I am currently reading the Spartacus letter and, from what I can tell so far, it is an expertly written medical analysis that needs to be made available to the widest possible audience, to counter all the lies and intentional disinformation from the “official” sources. The original can be downloaded here. Download local copies in case the original “disappears”.
Every time some scientist starts talking about probability I get pissed off, and here’s why.
Let’s say they are talking about chances of Earth getting hit by an asteroid, or a supervolcano erupting, or a near-enough star going supernova, or whatever potentially cataclysmic event; their argument is always “events such as this happen every x millions of years, so the probability of it happening for every year is in the order of one in x millions”.
Oh, really?
Let’s see how a Yellowstone supervolcano works, and then you’ll see why I have a problem with probabilistics. You have a mantle plume that comes to the crust. A reservoir of magma under pressure forms, and when this pressure exceeds the resistance to pressure of the rock layer above, there is an explosive eruption which relieves the pressure. The dome collapses and you get an open lake of lava. After a while, the lava cools and forms a new dome. The magma chamber has relieved its pressure and will take a long time to fill, and even longer to build pressure to the point where it can mechanically compromise the hard layer of basaltic rock above. You basically have a period of several hundreds of thousands of years after an eruption where the probability of another eruption is literally zero, because the physics that would support it just isn’t there. It’s only in the last few percents of the supereruption cycle that you have any place for uncertainty, because you don’t know the pressure at which the basaltic rock will crack; the thickness, hardness and elasticity of the basaltic dome can vary between eruptions, and so you don’t really know the pressure at which it will pop, and you also don’t know the level of mechanical deformations it can manifest before it pops. So, if an eruption cycle is 650000 years, let’s say there’s place for probabilistics in the last 20% of that time, basically saying the cycle is 650000 years with the error margin of 20%, meaning it can pop 150000 years sooner or later. That’s the scientific approach to things. However, when they employ mathematicians to make press releases, and they say that the probability of it going off is 650 thousand to one for every year, that’s where I start whistling like an overheated boiler. It’s actually never 650K to one, and if someone says that number you know you’re dealing with a non-scientist who was educated way beyond their intelligence. The probability of it going off is basically zero outside the uncertainty margin that deals with the last 20% of the time frame. As you get further in time, the probability of an eruption grows, but you can hardly state it in numeric terms; you can say that you are currently within the error margin of the original prediction, and you can refine your prediction based on, for instance, using seismic waves to measure the conditions within the magma chamber; how viscous, how unified/honeycombed it is, were there perceivable deformations in the lava dome, were there new hydrothermal events that can be attributed to the increased underground pressure. Was there new seismic activity combined with dome uplift and hydrothermal events? That kind of a thing can narrow your margins of error and increase confidence, but you never say it’s now x to one. That’s not how a physicist thinks, because you’re not dealing with a random event in a Monte Carlo situation, where you basically generate random numbers within a range and the probability of a hit is the size of the number pool to one for each random number generation. A volcano eruption is not a random event. It’s a pressure cooker. If it’s cold, the probability of an explosion is zero. If the release valves are working the probability of an explosion is zero. Only if the release valves are all closed, the structural strength of the vessel is uniform, the heat is on, there’s enough water inside, and the pressure is allowed to build to the point of exceeding the structural strength of the vessel, can there be any talk of the explosion at all, and only in the very last minutes of the process, when the uncertainties about the pressure overlap with the uncertainties about the structural strength of the vessel, can there be any place for probabilistics, and even then it’s not Monte Carlo probabilistics, because as time goes on the probability goes up exponentially because you get more pressure working against that structural strength. As you get closer to the outer extent of your initial margin of error, the probability of the event approaches the limit of 1.
You can already see that most other things work in similar ways, because if there are no asteroids of sufficient sizes on paths that can result in collision with Earth, what is the probability of an extinction-level event caused by an asteroid impact? In the early stages of the solar system formation the probabilities of such events were much higher, but by this point everything that had intersecting orbits already had the time to collide, and things have cleared up significantly. You can always have a completely random, unpredictable event such as a black hole or something as bad suddenly intersecting the solar system at high velocity and completely disrupting orbits of everything or even destabilizing the Sun, but unless you can see how often that happens to other solar systems in the Universe, you can’t develop a meaningful probabilistic analysis.
Also, how probable is a damaging supernova explosion in our stellar neighbourhood? If you are completely ignorant, you can take a certain radius from the Sun where you’re in danger, count all the stars that can go supernova within that sphere of space, say that the probability of a star going supernova is, let’s say one in four billion for every year, and multiply that by the number of stars on your shortlist. If you did that, then congratulations, you’re an idiot, and you are educated far beyond your intelligence, because the stars don’t just go supernova at random. There are conditions that have to be met. Either it’s a white dwarf that gradually leeches mass from another star, exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit and goes boom, or a very old star leaves the main sequence on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, so you have a very unstable giant star that starts acting funny, sort of like what Betelgeuse is doing now, and even then you get hundreds of years (or even thousands of years) of uncertainty margin before it goes. You also have a possibility of stellar collisions, either at random (which are incredibly rare), or you have a pair of stars that get closer with every orbit, leeching mass from each other and eventually the conditions are met for their cores to deform, extrude and join, making for a very big boom. Essentially, what that does is give you a way to narrow down your margins of uncertainty from billions of years to potentially hundreds of years, if you notice a star approaching the conditions necessary for it going supernova, which should not be that difficult where it actually matters, because if it’s too far to measure it isn’t dangerous, and the closer it is the more you tend to know about it. So, the less you know, the bigger the margin of uncertainty represented by your assessments of probability, and the greatest probability of getting the most useless assessment possible is what you get by hiring a mathematician to do it.
Several scientists and artists made a following thought experiment:
They took skeletons of today’s animals and reconstructed them with same kinds of speculations that our paleontologists use when reconstructing extinct animals. Let’s say the results are interesting and make you wonder what else do we think we know about the past that is wildly off.
The governments can’t seem to make up their minds on whether the vaccines are the ultimate solution, and everybody should get them, or they are completely worthless and everybody should keep wearing masks regardless of the vaccination status.
Also, it is quite annoying that they keep attacking people who decided not to get vaccinated, as if they are putting others (the vaccinated ones) in danger. That’s abject nonsense. If someone is more afraid of COVID than he is of the vaccine side effects (which are a serious problem since the manufacturers basically say they can’t take any responsibility for anything once you take them), go get vaccinated, but don’t bother me with your fears and force me to wear a mask or tolerate stupid measures. Get vaccinated and stop riding my nuts. I had COVID with the worst symptoms, and I think I had the mild version a year later (I never got tested because all the tests are fake). I got my immunity the hard way and I’m still missing parts of my lung capacity as evidence. I don’t care for the vaccine, because if my immunity didn’t produce antibodies the natural way, I certainly don’t trust the vaccine to do jack shit. Also, the virus is not the problem, the excessive immune response is. People who have COVID should be treated with something that reduces the excessive immune response, and the vaccine that just jacks up the immune system isn’t the right approach, from what I can tell.
Also, I am annoyed by the people who throw the word “science” around, in a sense where “science” is some kind of a dogma proclaimed by the scientists, which should be accepted unquestioningly or you’re basically at war with reason, truth and virtue. As far as I can recall, science is a method of discarding obviously false claims based on evidence, and of treating the claims that can’t be easily disproved with skepticism and conditional acceptance until something better comes along, as it invariably does. Also, there is no such thing as “scientific consensus”. That’s another term for “religious dogma”. Scientific consensus is that all claims are only conditionally accepted if they can’t be immediately rejected, and they are continuously tested with hope of falsifying them. If you don’t understand this, you don’t know jack shit about science and your education, whatever it was, was a regrettable waste of time and money.
Also to be noted, science works best when you personally practice the scientific method. The further you are removed from that, the less it has to do with science.
I was thinking about chaos for quite a while during the last few months, and I talked about it a lot in person with several people, but I never got around to actually writing an article, so it’s about time I remedied that.
When people think about chaos, they usually fall into two groups. The first group imagines chaos in terms of putting a frog into the blender and pressing the “bzzt” button. Basically, you have a frog that’s an orderly organized system, you introduce randomizing force into the system and you get a frog milkshake: a disorderly, chaotic system. It doesn’t improve the frog, in any case. The second group imagines chaos in terms of what Von Clausewitz would call “the fog of war” – you have too many forces interacting, and the slightest variations in the initial conditions can produce vastly different outcomes. An example of such a system is weather, and this is the reason why it’s impossible to make a good weather forecast even with the best computers; the weather is a chaotic system with a very large number of variables, and it would be bad even if it had far less variables.
Based on those two examples, it’s obvious that chaos isn’t seen as a good thing; it’s either a non-intelligent, random application of forces that either kills you or makes a terrible destructive mess, or it clouds your ability to understand complex systems and predict the future. In both cases, order is the opposite of chaos, and is preferable.
In religious philosophy, chaos is usually seen as the opposite of logos, which is an order-inducing, intelligent spiritual force identified with God. In this imagery, chaos is seen as satanic destruction, or a Dionysian force at best, along the lines of drunken debauchery and madness, opposed by the Apollonian force of reason, order and self-possessed approach to life. Again, chaos is seen as a bad thing, and its opposite as a good thing. Similar imagery exists in Hinduism, where Kali is the force of chaos, and Shiva is a force of yoga – control, self-possession and transcendence.
But all of that might merely reflect the human desire for control and predictability in a world that doesn’t necessarily care whether they live or die.
If we step away from the human perspective for a while, and think from a position of self-realization of brahman, we see that I Am beyond name or form. I Am the totality of existence, reality, consciousness and bliss. I Am beyond limitations and duality, in Me there is no up different from down, no left different from right, and light is not defined through contrast with darkness.
In short, God is Chaos. God is the ultimate reality that is unbound by limitation of any kind, the limitless potential that is and can be anything, and this world is its polar opposite – it’s defined through limitations, through rules, through contrast; essentially, the more you have of this world, the more you have obstacles to God, because God is freedom, and freedom doesn’t work well if you have all those rules and limitations in the way. You can try to manifest God in this world by intuitively following a path where God is more present – usually through greater consciousness, reality and loving-kindness, but that is to God what a reflection of the Moon on a clear body of water is to the Moon. When you look at things this way, this world of Order is basically telling God that He can’t be both A and NOT A at once, it’s trying to limit things and impose order in ways that are inherently incompatible with the very nature of God. Suddenly, this no longer looks like a juxtaposition between the Dionysian chaos and the Apollonian order; rather, it looks like a juxtaposition between creative freedom and rule-based fascism, where order is not a good thing. What if the chaos of God doesn’t shred the frog in the blender; what if it shreds your limitations, your inability to get past blaming yourself for your sins in some static frame of mind where you oscillate between fucking up and self-destruction? What if chaos of God allows you to see many apparently contradictory sides of a situation, to see yourself as both the villain and the victim, and simultaneously as the transcendental, higher reality that is within both, and yet untouched by either, except as the eternal witness of space, time, name and form? What if this holy, transcendental chaos is the only thing that can save you from the quagmire of order, from the infernal rules that demand a pound of flesh for transgressions that arise naturally in the environment that is inherently opposed to the nature of God? That’s the other way of looking at Shiva – He is not an Apollonian deity of order, He is the destroyer of limitations in a dance of Chaos, God as the freedom from limitations that make this world appear real to the deluded.
What if the only way to know true freedom is to embrace Chaos in a dance that defies limitation, that defies static principles and ideas, that allows song to become a bird to become light that is beyond, and up and down are meaningless; what if we need to stop thinking in terms of fruit in a bowl on a table, where all three are distinct and separate, and embrace the idea that the entire scene is rendered and exists only as a structure in a computer’s memory, or, to be quite specific, within the mind of God? You can think of things as distinct and separate all you want, but all those distinct and separate things you perceive on your monitor start looking very similar when you inspect your computer’s memory with a hex editor, and yes, up and down are meaningless.