Concrete to Sand

What strange alchemy is this?

I work in the realm of the abstract every day and have a front seat to the siren song of separating oneself from physical reality. There are a number of ways to find oneself far from reality and they range from the absurd: writing server software in a client-side language¹; to the more understandable: implementing a pattern without considering whether the underlying technology one uses also implements that pattern. This is software, though, and the results of separating oneself too far from reality are usually benign to occasionally deadly.

It’s patterns all the way down. There is no computer.

When the Therac-25 engineers cooked people to death it was because they had overwhelming and unfounded faith in their software safety lockouts that a skilled operator could outpace. The software allowed the machine to be built more cheaply, the predecessor machines had hardware lockouts that would prevent particular scenarios from ever arising. Reality was such that it wasn’t properly accounted for in software. There are other extreme examples of this but usually software failures rate on the level of inconvenience and not disaster simply because of the ubiquity of software in the modern day.

When a programmer accesses memory without performing bounds checking to ensure they hit a legitimate location you probably get an exception and dumped out of the program. Maybe the program swallows it and keeps going, maybe not. When they do that and your fly-by-wire system errors out you end up sending souls to the afterlife.

We are living through the era during which Western humans are feverishly detaching themselves from reality on all possible levels. There is a divide where some people are cognizant of the dangers of marching down this road and urging caution if nothing else, and others are embracing the abstractions and the great leap to the future. In return for divestment of petty beliefs in hard reality we receive what society exalts in the form of money, fame, social reputation, and the like. Almost all of these are fleeting ephemera.

Industry

Russia can’t possibly win a war! Their GDP is less than Canada’s. One of these statements is true, it is the case that the GDP of Russia is less than that of Canada’s. What might of Canada’s, though, could stop Russia from invading its neighbor and proceeding to grind them down? Are the Canadian war factories going to transition to three shifts and begin to disgorge oceans worth of brass shells to thunder from artillery? Here we see an easy disconnect to make between reality and the abstract. GDP is an abstraction, the total gross output of all areas of an economy no matter what they consist of cf. the reality of Russia being able to bombard a frontline for over a year with no sign of stopping in spite of news articles claiming they’re about to run out of ammo² which seems more true for Ukraine which is burning through NATO stocks and keeps asking for more. Russia has the industrial chain to produce ammunition seemingly ad infinitum whereas Ukraine does not seem to have this same capacity and is getting along thanks to their imperial backer.

America still has a considerable military-industry, though we are not as robust as we seem on the whole. One of the ways in which the mil-industry complex may fail is our reliance on smart over dumb weapons. A supply chain which requires more inputs and work results in less product at the end all other things considered equal. A great number of key pharmaceuticals and precursors were outsourced to China over the years, and we can only hope that industry will be re-shored or near-shored³ to reduce the fragility we ourselves have created. We largely outsource our appliance production, clothing, and so on and so forth, all in the name of a bigger GDP. At least our food supply is fairly secure because you can’t eat greenbacks.

Food

We reduce food to macro level inputs and outputs for diet. Eat {x} grams of protein per day, {y} carbs, and create a food pyramid which looks inverted, to my eyes. Then we tell everyone that this is the ideal diet regardless of your particular ancestry and even in the face of how those foods make the consumer feel. I do well eating meat, copious dairy, and carbs in the form of potato and bread. That doesn’t make my preferred diet the one that will work or that should necessarily be encouraged. I work at staying away from industrial food with the same thought that keeps me from going too far into abstraction in programming: simple is good in its own way. The numbers may look the same on the package but the extremely complex system-biome that is a living organism may not respond to or handle the inputs in the same way or get the same result.

Lol, he said, lmao, why are there vegetables on this chart

We are in the middle of a forced pushing of hard to digest vegetable proteins. This is strange given that we have sources of protein which are far superior, and some of which don’t entail the slaughter of animals or that the animals be kept in poor conditions. Why did I learn about protein quality and the critical role of cholesterol through a man who refers to himself as Raw Egg Nationalist⁴? How is it a man who is basically propounding localism and farm-to-table is being attaq? Why am I being sold a bill of goods by people who want to chemically produce an ersatz egg at a higher price that they can patent? The abstraction of the egg's qualities to nutritional facts without considering the whole egg of reality means that you get worse nutrition someone else controls for more money. Thrilling.

Just as good as the real thing

Then there’s the bizarre drive for insects. Yes, some cultures eat insects, and I’d be willing to bet that if you offered them beef, a superfood, in substitute they would jump on board the beef train in a heartbeat. Plato suggested a vegetarian diet to generate a pliable people. What of people who are forced to eat industrialized and unnatural food with a side of ground crickets? Perhaps you find yourself scoffing at the notion of diet affecting people in such a way: consider the vegan who becomes, through his eating habits, nothing more than a diet evangelical who has internalized plants’ need to be eaten to the point where he can’t shut up about how everyone should be eating a vegan diet. The flipside of this is the obese man who lacks self-control yet can’t stop the actions that are killing him. Each of these is a breaking of man and his will to subordinate himself to some thing whether or not that thing is worthy of subordination.

Automobiles

After clambering into a friend’s car on a cold day you ask, “Does this have heated seats?” “Yeah” and you look for the button to switch it on while he brings the motor to life. There’s no button. After twenty seconds the computer has booted and the screen stuck to the center dash is ready for commands, including the one which will turn on your heated seats.

What happens when the screen dies and HVAC command is gone on a -20* day? Hope the flappers and valves were set so that you don’t die? We traded real controls that physically close a switch, move a vent, and all the rest for the convenience of a cheap(er) and central place to command everything. We also traded many points of failure for a single point of failure on top of all the rest.

The C6 Corvette introduced electronic door openers to the Corvette line of cars. There’s a mechanical back-up as a just in case, same as on a 996 and awkward to get at if the battery fails. Nevertheless, someone died in their car because they couldn’t figure out how to open the doors from the inside⁵. There are more things wrong here: he didn't think to brace himself against the seat and PUSH and KICK the windscreen off, for instance, but a direct physical handle resolves the problem before it can manifest.

All my cars have electronic motors performing the assistance for steering. They’re worse for feel that the hydraulic systems that preceded it. At least they have an upside of not being a system that will leak fluids when the seals wear out and require a rebuild. Instead, I expect that when they fail the entire motor will need to be replaced, and maybe sensors, too. I’ve rebuilt the power steering pump on a car and it was pretty easy and the expense was something around $30 in seals from Toyota. A simple mechanical pump driven by a belt: find someone who has torn one down and you’re on your way with a few hours of cleaning and an hour or two of real work. An electric motor might be co-located on the rack and might be accessible. The cost to replace the whole thing will be hundreds of dollars. At least you got the tradeoff of worse steering feel and further detachment from the experience of driving.

Models above Reality

Two years ago, if you remember rightly, a little man fed data through his model and out came the world-quaking answer. Millions would die if we didn’t heed the warning of the Oxford model. As anyone who works with algorithms and computers knows: garbage-in garbage-out. The models fueled hysteria and were both bad in-and-of-themselves and they were fed bad data. Garbage out and we have an excuse for the fastest roll-up of power in history.

When reports came out of Italy that there was a respiratory virus with a 5% kill rate the rational response, provided that information, would be to shut down transit immediately and see what shakes out. Instead, we kept borders open and were quite fortunate that the death rates reported were off by orders of magnitude.

Climate change hysteria is also model driven. As are over-population hysterias which were initially based on Malthus’ geometric reproduction of species rate with linear food growth model. Malthus was wrong and recanted. When will everyone else recant, or at least consider that they might be wrong? How are we so detached from the events where reality bore out a different result from the models that we continue to trust in the models?

C.S. Lewis may have beaten me to this by 80 years and I learned this yesterday⁶. Ah well, thoughts exist outside of us and we don’t generate every thought we have anyway.

Mind-Body Abstraction

The body is just a meat machine is a natural consequence of a mechanical view of life. It may be the only view possible from the viewpoint of positivism and perhaps leading also to post-modernism which is a fancier way of saying mechanically deterministic universe where nothing matters⁷. If the body is a meat-machine and everything else is projected abstractions of minds upon matter, then who is to say what is real? Who is to say there is a will? Who is to say there is free will⁸? Who is to say that we can't make a man a woman and a woman a man? It's just matter and we can command matter as we must.

Stripping humanity of humanity is a great danger to us all. Descartes’ famous quote had it backwards and misunderstood what a human is, I am therefore I think. The doubt is removed and belief is possible once more.

1. NodeJS says hi! NPM also says hello and wishes he could stop copying 10,000 files to your local machine

2. https://www.newsweek.com/russia-running-out-ammo-how-much-longer-can-keep-fighting-1762346
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/07/24/theres-a-good-reason-russias-artillery-is-running-out-of-ammo-ukraine-keeps-blowing-it-up/?sh=606ba2b513d6
https://news.yahoo.com/russia-running-fresh-ammo-may-213130953.html
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/exact-date-putins-forces-run-27099598

There are more, but you get the gist

3. Preferably on a contiguous land-mass

4. Interesting to see which of the extremely-online guys end up being mainstreamed: I have 2021 timestamped Man’s World PDFs.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/which-came-last/ for a brief reconstitution of thoughts he’s shared on twitter under his @BabyGravy9 handle.

5. https://www.insideedition.com/12832-after-car-fanatic-dies-in-corvette-how-to-escape-a-locked-vehicle

6. This footnote recorded on the 6th of December, 2022

7. Heh, matters

8. The anti-free will people are ignoring both every day experience and the part where even if it were illusory you would want people to buy into the illusion to shape their behavior in some meta-determinitive way