A Tyson/NSF Postscript

I got a very nice private email from one of you, reading:

I thought your AI [artificial intelligence] article was one of the most thoughtful and tremor-filled (I was going to write tremendous and recalculated) I have ever read on the internet. I need to look back to when you wrote it and reread it.  Was it two years ago/ one?

I went back and looked at the post(s) she referred to, which are from October of 2017. It’s really a three-parter in the form of one of my open letters, this one to Professor Nick Bostrom, . The subject matter evolves and grows in the telling, from a critique on Bostrom’s (and others) Simulation Hypothesis (which I suspect most of you are somewhat familiar with) to the evidence for a ‘higher power’ (in this ‘version of reality’ or not) to an analysis of the state of Artificial Intelligence. Toward the end I came across a bit that relates to my recent post on Neil deGrasse Tyson and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Here it is:

Addendum: I finally came across an academic A.I. ‘expert’ who spills it outright as to who pays his salary (technically, he works for the U of Washington). His grant money comes from The National Science Foundation, he says, and… wait for it… The Department of Energy; both are Big Government Agencies laced with high tech and science spooks. He also informs us that he and his colleagues spend most of their time ‘writing proposals to various government agencies.’ Do you think maybe he and his colleagues do what they’re told? (Naturally, his Seti Institute talk on AI fails to mention any of the issues in this essay.)

A fellow Rubber Tramp and her pooch.

Go about 43:30 in and you’ll find him saying this:

‘Most of the computer resources we get are from the DOE (Department of Energy) and the National Science Foundation… the large scale facilities…the way it works is we are always in proposal writing mode to get time on these machines… maybe ten proposals a year… the sheer number of people whose research needs the high performance computing…’

Get the idea? It’s not just Tyson who works for the CIA via the NSF but academia too, although Professor Beane is probably a simple example of mind-control/useful idiocy.  Through his years in our educational system he has learned to accept the tenets of the various ‘standard models’ of science, nonsensical or not. Toe the line — whether it be Neo-Darwinism or big bang cosmology — or you have no career.

Also in the email was an important link, which I’ll pass on. However bad you thought the coming 5g system is, it’s worse.

I’ll be back in a couple days with more to say about Spacex.

Allan

Most of the Open Letter to Bostrom stuff still stands up, IMO, to the extent that I found myself doubting whether I still have the energy to come up with something of similar depth and insight. I would ask those of you who have the time and who are interested in these subject matters to give these posts a look, even if you recall them from before. With the benefit of another year’s research, I can assure you there’s some worthwhile information there. I was on a pretty productive roll back then.