[FRIAM] where are the "patriot hackers"?

Wed Dec 30 07:15:34 EST 2020

There is another beautiful example of Marcus’s point below that has come up over the past 8 or 9 years, for which George Musser gave a very good write-up of the current state of play:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-black-hole-information-paradox-comes-to-an-end-20201029/ <https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-black-hole-information-paradox-comes-to-an-end-20201029/>
Not in regard to empirical evidence in this case, but in regard to mathematical arguments, entirely within the domain of the rules for theorizing.

Several years ago I happened to pass through IAS at Princeton — notably _not_ visiting the physicists there, who would not let me attempt to tie their shoes, and rightly so — and a young woman physicist who happened to be lodged in the same guest-house as me told me at breakfast that there was a great buzz from a paper that it turns out was written by my former advisor (Polchinski) and a fellow postdoc and friend whom I had met in his very early childhood (Marolf) in our same home-town.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3123 <https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3123>
I think we were talking about Don as a mutual acquaintance, and I remember the way she said it: “Did you hear?  They just did something big.”  She was still quite junior, and very straightforward about the effort it would take her to understand, but determined and eager in that good-faith unadorned way physics grad students can have.
Of course I knew nothing of any of this, and just as I had never been smart enough to understand either Joe or Don, cannot claim better than a tourist’s level of effort to understand this thread of work, though the broad ideas are ones I think I could characterize without distorting them.

Anyway, the original papers were written from a frame “We present this calculation.  We are pretty sure it must be wrong, but we can’t find anything wrong with it, because it seems to be put together the way such calculations need to be.  Can someone else see what is wrong with it?”  The major red flag, like an exposed hydrophobic residue in a misfolded protein, was that high-energy phenomena were inescapable in observables where everything we think we understand about spacetime says there should only be low-energy phenomena.  So the chaperone wants to grab and dispose of that protein, whether or not it understands how it should have folded instead of the way it is.  There are many many dimensions in what we think constitutes an understanding of spacetime that it would do less violence to change, than would violating this phenomenology in which we think we know where there should be only low-energy phenomena and where there can be high-energy phenomena.

The Musser article is about how Marolf and Almheiri (two of the original authors still living; Polchinski died not long after this paper came out) and the other authors have a claim for what had been left out.  The current form of the calculation, as Musser describes it, is really shoestrings-and-glue, but the elements in it all feel right, in the sense that all the constructs are low-energy where they should be low-energy, there is a demand for quantum superposition of two things that classically make no sense superposed, just where there should be for a quantum black hole problem, and so forth.  It could be a few more years (or maybe many years) before the community can put together a version of this calculation that is considered sound and consistent across the board, but one can expect that the major elements in the current version will still be there in roughly the same places.

It’s really interesting how there can be sense in the ways these judgments are made, in a field where such a large part of what one is using is up in the air.

Eric

> On Dec 30, 2020, at 1:21 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> I have heard scientists say, when confronted with certain experimental evidence, that don’t believe the evidence.   It’s not just because they are arrogant, it is because they have experience with other evidence and highly-scrutinized models derived from that evidence – that there has to be another explanation.    (One recent example that comes to mind is the Q-thruster / EmDrive.)  It seems to me it ought to be possible to decouple clear thinking from how organizations work, and from personality.
>  
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
> Sent: Tuesday, December 29, 2020 8:24 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] where are the "patriot hackers"?
>  
> Wow, Karl is my guy, but I didn't know about this.  Thank you Stephen.  
>  
> To get to Nick's problem, we are at point in the history of our species on this planet where I think we must pay attention to the adjacent possible "truth" of an ecozoic vision (Thomas Berry) that involves an inter-species future.  Someone recently said  "science is a glass half filled" and that's because as practiced by most, science has become a system of thought closed to any but its own "truth."  Doesn't the best science embrace methods that consider all assumptions and facts to be open to question?  The division between what is "real" from what is "belief"  cancels out the possibility of what emerges that is beyond the grasp of modern science.
>  
> Einstein famously said "Imagination is more important than knowledge."  The imaginary story is missing in science, colonized by a mind-set and methodology that demands proof of "existence."  Physicist David Bohm, the godfather of the generative dialogue we teach and practice, understood this when he wrote that discussion (and by extension experimentation--not lived experience) uses only rational intelligence, while a full investigation of wicked problems demands additional perspectives perceived through our senses, emotions, self-awareness, and intuition.  There is more than one Truth to be discovered, dear Nick, and that ain't bat-shit.
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 2:54 PM Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com <mailto:stephen.guerin at simtable.com>> wrote:
> Nick writes: 
> >  But some assertions are bat-shit crazy, and provably so 
>  
> Knowing some of the background where Merle is coming from: Rights of Nature, Ecocide Law, etc <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fmedium.com%2f%40pella.thiel%2ftime-for-a-universal-declaration-on-the-rights-of-nature-ad97263a39f4&c=E,1,6i6-3TnYZDzMSrzgMRoHjZr9yZ-mCDyDtB8SyYKm8neZlfd63ddrBEeNY-L2lh0Ru9JLCnYSjJD-Xq3EvMCsNYsp7Zbsh7pwv-40NXbONw,,&typo=1>, it just may be our current Economic and Scientific paradigms (Evolution/Competition/Captalism) in Science are literally driving us batshit crazy.  
> 
> Provably batshit crazy.
>    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act>  
> 
> BTW, I got to the Guano_islands_Act starting from a google search of "metabolic sovereignty" *  as I thought it might get at Merle's idea scientificially.
> 
> This quickly got me to Marx's metabolic Rift <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_rift> from which the Guano Islands Act popped up.
> 
> -Stephen
> 
> * I'm supposed to be writing a paper today that has something to do with self-sovereign identity in decentralized systems which is why sovereignty is on my mind.
> _______________________________________________________________________
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>  
>  
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 12:39 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> I think I disagree, Merle.  If we lose faith that there is a truth to be found concerning the matters of which we speak as scientists, we lose everything. When we speak as  poets, etc., of course, we relax that constraint.  But what defines science for me is that there are truths to be found.  I am pretty sure Glen also disagrees with me, and DaveW and maybe Kim, so you are in good company.   If anything characterizes the assault on society of the last 4 years, it is the undermining of faith in the notion of convergent inquiry.  The first domino to fall was anthropology, in the sixties, which led to a mayhem of political correctness and purges that destroyed the field.  Sure we have to respect people equally.  Sure we have to treat their metaphysical non-sense on a par with our own.  But some assertions are bat-shit crazy, and provably so, and if you entertain the notion that all assertions are equally true, you might just as well drink the kool-aid and climb the  ramp into the space ship, so far as I am concerned.   I will wave you a sad good bye because we everybody’s shoulders to the truth-wheel if we are to survive.
>  
> Nick
>  
>  
>  
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
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>  
>  
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
> Sent: Tuesday, December 29, 2020 1:15 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] where are the "patriot hackers"?
>  
> "True" things about the world beyond the reach of science must be included in the expanding dialogue, like a mountain that is also an earth being, or forest animals that are spirit masters of their worlds. We can think of them as other-than-humans, but they "exist" in indigenous cultures.  They are only "beliefs" in ours,  but for those of us who are "Animists", they are always present in the dialogue. 
>  
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 9:40 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> So, I'm once again down in a rabbit hole over whether Dave's (cautiously backed by Kim) idea of a "science of the mind" is reasonable, wherein subjective/reflective techniques like psychedelic drugs or meditation can say "true" things about the world, particularly that may be beyond the reach of science. And there I am reading about Falun Gong <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong>> and its "outlets" like The Epoch Times, which spew constant nonsense, feeding the delusional QAnon narratives:
> 
> https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-newest-trump-boosted-viral-maga-star-has-ties-to-the-epoch-times <https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-newest-trump-boosted-viral-maga-star-has-ties-to-the-epoch-times>
> 
> And I'm wondering, where are the "patriot hackers" and Anonymous?
> 
> What happened to all that rigmarole about protecting the world and the internet from insidious sh¡t like The Epoch Times? Is it that ostensibly white hat members are combating shallow techniques like DDoS so well that the script kiddies who used to claim to be Anonymous are outmatched? Maybe Assange siding with Trump fractured the group? And what about the Jester <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist)>>, who was arguably more capable than the large majority of hacktivists? Was he hired by the NSA and now works alone in a steel cage? Or has his mind been infected by the attractive conspiracy theories and persecution complexes we dorks are so susceptible to?
> 
> I feel confident that some of you have some insight! Please share.
> 
> -- 
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
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