alan-crowe

Another example of "wasn't widely deployed because of its cost" is the Kalthoff 30-Shot Flintlock from 1659. Here is a video from Forgotten Weapons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghKrbNpqQoY

I'm starting to see Henry Maudslay's screw cutting lathe (1800) as a turning point. Before it, inventors could invent really cool devices, and carefully hand make one or a few, but they would be too expensive. Then machine tools made shaping metal cheaper. That included shaping metal to make machine tools. So costs fell and fell, and eventually all sorts of things became cheap enough for wide deployment.

That is scary, because the "right time" to invent something depends on the capabilities of production machinery setting the production cost. As an inventor, one likes to think of success of the inventing lying in ones own hands, but there is an ecosystem of production machinery that has an out sized say in how much your invention will cost to mass produce. It can even veto an excellent invention by saying "Not yet!".

The review distills the book's view of the difference between pure mathematics and applied mathematics. "applied" split from "pure" to meet the technical needs of the US military during WW2.

My best example of the split is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_of_second_derivatives Wikpedia notes that "The list of unsuccessful proposed proofs started with Euler's, published in 1740,[3] although already in 1721 Bernoulli had implicitly assumed the result with no formal justification." The split between pure (Euler) and applied(Bernoulli) is already there.

The result is hard to prove because it isn't actually true. A simple proof will apply to a counter example, so cannot be correct. A correct proof will have to use the additional hypotheses needed to block the counter examples, so cannot be simple.

Since the human life span is 70 years, I face an urgent dilemma. Do I master the technique needed to understand the proof (fun) or do I crack on and build things (satisfaction)? Pure mathematicians are planning on constructing long and intricate chains of reasoning; a small error can get amplified into a error that matters. From a contradiction one can prove anything. Applied mathematics gets applied to engineering; build a prototype and discover problems with tolerances, material impurities, and annoying edge cases in the mathematical analysis. A error will likely show up in the prototype. Pure? Applied? It is really about the ticking of the clock.

The important context is that life is short, just seventy years, and has stages, your early twenties are a magical time. Losing your ambition and wasting your early twenties are a subtle danger, but nevertheless a serious danger.

My analysis it that it is a plot by a company that makes "child proofing" gadgets. People are having fewer children, so sales of child-proofing gadgets are falling. People are keeping dogs and cats as pets instead, but neither dogs nor cats have the dexterity to make child-proofing gadgets a must-have pet accessory. Pet Raccoons could save the child-proofing gadget industry, with only a minor pivot to tougher, gnaw resistant gadgets.

The documentation pages for FreeBSD include manual pages, for example

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hcreate&manpath=Fr...

A basic exercise in mathematical logic involves looking for minimal sets of connectives. You can base logic on just NAND. But you get NOT by joining two inputs together, so you might refuse to count that and say it is NOT and AND. Another possibility for binary logic is implication, =>, and NOT. Because (NOT A) => B is equivalent to A OR B and obviously (OR and NOT) work just as well as (AND and NOT). What though are minimal sets for ternary?

The familiar 74181 has control inputs to let the circuit summon any of the 16 operations on two bits. (A two bit operation has four possible inputs, and two possible outputs for each input so 2 ^ 4 = 16 possible operations). A similar ALU part for ternary would have two trits as input so nine possible inputs. Each would have three possible values, so 3 ^ 9 = 19683. It would need nine control inputs, each a trit. But 19683 is so much more than 16. How many gates do you need to be able to combine them to produce all possible (trit,trit)->trit gates?

Here are three gates that get you a long way mathematically. First a swap gate

-1 -> 0

0 -> -1

1 -> 1

Then a permute gate

-1 -> 0

0 -> 1

1 -> -1

This lets your generate all permutations

Then you need a "spot" gate that spots one input, say (0 0) and output 1, and 0 otherwise. Since you have all permutations you have all spot gates. And inverse spot gates. Does that solve the problem? It is late and I'm tired. And I can see that the mathematically minimal set is impractical.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Balanced_ternary_ope...

has six operations. There are three for doing arithmetic, the units from multiplication, the units from addition, and the carry from addition (it is part of the attraction of balanced ternary that there is no carry out from multiplying digits). There are also three for doing logic, based on -1 is false, +1 is true, and basically degenerating into binary logic.

Is that how this is done? The Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) has two kinds of words, numbers in balanced ternary, and bit-rows in degenerate binary. The hardware is built with a pragmatic mixture of binary and ternary logic gates, with the ternary gates heavily used in the Arithmetic Unit, barely at all in the Logic unit, and only opportunistically in the rest of the hardware, that is mostly binary gates as usual?

I have a bizarre mad science interest in this because I see how to build AND gates with mechanical linkages, http://alan.sdf-eu.org/linkage-logic/now-with-labels.html and wonder if the same technique works for ternary gates. But what are the operation tables for ternary gates? I should attempt the specialized ones for arithmetic first.

Grothendieck starts by asserting that the experimental-deductive method has been spectacularly successful for four hundred years. His article never gets round to revisiting this. He never notices the bi-modal quality of the successes. Some truly spectacular successes, quite a lot of knowledge that hints weakly, and a rather empty middle ground.

Think about gyroscopes. Newton invents classical mechanics, with no specific rules for rotating objects. You get a top mathematician, Euler, to work out the implications for rotating objects. The implications are weird and implausible. But it turns out that they are spot on. People invent gyroscopes and exploit the truly spectacular success of the experimental-deductive method.

Another example could be James Clerk-Maxwell building on the work of Faraday and Ampere to come up with Maxwell's Equations. The equations predict electro-magnetic radiation, so Hertz goes looking and, yes, it is really there!

I want a name for this kind of truly spectacular success. I'll build on the gyroscope example and call it Gyro-gnosis.

But think instead of Hook's law. Spring force is proportional to extension. Kind of. It is useful enough if you don't pull too hard on your spring, but it is not fundamental. Or think of animal testing in medicine. There is some theory. All life on Earth today is based on DNA. We know the branching of the tree of life; mice are mammals, so mouse research should link up with human health, sometimes, a little bit. But theory and experiment combine to give us hints rather than wisdom.

I want a name for this kind of weak knowledge that so often leads to disappointment. Stealing the T from Theory, taking the whole of hint, and the end of wisdom, I'm going to write Thintdom.

By page six, Grothendieck is on to his manifesto "Fighting Scientism". We are certainly in trouble, due to thintdom being granted the prestige of gyrognosis. But if you want to push back, you have to drive a wedge between thintdom and gyrognosis. Since gyrognosis is truly spectacularly successful, fighting against it is just banging your head against a brick wall. One needs to separate out the weaker forms of knowledge so that one can criticize thintdom without its proponent being able to use gyrognosis as a shield. If you let thintdom and gyrognosis be joined together as empiricism, your criticism cannot be made to stick because the parts of empiricism that work well, work far to well to be criticized.

It is now commonplace to notice the depth of the technology stack, from applications, down through compilers, assemblers, the block diagram level of hardware, the register level, the logic gate level, the transistor level, circuits with parasitic inductance and capacitance, doping and migration, statistical effects,... When you build up the way, some of the lower level features are preserved, such as conservation of momentum. And some of the lower level features help with understanding the higher levels. But medicine offers a clear warning that Nature's stack is too deep. Four hundred years of "success" have taught us what that leads to. Sometimes you get gyrognosis. Sometimes you get thintdom.

By the end of his piece Grothendieck is pining his hopes on "inner class contradiction" within the scientific caste. Maybe. I think the most promising starting point is to push back against linguist poverty. We have only one word, empiricism for, err, empiricism, so the four hundred year old empirical lesson that the successes of empiricism are bimodal goes unnoticed.

Your comment needs a link, such as https://www.castlecraig.co.uk/addiction-resources/what-are-b... to brain zaps. The phenomenon is not widely known and your comment will not be understood without it.

Sabine Hossenfelder, a physics Youtuber, recently departed from her usual content to discuss sorbitol giving her digestive problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5v61YtDYo4

I think that you are missing how credibility and propaganda intertwine. The BBC gives you accurate reports on Indonesia and Chile to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Britain. Aljazeera give accurate reports on Boeing and Airbus to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Qatar. NPR give accurate reports on Angola and Bangladesh to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of the USA.

One navigates an adversarial information environment by harvesting the free truth provided by those seeking to build credibility. Then one tries to avoid the flames when the same organisations burn their credibility to boost their funders and owners.

It is clear that the weight attached to LOC will decline as management acquires more directly relevant information. The difficult issue is whether there is a zero lower bound.

Imagine buying in software, against a specification. A fully detailed specification with tests both for logical correctness and performance. If there is a choice of vendors, at similar prices, one naturally chooses the package with fewer lines of code. The weight attached to LOC is negative.

The anecdote is interesting because it invites the following speculation. Question: How many extra data points, beyond LOC, does one need to manage a software project? Answer: Enough that the weight attached to LOC, given optimal use of the other information available, is negative.

"Professor-General Norden" might be a dig at the Norden Bomb Sight, an American high-tech wonder weapon that under-performed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6D5rXbMBKo tells the tale.

But there is a surprising counter claim that the dodecahedrons predate the invention of knitting:

https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2022/08/04/fiber-arts-myster...

One sees signal beacons (a bonfire on a hill, used to send a simple warning message) both up close, and from a distance of many miles. Thus one sees with the naked eye that a great fire looks like a mere candle from far enough away. Then one boldly extrapolates: perhaps it is the same with the sun and the stars.

Steel man one: controlling the social costs of mate competition. Struggling to find a wife? Start an affair with a married woman, persuade her to divorce her husband and marry you. If that is permitted then the happy husband has to guard against it all the time. That is a cost. By the exchange doesn't create more women; the gain to one man is exactly cancelled by the loss to the other. Socially it is net loss. Complications: the gain to the woman on finding a more suitable husband, the loss to the woman when the second man tires of her and divorces her and her first husband doesn't want her back. The distress of the children of the first marriage.

Exercises for the reader: (1)Gender swap the previous paragraph. (2)Add in the effects of alimony, child custody, and child support that we are willing to talk about. (3)Add in the dark side of child custody and support with women making false allegation to win custody and the money that comes with it.

Steel man two: Some people are so attractive that they have a choice of who to marry. Homo Economicus studies divorce law, and the effect of divorce incentives on mate choice is immediate. Normal people are influenced indirectly, by the marriages and divorces of parents, aunts, uncles, the parents of their friends, movies and novels about family life. Perhaps the eventual effect that filters through to normal people is the same as what Homo Economicus calculates so promptly, but with a lag of twenty to forty years.

Does a woman chose a dangerously sexy man, or a boring good provider? She doesn't ask the questions: what if he beats me? Trades me in for a younger model? Dies in a fight or motorbike accident? Bores me to despair? But all those scenarios play out in the romantic fiction she reads, and she knows which are the fantasy ones, and which are the ones that play out under real life divorce law.

If divorce is forbidden, people make safe choices. If divorce is permitted people take risks, and society gets to pick up the pieces. The usual argument in favour of divorce to end violent, unhappy marriages treats the rate of violent, unhappy marriages as exogenous. A rival argument is that the rate of violent, unhappy marriages is endogenous. The causal chain runs: permit divorce, more risky marriages, more violently unhappy marriages. Which leads to a tricky calculation: more bad marriages, but divorce ends a bad marriage, so many of the bad marriages as less bad because briefer. (complication: some of the safe-choice marriages turn out to be pretty bloody miserable)

That is not the correct calculation. There is inter-generational transmission of trauma; the children of bad marriages that break down, grow up to have bad marriages that break down. That adds another twenty to forty years of lag on the effects of changes to divorce laws filtering through.

Back in 1700 the considerations above would have been a little scandalous, because that way of thinking is atheistic. Say it out loud and people would think that you had read too much Thomas Hobbes. But they had a curious notion of providence, with faith in God being bolstered by the sense that He had handed down moral laws that worked out for the best. I think that they had their own ways of combining Theism and social-realism.

In the original understanding of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the public policy take away is the anti-prison argument: you can try to set up a prison system that treats the prisoners in a kind, reforming way, but the guards will treat the prisoners in a brutal, deforming way because that is what humans with power do automatically.

The kind of experiment that would provide convincing evidence would have a pro-prison psychologist trying to rig the experiment by tipping off the guards that they are supposed to show the best side of human nature and treat the prisoners in a kind, reforming way; but it all goes horribly wrong when the guards ignore the push from the experimenter and are brutal anyway.

What do we expect would be the outcome of an experiment where the pro-prison psychologist running it tips off the guards about how they are supposed to behave? Zimbardo's work is rather ambiguous. Perhaps it generates the expectation that the guards will be brutal. Perhaps it generates the expectation that the guards will conform to the clues and hints injected by the psychologist running the experiment. The work suffers from a fundamental wrong way roundness in relation to the public policy controversy.

My reference point for this kind of thing is the video cassette recorder (VCR). Trusting to memory I think that they entered the consumer market at around $700 and were down to around $100 by the time they were obsolete. But before they reached the consumer market, they were a super-expensive professional item. Getting helical scan VCRs (a high precision, complicated electro-mechanical technology) to the consumer market involved impossible price reductions, just to reach the consume price point of $700. I never expected further big price reductions to follow and was wrong.

A weed killing laser robot seems obviously stupid - an expensive electro-mechanical system generating trivial value with each weed zapped. There is no way to get the price down low enough for this to make sense. But CD players have servo control of the tracking and focus of the laser. Much lower power than needed for weed wacking, but much faster and more accurate than needed and very cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wplLkxBsqQo Adequate cameras are cheap enough. AI vision processing is on a roll and we can look forward to huge price falls. The technology looks promising from the outside.

We can dig into the nature of the pareidolia.

The basic technique for coping with life's problems is to copy the answer from somebody more intelligent. I'm an ordinary person, facing a problem in domain D; I spot a clever person and copy their opinion on domain D. Err, that doesn't really work. Even clever people have weaknesses. The person that I'm copying from might be clever on their specialty, domain E, but ordinary on domain D. I gain nothing from copying them.

One way round this problem is to pay close attention to track records. Look to see how well the clever person's earlier decisions on domain D have turned out. If they are getting "clever person" results in domain D, copy. If they are merely getting "ordinary person" results in domain D, don't bother. But track records are rare, so this approach is rarely applicable.

A fix for the rarity problem is to accept track records in other domains. The idea is to spot a very clever person by them getting "very clever person" results in domain F. That is not domain D, so there is a logical weakness to copying their opinion on domain D, they might be merely ordinary, or even stupid on that domain. Fortunately human intelligence is usually more uniform than that. Getting "very clever person" results on domain F doesn't guarantee "very clever person" results on domain D. But among humans general intelligence is kind of a thing. Expecting that they get "clever person" results (open rank down) on domain D is a good bet, and it is reasonable to copy their opinion on domain D, even in the absence of a domain specific track record.

We instinctively watch out for people whose track record proves that they are "very clever", and copy them on other matters, hoping to get "clever person" results.

Artificial intelligence builds towers of super human intellectual performance in an empty waste land. Most Artificial Intelligences are not even stupid away from their special domain, they don't work outside of it at all. Even relatively general intelligences, like Chat GPT, have bizarre holes in their intelligence. Large Language Models don't know that there is an external world to which language refers and about which language can be right or wrong. Instead they say the kinds of things that humans say, with zero awareness of the risks.

And us humans? We cannot help seeing the super human intellectual performance of Alpha Go, beating the World Champion at Go, as some kind of general intellectual validation. It is our human instinct to use a "spot intelligence and copy from it" strategy, even, perhaps especially, outside of track record. That is the specific nature of the pareidolia that we need to worry about. It is our nature to treat intelligences as inherently fairly general. Very clever on one thing implies clever on most other things. We are cursed to believe in the intelligence of our computer companions. This will end bad, as we give them serious responsibilities, and they fail, displaying incomprehensible stupidity.

or cloakatively clichéd.

People grow old and die. It takes about seventy years. Thoroughly wasting a year of everybody's lives is equivalent to 1.4% mortality.

It is more nefarious than that

https://babylonbee.com/news/lego-introduces-new-sharper-bric...

These are depopulation bricks.

Here is a less scatological parable about GDP.

Alice loves widgets. She would pay $100 for a widget. She goes on line and finds Bob offering widgets for sale for $100. Err, that is not really what she had in mind. She imagined paying $30 for a widget, and feeling $70 better off as a consequence. She emails Bob: How about $90?

Bob feels like giving up altogether. It takes him ten hours to hand craft a widget and the minimum wage where he lives is $10 an hour. He was offering widgets for $150. $100 is the absolute minimum. Bob replies: No.

While Alice is deciding whether to pay $100 for a widget that is only worth $100 to her, Carol puts the finishing touches to her widget making machine. At the press of a button Carol can produce a widget for only $10. She activates her website, offering widgets for $40. Alice orders one at once.

How would Eve the economist like to analyse this? She would like to identify a consumer surplus of 100 - 40 = 60 dollars, and a producer surplus of 40 - 10 = 30 dollars, for a total gain from trade of 60 + 30 = 90 dollars. But before she can do this she has to telephone Alice and Carol and find out the secret numbers, $100 and $10. Only the market price of $40 is overt.

Alice thinks Eve is spying for Carol. If Carol learns that Alice is willing to pay $100, she will up the price to $80. So Alice bullshits Eve: Yeh, I'm regretting my purchase, I've rushed to buy a widget, but what's it worth really? $35. I've over paid.

Carol thinks Eve is spying for Alice. If Alice learns that they only cost $10 to make, then she will bargain Carol down to $20. Carol bullshits Eve: Currently they cost me $45 to make, but if I can grow volumes I'll get a bulk discount on raw materials and I hope to be making them for $35 and be in profit by 2016.

Eve realises that she isn't going to be able to get the numbers she needs, so she values the trade at its market price and declares GDP to be $40. It is what economist do. It is the desperate expedient to which the opacity of business has reduced them.

Now for the twist in the tale. Carol presses the button on her widget making machine, which catches fire and is destroyed. Carol gives up widget making. Alice buys from Bob for $100. Neither is happy with the deal; the total of consumer surplus and producer surplus is zero. Alice is thinking that she would have been happier spending her $100 eating out. Bob is thinking that he would have had a nicer time earning his $100 waiting tables for 10 hours.

Eve revises her GDP estimate. She has committed herself to market prices, so it is up 150% at $100. Err, that is not what is supposed to happen. Vital machinery is lost in a fire, prices soar and goods are produced by tedious manual labour, the economy has gone to shit, producing no surplus instead of producing a $90 surplus. But Eve's figures make this look good.

If you enjoy the intersection of H P Lovecraft and mathematics you may enjoy https://www.hulver.com/scoop/story/2009/1/15/182727/390

Reading the Wikipedia page, the Frank-Caro process is a straight forward chemical reaction. Shovel calcium carbide into your reactor. After the reaction is done, shovel calcium cyanamide out of the reactor and on to your farm land to fertilize it. The calcium is "consumed" in the process, in direct proportion to the amount of fertilizer that the reaction creates.

The article talks about Ca3CrN3H as a catalyst, giving the impression that the three nitrogen atoms in the compound stay put; it is different nitrogen atoms that get pumped into the reactor and leave as ammonia to be spread as fertilizer. The calcium remains in place, merely making the reaction go faster.

Catalysis is always a bit mysterious because the catalyst is unchanged by the reaction as though it wasn't involved at all. I don't think that there is any expectation that one can discover catalysts by taking reactants as a hint. Indeed, the classic platinum catalyst in a catalytic converter uses platinum, a very unreactive metal.

In the UK the government both limits the supply of doctors and manages a fairly cheap National Health Service. How? It is rationed by queuing and achieves poor medical outcomes.

The Go book The Treasure Chest Enigma by Noriyuki Nakayama starts with an essay that gives the book its title. The Treasure Chest Enigma is a life-and-death problem too hard for professional Go players, but easy for amateurs. A real life problem that caused much consternation and merriment in the Nihon Ki-in in 1958.

It relies on the technique that is at the heart of this paper. There is a small dead group completely surrounded by a larger group. But the larger group runs out of liberties and the small dead group comes back to life when the big group is captured.

This kind of thing never comes up in professional play. (The game that it came from was part of the qualifying tournament for professional shodan; Mizuno Hiroshi and Noriyuki Nakayama were not yet professional players.) All the top players had drilled so hard on the life and death problems that actually arise in professional play that they had developed a peculiar blind spot around capturing races with one group completely surrounded by another.

My expectation is that the first fifty years of Artificial Intelligence disasters will be dominated by humans being over-impressed by the intelligence of AI systems and giving them responsibilities that they are not read for. This article https://www.gbnews.com/news/ai-latest-news-judge-legal-decis... already speculating that "AI machines 'could soon make legally binding decisions' in UK, says senior judge" is the kind of thing I fear.

I don't know what to make of The Treasure Chest Enigma.

Theory one: it tells us that we are already coping successfully with this problem in human intelligence. Yes, AI has weird mental blind spots, but people do too and there is no need to worry.

Theory two: Human mental blind spots are smaller and more obscure that the mental blind spots of current AI. There is plenty of quantitative difference so that we can legitimately worry that AI blind spots will cause unexpected disasters. We will be taken by surprise because we are used to human intelligence with its small, benign blind spots. The significance of The Treasure Chest Enigma is that it exists, which tells us that mental blind spots are inherent to intelligence. We will not solve the problem of AI having large, dangerous mental blind spots easily. We can only hope to shrink the problem down to an ineradicable core.

I call this issue "Tower Jumpers" versus "Arm Whirlers". I'm taking the names from Inventing Flight by John D. Anderson, Jr. The book is mostly about the Wright brothers. It starts with a discussion of the early history, with brave men inventing wings, strapping them on, and jumping out of towers. Jumping to their deaths. Others were more cautious and built gadgets to help them understand wings and lift. Wind tunnels were invented late. Before wind tunnels they used the whirling arm apparatus.

A theme of the book is that outsiders were taken by surprise by the success of the Wright brothers. Outsiders only got to hear of the passion and tragedy of the Tower Jumpers, who were making no progress. Only insiders knew of the Arm Whirlers with their gradual accumulation of knowledge and slow progress.

The distinction helps us understand "skin in the game". If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers. Insisting that they have "skin in the game" will ensure proper caution. If you cannot tell which is which, insisting on "skin in the game" will have an uneven record, with the Tower Jumpers ruining your safety record and their own skin.

The trickiest question is: how much skin in the game? Insist on too much and the Arm Whirlers will stay away; they were the risk averse ones. Then you only have Tower Jumpers and insisting on "skin in the game" will help you not at all.

That is powerful writing. Powerful by orthodox literary standards. In my own notebooks I regard that kind of writing as bad. I call the trap that it falls into "letting language do my thinking for me."

Consider "directed toward a goal that people set up for themselves in order to have some goal to work toward." I've dropped the words artificial and merely. What work were they doing?

I think that the word artificial is imposing a binary, "natural" versus "artificial", on the way that we think about goals. The paradigm of a natural goal is having sex to start a family. The paradigm of an artificial goal is playing golf. Which is science? It has to fall in the artificial bucket, so it is like golf, and therefore of low value.

If I were writing in my own notebook, I would think that I had tricked myself. I've persuaded myself that science is low value. I look for the clever argument that I've used; its not there. I've been incautious in my use of language, stuck in the word artificial and failed to wonder whether there are any artificial goals that are surprisingly valuable.

merely is heavy with implications. One might set oneself a goal in order to have something to work towards, to avoid the tendency to sipping and sampling which so often defeats the aspirations of gifted beings. This might be within a larger context; the aspiration may be towards a noble and lofty goal. merely trashes all that. A simple little word that slots in easily, merely making the words flow more smoothly. And yet it has smuggled in heavy negativity. Once again language does our thinking for us, guiding us towards a conclusion, and concealing from the author his lack of justification.

Turning to the second quote, one notices that blindly is a powerfully pejorative word. Who wants to be blind? Here is does triple duty, with three meanings. First, we are doing science because we are curious about something that we do not know. It is a cliche to call such groping in the dark blind. So no-one can disagree that science marches on blindly. The phrase "real welfare" intensifies the negativity. Notice the weasel word real. Nothing and nobody can meet the test of having regard to real welfare because the word real licences us to raise the standard for what counts as welfare into an unknowable, remote future. Science must confess to not being able to foresee ultimate consequences and confess a second time to being blind.

The third meaning of blind refers to the reasonable critique. It is hard to respond appropriately to even foreseeable medium term consequences and scientists often fail to do so. Is this reasonable critique actually justified? The claims made by the previous two meanings of the word blind were true, even if unimportant, so it is tempting to nod this through. The third meaning gains our approval by the momentum of the first two meanings; another example of language doing our thinking for us.

If we can escape the momentum of language, the example of Louis Pasteur will spring to mind, or Humphrey Davy investigating flames to invent the safety lamp. Scientist sometimes pay close attention to the foreseeable, medium-term welfare of mankind.

Is it true to say that science marches on, obedient to the psychological needs of scientists, government officials, and corporate executives? Yes, this is obviously true. Yet it is only that sneaky little word only (which I left out; did you notice?) that makes this important.

Ponder the tale of medicinal chemist trying to explain to his boss that it is actually the mice that are in charge. Science can only march on if it obeys the mice. Leaving them out misses the point entirely. That little word only both makes the ringing phrase important-if-true and hopelessly-false.

Notice how hard this overlong comment works to expose how language does our thinking for us. It is an example of Brandolini's Law. Cultivate a horror of powerful writing, before it tricks you into believing falsehoods. No-one is coming to save you. Untangling how language does our thinking for us is too much work.

Claiming that things are OK because they are pervasive makes William Willerforce cry.

Section IV says: The idea of biological or cultural evolution causing a mass population explosion is a philosophical toy at best.

I think it likely that biological and cultural evolution get tangled together. Ponder the Darwinian pressures on the memetic immune system. It gets really complicated when things get Darwinian on two levels. People need a memetic immune system, to protect them against memes such as the Skoptsy[0] or Shakers[1]

Memes themselves need to fit in the obvious sense of telling people to spread them. But in addition to this single level fitness, there is a cross-level concept: a meme is fertile if it encourages its hosts in their biological reproduction. The "be fruitful and multiply" meme has an edge, separate from its own reproductive success, in an increasing number of hosts. A meme is barren if it discourages its hosts in their biological reproduction.

This complicates the Darwinian pressures on the memetic immune system. Assuming that the mechanisms in play are subtle enough to distinguish between fertile memes and barren memes, evolution shapes our memetic immune systems to block barren memes while leaving us vulnerable to fertile memes.

Suppose that being smart correlates with having a subtle memetic immune system. Then we expect differences between smart and stupid people. We ponder barren memes and notice smart people being more resistant than stupid people. That seems natural; memes are basically selfish, being more resistant is good, right? Then we ponder fertile memes, and smart people are more vulnerable than stupid people. Wait! How are smart people getting infected by these memes, aren't they supposed to be smart? Whoops! Gaps in the memetic immune system to let the fertile memes through are favoured by natural selection.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skoptsy

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaker_communities