I’m a scientist, I don’t believe in anything

In my early lab career I needed to fabricate this square yard plate of inch thick 304 steel into something useful by drilling lots of holes in it.  It was a bit beyond my skill: one of the holes was 2 feet in diameter, and 304 is bloody awful. After blowing up too many $20 mill cutters, we called in a real machinist. This was early 90s, so Pitt still had some cool mustache dudes who know how to do useful things like this. I don’t remember what his name was, or even how he accomplished all the big holes (boring bar with the big one), but I do remember he used to fuck with me. Just like in the good old days when I was an auto mechanic. His way of fucking with me was to tell me things which were obviously not true about setup of machine tools, flying saucers, women, eating hot dogs: whatever came to mind. Nothing dangerous; just the kind of thing guaranteed to blow up a milling cutter or getting mustard on my nose, or having a waitress slap me upside the head or what not.

Working class people do stuff like this all the time; little pranks -it breaks up the day. But the cool thing about this guy is he told me that most over educated people have this cognitive flaw; we’re credulous. We believe anything we’re told if it seems plausible, especially if we’re unsure of ourselves, which we mostly are. Nerds are learning machines; that’s why we get paid. Nerds don’t like thinking about stuff; they mostly shove things in their brains like fat people stuff themselves with doughnuts and pizza. Machinists are a bunch of working class dudes who don’t believe anything from this constant ribbing by their colleagues, and the fact that some of their colleagues are actual retards (note to academic/tech bros,  some of your colleagues are also actual retards: many such cases). They think and ask questions before they believe. “OK if I start with the cutter there, what will happen.” This is the essence of science and engineering.  Believing the guy telling you to put the cutter there just because he knows more shit than you is just setting you up for  a minor prank on  you.

The implications of this are immense; most nerds are insecure even within their intellectual realms. Tell them something technical, like the two years of “muh covid” baloney and they spin up their intellectual powers trying to understand the information put in front of them. No critical thinking is employed, they’re too busy trying to master the difficult material put in front of them, just like they did when they were a larval interlectual in skrewl.  It’s the same with any old marketing baloney. Many people believe the M2 architecture is faster than, say, my 2011 vintage Sandybridge stinkpad. Apple spent all that money on it, after all, it must have been a genius move for consumers who want computational horsepower, right? The nerd happily spreads his intellectual buttcheeks and spends all this time reading the wonders of the M2 as if it were actual information rather than marketing baloney (you know, disinformation). And of course every smart person knows about Moore’s law, so obviously it must be exponentially 13 years better than an I7 of 2011 vintage. M2 might be faster if you’re doing video codec crap, but it certainly isn’t for every day tasks. You know, like generic matrix multiply. That will make M2 weenies real mad; they are the smarties and Locklin is the dumbass right?

I blame Kebab if M2 results are actually faster here

I mean, feel free to check it yourself. There’s lots of anti-knowledge like this out there; propaganda or in the apparatchik parlance disinformation masquerading as information. People think Apple invested in this architecture for performance reasons because the propaganda tells them what a triumph it is. The reality is probably something like it’s easier for their developers to build to one architecture; ipotato and ipotatobook, and Apple gets to keep more value by not dealing with Intel, even though Intel’s chips are obviously better.

I often find myself completely alone in denouncing the most obvious and egregious impostures; nanotech, openAI, FTX, noodle theory, autonomous vehicles, quantum computing BS. When I do this, nerds are furiously googling up wikipedia articles trying to refute me because their self-conception involves being the smarty pants know it all who was a good little boy and studied hard qubit to make  teacher happy. When the market mean reverts and the line converges to reality rather than someone’s marketing to dorks, these nerds dutifully forget how wrong they were and move on to the next thing they’re going to be wrong about.

Putting aside the specific cases where I was right and all the sputtering  “well actchooally” nerds reading wikipedia articles were wrong. This dynamic of nerds falling for marketing hype and various crazes has dominated the directions of the last 60 years of research and engineering development. During the first decade of that timespan we got moon landings and integrated circuits, but compared to the period between 1900 (pre Wright brothers) and 1960 (post Sputnik), that ain’t shit. Worse; all the real progress stopped after the first decade: 1970 to present has been absolute shit. It has been shit in part because of this sort of credulity. Credulity begets crazes and makes such people the pawns of marketers who get free amplification from NPC nerds doing their science and technology ghost dance. We don’t live in a golden age of technology: we live in the age of propaganda and marketing. Virtually all visible technological development of the last 20 years is for the dissemination of propaganda and surveillance.

If a field has marketing associated with it: drug manufacture, tech, auto manufacture -the things you think you know are probably bullshit. We’ve established that the humble and relatively unimportant subject of machine learning contains  pervasive and amateurish marketing bullshit. You can probably find interesting things going on in subjects like Geology, petrochemicals or Archaeology with shields mostly down. For those who have to work in marketing infested areas, you need to be extremely bloody minded. Ask yourself how you could know if the claims are true, independent of someone making the claim. You absolutely must not listen to any experts without a complete “qui bono” analysis: you need to think through how the information in question got in front of your nose. There are no more “scientific americans” to do the vetting for you, and everything now published there and in other such legacy places is probably a lie. “Experts” are almost universally frauds.

The upside to all this is history has restarted and everything is up for grabs. The mass of bugmen LARPing as scientists, government welfare queens, bureaucrats, snitches, nerds and bums are weak: they’ve allied themselves with the other floundering Western “authorities” who are all-in on censorship: the precise opposite of the scientific process. Times like this are when things start to move and change. It’s not going to happen in existing large institutions, but it is going to happen.