiments, after Daniel Ellsberg’s PhD thesis, whereby people were asked to choose between two urns: one that represent a preference for either a known probability distribution (within an Urn) or to choose the urn with ambiguity as to the outcome.


This philosophical question is two-fold: how should you reason in an infinite setting as an
individual (Turing machine) when Bayesianism breaks down, and further, how can we notice
where and how we are assigning space-or-time cutoffs or delinations in the game
(boundaries/payoff matrices) and evaluate either criterion in our latest models, in a clear fashion
to assess the credence of beliefs between rivaling scientific models.


The broader claim is that you could apply Bayesianism to the behavior of a specific known
Turing machine. Because of the halting problem, you can’t have multiple non-specified Turing
machines (coherently computable games) in the same ontology (an extension to Daniel’s point
within the framework of computability) applying Bayesianism. Recasting the discussion into
‘computable scenarios’ the world where Bayesianism ‘works’ (Aumann’s agreement theorem) is
where the multiple Turing machines doing Bayesianism are components of one Turing machine.

The so-called measure problem in quantum cosmology and pathologies associated with it, are
an illustration of this. That is, cosmologies describing an infinite universe with conjectured
boundaries, also known as initial conditions (i.e. payoffs matrices in the finitely computable
case). You do not “know the game” in an infinite universe or multiverse, only your constraints,
initial conditions, lurking here again, as in Ellsberg’s finite game. Further taking the view from apersonal self and subjecthood, Bayesianism (over scientific theory space) breaks down in the
same manner from a single scientist’s perspective who is posing the theory.

Economists give us examples of finite games. Another way of saying what Ellsberg showed, is
that preferences for ambiguity over well-known “spatially” discrete bets (urn) with the same bet
parameters ie. boundaries, can be rationally consistent in the same manner that subjective
preferences for known risk distributions. Infinite extensions to this principle might suggest in
some cases that we ought to be neutral over scientific models with combinations of computable
Turing machines (a particular state of the world) but in practice, we often aren’t.


Global prediction and theory credence in the sciences both contain embedded ambiguity
preferences analogous to the Urn models. Introducing a computational paradigm, the claim is
that we should be able to declare when certain types of ambiguity in games (i.e. computable
structures within theories) are present and therefore say when we prefer / ought to prefer one
theory over another, indeed making a bright line over model credence. Engaging from an ‘all-
knowing mathematician’s perspective’, questions of the form: Which model is more likely:
General Relativity or Special Relativity? And: How do we know it’s not the big bang right now?

All “infinite games” a la scientific models are delineated (i.e. game boundaries) with respect to
either space or time and explicitly require explanation that lends itself to a type of risk
assessment when attempting to calculate model confidence or degree of credence from a
sound agent evaluating the quality of those beliefs.


My claim is you cannot really be a rational agent (a single Turing machine) calculating risk with
an unknown underlying ontology (ie. game; such as an unknown distribution in an Urn).
In a similar manner, you cannot have strong credence in your accuracy involving global
technological questions or accuracy of your scientific world model, when you have infinite
“spatial geometries” (not an Urn) in the underlying framing of the problem/game/theory.

Where Bayesians Go Wrong

Aumann’s agreement theorem is important for Bayesian ontologies, that is the real paradox here, Ellsberg’s “paradox” is an empirical phenomena highlighting the fact that our academic assumptions about rationality (or more precisely, Savage’s assumptions, a la the Savage Axioms) are probably not quite right. There is a further interesting question about the removal of a conundrum coming from one underlying probability distribution of the same type versus many.

Economic versus Physical Theory Preferences

Economist’s notions of probabilities are that of experiments coming up one way or another
versus probabilities of particular theories eventually being falsified. These are questions I will call perspectives from local ‘subjecthood’ versus “a view from nowhere” in either space or time. The latter involves harder or impossible to specify (due to the infinite nature) measures than those of discrete economic ones with an adversary, which we will get into later. (Look out for a future section: “Quantum Games”). Although unsatisfying to the questioner offering the finite game, it might also be said to be rational in a finite game not to have a preference to play a game, including one with a monetary payoff, when you do not know the ontology/(probability distribution) of the underlying game.

This disposition I think of as the “declining to bet scientist”. In other words, is it perfectly rational
to decline to pick a ball in a finite (urn), assuming of course that your utility for money is greater
than none–when you do not know the underlying ontology of the game? (In the case of the
distribution of balls).

Explanation versus Risk is relevant to scientific versus economic thought, respectively: How does Explanation factor into probabilities, versus more straightforward games? Infinite ambiguous scenarios/games/bets, often Knightian ones, are distinct from Ellsberg scenarios, those depicting finite ambiguous games, and always require explanation to gain plausibility.

Indeed it matters whether we are explicit about the explanatory bias of the prediction or not.
The speed of light is constant as an assumption is a different species altogether, a different
thing from the assumption that the amount of information carrying capacity at small scales is not
infinite. The latter we don’t know about, therefore it is probably finite, because most things are.
This is a different kind of assumption from one that says: “here is a physical limit and there’s no
rival theory on the horizon”. Give examples: Berkenstein / speed of light.

Betting in an Infinite World


Is it really all about the size of your own world bubble? In the limit, yes.
What are the appropriate boundaries in cosmology (“infinite games”) and are we in an infinite or
finite universe? The jury is still out on this one, albeit with strong empirical evidence pointing
towards infinite. Ironically though, this is the subject where we have the strongest reasons to
suspect empirical evidence to be fundamentally unconvincing. Therefore how do we find
ourselves mathematically able to make bets at all about the broader world which we are embedded in?

So long as there is a clear “urn” geometry i.e. a world model with a boundary,
then we are in a finite scenario: statistical mechanics is preferable here. For instance, the problem with having an infinite multiverse is that if you ask a simple question like, ”If you flip a coin, what’s the probability it will come up heads,“ normally you would say 50 percent. But in the context of the multiverse, the answer is that there’s an infinite number of heads and infinite number of tails. Since there’s no unambiguous way of comparing infinities, there’s no clear way of saying that some types of events are common, and other types of events are rare. That leads to fundamental questions about the meaning of probability. And probability is crucial to physicists because our basic theory is quantum theory, which is based on probabilities, so we had better know what they mean.

Infinite models “games from the outside” so to speak, imperfectly kludge towards referring to
anthropic selection (where am I located in space and time, and, how do I know?) effects in
cosmology, versus what I will heretofore call the “local ambiguity of an agent” from an unknown
distribution of an Urn, a la Ellsberg’s empirical evidence for denying that the second Savage
Axiom is really held by a rational agent.

Local ambiguity is ambiguity over otherwise clearly defined boundaries (features of the game) in
a possible bet or other transaction, albeit with an overall unknown distribution. Ellsberg showed
us the possibility for making distinctions between conventional notions of risk (Bayesian versus
Frequency) and ambiguity-aversion more generally, over payoffs where it could still be rational
to prefer ambiguity to a sure-thing.

“Time-games” (ie. evolution of objects and technological betting and bets
on societal progress) versus “Space-games” (ie. be it in probability urns or explanations on cosmological distributions) can both be Explanatory reasoning towards Probabilities, where the boundaries are either time or space.

Below is an example of trying to construct probabilities in infinite time. In this example, time is the Ellsberg “urn”. In all “cutoff” schemes for an expanding infinite multiverse, a finite percentage of observers reach the cutoff during their lifetimes. Under most schemes, if a current observer is still alive five billion years from now, then the later stages of his life must somehow be “discounted” by a factor of around two compared to his current stages of life. For such an observer, Bayes’ theorem may appear to break down over this timescale due to anthropic selection effects; this hypothetical breakdown is sometimes called the “Guth-Vanchurin paradox”. One proposed resolution to the paradox is to posit a physical “end of time” that has a fifty percent chance of occurring in the next few billion years.

Another, overlapping, proposal is to posit that an observer no longer physically exists when it passes outside a given causal patch, similar to models where a particle is destroyed or ceases to exist when it falls through a black hole’s event horizon. Clarification of Ambiguity over finite versus infinite games (where games include our models of physical systems).

Knightian uncertainty simply refers to uncertainty that we lack a clear, agreed-upon way to
quantify—like our uncertainty about existence of extraterrestrial life, and models of physics as
opposed to our uncertainty about the outcome of a coin toss. An agent in a state of Knightian
uncertainty might describe its beliefs using a convex set of probability distributions, rather than a
single distribution: All models involving infinity are such models.

Here I make explicit the distinction of probability models from “subject” (my choice of balls in
particular urns) versus probability from object (whether I exist counterfactually in world A, versus
world B, which are both based on Bayesian reasoning and anthropics in infinite scenarios).

Here is an example of what I am calling infinite-in-space; versus in time:


The Self-sampling assumption “SSA” is characterized by the ethos: “All other things equal, an observer should reason as if they are randomly selected from the set of all actually existent observers (past, present and future) in their reference class.

For instance, if there is a coin flip that on heads will create one observer, while on tails they
will create two, then we have two possible worlds, the first with one observer, the second
with two. These worlds are equi-probable, hence the SSA probability of being the first (and
only) observer in the heads world is 1/2, that of being the first observer in the tails world is
1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4, and the probability of being the second observer in the tails world is also
1/4.

This is why SSA gives an answer of 1/2 probability of heads in the Sleeping Beauty
problem. SSA is dependent on the choice of reference class. If the agents in the above example were
in the same reference class as a trillion other observers, then the probability of being in the
heads world, upon the agent being told they are in the sleeping beauty problem, is ≈ ⅓.
SSA implies the doomsday argument if the number of total observers in one’s reference
class is finite. And another example, of infinite in space bets:

Self-indication Assumption “SIA”: All other things equal, an observer should reason as if
they are randomly selected from the set of all possible observers.


“Randomly selected” is weighted by the probability of the observers existing: under SIA you
are still unlikely to be an unlikely observer, unless there are a lot of them.
For instance, if there is a coin flip that on heads will create one observer, while on tails they
will create two, then we have three possible observers (1st observer on heads, 1st on tails,
2nd on tails), each existing with probability 0.5, so SIA assigns 1/3 probability to each.
Alternately, this could be interpreted as saying there are two possible observer (1st
observer, 2nd observer on tails), the first existing with probability one and the second
existing with probability 1/2, so SIA assigns 2/3 to being the first observer and 1/3 to being
the second – which is the same as the first interpretation.


This is why SIA gives an answer of 1/3 probability of heads in the Sleeping Beauty problem.
Notice that unlike SSA, SIA is not dependent on the choice of reference class, as long as
the reference class is large enough to contain all subjectively indistinguishable observers. If
the reference class is large, SIA will make it more likely, but this is compensated by the
much reduced probability that the agent will be that particular agent in the larger reference
class. Although this anthropic principle was originally designed as a rebuttal to the Doomsday
argument (by Dennis Dieks in 1992) it has general applications in the philosophy of
anthropic reasoning, and Ken Olum has suggested it is important to the analysis of quantum
cosmology.

Adversarial Games versus Cooperative ones

To be continued – A discussion of Quantum white-hat trade partners versus classical adversaries.
Other: Misc. Various generalizations of probability theory, of which the best-known is the
Dempster-Shafer theory of belief. Free energy / Negative entropy

February 8, 2022 by
Politics & Critical Theory

Language, Ideology, Barbarism and Conditioning: HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Written: Jan 13th 2022

Back in Plato’s day, there was only one wise guy wise to the fact that he could get away with a lot if he claimed to know nothing.  By the time I was a kid in Coney Island, the news had trickled down, through books like Illuminattus, published in the same year as the second presidential debate, between Johnson and Ford and not that different from debates between Obama and Romney.  But back in the day of the first presidential debate, between Kennedy and Nixon, the American public got to see what it was like for two people to think they did know something, understood more or less how their institutions worked, and had a plan for the country.  Not long after that Kennedy at least received a rude awakening, when he learned that even as the President he couldn’t see the US Nuclear War Plan.  

Daniel Ellsberg remedied that, sharing the real Nuclear War Plan with Kennedy, who had eventually been given a fake one.  He could do that because he had written the real one.  Many years later he shared other information with people who he really believed were entitled to know it.  This almost got him killed but played a key part in bringing down Nixon, another guy who thought he knew something.  

He had some more important secrets to share, but he couldn’t hold on to them while he was running from the government, and somewhere along the way the general public ended up believing that they knew nothing, and could no nothing, so by the time he was able to reveal them anyway, in the Doomsday Machine, and by the time Assange and Snowden tried to invoke his precedent, tried to tell the public and the courts about crimes that were being committed against them, there was no-one left to think that now they know.  

Militaries internally employ a great deal of technical jargon such as ‘orientation’ and ‘situational awareness’ derived from the more cybernetics influenced side of Postmodern thinking.  They also make use of modern thinking such as game theory, which requires agents representing the world and making decisions within it.  Military language presumes a metaphor of chaotic collective exploration and motion, within which we presume the impossibility of clarifying the situation adequately to make use of a courtroom process.  What would ‘‘reasonable doubt’ mean from someone who hadn’t established that they know which way they’re going?  The military mindset centers on stimulus and response, action and speech-action.  When we bring its radical skepticism into our public affairs, we don’t presume that we could credibly carry out a free and fair election.  Military language embeds the ideological assertion that man does not survive by thinking.  When we bring it into our military contracting process, it cements a commitment against thought, a commitment to look at what thought calls for and get it backwards.  

Military jargon sees the world as a system of control systems with certain human capacities such as situational awareness granted as applying to elect troops as additions to its major working metaphor of springs.  For compatibility with the military, the MBA curriculum and other jargon of the professional/managerial class implicitly makes analogous assumptions, for instance by treating markets as consisting of alpha and beta with the latter determined in terms of an assumed correlation between the prices of assets and a ‘market’ which they deviate from as if on springs.  This is a different system of metaphor from that which would have been used by more traditional investors, who would have thought in terms of concrete questions about what might go wrong in their proposed plans and how much they would be likely to bring in if their plans came to fruition.  The latter is a natural fit for the language of commercial accounting and civil law, but not to that of military jargon, which would regard a court as having too slow an OODA loop to provide credible civic defense.  

OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.  It’s a bit of Air Force jargon developed by John Boyd.  It doesn’t leave room, within it’s jargon, for courts adjudicating ownership of assets via contract disputes.  It imagines that delay tactics will make disruption of the context of the decision inevitable, rather than the dispute resolving.  The Professional Managerial Class, inheriting such assumptions, runs Boeing under the assumption that credit flowing to it from the federal government and if need be the federal reserve need not be in any sort of correspondence to expected ability to repay.  The common sense of the ideology is that it would have to be rolled over.  

Doing business with the military is conditional on using its language, which assumes a world where people are trying to be used instead of trying to make decisions, and who think it’s wise to maintain that they know nothing but are only following orders.  The function of bureaucracies locks in uniform truth standards among its participants, leading to the propagation out from the military ethos which precluded making one’s own decisions and being intentionally accountable for their outcomes.  Instead, not sticking out is the norm to be approached.  

The managerial class is the extension of the professional norms of the military industrial complex throughout the top ranks of the sectors of the economy deemed militarily important during the Cold War.  Being crypto-military, explicitly claims, through its jargon, that the way to receive value is by applying force, a-la cybernetics.  This paradigm contrasts strongly with the jargon of the bourgeois, who talk in terms of ownership and profit, a-la Classical Economics and Commercial Law. 

February 8, 2022 by