Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 06:38:10 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Dave Hayes <dave@jetcafe.org> Cc: Lawrence Sica <lomifeh@earthlink.net>, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>, Ceri Davies <setantae@submonkey.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why did evolution fail? Message-ID: <3D6CD242.F86BCC1F@mindspring.com> References: <200208281030.g7SAUJ101187@hokkshideh2.jetcafe.org>
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Dave Hayes wrote: > >> > It's the consensus that a consensus defines correctness. 8-). > >> > >> Unfortunately, adherence to this consensus prevents you from > >> seeing anything else that might be there. > > > > IYHO. 8-). > > Actually no. It's observable to yourself if you are willing to do the > work or open the eyes a bit. I can't do this for you because...well > that would be a consensus blinding you. ;) This is patently false. You can commit to comply with consensus, while still dissenting. Civil disobedience isn't the only possible means of protest, and it not that effective compared to, say, being elected to congress. > >> For example, it was one time known by consensus that the correct > >> viewpoint was that the world was flat... > > > > And it was, for all intents and purposes. As a working hypothesis, > > it's as good an approximation as, say, Newtonian mechanics. > > Yet it wasn't exact, and the example holds as to how consensus can > blind you to the exact truth. The exact truth is a Platonic ideal; it's not achievable in the real world (give us a couple hundred thousand years and check back, though). The closest you can ever get is a working hypothesis. Accepting that fact is how we ended up with things like light bulbs that worked, even though the Catholic Church had a good 1800 years to get "how to make light bulbs" as revealed truth. > It's not provable, no. > > Also, my opinions are seldom humble, being a creature of ego. Har. ;^) > > It's useful in that it's predictive. That's makes it one up on > > uncontrolled anarchy. > > Anarchy is always perceived as uncontrolled. This stems from a > commonly held fear-based view of that state, usually reinforced by > people wanting to make sure you are supportive of whatever government > is in place. In other words "Yes, you are advocating anarchy". That's fine, as long as you realize that the vast majority of humans *like* predictability, and anything besides that is outside their comfort zone, and short of insurrection, you are not going to get the anarchy you want. > You see, people that talk about revolutions, people who hate this or > that government...they are all misguided. I believe "The Who" said it > best: "Meet the new boss, he's the same as the old boss". Mankind's > evolutionary state is such that no matter what organization or > community forms, corruption, inefficiency and politics will derail any > -real- "good" that said organization can do. So work on human evolution, instead of pissing in people's campfires because they aren't building fusion powered heaters fast enough for you. > This is not a bad or good thing, it simply indicates the current level > of human evolution. Humans are not ready for the next level at the > moment. Says you and Ted Kaczynski. > This is because it's terribly frightening to most humans to a) > be personally responsible for their own actions, b) honor others > regardless of what they choose to do, c) maintain a state of constant > present-time awareness, d) follow their own internal codes of conduct, > e) find their passion, and f) dance their passion into existance. (d) is problematic. > Doing any one of these things is difficult even for people we call > "aware" or "cool" or "respectable". Doing all of them can put the > person at odds with "consensus" and evoke a palpable state of fear. > This is why these things are not done commonly. It takes someone > really in tune with themselves. Or a sociopath. > True Anarchy can only be achieved when enough people who take the > above steps live and work together in the same area. At this point, > there is no need for government, police, lawyers, courts, contracts, > trolls, or even charters for mailing lists. People naturally do the > thing that is appropriate, it never even occurs to anyone to "hurt" > someone else in any way, it never occurs to anyone to be "hurt" by > anything other than someone else's physical actions, and everyone > is able to get along with others as naturally as eating or sleeping. You forgot about people who eat people. > No one's ready for this, yet. Painting it as evil or fearful just > marks you as someone who isn't there yet or has no reference points to > it. (That's not a bad thing, either.) The lack of reference points may > stimulate you to pick this idea apart. I'll point out now that every > argument you lob against this concept stems directly out of your > fear...don't ask why, I can't explain it logically. You seem to believe that I disagree with your psotion because I don't understand it, but in fact I *do* understand it, and while it has the same seductive logic of true communism, it ignores the fact that human beings are biological machines, and no matter how enlightened everyone starts out being, there are bound to be malfunctions or even bad initial blueprints. One of the first communist communities was The State Of Deseret, which covered much of the Southwest, but shrunk until it was just Utah, in order to obtain statehood. If you needed new pants, you went and got a pair of new pants. It failed when kids found out they could turn a pair of pants they didn't like into "old pants needing replacement" by backing into the grinding wheel, among other abuses of the system. If it's "to each. according to his need", well, then, all that's really necessary is to manufacture "need". > >> I didn't say that. You did. The real solution is for individuals > >> to make trolls irrelavent. Until we can do that as a group, we > >> aren't there yet. > > > > Make them irrelevent by removing them from the gene pool? By > > removing their mail accounts? By denying them DNS services? By > > blocking packets from them at our routers and firewalls? I > > didn't expect you to advocate the Spanish Inquisition... but > > then I guess no one expects that. ;^). > > I'm sorry, I guess you forgot that you have the absolute power to > control your online input. You can make a troll irrelevant in a number > of ways: [ ... ] None of these work to avoid costing me storage space or time to download, or per packet charges to download, etc.. The closest you can get is ISP's doing server-side filtering, which is not really something you are going to be able to get them to do, since such filtering requires CPU resources, and those resources have to be paid for somehow. > These are just off the top of my head. I can come up with others if > you like? ;) Yes. Come up with one that lets me not download or store the message in the first place, and takes no ISP resources to filter. The easiest one I can think of is requiring sender certificates. > >> I don't accept that. Deleting them means there are no more tests to > >> tolerance, which means tolerance becomes weak. If another problem were > >> to surface which required strong tolerance, the problem would not be > >> solv-ed. > > > > So, for example, if you don't constantly pound on your skull with > > a brick, in six months time, the first loose brick you see will, > > without a doubt, be fatal to you from six yards away? > > This example is such a straw man. There's a real difference between a > brick and a troll. If you doubt me, try both and see which hurts > more. The troll. I can make the brick stop any time I want. > > What you are describing is an overly simplistic version of a > > mutual security game. > > IYHO. ;) Actually, according to complexity theorists: http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/indexResearch.html http://www-chaos.umd.edu/ http://cnls.lanl.gov http://t13.lanl.gov http://www.ccsr.uiuc.edu http://www.beckman.uiuc.edu http://www.nbi.dk 8-). > Actually, the important part is our disagreement as to where to hang > out. ??? > > Because it's not societys job to accomodate the every whim of > > the sociopathic individual? > > Accomodation and toleration are a bit different, don't you think? No. If you tolerate a behaviour, you implicitly condone that behaviour. > This is a matter of scope. On a subway, you are pretty much stuck > there (you can change trains of course) physically. On a mailing list, > you have this wonderful button on your monitor that makes anything > anyone says irrelevant...it's called the "off" switch. You don't have > to be on a mailing list. You don't have to read each and every message > on said list. Or I don't have to hang out on lists with trolls. But your theory says no matter what list I'm on, trolls will be an emergent part of the environment, and that I should not block their access to the list, merely because the name of the list is "list with no trolls" or something similar. I, on the other hand, feel perfectly comfortable blocking access to the list for eggregious disruption of the lists ability to fulfill its charter. > > There may not be choices we prefer over others. I prefer to choose > > not to tolerate sociopaths. > > If they are killing many people daily, I can see this. Killing a > mailing list troll is a bit extreme, don't you think? Let me get back to you on that... > >> > The recent spate of trolls on the FreeBSD mailing lists also > >> > belies your theory: if your theory were correct, they would > >> > have been there all along, and not be a relatively recent > >> > phenomenon. How do you explain that away? > >> > >> Just because they don't post doesn't mean they aren't there. > > > Er, interesting theory... ever heard of Occam's Razor? > > I don't shave, I have a beard. ;) The simplest theory is that they weren't there until recently, and all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best. Of course, I have a theory on why they have arrived, and what their actual goals are (they are not the goals or purpose you state for trolls, in general, because they are not the emergent environmental trolls you claim are the only possible trolls), and I could even give them pointers, since they probably have not bothered to mathematically model the project that they are attempting to disrupt (they are probably incapable of doing the necessary math, actually). So rather than pushing "the right buttons", they are shot-gunning, and hopping to hit the right button by accident. They are incredibly bad social engineers. > >> Perhaps they were biding their time? > > I guess we will all die of Ebola next Thursday at 17:05 Zulu, > > since we are all infected, the virus has merely been "biding > > its time". Sneaky bastard, that Ebola... 8-) 8-O. > > You are an interesting person, I must say. Your examples are only > weakly parallel to the actual issues, yet you are convinced of them > with the force of a thousand zealots. I see my mirror in you, sir, > and I am grateful for the chance to observe this. =) It's an intentional tit-for-tat. > >> That is the entire problem with our planet to date. This is not the > >> original purpose of the individual, nor does this game of maximizing > >> sum have any meaning outside of the society it is in. > > > > Well, I think I speak for everyone > > -That- is the number one cause of trolling. People cutting off people's sentences in the middle in order to take them out of context? 8-). > > when I say that you're always free to find another planet, > > where you declare what (IYHO) you believe the purpose of the > > individual to be, and then deport anyone who doesn't agree with > > you.... > > Man, do you miss the point. My failure to agree with you is not a failure of you to properly communicate what you feel is the worth of your thesis, it's a result of my disagreement with that thesis. > >> Society expects individuals to conform to a standard that may or may > >> not be appropriate for any particular individual to conform to. This > >> tries to limit the genetic search space of the planet. It's > >> counterproductive to the global algorithm. It also backfires > >> constantly. > > Socially appropriate? Appropriate in what context? You are > > starting to sound like Archimedes Plutonium... > > Who? Well known usenet troll from the late 1980's, early 1990's, had a particular fondness for the fusion related science newgroups. He was tolerated because the commercial people had not yet come in and turned the place into a sewer. > >> >> The real "better", if it exists, exists for everyone. > >> > The avowed racist and the cannibal? > >> Them too. > > No, not them too. The benefits of society do not accrue to those > > who would destroy it. > > Perhaps the cannibal learns to eat prisoners, and the racist goes > to live among his kind. What about your putative "troll" of "the wrong race" who chooses as his means moving in next door to the racist who is actually in the process of attempting to "live among his own kind"? What about the putative "troll" whose "moral code" requires that when he eats people, he only eat people "who stood a sporting chance at not being eaten, or eating him instead" -- which would definitely not include the prisoners you are willing to feed to him. > >> > An individual is expected to conform to social norms. > >> > >> Some individuals aren't here to do what society wants them to. I feel > >> it's dishonorable to expect them to conform. > > > > What about locking them up, and having no expectations of > > them, other than that they not escape, and that they will > > eventually die of natural causes? > > Everytime I point to this, you presume that the individual in question > is some sort of extreme mass murderer. Where we fail to communicate is > that I am pointing to the misfit, not the murderer. While both are > nonconformists, there is a difference in degree and manner of their > non-conformity. Reductio ad absurdum: I argue the extreme case because it is the case that must be addressed in order to set boundary conditions other than "it doesn't bother me that much, so you live with it because I live with it". Only when the extremes are addressed is there a range in which to locate imtermediate cases. Your continued attempts to address the "what do we do or not do with minor misfits, once we have built the anarchists utopia" presumes premises which I'm not willing to accept directly, merely for the sake of argument (actually, you haven't *asked* that your premises be conditionally accepted that way, you've simply held them forth as something everyone should just naturally accept). One of these is that "all trolls are only minor misfits", and another is that "minor misfits should be tolerated in the utopian anarchy". > The tiger is the tiger. Do not expect the tiger to act like the > rabbit. Yet, each animal has his place in the ecosystem. Pigeons are a non-native species in North and South America. > > Are you arguing that it is *never* right to segregate people > > from the larger society? > > Not really. I'm arguing against this knee-jerk "hang em till they rot" > attitude that I think I see in you applied to people who's only crime > is thinking different than the pack. You keep using murderers in your > examples and I keep using artists. I don't want to "hang em till they rot", I just want to block their postings to a particular set of mailing lists. On the flip side, you keep portraying sender blocking as if it were some form of capital punishment, inviting extreme comparisons. > It's not working. That's because trolling is not "art", any more than any other criminal activity is "art". > > Whatever wanted to displace it would have to have a normative value > > in excess of $200 billion *above* the equal base value of the OS > > itself. > > I thought M$ claim to fame was "easy to use applications that > didn't need training". I don't know if I buy this one. What is claimed, and what is, are often two different things. > >> I do. Those are our survival as a race should a real mega-disaster > >> happen. Without them, we don't survive (unless a mega-disaster > >> never happens). > > > > You must see some redeeming traits in the Jeffrey Dahlmer's of > > the world that I don't. > > I see genetics, genetic algorithms, and I can kind of percieve the > grandeur of the unanswered genetic question we are solving. "42". > I recognize that "that one asshole" has to be there or we don't > search the space of all solutions completely. I also recognize > we can't know the question, so we shouldn't assume that someone > doesn't have that answer...whoever or whatever that someone is. What is being searched or searched for, and who and where are the pan-dimensional mice who entered the search terms? > Before you go there (which you apparently will), I'm not condoning > murder or rape or any of that. I merely recognize that it is > impossible for me to control other people, and that real control > begins with yourself, which has a better chance of success than > anything else. I don't kill, steal, rape, etc, and that's good enough > for me. I don't think it's possible for individuals to assert any important amount of control over more than a few people, either. But it's demonstrably true that society can, and does, exert such control. Where you seem to differ from me is that I think it *should*. > Most of my examples of "sociopaths" were constructed with artists and > misfits in mind. There are those I know who think so different from > you that you would most assuredly panic upon the first attempt to > communicate. One could even say the people in this fora are "misfits" > of a sort since they certainly don't fit the actual norm of society. Hardly; I'm merely playing angel's advocate to your devil, for a behaviour that I personally find extremely undesirable, and likely to result in consequences you claim you want to avoid. > You are using murderers because you hate trolls. I consider that > intellectually dishonest, but I give you some slack on that since > I recognize that you are human and have these kinds of emotions. > Also, maybe I should be picking stronger examples of sociopaths, > and maybe the fact that I don't is just as dishonest. I'm picking extreme examples of antisocial behaviour because of the reasons I have outlined above. I do, in fact, hate the behaviour of trolls, and would just as soon that it were made technologically impossible for them to persist in such behaviour without the consent of the targets of the targets they act out against. I look at this as a design problem, like the TCP protocol requiring two response packets for a single request packet, with no means of retransmit, or like gravity. The trolls can't disobey the laws of physics merely because it suits them to do so; niether should "the laws of physics of mailing lists" permit such behaviour. Rather than stepping of the cliff and just hanging there, it would be nice if, when they steped off the cliff, there were consequences that were enforced automatically, imparitally, and immediately. > Perhaps I just wish you'd try to see what I'm saying, instead > of swinging that sword so much. ;) I understand that you're claiming trolls are not sociopaths, they are merely people with the email equivalent of Tourette's Syndrome. Understand me, when I say I won't hire these people to work the mailing lists, any more than I'd hire myself as a spotter. > > You're not seriously advocating that script kiddies serve a social > > good which is not already served by the people who originally > > discovered the problems, or that those who discover the problems, > > but exploit rather than disclosing them are somehow beneficial to > > society? > > There you go with that extrema again. Pick your examples carefully and > you'll always win, right? Overgeneralize to include all destructive acts under your umbrella, without addressing a specific case that could be shot down, and you'll always lose, right? > Think about it. Without script kiddies and exploiters, how would the > systems get stronger? Why would the systems *need* to be stronger, if there weren't script kiddies and exploiters? But I'll answer the question: by design, and by disclosure of weaknesses by a third party. There's no need for a Morris worm, "Code Red", a Virus, or actual use of an exploit against a target by hundreds or even thousands of people who could never write the code themselves in the first place, for the problem to be disclosed. Merely disclosing the problem to the right people should be sufficient, and if it isn't, diclosure to the public at large is. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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