Stories, News, Books, and Videos on Science, Technology, Computers, Environment and the Realites of Life, for the general, smart public
kawa
Unmarried, Loving Life!
Posts by kawa
Hardcore exemplification of the Selfish Gene Theory in the world of finance, and why does altruism work only on similar layers of power
Sep 19th
“Half of the world’s wealth is owned by two percent of the population“, and the gap between rich and poor is getting wider and wider. What more evidence do you want in order for you to accept the inherently selfish nature of every human being? We’re not going to abide by the conspiracy theorists’ thesis which states that these wealthy men are evil conspirators set up to destroy the world, are we? So, how are we going to explain this architecture in the distribution of wealth and power that we see nowdays?
Richard Dawkins’ “Selfish Gene” taught us a great lesson: Every organism on this planet should and will act only in the interest of its selfish replicators, its genes. Although in the ending of the book Dawkins tries to redeem the faux pas with his chapter on memes, its overall message is blunt and clear: Cooperation between individuals is a characteristic that evolves only if the net payoff of that social contract is greater that the net loss of non-cooperation (defection). That means that you spread more of your selfish genes mostly when you cooperate with and help your close kin, and a little bit when you develop social bonds with individuals that you don’t relate with that much but that may provide you access to resources in the exchange of you providing them also at a later time. Resources may represent food, water, land, females, etc. These are the true motives of cooperation.
With the evolution of complex social systems, specialized social organizations started developing. Tribes, countries, governments, unions, churches, political parties, free trade organizations, and of course corporations. You don’t think all of these societal or economic megaliths work together for the benefit of the whole planet do you? Don’t be fooled by the woulda-coulda-shouldas that took too naive sociology classes in their college. These social constructs are interconnected in a complex network in which the cooperation of two entities means the peril and suffering of another. Energy just flows. It’s neither created, nor destroyed. Why shouldn’t giant corporations make massive profits for themselves and their employees (just like the leader of a tribe would profit from other tribes in order to help his closer kin) at the expense of individuals that are not part of that corporation (i.e. not part of the tribe)? The smart thing each and every corporation should do is to try, at first, to annihilate all the competition located on the same societal strata (other corporations), and if that fails try to cooperate with it. And this exactly what you see: Corporations merging with each other while others file bankruptcy, bank cartels that indebt whole nations, teams of nations going to war with each other for resources. Isn’t the picture already clear enough?
The main point i’m trying to make is that there is no inherently biological good for the species, good for the ecosystem mechanism programmed into our behavior. Group Selection Theory, as stated in The Selfish Gene, is a chimera. Countries, Corporations, Bankers, through the individuals within, will fight or cooperate with each other in order to suck the juice out of as much of the other entities as they can. Arms races develop. Groups of individuals get better and better at defending themselves or profiting from other groups, while the weak ones die along with their constitutive elements, the people.
Evidence for what i’m saying? How can you explain that while the world’s resources are getting depleted at a rate unimaginable in the past, the demand keeps blithely increasing? Growth, growth, growth is on every politician’s lips. Yeah, he has no problem to fool its sheep in order to get an easy vote. And why should he care? By the time the whole world is going to suffer from famine, he’s already dead, he’s already had the party of his life. Peak oil is waiting around the corner. Yet, you don’t see and politician, corporation, or country acknowledge that. Why is that? Again, each entity tries to maximize it’s profits in the short term, never bothering with the energy bereft planet that our children, their children, will inherit in the near future.
Is there any chance any of this will change? Maybe. But, until then let us just face reality. You just watch Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders (2006) by James Scurlock, the chronicles of abusive practices in the credit card industry, and you tell me how is this planet going to solve its energy issue when it couldn’t even stop the selfish bank cartels indebt sovereign countries by printing money out of nothing, and lending people’s money to themselves? You may have the answer, i don’t!
Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders (2006) is an independent feature-length documentary film which exposes abusive, selfish practices in the credit card industry. Written and directed by James Scurlock, the film uses interviews with creditors, debtors, academics, and others to illustrate its blunt story. The film premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, USA, in 2006 where it claimed the Special Jury Prize. It went on to several film fests including Bergen, Maui, Seattle, Full Frame Documentary, New Zealand, Milwaukee International, Woodstock, Leeds International, Oxford and IDFA film festivals.
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Terrorism Deception – Why religion’s blinding faithfulness is not the only to be blamed for terrorism’s atrocities
Sep 3rd
Are terrorists just straight out nuts, religious fanatics with only one goal in mind: to destroy every other religion? Or, are they some particular type of people who just so happened to be infected with the wrong kind of meme: RELIGION?
Liberty is the prevention of control by others. Living in a time when Big Brother starts to invade our lives, and some of conspiracy theorists’ “absurd” tales come to be true, addressing the above problem might help us cut its root not doctor its effects. Prevention is better than cure; prevention of terrorism is better than letting Big Brother handle the issue afterwards. We need to know what makes a human being become a terrorist in order to not lose our freedoms.
In a 2009 Paper, and in a 2010 addendum to that paper, Ginges, Hansen, and Norenzayan compared two hypothesis: the religious-belief hypothesis and the coalitional-commitment hypothesis in order to find out the exact reasons that push suicide terrorists to such extreme measures. The religious-belief hypothesis, if we were to quote their paper exactly, is somehow caused by “…devotion to religious belief which encourages suicide attacks, because, for example, religious belief might lead to hatred of non-believers…”; so, simple and outright hatred of non-believers caused by the devotion to religious belief as a whole should be the main artificer (no joke here), the start of the causal chain which leads to suicide terrorism.
On the other hand, if we consider the other hypothesis, the coalitional-commitment hypothesis, which quoted again states that “…frequent attendance in collective religious ritual might facilitate positive attitude towards parochial altruism in general and, in relevant contexts, suicide attacks in particular.“, we find out that suicide terrorism may be simply caused by sheer devotion to the group in which frequent attendance to collective religious rituals take place quite often so that potential suicide terrorists get sucked into what is called “parochial altruism”, that is, an extreme case of altruism where the perpetrator kills himself in order to kill as many individuals of the rival group as he can.
By measuring the frequency of prayer in order to get a hint about the religious devotion of several religious groups, and the frequency of attendance at the synagogue, mosque, and church, the researchers reached a dubious conclusion. No link was found between frequency of prayer and parochial altruism, and more to this, no link was found between frequency of prayer and suicide terrorism. Instead, strong causal relations between frequency of attendance at the synagogue and parochial altruism/suicide terrorism sprouted from their study. To make this more clear, the researchers found no evidence to prove that the more you prayed, that is, the more you were devoted to the religious belief system, the more likely it was you would commit suicide terrorism; nor did it prove that increased prayer frequency breed more cohesion between you and the religious group as a whole so as to make you kill other individuals belonging to rival religious groups. Instead, the sheer frequent attendance to collective religious rituals which increases within-group cooperation, no matter how devoted you were to that religion’s beliefs, fostered and boosted your chances to become a suicide terrorist, and also the chances that you would support suicide terrorism due to increased outer-group hostility.
Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan concluded:
Since frequency of attendance at sites of collective religious ritual always strongly predicted support for suicide attacks but frequency of prayer never did, we concluded that our results strongly supported the coalitional commitment hypothesis, but failed to support the religious belief hypothesis. We also argued that this more broadly implies that any relationship between religion and suicide attacks may be independent of devotion to specific religious creeds and instead is a function of the way religions help to bind people together into communities of parochial altruists.
In the 2010 Understanding Suicide Terrorism: Premature Dismissal of the Religious-Belief Hypothesis paper, Liddle, Machluf and Shackelford thwarted the conclusions of above study by stating that the method used in order to prove that the religion-belief hypothesis is false is in fact flawed, so further studies are needed in order to clarify the issues. Scientists concluded that the premature dismissal of the religious belief hypothesis by only measuring religious devotion in general without actually disproving certain specific religious beliefs makes the inference of the Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan study come too bright and early.
Now, first of all, taking as input only religious motives when one analyzes the complex algorithm of global terrorism has pretty low chances of yielding a practical and working model for this phenomenon. We can easily find examples of extreme terrorism and suicide terrorism which an attentive non-shallow analysis will show us they have no connection with religion at all. The fact of the matter is that a high number of terrorist acts all around the world are caused by the revenge for the abusive actions inflicted by some groups onto others; the Chechen war and Chechen terrorist acts are examples of such events that easily come to anyone’s mind, even though some naive analysts might catalogue them as wars started because of religious motives. Further studies will have to address the above in conjunction with the motives presented by the Liddle, Machluf and Shackelford rebutal study.
And now a little critique only on the Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan study. Researchers concluded that suicide terrorism may be simply caused by sheer devotion to the group in which frequent attendance to collective religious rituals take place quite often so the suicide terrorist gets sucked into what is called “parochial altruism”. I can’t find this argument as the only plausible reason for suicide terrorism because i can easily give you examples of groups in which frequent attendance to collective rituals also take place and there is no suicide terrorism taking place there, even though we may find evidence for parochial altruism. One example is UK’s soccer hooligans. They attend weekly in collective soccer rituals and they don’t commit suicide, but, and here is the glint, they do engage in public fights quite often thus proving that parochial altruism is caused by the group’s collective rituals. I think this argument can be further developed to support Liddle, Machluf and Shackelford in their attempt to show that the specificity of the religious beliefs must also be of major importance if we are to solve this mystery.
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Book Review – Inside Cyber Warfare written by Jeffrey Carr – Mapping the Cyber Underworld
Aug 26th
Internet connections have long ago ceased to represent only the blood vessels of our modern society. The complexity of what a few decades ago was a DARPA military research program has become akin to that of a global brain in which its neurons, the computers, are much more numerous than those found in the cerebral cortex of a cat.
Every aspect of our social, financial, and personal life is dependent on the hundreds of millions of Internet connections that cobble together all of our talents, ideas, visions and bake these into all the technological wonders and “freedom of expression” liberties which we now gladly, but blithely, enjoy these days. If these connections cease to exist so would your modern life. For that matter even mild and average disruptions of the wired system belonging to this boundless and dense Internet environment can be easily translated into millions of dollars of loses and even human casualties.
“Opportunity only knocks once” could have been easily quoted by anyone before the advent the Internet and modern networking. But now, having the possibility to connect with anyone from anywhere, anytime we choose to do so, opportunity has stopped to be a gift of life with which only the lucky ones will meet. With all this honey an undesirable effect will emerge; because an unseen law of nature makes every convenience come with its price, we will hardly enjoy the fruits ripen by the Internet’s human-ideas-cohesion knack without party-poppers, whose intentions hardly coincide with those of the group comprised of us more civilized individuals, that will try to exploit every vulnerability of this global informational network. Every aspect of your life, your ideas, your social connections, your family, your “secrets”, even your daily schedule become less personal once you plug all of these into the globally wired Internet. Cyberwarfare has begun!
Inside Cyber Warfare – Check Reviews on Amazon.com
Inside Cyber Warfare – Check Reviews on Amazon.co.uk
If you think Cyberwarfare is only about petty Internet crimes like credit card forgery and fraud, Website defacements done by immature individuals in desperate need to prove something, and malware coded with the intent of causing normal people like you and me to mentally brake down and throw our Windows based PCs through the window, then you are badly mistaken. The evidence brought about by this book and the fact that it’s target audience are Information Warfare policy makers will convince you that Cyberwarfare can be as serious as the armed warfare between countries and even terrorism.
The 2010 Stuxnet worm first discovered in June by a security firm based in Belarus (VirusBlokAda) specifically infected Iranian computers using Windows OS as their operating system platform in order to pave their way towards the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems used in Iran; the virus was supposedly coded by professionals to target Iranian nuclear power plants, industry sectors, and important infrastructure networks that used SIEMENS control systems as their automation technology; this is the first computer virus specially designed by a team of computer programming professionals, industry specialists, and specialized hackers; the time, the money, and the complexity of the malware gives us pretty good evidence on the possible implication of US intelligence agencies in aiding these kind of groups both financially, logistically, and even in creating themselves these special divisions of informational warriors.
Informational Warfare of all types, complexity, and level of damage inflicted on enemies has been going on for a long time. Non-state hackers driven by political and religious beliefs, state sponsored youth group organizations, cyber mafias thieving unwary online navigators of tens of millions of dollars, major corporations, companies and internet providers led by the urges of high profit, they all are part of this cyber war, and in one way or another, willingly or not, they pave the way and help build the “informational infrastructure” that will make computer viruses and specialized malware the future bullets that are going to be used by nations in order to wage war one upon another.
Jeffrey Carr’s Inside Cyber Warfare provides ample evidence for the information war stories that wandered in the mainstream media and alternative media at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. The story about People’s Republic of China (PRC) hackers’ war waging upon U.S. government websites , the cyberwar between Israeli and Palestinian hackers due to the Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against Palestine, the Russian cyberwar between Chechnya, Georgia, and Estonia, where clear evidence for state sponsored hacking divisions is provided by the author, the 2009 Iranian presidential elections, and much more are analyzed in this very readable text which paints with unchallengeable arguments the not so rosy picture of Internet Dynamics.
Even Hacking techniques are given a non-shallow attempt at explaining in order to make their picture clearer. The book provides examples of attacks done by hackers using DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) techniques, SQL Injection (SQLi), Buffer Overflow vulnerabilities, Backdoor malware, social engineering techniques applied using social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook, and the list can go on. Even though all these methods are also used by cyber criminals for extorsion, industrial sabotage, theft, revenge, economical espionage, they can also be ferocious, anonymous (sometimes untraceable) tools that can be easily used by terrorists, political activists and special state departments in order to wage war on enemy countries.
More to this, a lot of the text in this book engages in an interesting debate and argumentation onto the possible policy measures which state departments, intelligence agencies, and international organizations have adopted and will need to adopt in order to fight cyber crimes, cyber terrorism, and ultimately cyber warfare. Overall, the book deserves a score of 8 out of 10. Highly recommended for programmers, IT specialists, and government and intelligence agency policy makers, even though it can be easily enjoyed by anyone interested in the subject.
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Book Review – Guns, Germs, and Steel written by Jared Diamond – The major reasons for today’s distribution of power and wealth around the world
Aug 11th
What would a roundabout superficial brainstorming session yield as answer to the question of why is the global arrangement of wealth and power distributed in the way we see it now-days? Why did the European colonialists manage to dominate and decimate the Maya, Inca, and Aztec empires or the nomadic hunter gatherer tribes of the Americas, Africa, and Australia, but not the other way around?
Can the shallow assumptions about the genetic inferiority, concerning either intellectual or brute physical fitness, that the conquered societies purportedly were the phenotypic manifestations of, be the correct explanations for the observed happenings? Could the Conquistadors’ genes have made them more easily adaptable to whatever environmental pressures nature contrived in their path towards conquering the major societies of the Americas?
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel will offer an au courant, astute explanation about the systemic distribution of wealth all around the world, and will flat-out deny one of the premises that started this article, the one concerning the supposedly intellectual inferiority of the hunter gatherer tribes. The genes responsible for the mental abilities of the less wealthy, less powerful, less literate, less industrialized societies that roamed all continents, and that still roam certain places on this planet are certainly, Jared argues, not to be considered as having any significant importance into the developments of the last 10000 years. Hunter gatherer tribes are not more primitive, but are the result of the environmental hold backs, be it the scarce resources, geography, or the improper climate that bedeviled these tribes in one form or another during the lapse of time.
So if this purported difference in intelligence between Eurasians and their conquered societies is not a reason worth taking into account if we want to answer the above questions, what are the real causes for the observed differences in wealth and power? Why wasn’t Africa, with its more than 5 million years of human evolutionary history, the launch pad of colonizations, technology, and industrialization? What are the ins and outs of the causes that made it almost sure that Eurasia will satisfy the adequate conditions in which industrialized societies based on literacy, steel, and technology could easily evolve and conquer the rest of the world?
The answers to the above questions are rather counter-intuitive, and some are certainly cynical. First of all to put an end to all theories that struggle with human genetics as a cause for the observed facts let me state this: There would be little time for much significant differential evolution of intelligence in the different tribes that roamed the various continents of our planet; the few hundreds of ancestors of all living humans today took an exit out of Africa some 100.000 yrs ago, too early for significant genetic mutations to have happened. More to that, look at industrialized societies today! Besides the assault of useful information of course, today’s children grow with a shallow view of life, being bombarded all day long with stupid useless hogwash memes generated by their TV programs or their Facebook account.
Contrary to them, the children of the remaining hunter gatherer tribes that live in our times (Papua New Guinea) stretch out their mental muscles early in their lives, having to cope with wild life, scarce resources, spatial memory and navigation, territory memorizing, and other types of issues that take their survival skills to the edge. So, maybe society and culture, not genetics, should be considered a significant factor in the overall intelligence of today’s humans. Therefore, you can hardly say people of hunter gatherer tribes are intellectually inferior to us. So for the sake of argument, Jared argues, let’s consider them equal.
In 11000 B.C. all things were dull, similar, and un-experimented. All tribes looked almost the same, and behaved almost the same as if nothing significant had happened since the time our ancestors escaped Africa 100.000 yrs ago. But a strange force accelerated the evolution of the tribes from the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization from Western Asia, which included the once fertile regions of Mesopotamia and the Levant, delimited by the dry climate of the Syrian Desert to the south and the Anatolian highlands to the north. In this region plant and animal domestication began to appear.
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Книжное обозрение – Пушки, микробы и сталь написана Джаред Даймонд – основные причины распространения сегодняшней власти и богатства во всем мире (по-английски)
Jul 20th
(Потому что наши русские читатели очень важны, мы сейчас в поисках профессионального переводчика. Мы приносим свои извинения, что на данный момент, мы можем лишь предоставить текст на английском языке.)
What would a roundabout superficial brainstorming session yield as answer to the question of why is the global arrangement of wealth and power distributed in the way we see it now-days? Why did the European colonialists manage to dominate and decimate the Maya, Inca, and Aztec empires or the nomadic hunter gatherer tribes of the Americas, Africa, and Australia, but not the other way around?
Can the shallow assumptions about the genetic inferiority, concerning either intellectual or brute physical fitness, that the conquered societies purportedly were the phenotypic manifestations of, be the correct explanations for the observed happenings? Could the Conquistadors’ genes have made them more easily adaptable to whatever environmental pressures nature contrived in their path towards conquering the major societies of the Americas?
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel will offer an au courant, astute explanation about the systemic distribution of wealth all around the world, and will flat-out deny one of the premises that started this article, the one concerning the supposedly intellectual inferiority of the hunter gatherer tribes. The genes responsible for the mental abilities of the less wealthy, less powerful, less literate, less industrialized societies that roamed all continents, and that still roam certain places on this planet are certainly, Jared argues, not to be considered as having any significant importance into the developments of the last 10000 years. Hunter gatherer tribes are not more primitive, but are the result of the environmental hold backs, be it the scarce resources, geography, or the improper climate that bedeviled these tribes in one form or another during the lapse of time.
So if this purported difference in intelligence between Eurasians and their conquered societies is not a reason worth taking into account if we want to answer the above questions, what are the real causes for the observed differences in wealth and power? Why wasn’t Africa, with its more than 5 million years of human evolutionary history, the launch pad of colonizations, technology, and industrialization? What are the ins and outs of the causes that made it almost sure that Eurasia will satisfy the adequate conditions in which industrialized societies based on literacy, steel, and technology could easily evolve and conquer the rest of the world?
The answers to the above questions are rather counter-intuitive, and some are certainly cynical. First of all to put an end to all theories that struggle with human genetics as a cause for the observed facts let me state this: There would be little time for much significant differential evolution of intelligence in the different tribes that roamed the various continents of our planet; the few hundreds of ancestors of all living humans today took an exit out of Africa some 100.000 yrs ago, too early for significant genetic mutations to have happened. More to that, look at industrialized societies today! Besides the assault of useful information of course, today’s children grow with a shallow view of life, being bombarded all day long with stupid useless hogwash memes generated by their TV programs or their Facebook account.
Contrary to them, the children of the remaining hunter gatherer tribes that live in our times (Papua New Guinea) stretch out their mental muscles early in their lives, having to cope with wild life, scarce resources, spatial memory and navigation, territory memorizing, and other types of issues that take their survival skills to the edge. So, maybe society and culture, not genetics, should be considered a significant factor in the overall intelligence of today’s humans. Therefore, you can hardly say people of hunter gatherer tribes are intellectually inferior to us. So for the sake of argument, Jared argues, let’s consider them equal.
In 11000 B.C. all things were dull, similar, and un-experimented. All tribes looked almost the same, and behaved almost the same as if nothing significant had happened since the time our ancestors escaped Africa 100.000 yrs ago. But a strange force accelerated the evolution of the tribes from the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization from Western Asia, which included the once fertile regions of Mesopotamia and the Levant, delimited by the dry climate of the Syrian Desert to the south and the Anatolian highlands to the north. In this region plant and animal domestication began to appear.
More >
Book Review – “The Selfish Gene” written by Richard Dawkins – We’re slaves of the genes, programmed by memes, no god supervenes
Jul 4th
Why are people? The title of chapter one properly defines the reason for this book’s existence. Why their worries, why their struggles, fears, lovings, hatings? What is our purpose on this planet and ultimately in the universe? Why all the bad things in order to feed our visceral hunger for pleasure? Why does the phrase “nature red in teeth and claw” make such a perfect opening epigram for any biology book?
Naive lily-livered eschewers run all their lives on the treadmill of ignorance diverting their thinking from the answers to the above questions, beguiling themselves to some hopped destination where all things must be about peace, pleasure, and the good of man. Call it heaven, nirvana, ultimately the reason for all this life of struggle. These are the theists not famished at conception with the love for the real truth, be it white, gray, or black. They will never have the guts to face reality, they will always be driven and controlled by emotions. And what do you expect to happen when you have individuals with this kind of agenda up their sleeves? The Bible, brain-washed children, a general milieu of malevolent ineluctable set of memes from which society can have no hope of freeing its fettered limbs from the leashes of nature. And in the middle you have the people who didn’t have the time to make up their minds, and this book is for them in particular.
Yes, life can be fun. But there are myriad of antithetical examples both in the animal kingdom and in the human society in which life is anything but innocuous. This book is about the truth of these facts and the reasons for it being this way. Its purpose is not to feed the emotional thirst for positiveness, safety, and well being. Its embodied astute goal is to climb the ladder of truth, blithely analyzing the causes and effects, the ontology and systemic organization of nature and its products: Us and all living things that roam planet Earth.
What is this book’s mission? To explain biology’s gears, levers and pulleys, individual selfishness, altruism, behavioral strategies in animals and consequently in us humans, presenting all of these using the gene, that is, the slightly small set of bits from the chromosome that is capable of surviving meiotic division a significant amount of time for it to be considered a long living sequence of DNA, as the single unit of natural selection.
So, although counter-intuitive, the consequences of adopting this point of view apparently transforms us human beings into mere puppets, zombie vehicle robots designed, programmed and polished for eons by our genes in order to preserve their prodigiously long chain of nucleotides. That is, blindly designed, blindly programmed, for genes are only mechanistic stable arrangements of molecules that sprouted in the non-steered, full of ingredients but lacking design, primordial soup; genes are the software that bootstrapped themselves in the Multiverse from shabby tooled beginnings. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, this software began to be assembled by the environmental machinery that is planet Earth some 4 billion years ago.
Therefore, Natural Selection does not select between ecosystems, or species, or groups, or even individuals, but between genes. This so counter-intuitive approach is tantamount, Richard argues, to the cyclic change in perception when one looks at a Necker Cube; from time to time, as you look at the cube, it seems that the point of view from which you look at it changes its position. The same thing happens when we analyze what does the “Necker Cube of Natural Selection” act upon when it selects between structures that need to survive. But unlike in the Necker Cube analogy where any point of view might be the right one to look at, in the case of analyzing natural selection’s inner workings some points of view might be more needless than others. Ecosystems, groups, species, and individuals do not fight for dominance, instead, the structures they emerge from do it: their Genes. There is no act done for the good of species. Instead they’re acts done for the good of the genes, more exactly, for the good of complexes of genes. The genes’ blind, blithe, and most importantly, unconscious acts are iconoclastic image destroyers for the mis-construed whelps of group selection. Let’s analyze this book chapter by chapter.
