Unabomber and the Technocracy Design

All of Ted’s political writings were in code, a code that was never properly cracked by police – but later finding codesheets like this one gave the necessary instructions for decoding.

Ted Kaczynskib
Known infamously as The Unabomber, Ted was a gifted child. Finding a love for mathematics at a very young age, he went on to get a PhD at Michigan – his thesis on boundary functions was commented on by a member of his dissertation committee saying: “I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it.”, his publications caught the eye of Berkley where he went on to teach. But this great academic life ran parrallel to a social inability, introverted, Ted found solace in himself. As a child he was distant and cold. The only other thing to catch Ted was nature and being outdoors, this would be the basis of his philosophy – personified later when he adopted a survivalist lifestyle in the woods outside of Montana. During his times at Universities he stayed out of all the activism happening at the time showing no signs of strong feelings towards politics.
But then came the attacks and the infamous manifesto…

Kaczynskib believed in a sort of anarcho-primitivism, living for yourself with no technology, and no money. Without a price-system (economy) his view can’t be put into the left-right wing spectrum, but interestingly another system without an economy advocates the opposite – extensive technology use in a collectivist manner:

The Technocracy Technate Design
In short, it is the social movement from the 1930′s related to energy accounting. It’s founders, Howard Scott (engineer) and Marion King Hubbert (geoscientist) created the Technical Alliance which did a range of research projects in energy accounting accross North America. They later founded Technocracy Inc which was where the idea came to fruition. It was popular with the scientifically inclined and thus it’s not suprising that it interested Albeirt Einstien, who met with Technocrats a few times to learn more.

Technocracy, assessing humans as energy consumption machines, aims to balance resources used with the energy cost of making those resources – creating abundance. Also using technology to free the people of the majority of labour and social stresses of competition in a monetary system. So while socialism and free market can be seen as two sides of the same coin, these two can be seen as two sides of the same cog.

Here are a few interesting differences:

Unabomber Manifesto		Technocracy Study Course
“There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.”	Government	“All philosophic concepts of human equality, democracy, and political economy have upon examination been found totally lacking and unable to contribute any factors of design for a Continental technological control.”
“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”	Technology	(On the rate of production): “While this trend has advanced further in some industries than in others, it is present in all industries, including even the most  backwards of them–agriculture. Since the cause for this development, namely, technological improvements, still exists in full force, there can be no doubt that this trend will be continued into the future.”
“Freedom is restricted in part by psychological control of which people are unconscious, and moreover many people’s ideas of what constitutes freedom are governed more by social convention than by their real needs.”	Freedom	“It APPEARS to be little realized by those who prate about human liberty that social freedom of action is to a much greater extent determined by the industrial system in which the individual finds himself than by all the legalistic restrictions combined.”

Complex Bases

Bellow is Donald Knuth, his most famous work is probably The Art of Computer Programming for which the content won him a Turing Award in 1974. He also came up with the Up Arrow notation used in my posts on Large Numbers and God. Those posts were inspired by one of Knuth’s books, this post was inspired by his number system.

The Quater-Imaginary System
As a student at High School he entered into a science talent search and his submission was the Quater-Imaginary system, or Base 2i. It’s interesting because it uses the digits {0,1,2,3} for representation so it would seem at first glance to be quaternary (Base 4) – but it’s not!

It is actually an imaginary base, as the complex version is (0r±2i). Like the decimal system, quater-imaginary can finitely reperesent all positive real integers -but it can do more- it can finitely represent all positive AND negative real AND imaginary integers without signs (i.e., 3i, -8). Which can be seen in this table:

Base 10	Base 2i	Base 10	Base 2i	Base 10	Base 2i	Base 10	Base 2i
1	1	-1	103	1i	10.2	-1i	0.2
2	2	-2	102	2i	10.0	-2i	1030.0
3	3	-3	101	3i	20.0	-3i	1030.2
4	10300	-4	100	4i	20.0	-4i	1020.0
5	10301	-5	203	5i	30.2	-5i	1020.2

 

 

The Dragon System

The Twindragon also known as the Davis-Knuth dragon!

It’s not offically called that, but the second most known complex system is Base (−1±i) which has an associated fractal shape (twindragon). It uses the numbers {0,1} for representation. It’s a very clean and eligant number system that was created by Walter F. Penney in 1965. As with quater-imaginary, this number system can be used to finitely represnt the Gaussian Integers.

Interestingly the radix starts with a negative number, but this isn’t a problem, negative bases work just aswell as positive ones. Infact in 1957 a Polish computer called BINEG was designed using negabinary!

Base 10	Base (-1±i)	Base -2	Base 2
1	1	1	1
2	1100	110	10
3	1101	111	11
4	111010000	100	100
5	111010001	101	101

Base (-1±i√7)/2 and Others
Here the length of the numbers don’t increase monotonically, for example 12(11001100) and 13(11001101) are shorter than their predecessor 11(11100110011) which is the same length as 14(11100010110). It isn’t the only base to hold this attribute but it’s one of the quickest to show it. Source and explination here.

As well as whole-number radix systems it is possible to use fractions and even irrational numbers, one example I go over is Phinary (Base 1.61803…) also known as the Golden Ratio Base. On my Research Page I am looking at a series of systems, starting with the golden ratio, which I call the Metallic Series that can all be used under the same rules.

I find number systems quite interesting and I have started messing around modelling them in different ways, in a previous post (Numeral Automata) I look at them using cellular automata.

World Astronomy Day!

Astronomy Day is an annual event that was set up by a chap called Doug Berger in 1973, he’s the president of the Astronomical Association of Northern California. Originally the idea was to set up telescopes in industrial areas so passers by could view space in a way they may never have had before, now it is a world wide event that gets all types of people up and outside looking at the stars! If it’s a clear sky go check them out, they’re awesome. Otherwise if it’s cloudy or daytime then the SLOOH SpaceCamera is doing an Astronomy Day Marathon which can be viewd live here.

In my spare time I like to attempt photography, the things I’m most interested in are astrophotography and photography outside visible light, but I am partial to a bit of nature now and again – here are some recent shots:

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If you happen to like photography (of any type) me and a few others will be contributing to a new blog called Photofun. In it we will be photography with information on what we’re using and how we’re using it, it’ll be a sort of social learning experiment for us. If you know others who are maybe starting out or wanting to start photography, this might be just the thing to help along the way – so don’t be afraid to share!

Randolph Diagrams

This is what a genius looks like.

There is something aesthetic and elegant about Randolph diagrams, unfortunately they aren’t commonly used. I found out about them when reading Embodiments of Mind by the glorious and bearded Warren McCulloch.

The Original Proposal:
In the book he refers to them as “Venn functions” and they are briefly explained as being derived from Venn’s diagrams for sets but in McCulloch’s case they were used to express logical statements. If you draw a Venn diagram of two circles intersecting you are left with four spaces ( a/b, a&b, b/a, U ), adding a jot into a space to denote truth or leaving it blank for false gives you the 16 possible logic combinations. They are great examples of the isomorphism between logic and set theory:

He used these as tools to help teach logic to neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. Later he developed them into a probablistic logic which he applied to John vonn Neumann‘s logical neuron nets. Which I will discuss in the next post.

Randolph’s Diagrams:

The truth values for three statements.

McCulloch does mention that they could be used to apply more than two statements but doesn’t show how, later John F. Randolph developes the system as an alternative visualisation of set relations neatly coping with more than two sets (something Venn diagrams begin to struggle with after five). For each additional statement/set a new line is introduced in each quadrant. Four statements would be a large cross with four smaller crosses, one in each quadrant.

Wikipedia has an example of the tautological proof for the logical argument, modus ponens, which can be found here, but I thought it would be good to show how three values are handled – so we’ll use syllogism, as in “Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal” being reduced in it’s logical form to tautology:

((A implies B) and (B implies C)) implies (A implies C)

Education, Not Training

One of my lecturers said an interesting thing today, it was self-evident almost instantly but has obviously been overlooked by policy makers in the past. “Training is getting you ready for a specific thing [like programming in Java], but education is teaching you to understand [the algorithms]“.

The idea of ‘getting kids ready for jobs’ is no doubt detrimental to their actual education and thus their ability to learn on their own later in life.

Equality?

I make a clear distinction between ‘equality’ and ‘equalising’ – the idea of equality, at least how I see it, derives from meritocracy. Judging people purely on nothing other than their ability relative to the situation. Equalising on the other hand is attempting to make everyone equal instead of treating people equal. Quotas, for example, create inequality by forcing employers to pick from a specific section of the applicants and thus not judging everyone on the same terms.

Libertarian philosopher John Locke put forward the idea of everyone being equal at birth because they come into the world knowing nothing (clean slate). This is ofcourse not the case, genes for example bring nature into the equation alongside nurture, but given free access to education at least any monetary inequalities are negated. Physical differences are harder to overcome although again, free healthcare is the obvious way to try and bring those worse off onto the playing field. Meritocratically if someone has no legs and is great at programming – he would get a programming job without any issue.

In attempts to help those in need generalisations are made and applied across a broad spectrum , this social application of the law of large numbers creates a sort of legislative segregation of people. As in it creates the mindset of sex/gender/race/religion when they shouldn’t factor in anyway. Ofcourse treating every case individually would be a bureaucratic nightmare – but with free knowledge and health, and in the future transhumanism, the situations wouldn’t have to be assessed, they would assess themselves.

Meritocracy: Equality by Proxy

House of Meritocracy: Lords Reform

Note: In an attempt to stop skewing the idea of the Technocracy Movement or the North American Technate plans, I am going to refer to my House of Lords reform as meritocratic as oppossed to technocratic.

When the news of the Higgs finding hit the media it was up to Libdem MP Julian Huppert as a former scientist to explain the field on a show called The Daily Politics (link here). It was nice to see science being enjoyed by the political class but it was a sharpe reminder of the severe lack of specific knowledge in the House of Commons. It was a shame to see him talk for the Lords Reform as it looks to decimate a lot of the expertise existing in Parliament.

House of Lords
As it stands the upper chamber contains 775 members consisting of appointed life peers  and the last remaining hereditary peers (92) – these types are called Lords Temporal, it also contains 26 Bishops which are referred to as Lords Spiritual. The house itself acts as a proof reading for legislation but doesn’t hold definitive power over actioning bills.

For a start, the non-elected members are appointed after half a lifetime of doing excellent work in their field – they have not spent time and money winning votes and making promises. Another fantastic element is that it has people of real expertise being able to give valuable opinions on areas in their subject. This respect for knowledge and decrease in partisan politics is intrinsic to the true nature of the House of Lords (but still needs a lot of improvement).

The Libdem reforms propose to make the upper chamber much smaller and have it 80% elected and 20% appointed. The 80% will be elected by a different voting system, proportional representation, and will serve 15 year terms without chance of re-election. The idea is an ideological one of moving closer to true democracy – but that is exactly what it isn’t doing. 15 years is just too long for any sense of democratic accountability, if they are awful – you’re stuck with them for the long hall. Alongside this the one term per person means if they are good – you can’t keep them. Worst of both worlds.

Previously the Labour Party actioned some fantastic reforms to the House of Lords that got rid of hereditary peers (in the sense that they became life peers) and in increasing the presence of Crossbenchers (Publicly non-partisan Lords). These are the types of reform that work with the function of the upper chamber, not against it.

Alternative Reform – A Secular & Meritocratic House

Singapore’s world renowned education system prides itself on a pillar of meritocracy.

Alastair Campbell spoke about an idea he had of a unicameral system (just the House of Commons) that takes advice from a sort of upper house existing in the EU, shared by all other European members. Now although this is radically different to my idea, it did speak to me, the idea of everyone taking the same advice without tribal investments is clearly a good thing – but alas, as regions differ so do social issues, making this a faulty idea.

My ideas are for a secular, fully appointed house of field specialists. The function of the house has always been to scrutinise legislation. The advice of a second meritocratic house does not in, any way, take away from the democracy of the system. I have writen about these ideas and stronger reforms in greater details in the following posts:

• Marrying Democracy and Technocracy
• Technocratic Thoughts
• Academocracy

The meritocratic approach taken by Labour on Lords and the Conservatives on Education is clearly the only direction for a rational nation to move in. These need to continue and develop further.