Author Archive: Davide Pasca

I'm not a fan of the "phobia" suffix. I think that it's easily abused these days.

One classical misuse of "phobia" is with the term "homophobia", as if straight men had nightmares of being chased at night by a cosmopolitan gay man holding a pair of sharp scissors !

Jokes aside, the presumed fear in this case would be that of the potential for straight men to find out that they may actually be attracted to the same sex. The idea is that it would be some sort of fear of the unknown. Calling someone an homophobe is an attempt to paint that person as unrefined and uncultured, someone that dismisses same-sex intercourse instinctively, someone that has not evolved to the point of going beyond his natural instincts, and that is afraid of doing so.

That is some cheap psychology that unfortunately has become mainstream and has indeed helped to put straight people on the defensive. This is the kind of propaganda that drives many men to pledge some kind of allyship just to look more socially aware.

Now for an example of an actual phobia, these days I'd put Russophobia on top. I'm impressed by the amount of people, especially in the United States, but apparently also in some countries in Europe, that suddenly appear to be fanatically anti-Russian. The 80s are back, with a vengeance !

The reason why I think that this is a legitimate phobia, is because the hate that is displayed is borne out of actual fear. Deep inside, these people realize that Russia is a force to be reckoned with. Russia is a country that even after the fall of the Soviet Union has continued to develop its own technology. This is most notable with aerospace engineering and weapon systems. I'm a big proponent of developing your own technology. In my case that would be software technology, but that's truly essential when it comes to tech that is vital to the security of a nation.

At the same time, the Russian culture hasn't been as softened as in the west. The average Russian is culturally more resilient to the concept of a full-scale war. The human cost that Russia is paying is unthinkable for the average American or European citizen. This is shocking for a population that has been so detached from conflict and that has a relatively comfortable life. A life so comfortable to the point in which public discourse has shifted towards complicated social and environmental issues that are not as consequential as they are made out to be.

Photo by Matt Hrkac/Flickr, CC BY-ND

Perhaps the most important source of this phobia is the realization that the current generation of US and Europe military have little experience with conflicts that are not asymmetrical. Simply put, America has been picking fights with 3rd world countries, bombing them to smithereens with virtually no opposition, and with no real repercussion for civilian casualties. I'm not going to say that any war is easy, but I'm sure that it's a lot scarier when your opponent also has tanks, jets, drones, cruise missiles and everything in between.

It should be noted that technology isn't simply about developing the smartest bomb or the jet with the coolest AR helmet. Technology is also essential in optimizing production of such weapons, as well as building systems that are resilient and don't require too much maintenance. F-22s and F-35s are fantastic on paper, but they are very expensive to produce and they tend to waste precious time on the ground for continuous maintenance. I'm sure that a similar argument can be made for other vehicles of the west vs those that are Russian-made.

The American and European population is scared of an adversary that isn't from the 3rd world. Meanwhile, the "emperors" that pull the strings of those respective regimes, are afraid to be found out as having no clothes. The survival of the elites of the west depends on the population to believe that those elites are virtuous, strong and powerful, but at the same time they cannot ask to their people to accept casualties, because they now live in a soft world, a world where every dead service...person is a tragedy.

The fear is real, and it's not misplaced. Hopefully the people will move from the stage of fear into one of acceptance, and will perhaps wake up from whatever dream they've been pulled into. Unfortunately it's in the human nature to wake up only when it's too late. A lot of people will have to suffer very grave conditions before they finally stop believing the cheap Hollywood action-flick narrative that they have been fed for decades.

When the time comes for some major political elections, there's always a big push to "get out and vote". A big deal is made about how every vote counts, and how if you don't participate, someone else will vote for you, meaning that the vote from others will have relatively more power. For example, in a pool of 1 million voters, if you don't cast your ballot, each voter will have a stronger impact, albeit by a mere 1 millionth of a vote.

Voting is pushed as empowering and individualistic. In reality it's a completely statistical issue. Your own vote by itself is irrelevant in the context of millions of other votes. From a purely individual point of view, you may or may not cast your ballot, and the outcome of the election will be exactly the same for all intents and purposes. No butterfly effect applies here.

To make a pop-science analogy, this can be seen as some sort of poor-man's quantum superposition. The voting booth can be considered as a closed system, where anything that happens there has no effect on the outcome of the election. The "you" that votes A, B, C or abstains, can coexist with no practical effect to the outside, all because of the extreme dilution of a single vote.

There is some value however in the intent to cast a vote in a certain way, and that is to apply self-reflection to have an estimate of the outcome of the election, at least as far as your own demographic goes. That in itself is not a greatly applicable knowledge, being in itself only a guess of a portion of the voting population, but it's more consequential than actually casting a ballot.

To me this is interesting as it highlights the duality between perceived direct decisional power and actually usable power. We're sold the idea that we have a say on things as active participants, while in reality the only true power resides in the ability to self-reflect and predict the direction of a herd, but even that is not something that is directly applicable in most cases (maybe guess how the markets will react the next day ?). The greater power is that of introspection. The act itself of realizing and reasoning over the actual practical effect, or lack thereof, of voting, is further knowledge into understanding the place of the self amidst a collective.

If the power structures were honest, they would plainly state that civic duty is not about casting a ballot, but it's actually to behave like a statistical sample. It would not be a good civic duty to behave as an observer of yourself and to act out of left field, driven by some sort of superego. It's a good civic duty instead to act predictably, as it makes things easier for the manager class in the governmental institutions, as well as for the private ones.

In practice, one could still go and vote, but at least, as a thought experiment, it's worth considering why the actual practice of casting a ballot is not an act of free-will, rather it's a statistical sampling of a collective mind that is an amalgam of popular culture shaped by mass media.

I recently moved from DuckDuckGo to Presearch.

• Search engine: presearch.org
• Project page: presearch.io
• Privacy browser Android: Google Play link
• Privacy browser iOS: App Store link

The reason for the move was the announcement that the engine would filter results to favor a specific party on the Russia - Ukraine conflict.

Last year DuckDuckGo did already show its cards with "woke" discrimination of potential employees, where they'd favor less skilled employees as long as they had enough melanin in their skin and relatively uncommon sexual preferences.

DuckDuckGo supposedly still shields its users from being tracked for advertisement, but I think that most users went in expecting relatively unbiased results.

It should be noted that, as far as I understand, DuckDuckGo itself is a little more than a customer of Google and other major search engines. In practice, DuckDuckGo simply buys search engine usage from Google. For this reason, it was always a temporary solution, because Google's bias its already built-in in the results, plus they could pull the plug at any time, transforming DuckDuckGo into a sitting duck. Remember: if you don't build your own technology, you're just a power user.

Presearch looks more interesting, it's decentralized, it has its own search engine and also allows to quickly select other classical search engines.
Presearch was founded by people that already years ago had issues with Google's search engine result manipulation (see: "Google Penalizes Local Businesses On City’s ’Shop Local’ Website"), so, hopefully the founders are in it for the long run.

It's important to keep in mind that Presearch is just another offer. I don't plan to get married to it, but my time as a user is better spent on a new interesting decentralized project, than supporting DuckDuckGo, which is no more than a gate keeper.

In a previous post I reasoned on the importance to entertain the wildest theories and to listen to those that propose them.
I truly believe that it's important to keep an open mind, either to learn something new or as an exercise on how to find holes on such theories. It's all brain food.

I was recently listening to an interview to a relatively public figure that would normally be labeled as a conspiracy theorist. At some point, the subject of the 1969 Moon landing came up. Unsurprisingly, the interviewee was skeptical about it.

The general reaction of most would be that of disbelief, with an immediate rejection on the basis of pure reverence of NASA as an organization, but I don't think that that's enough. As I said, I think that it's a good mental exercise to try and find why certain claims can't be sustained, even if the conclusion is probably the same as the mainstream belief. Forming your own reasoning is a valuable experience, something from which new tools for reasoning can be acquired.

Onto my defense of the Moon landing, the simplest validation that I can think of is the argument against the visual effects that would have been needed to simulate a different gravity while filming on Earth. Believable representation of different forces of gravity has been the hardest thing to do in science fiction for many years. It has basically been impossible until we achieved photorealism in computer graphics.
Some say that Stanley Kubrick did that well in "2001: A Space Odyssey", but that's an exaggeration. The film was exceptional in many ways, but the visual effects used in it are a far cry from what's seen in the broadcast of the first Moon walk.

The reason why low gravity VFX took decades to start to become believable is due to our innate ability to judge certain physical phenomena. Our brain is wired to recognize dynamics, in fact we are naturally excited when we see movement, collisions, explosions, even rag dolls, because we can instinctively recognize the realism of the physical world.

I don't know to which degree our ability to recognize and appreciate dynamics is innate or learned. For sure, we show awareness from an early age, and it constitutes the bulk of child play. This also gives us the apparently uncanny ability to recognize a friend from afar and from behind, if he's simply walking.

It's very hard to trick the brain about dynamical phenomena. Any sort of wired complex rigging that would have been required to simulate low gravity on video in 1969, would have looked unnatural if not downright silly.

That's my reasoning on the subject. It's not a sophisticated approach, but I think that is one that has possibly the best ratio of believability and relatability vs the amount of time invested in research.

For a kid, the revelation that Santa Claus is indeed not real is a bit of a rite of passage. Welcome to the real world, there’s no magic, you’re now an adult like us. It’s almost as if one wakes up from a dream to start his or her new life as an adult on planet Earth. A few decades after that revelatory event for me, I’m starting to see some irony in it.

The world of adults is a mixed bag. Adults with a developed brain are able to think rationally and to execute rational tasks, while also living ordinary lives immersed in irrationality. I suppose that we could all be excused for engaging in suspension of disbelief, given how inexplicable is the wider context of the universe in which we’re living in, both in terms of space and, even more puzzling, in terms of time.

Anyone that has ever paused to rationalize their existence, had to eventually crawl out of that rabbit hole and suspend their disbelief in order to go back to have a life. This is a prime example of how we're able to engage in suspension of disbelief. It's not just something that we can do, but it's something that we must do.

Another, perhaps less profound reason on why our mind is able to put objectivity on the side, is a predisposition to skepticism towards what’s new and unproven. Prejudice is a necessary component for survival. Occasionally one may be better off selecting for the unknown, but the risk is higher, so, there's a predisposition to go for what's known.

At the societal level this can be seen with political movements or ideals. We tend to pick a side and stick with it. A person will defend their political party to extremes because, for example, some accusation of some misconduct may turn out to be invalid, or there might be a noble justification, or maybe one simply doesn't want the other party to get a win, because they are perceived to be inherently and fundamentally wrong, if not evil.

There are many reasons why one may be willing to consciously or unconsciously allow for exceptions to the integrity of an ideal. Nevertheless, this happens and it's part of how we function. Things get worse from here: although suspension of disbelief is a necessary trait of our minds, it's also something that can be hacked and used. Any sufficiently unscrupulous and clever individual or small organized group, can target the mind of another person or group and get them to suspend their disbelief to an exceptional degree. This makes for a dangerous world. One where large swaths of the population may get hacked to operate against others and against themselves.

We study history and see how we've advanced, how enlightened we've come to be. To me, this is only a facade. We judge our progress by great practical achievements in the field of science, engineering and architecture, but I'd argue that great achievements were obtained by exceptional people, in spite of how primitive we are, not because humanity as a whole has made much progress. Literacy has elevated the level of mediocrity, but better mediocrity is not progress. You can train people to do exceptional things, but that only shows how good we've become to impart knowledge, how good we've become at producing very advanced robots, but robots nonetheless.

When we're welcome in the world of adults, we leave Santa Claus behind, only to enter a world made of bigger, more sophisticated and much more consequential lies. At the top of the chain, there's probably the lie that we're following a path of progress for humanity. We're like pigs in a stall that get excited for a new feeding machine, and don't you dare complain about your living arrangements. You ungrateful pig ! You would be nothing without our democratically elected leaders and their appointed experts. Stop grunting and get your new tastier feed.

From time to time enough people find the collective energy to question the status quo, and maybe even gather some political power. But the system has a way to digest those flukes, either from the outside with oppression, or from the inside with corruption.

Happy New Year !

"Informatics" is the term used in the Italian education system in place of "Computer Science". For one reason or another, I was never in tune with standardized education, however there have been times in school when I felt that I learned something that gave me a new perspective on things. One such moment was when a relatively rogue professor, spent a whole lesson explaining the fundamental importance of information and science of information, and how that encompassed the whole universe.

The concept of information is possibly the most important abstraction that our brain has ever conceived. Every living creature can collect and manipulate information. What sets humans apart is the ability to be self-aware of that ability.

With that self-awareness, together with observation of nature, also comes the ability to conceptualize recursion in the abstract. Recursion adds a dimension to abstraction. This is what allows us to contemplate quantities from the infinitesimally small to the infinitesimally large, both for material and immaterial things. Recursion is indeed embedded in nature (see reproduction), but the ability to use that in the abstract is what makes humans as intelligent as they are.

Now I wonder if there's a concept that is more profound and fundamental than that of being able to recursively conceptualize/abstract things. Perhaps our brains already would have the plasticity to work on a new plane of thinking, but we're stuck with what we can conceptualize by extrapolating only what we observe.

This pursuit of new fundamental planes of reasoning may be a necessary step towards answering the bigger questions in nature. The hope is that we may reach it by "bootstrapping" from the current analytical tools that we have, much like we do with mathematics. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what this would look like, because it's one of those cases where one doesn't know what he doesn't know.

Perhaps my view of what's fundamental reasoning is too much a matter of interpretation, it's hard to quantify something so abstract. Either way, it's still something worth considering.

Deboonk-ism is a phenomenon by which people rush at debunking what's perceived to be a wild conspiracy theory. Debunking, as in deconstructing a theory or a system, can be a great way to analyze a problem. However, in most cases it's done out of faith and prejudice, without any real research to truly understand the root of the issue at hand, which is usually a lot more complex than initially thought.

The typical deboonker has a general idea of what the scientific method is about, but has also an idealistic view of science, as some religion that is practiced in academic circles and that is able to produce consistently objective results, all with an acceptable degree of confidence, and all vetted and communicated by benevolent gate keepers coming from the corporate world, political world and the press.

It becomes then a tribal and religious act, one that does more harm than good. Tribalism is a human thing, but modern social media has certainly amplified the effect. We all have a tendency to hypercorrect trends. Truth may be in the middle, but we tend to get there by arguing by extremes and holding certain beliefs for years at the time. Anything that doesn't conform to a prescribed narrative, is immediately ridiculed an belittled, no room is given to skepticism and actual critical thinking. Hypotheses that are ad odds with the mandate of the day are quickly shot down. Any evidence, or lack of evidence, is dismissed on the spot, as some infectious disease that will rot the mind in minutes.

From a social perspective, it pays to follow the mainline, because the infrastructure of conformism gives some form of insurance towards mistakes, it's a shield against humiliation. As long as you stick with the plan, you have moral right to debunk the skeptics. You won't be criticized in case of obvious mistakes, because you were simply following a narrative coming from above, and those that are above are professionals at deflecting blame (see "George Carlin on the language of politics", a must watch in my book).

On the other hand, being a skeptic is dangerous, because any mistake becomes automatically confirmation that one should not have dared to stray from the herd. Even worse, one is automatically bundled together with any other person that is considered to be a skeptic, also known as "guilt by association"… i.e. "you're not one of those flat-Earthers, are you ?".

The social pressure makes things worse, because the more rational skeptics tend to be silent for fear of reprisal, leaving the job to speak out to those that may be a bit too obsessive if not downright paranoid. This amplifies the effect of conformism, where the deboonkers can go wild, and wild they go. It's a power trip to be right on social media, dispensing smackdowns on the few that still dare to bring up points that sound too crazy to be true, whether or not there's any actual truth to be had.From a purely practical perspective, being a conformist and toning down critical thinking is necessary to make things work in a collective. There's no doubt that humanity gets in the way of productivity. As technology improves, we employ more and more robots to help us with labor, but robots aren't necessarily mechanical. Historically, the majority of humans have been employed to work in a very organized fashion, something that requires limited critical thinking and limited creativity.

Even in a future in which less labor will be required of us, for as long as we're considered an asset, or even just a competing force to be discouraged, there will be a structure in place to sustain uniformity of thought. I guess that deboonkers are here to stay.