Power, Government and Religion

Ok, I've thought a little more about it and I want to state unequivocally that my desires are for private enterprise to come up with approaches and solutions to our problems, one of which is the never ending struggle by our government and institutionalized religion to take and hold power over us.

Many people moan about pork barrel projects funded by tax dollars, but this is only the face of the beast. The problem is in the assumption that Uncle $am has ANY right to spend money on anything other than protecting the rights of individuals, the citizens from whom the power is derived. All other uses of tax money constitute nothing but the exercise of the power that has been stolen from those individuals. Sooner or later it will no longer be just an exercise.

When you have entrenched propaganda machines like public schools teaching young people that government knows best, it is very hard to make them understand the real principles of self-reliance and freedom from coercion. It's easier to let the government make decisions, even though the government demonstrably does nothing well.

If you stop to think you will realize that the wars on drugs, terrorism, poverty, discrimination and ad nauseum all have one thing in common - some group has to give up some rights in order for some perceived injustice to be corrected by our benevolent, protective, well meaning but power hungry government. This will only stop when all have given up all rights.

If you don't like people using drugs recreationally, don't associate with those people. If you don't know who they are, in other words, if you cannot tell who is or is not using, why do you care? If it is so bad that they hurt others, then their violations of other people's rights will give society the right to deal with it in the legal system, which exists to preserve individual rights and to punish those who violate them. Some worthless movie stars snorting cocaine are likely only dangerous to themselves. Let them self destruct. This will improve society.

The same goes for poverty, if you don't like it, create a job for someone that doesn't have one. Or teach people how to improve themselves. Otherwise, shut up. I don't care that you feel their pain.

For terrorism, simply stop interfering with the freedom of people to choose their own way of life. If they choose to live in slavery under despots, that is their business. If they choose to change, it is their responsibility to effect that change. You cannot force freedom on anyone. They have to want it.

Perceived discrimination is the biggest joke of all time. Do you spend all of your time worrying about what other people think about you and how they treat you? Perhaps you need a change of attitude in order to change what they think, instead of telling them that they must accept you because, or in spite of your color, religion, orientation or whatever. There are ALWAYS going to be people who don't like you. Get over it. The best revenge is living well. Put your efforts to that instead of trying to make everyone see what a wonderful person you are. We really don't think about you at all.

Do this so that the government doesn't have the reason to continue to erode our freedom.

A great way to live well is to open your mind and look for the facts. Quit the wishful thinking and figure out what is real and factual, then act on it. If you choose to believe something on faith, that's OK, just be prepared to accept that others are not going to accept your word on it. They will want facts, and faith isn't based on facts. Don't try to argue ethical arguments based on faith. Ethics can only be based in reality, the reality is that the sum total of improvements made by individuals in self interest, is the state of society. When individuals do not improve themselves, society is doomed. Religion is never an improvement on the state of society, only a way for those professing humility to exercise power over those who choose to believe their brand of mysticism. To put it another way, religion has always been used to present people with a moral dilemma, to act according to their nature and be damned, or to act against their nature and be "saved." It is the nature of man to be human, but religion would have you believe that this is evil, and that their particular code of behavior is the only way to be acceptable to your fellow man and to God. I say that God didn't make every animal except man to act according to its nature, leaving man in an impossible situation. It is very powerful to tell a child that a certain behavior will result in their everlasting damnation. It is a great evil to tell them that pleasure or rational self interest will do so. Yet religion often does.

No matter your place in the grand scheme of things, your characteristics, or personality, you can be a force for positive change. All you have to do is quit whining, stop the self destructive worrying about what others think, and start living your own life and taking responsibility for your own happiness. Don't try to please me, or worry what I think. I'm not signing your paycheck, and I'm not condemning you. I just don't care. My life is full enough without all that.

I'm just doing my tiny bit to improve things for all of you. The least you can do is get out of the way.

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I Meta Meta

No, it isn't a fraternity or sorority.

It is a level of abstraction, a way of putting a description of information into the information, or on top of it. In other words, information about information. You can think of meta data as the column headings in a spreadsheet or a corporate financial statement. In that case, the meta data labels the data in the column below the label.

For a time sequenced group of spreadsheets or financial statements, there is also the date, which in a sense is meta-meta data, data about the group of spreadsheets or statements.

OK, I know we all understand what it is and how it works, and those who write html code, xml, css and other data descriptive things use it all the time. An html tag is meta data.

So is a card catalog in the library, or a building code.

Describing data is important in cosmological and philosophical senses as well. I touched on this in a previous blog, but it's important to say it again: In any closed system, there is not enough space to describe that system. Self reference or recursion is well known to computer geeks like me to require careful management to avoid running out of resources due to circular references, or too deeply nesting the recursion.

If we were able to use every atom in the universe as a storage medium, there wouldn't be enough of them to describe the system we had built, much less describe the universe. In other words, there are simply some things we can NEVER know.

One easily seen example of this is weather modeling. The most powerful computers ever built can't reliably model our planet's weather pattern for any extended period. There are too many variables, and some are linked in poorly understood ways with others. We have to build models that are incomplete because we don't yet understand all the interactions, but if we understood all the interactions, we wouldn't have a model, we would have a weather system. A perfect description is the object described. I have read fantasy fiction where knowing something's true name gave you power over it, and it's the same for objects. The only way to perfectly describe something is to point at the thing you are describing.

So maybe instead of trying to pile descriptions on top of descriptions of data, maybe we need to use the idea of "de-metaing" the data, or reducing the amount of data required to describe something as well as minimizing what is needed to tell us what the data means. Sort of a .zip or .arc compression. A function in mathematics can describe a complex set of relationships, so we only need the function and the ability to analyze it to understand all those relationships. We don't have to store all the data about them because the function does that for us.

It's time to start looking for ways to normalize all the data that we have generated. A primary record and a secure, guaranteed backup is all that is needed for any single piece of data. Repetition is wasteful when the storage resources are finite. Of course, this only applies to factual data. This will leave more room for the infinite ways in which we can use these facts for discourse and theory.

An example: Google "GNP 2000". There are more than two million hits. Most of the information is redundant, and that's only the copies on the world wide web. There are plenty of hardcopy references that may not even be listed once. Sure, many of those hits are analyses (and some are irrelevant) but the same basic information exists in each analysis. It's nice to have a book in your hands, but at some point in our future, that is going to be a huge waste of resources. Books don't have a very high information density compared to solid state (computer) memory, which is itself wasteful of resources when compared to technologies that store data on molecules, atoms or even photons.

Also, there is the issue of errors. Today, an correcting an error in data that is used in many different analyses takes a certain amount of time to propagate. During the propagation period, there exists a decreasing number (with respect to time) of references to the invalid data, which in turn may be cited and used in decision making. Those decisions are then necessarily flawed, and may cause damage to the very system being analyzed when implemented.

Of course, certain data are proprietary, as are many of the algorithms used for analysis. If a stockbroker uses incomplete or erroneous data, or demonstrably flawed analysis, to make recommendations for buy/sell/hold decisions, that can affect many investors. It is very important that corrections are made in the shortest possible time, and those recommendations should change in as close to real time as possible. This benefits the broker as well as investors. This is still an argument for a new approach to information storage, the difference being only in the possession of the data, not it's structure or usage.

Once we have perfected the science of storing facts, then we approach the thornier issue of what to do about all of the crazy people saying insane things just to hear themselves talking. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

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