A Scientist

I am a scientist

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Last Notes

2024-04-25 18:37:16

Privacy is normal.
Anti-privacy (AKA surveillance) is abnormal.
To all intelligence agents, political operatives, collectivists, and bureaucrats everywhere: that you want to know what I am thinking, doing, saying, where I'm going and who I'm associating with does not make it ok for you to know those things.
That you want to know those things makes you a pathological human. That you think you have a right to know them makes you a dangerous human.

2024-03-25 17:38:35

New essay on substack: Who is the Enemy?
https://open.substack.com/pub/iamascientist/p/who-is-the-enemy

2023-12-15 14:32:46

The Most Dangerous Force in the World in 2023 (in one sentence)
The most dangerous and divisive force in the world right now is the apparently complete lack of awareness on the part of self-styled, developed-world “liberals” (which I quote because the version of “liberalism” or “progressivism” that pertains now has nothing whatsoever to do with the principles, values, and priorities of what was called “liberalism” up to about 2016) that their program of “inclusiveness” and “diversity” enforced in practice by the most extreme measures of censorship, persecution, marginalization, and even criminalization of any speech and thought that doesn’t conform to their preferred narratives is ouroborosly hypocritical and entirely self-negating.

2023-12-10 23:09:18

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The A in AI
https://iamascientist.substack.com/p/the-a-in-ai

2023-11-26 17:41:56

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Agree that revolution is not a permanent solution and was not intending to present it as such though I can see how it might read that way.
Instead as implied in the quote from Jefferson at the end of the essay, I think it's a periodic necessity.
I also think you could hope that humanity might one day mature to the point where cycles of crapification and cleansing were no longer necessary, but that's not where we are now.

2023-11-24 14:58:41

New essay up on Substack:
Corruption is Inevitable; Revolution is Essential
https://iamascientist.substack.com/p/corruption-is-inevitable-revolution

2023-09-21 11:45:12

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The absurd election of Trump was those angry people growling. Unfortunately, the political left in America interpreted that growling not as a warning related to their own, let's call it "questionable" behavior, but instead as an indichtment of the mental health and morality of the numerical majority of Americans.
I'd say that the most important and relevant thing they are ignorant of is the fundmental hypocrisy at the core of nearly all the values they are currently mindlessly championing; Ardern, for example, calling for government regulation of online speech as a means of protecting free speech.
She (using her here as a representative example of the political left in the west) really does not seem to be aware at all of the self-contradictory nature (much less the embedded elitist, superior tone) of this sentence: "As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even the most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech that we value so highly,"

2023-08-27 11:15:14

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I think this is partly true of some - today unfortunately perhaps most - humans. Though to be more precise I’d formulate it like this: Many humans today - by habit - function cognitively analogous to LLMs; rather than interacting at the level of understanding, depth, and meaning, they merely regurgitate semantically valid linguistic constructions pieced together from sources they have read or listened to previously.
Such humans (and LLMs) are functioning in language like a sophisticated parrot. All manner of clever AND USEFUL (like a tool is useful) results are born of this type of surface rearrangement of language. Unfortunately this mode of linguistic functioning is bereft of everything meaningfully rich and deep that human minds are capable of. It's exactly NOT 'sentience' (or even anywhere in the same ballpark) in the sense that most people intend and understand that word. And it's not "close" or "getting there" because there is no pathway from rearranging linguistic symbols to sentience; it's a different thing altogether.
Artificial intelligence (today) is perfectly termed; it's precisely not authentic intelligence. It's a facsimile; a clever and useful simulacra (in the exact sense of Baudrillard). I don't know of any reason that natural ('authentic') intelligence or sentience could not be instantiated in man-made machines. But LLMs are not that and will never be that; they are something altogether different from that.

2023-08-27 10:27:17

https://cdn.nostr.build/i/601d2d73d9bf0e8bc6cedaae4e0bcfff6c150cf2f7d4362fcb0ba555810b5836.jpg

2023-08-10 10:58:37

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I like that cartoon.
Here's Mickey's epistemology applied to mRNA covid vaccines by a molecular biologist:
#[0]

2023-06-26 17:02:19

sed -i 's/try and/try to/g' Internet

2023-06-10 12:27:55

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I'll see your Dan Bashara / Kenz Mangan and raise you one Buckaroo Banzai:
"Wherever you go, there you are."

2023-06-07 19:01:53

On the scale of what is altogether, differences between humans and bacteria are footnotes.
But on the human scale, the difference between competence and incompetence is GIGANTIC.

2023-06-05 14:33:23

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100%
It's too bad that human collectives seem to need the pendulum to swing to such painful and destructive extremes over and over, rather than simply recognizing where health is on the trajectory and settling there straightaway.

2023-06-02 14:42:41

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Be not proud of who or what you are. Be HUMBLE entity, because no matter who or what you are (or think you are) everything about who and what you are is indescribably, unutterably, unspeakably INFINITESIMAL in the context of the Real.

2023-05-23 10:12:52

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The authors of that blog post are among the stupidest smart people I've ever experienced.

2023-05-15 13:53:20

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LOL - I only meant that they buzz around incessantly and annoyingly within the "air" of language — like moquitos. In fact, it's a bad analogy because moquitos are self-producers (biological entities) and thus, in my view, far more interesting / miraculous.

2023-05-15 12:56:33

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LLM's are language mosquitos.

2023-05-15 12:30:18

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This is all exactly correct in my view. LLM AI's are a powerful parlor trick. They are not anything like an intelligence in the biological sense of that term and they are never going to be.
The primary difference that makes a difference (Bateson) between an LLM and any and every form of biological / natural intelligence is that biologiclal entities are selves and LLM's are not selves. In fact, the defining characterstic of a biological system is that it is organized to produce a self (autopoiesis). That is the line that demarcates the realm of the living from the realm of the non-living (note well: it's not self-reproduction which is an oxymoron, it's self-production).
Biological entities have agency and intentionality that is the result of their self-producing organization. Effectively, because they can die, they have desire. And desire drives all intention.
LLM's have nothing like that at all. No self, no death, no desire, no intentionality. It's a categorical absurdity to refer to the processing of an LLM model with a pronoun ("you") and it's an act of intellectual vandalism that AI developers have programmed LLM chat systems to produce speech that refers to a 100% non-existant "I".

2023-05-12 18:28:06

"Do nothing" is almost always better than "do something."
If you're going to do anything, do the RIGHT thing.

2023-05-08 15:30:58

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When I wrote that human activity was "causing" global warming, I really meant "contributing to".

2023-05-08 14:25:22

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Depending on what you mean by "false", I agree. Almost certainly human activity is causing global warming. But I don't think we have any basis whatsoever to understand the implications of that.
People thinking and behaving as though this realm we share maps cleanly to binary (true / false) logic is a real problem in science and metascience (and policy based thereon).
Ioannidis seems to be every bit as guilty of this fallacy as those whose work he is critiquing.
Models are *models* and the map is not the territory.
So to me, the "falsity" in the conclusions is not that the truth is the opposite of whatever is being claimed. It's that the underlying assumption that having conducted the study and run your stats gives you someplace to stand to make firm statements about reality is absurd.
That's exactly not science.

2023-04-21 13:02:13

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When the people who write laws perceive you as a threat, you have to know they are going to make you illegal.
It's heroic to publish the truth in a time when lies and liars rule, but it might not be the best course for your personal well-being.

2023-04-18 10:01:17

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I've been a subscriber to your substack for a couple years. I’m happy to support your fighting the good fight and doing real journalism. Also more a supporter of protocol over platform and so very grateful to be able to keep up with what you are doing via nostr rather than twitter or substack's yet-another-new-social-platform.

2023-04-17 20:09:41

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Wow - did not expect that.
┐ ┐= ┐.

2023-04-17 13:59:26

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Distinctions.
https://ia800606.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/35/items/olcovers652/olcovers652-L.zip&file=6529780-L.jpg

2023-04-17 13:48:23

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I've never read his work so probably don't have a valid take. But watching that video for a few minutes I came away feeling like he has unstated a priori assumptions about both science and reality that I don’t share and the core of his thesis seems to me to be a faulty extrapolation of those assumptions. His faith in his theoretical model also make his claims feel like overreach to me.
That said, I have a lot of overlap with a lot of his conclusions and although I don't think he can legitimately dismiss the notion of reality altogether (which he does seem to be trying to do, but again that may be a bad read by me because I have not studied his work), I think he and I would agree that whatever actually _IS_ we don't and can't know that.
Although he and I seem to share a lot of academic background (I'd be surprised if we don't have colleagues in common) and I have done a fair bunch of work in cognitive evolution and come to a lot of the same conclusions in that work, I think that he would probably classify my position with regard to "reality" as more "philosophical" than "scientific."
He seems to want to believe that evolutionary theory is some kind of solid ground that he can stand on to make epistemological pronouncements. My view is simpler: there is no ground (there is no spoon, Neo).
To me, basing an organisms non-access to direct perception of reality on an evolutionary argument is not exactly *wrong*, but it is unnecessary and over-complicating.
If you just take a moment to think it through logically, it's immediately obvious that we can never know what we don't know and that means we necessarily do not and cannot (ever) know what _IS_ altogether.

2023-04-17 10:55:37

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999 times out of a thousand I hate when someone seems to agree with me. You might be the other 1 out of this year's 1K.
I, on the other hand, want to make it hard for you all: I'm not on the other side. I'm on no side. I’m antiside (which seems like it might yet be a side, but I think that's just an unavoidable artifact of language).
If you think I'm on your side, you're probably wrong. If you think I'm on the other side, you’re probably wrong.
The problem with free speech is that most people really don't have much to say that is worthwhile. But the problem with censorship - which is a far, far more dire problem - is that when you stop people from expressing themselves freely, you are not stopping them from thinking and feeling what they think and feel.
You are just making sure that whatever they think and feel that you don't want them to express will come out sideways and with far more negative force than if you just let everyone express themselves freely in a natural discourse.
I don't know how this is not perfectly obvious to the anti-liberal, faux-left of today.

2023-04-16 10:46:40

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You are exactly right. And within science this perversion is tragically leading to the practice of "science" itself becoming anti-science. In my experience it's more than a "significant fraction" - it's almost everyone.
I wrote a short essay on science and covid in Oct 2021. Copied here to Nostr now: #[0]

2023-04-16 10:31:15

This short essay was originally published on Substack on October 16, 2021. Copying here.
# epistemRNA
I am a scientist. In particular I hold an advanced degree in cell and molecular biology from the University of California and I have co-authored published research in an established, peer-reviewed scientific journal (Journal of Neurophysiology). I include these credentials for the sake of people who believe credentials confer credibility. Having met and worked with many people with and without credentials, I do not hold that belief and I assert that the credibility of what follows is self-evident.
## 1.
Here’s my scientific *opinion*: If you have *faith in science* but do not actually understand how science works, what the scientific method can and can’t tell you, *what science is*, then that (your faith, your “scientific beliefs”) is exactly **NOT** science. That is religion. Following others, I call that religion “scientism”. It is a scourge on the practice of actual science and its ubiquity is a symptom of a widespread, catastrophic estrangement from the fundamental responsibilities of knowing how to think and thinking for oneself.
If, on the other hand, you *don’t believe in science* because you do not understand how science works, what the scientific method can and can’t tell you, *what science is*, and because scientific results seem to be in conflict with your religious beliefs, something you read or something someone told you, then you are afflicted with a similar, if sociopolitically distinct, mental pathology.
For whatever it’s worth, my seat of the pants estimate is that the above two characterizations cover approximately 97% of human thought about “science” in our time. To quote a modern media clown: *sad!*
Anyone who believes that science tells you anything definitive about what the world is, is not a scientist. Even if they have scientific “credentials”. If you think you are a scientist and that science tells you anything definitive about what is, you have an anti-scientific premise, an *a priori*, faith-based assumption that an experimental result specifies the world it must happen in when in fact any given experimental result is compatible with an infinity of potential worlds (some of which you can partially imagine, a literal infinity of which you cannot), and you are practicing *scientism*. In my experience, this criticism applies to well over 90% of working “scientists” and 100% of “science” bureaucrats (e.g. Anthony Fauci) and entertainers (e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson).
**We are each and all of us born into a perfect mystery.** Science, the scientific method, can never tell you what *is*. Science, true science, is an iterative methodology for finding ways that work in the mystery. Newton formulated his physics within a context that was entirely naive of an encompassing quantum formulation that came later. Newtonian physics is both perfectly “true” in the sense that it makes perfect predictions about everyday objects in the human realm of perception, and at the same time perfectly “false” as a description of reality since it was later found not to explain all manner of phenomena that were unknown to Newton. Newton’s physics is now thought of as an approximation — a special case of a more encompassing physics — that is “true enough” under certain conditions. And because it is and will be forever inescapably the case that we can’t know what we don’t know, we are also and forever Newton and our most sophisticated current theories have exactly the same truth-status as Newton’s. No really; *exactly* the same. This is unavoidable. We have no place to stand outside the bubble of what we can know to perceive that bubble’s limits with respect to what is altogether. We can never know what we don’t know. We will always be Newton, doing the best we can in an always bigger mystery than we can imagine.
A true scientist lives and dies as a perfect skeptic, questioning everything (**everything!**), humbly *understanding* that they never really *know* anything. And, by the way, having enough spine to live in the world without the comforting fantasy of certainty.
## 2.
mRNA vaccines are an extremely promising experimental technology that may revolutionize immunization (itself originally one of the great practical achievements of the scientific method). I believe that for a certain sub-population (the elderly and those with certain comorbidities), their heightened risk of severe complications and death from the COVID virus justifies their use of experimental COVID vaccine(s). I make medical decisions for my elderly mother who has many respiratory and other comorbidities and I have chosen for her to be vaccinated.
For myself, fit and healthy at 60 years of age with no known comorbidities, the vaccines currently feel more risky to me than the virus. Can I tell you this is definitively true? No I cannot, *because I am a scientist* and that means that I DO NOT KNOW FOR SURE. What I do feel confidence in saying is that nobody else knows for sure either. Anyone calling themselves a scientist who is definitively telling you that the virus is more risky to you and to society than the vaccine cannot know this is actually true; thus their posturing of certainty means that they have an agenda of some kind which has nothing to do with science, or that they are an idiot (or both).
The word *immunity* has understandably been in significant use in human discourse during the course of the COVID pandemic. It’s one of those interesting words that has different meanings in different contexts and the differences for this particular word have suddenly become material for people in a new way.
When used colloquially, at least in American English, the word *immunity* often connotes something like total insusceptibility to one or another kind of threat. As a technical term in biology, the word *immunity* (by itself) means that an organism has some unspecified (statistical) *degree* of resistance to infection by an immunogenic pathogen (bacteria, virus, etc. ). That degree of resistance could be a little or a lot, depending on many factors.
A lack of appreciation for the difference between these two connotations of the word *immunity* — the colloquial and the technical — seems to me to be leading to a lot of misunderstanding, stress, and conflict in human society at the present time.
Do the COVID vaccines confer *immunity* to those that take them; in other words, do the vaccines work? The answer totally depends on your definition of the word *immunity*. Do they confer total insusceptibility to infection (the colloquial meaning of *immunity*)? No, they do not. Do they confer some meaningful degree of increased resistance to infection and serious illness (the technical meaning of *immunity*)? Yes, they clearly seem to.
Do COVID vaccines confer some kind of “superior” immunity vs. the natural immunity one develops by becoming infected with COVID and subsequently becoming well again? This would be the only possible rational justification for a vaccine mandate that did not exempt those with natural immunity. This is an interesting question and I do not believe we currently have enough empirical information to give a satisfactory answer to it. Anything is possible (the first rule of real science), but on the surface it seems highly improbable that mRNA vaccines are likely to confer *superior* immunity over natural immunity for at least two reasons.
1 - mRNA vaccines provoke a focused and comparatively one-dimensional immune response to a single viral protein antigen. An immune response to a systemic, whole-virus bodily infection is a very multi-faceted affair with all kinds of different cells in the body participating in the marshaling of a wide-ranging defense to many different aspects of the replicating viruses, both structurally and functionally. We have learned a lot about immune responses. We still have a lot to learn about them. We will never know all there is to know (another flavor of the first rule of real science). The natural immune response to a viral infection is an extremely complex and robust cognitive phenomenon in which the body’s immune system literally learns how to recognize and defeat a viral incursion. To use a bad and woefully oversimplified [American] football analogy, the difference between an mRNA vaccine immune response and a natural one is that the response to the vaccine is something like ignoring most of your defensive team and telling just your linebackers to look for a specific shoe on the opposing team and then tackle whoever is wearing that shoe. Whereas a natural immune response is like giving your entire defensive team a profound and thorough understanding of the whole opposing offensive team, all the different positions and the relations among them, all the historically known offensive plays and the whole gestalt of the offensive strategy, and then teaching them to work together as a coordinated unit to stop the opposing offense from moving the ball forward.
2 - Statistically speaking, we know that the vaccines are not 100% effective. Some vaccinated people under some conditions become infected with COVID. However, every unvaccinated person who is infected with COVID and survives the infection and gets better is 100% immune to at least the strain of COVID that infected them, for at least some period of time. Getting well from an infection is perfect *immunity* (for some period of time, the colloquial and the technical meanings of the term are the same) to whatever infected you. The viral infection doesn’t just go away or “peter out” on its own. Getting well means your immune system has *defeated* the infection. That is immunity. To my knowledge, there is not sufficient empirical evidence at the present time to indicate whether natural immunity or vaccine-induced immunity is either (a) longer-lasting or (b) more effective against a wider range of COVID variants. If I were a betting man, I would bet on the more wholistic, natural immune response to be superior in both regards.
Are mRNA COVID vaccines safe over the long term? I don’t know *and nobody else knows either.* No representative sample of humans has been vaccinated with an mRNA COVID vaccine for a period that constitutes anything close to “long term.” There are a lot of people with a strongly held **belief** in a specific theory of how mRNA vaccines work. There is no room in that theory for an infinity of possibilities which no experimentation that has been done to date rules out. The fact is that though many people who call themselves “scientists” are very professionally staring into lenses and assuring the public that mRNA COVID vaccines are 100% long-term safe, if pressed they would absolutely have to admit that the most they can possibly say in truth is, “if my extremely specific and limited theory of what the vaccines do is correct, and if they don’t do anything else that I do not know about and haven’t imagined, then they *should* be safe.”
From my *scientific* point of view, the idea of injecting *everyone on earth* with an experimental vaccine with *unknown long-term risk* against a pathogen that has serious or life-threatening consequences for less than 5% of those infected (on average, and far, far less for most age and cofactor cohorts) is literally insane. We certainly are living in interesting times.
Because humans in general have somehow become absurdly convinced that everything is either black or white (and that everyone *must* be on either team black or team white), I feel like I have to add here that none of the preceding should be taken to mean that I currently believe COVID vaccines are long-term dangerous. The vaccines could very well be among the safest and most effective medical interventions ever invented. I am a scientist, *so I don’t know.* I’m saying we don’t (can’t yet) know if the vaccines are long-term safe or not. The uncertainty is what matters here.
I’m sorry, but the apparent desire among many people for reality to fit into neat little packages of tweet-length text does not make it so. We exist in an unfathomable complexity where simple yes or no answers are appropriate in the tiniest fraction of an overwhelmingly few instances of super-constrained, usually artificially constructed circumstances. In the real world, it’s all shades of all colors all the time. The attempt to squash what is into binary pixels is a conceptual abomination that humans will have to transcend if humans are to persist.
mRNA vaccines have never been widely used before now. They have a risk and the amount of that risk is *currently unknown*. So if you are talking about injecting them into *everyone on earth*, multiple times, with an *unknown risk*, that, to me, is a *dangerous decision*. Even if you think you have a reason to believe the risk is low, the consequences of being wrong are potential ruin. For the Entire. Human. Race. That doesn’t mean I think the vaccines are definitely dangerous; it means that *given what we currently know* it seems unacceptably risky (because of the potential for ruin) to vaccinate everyone.
In my scientific career, I conducted many experiments on laboratory animals. I always had a theory going into those experiments and I have often been surprised by the results. At the present time, under the present circumstances, I choose not to be a laboratory animal myself. Under other circumstances, or in the future, I might make a different decision for myself. Under other circumstances that I can easily imagine, I might also be in favor of vaccine mandates. At the present time, under the present circumstances, as a scientist and as a human, I am completely opposed to any kind of COVID vaccine mandates.

2023-04-15 13:33:52

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I don't know how familiar you are with public key cryptography but it can be tempting to think about your private key like a password, BUT YOU SHOULD NOT.
It's actually more like your entire identity because if someone else gets control of it, there is no "authority" to appeal to to regain control of your "account". In fact, you have no account - just the identity conferred by that private key.
You are going to be a target, so before you build a big following which would be painful to have to rebuild from scratch, if you are not an opsec person you might want to get some basic security tips from someone you know who knows their way around (maybe @jack or Ed Snowden).