Widespread Mental Atrophy and the Coming Idiocracy

It has been widely observed that the birthrate of countries tends to fall as they become more wealthy. Most countries in Western Europe now have birthrates below the replacement rate; in the absence of immigration, their populations can be expected to fall in the future.

... one might expect that since low IQ countries tend to be less wealthy, they should also be expected to have higher birthrates than countries with high IQ. If population IQ and wealth remain constant, the average IQ of the world should then fall over time, since a larger portion of population growth will occur in low IQ countries. _Fourmilab

FourmilabWe are fairly safe in projecting a steady decrease in the world average population IQ over the next 40 years, given current trends in birthrates. The "Flynn Effect" may slow the rate of decline of mean global population IQ somewhat, but the trend seen in the two graphs presented here is the most likely general scenario, for this statistic.

GNXPFollow the Dark Blue Line Down L to R
This dysgenic trend is caused by differential birthrates between women of high intelligence and women of low intelligence. It portends an ominous future for large areas of the world which may lose or destroy their "smart fractions," their lifelines to high technology amenities of the developed world such as electricity, modern transportation, and modern medicine.

But a far more pressing concern for modern societies in the year 2011 is the process of "dumbing down" which has been applied to citizens from pre-school through graduate school, and beyond. It is this underutilisation of cognitive potential which is greasing the wheels for the bullet train bound for Idiocracy.

Consider the public and academic debate over why Japan surrendered at the end of World War II. In the Boston Globe article linked above, the author presents what he and others claim is a new and radical theory which they say is likely to overturn decades of conventional wisdom. Instead, what is presented is a false dichotomy -- an elementary logical fallacy which should have been spotted by anyone graduating from grammar school. Yet, you have academics grappling for supremacy based upon the inability to integrate multiple causes for events.

Or take this article about the famous "wild boy" Peter of 18th century Germany. The author of the article, an historian, apparently settles upon an explanation for the wild boy Peter's existence, which any 8 year old would instantly recognise as impossible. See if you can spot the author's oversight.

We are faced with a future of magnificent technologies, where each human can potentially own thousands of "technology slaves" to do large numbers of things for him on a routine daily basis. In such a pampered world, there is a clear danger of humans allowing many of their faculties to atrophy and wither, becoming vestigial. It is yet another form of "dumbing down," to add to the multitude of other forms emanating from schools, the media, mainstream culture, and the labyrinth of political rules, regulations, and norms which are endless, contradictory, inexplicable, and ultimately destructive to independent thought and action.

The Idiocracy will have many simultaneous causes. The process described in the video clip above is just one of the many dynamic foundations of the coming Idiocracy -- which will be far less benign and peaceful than the movie portrays. More like The Coming Anarchy described by Robert D. Kaplan.

The multicultural celebrations in London last week offer a foretaste of the coming state of any western cities which have allowed neo-tribalism and multiculturalism to proceed beyond a prudent point. Some cities will be lucky to escape total destruction of city centres and the immediate surrounding areas.

Global IQ Test Results by Nation

Many wonderful technological and scientific discoveries and developments are on their way. It is important to position oneself so as to be able to take advantage of these technological advancements. At the same time, it is important to place yourself and your family in a place of relative safety and security, and to always push yourself and those close to you to develop and expand their given abilities.

It is important to keep in mind the critical core needs of an advanced civilisation, and to develop better ways of providing them on an impromptu, decentralised basis. Brian Wang takes an interesting, preliminary look at this idea.

If your government and mainstream culture is killing the future of your civilisation, you need to think of alternatives.

The College Imperative and the Coming Idiocracy

More: Now we are learning that as many as 85% of US college graduates are forced by debt to move back in with their parents when they leave college. Perhaps someone should have told their parents this was going to happen, before the fact?

For several decades, American children have been pushed toward a college education as the path to life and career success. More and more children are enrolling in college -- over 70% of American high school graduates enrolled in college over the past decade. Yet there are many reasons to believe that this rush to a college education is not only counter-productive, but may be downright destructive to a society.

Image Source
It has been argued persuasively that a rigorous 4 year college degree can only be put to good use by a person at or above the 80th percentile of IQ. Forcing more people into the system requires a dumbing down of admissions, a dumbing down of course work, and a dumbing down of evaluations and credentials.

If 70.1% of high school graduates enroll in a college or university, how does a college degree give you an advantage over the rest of the population? Back in the early 1960s, Americans didn't need to go to college. We were a creditor nation with a strong manufacturing base. With an unemployment rate of only 5%, jobs were available to almost everybody. Less than 50% of American high school graduates enrolled into college. For those who did attend college and graduate with a degree, it was actually something special that made you stand out from the rest of the field, because not everybody had one.

...The current college education bubble is one of the largest bubbles in U.S. history. The college bubble has been fueled by the U.S. government's willingness to give out cheap and easy student loans to anybody who applied for them, regardless of if they will ever have the ability to pay the loans back. Student loan debt in America is now larger than credit card debt, but unlike credit card debt, student loan debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy. _CollegeBubble

The situation is even worse for women. Women who go put all their energies into the higher education bubble and a career, all too often risk dying childless and unloved, and deeply in debt besides. Even so, the proportion of women attending college is growing and approaching 60% as the proportion of men continues to fall toward 40%.

It is the most intelligent and best educated women who are choosing careers over motherhood, while the least intelligent women are bearing the lioness' share of children. Given the choice of sex partners by less intelligent women, it is likely that the average intelligence of newcomers to society is declining -- a dysgenic process leading to Idiocracy.

GNXP
The same trend toward higher proportion of births from low-IQ populations is taking place in nations across the western world -- in no small part due to the push for more children to go to college, particularly women.

Many other potentially catastrophic side effects of the "college imperative" are put on display in the documentary "College Conspiracy." The college bubble is a source of massive capital misallocation and extreme (often frivolous) debt, for youth just beginning their lives. The psychological impact of living under so much debt is incalculable. Many young people must postpone thoughts of marriage and raising a family for many years -- and sometimes indefinitely -- due to massive educational debt. And the problem is only growing worse over time.

Is college a waste of time? No, it is a waste of lives and a waste of human capital. The college imperative is becoming the waste of the future -- the midwifing of the Idiocracy.

Artificial Intelligence: Experts Admit that AI Stinks

Marvin Minsky, Patrick Winston, Noam Chomsky, and other thinkers, researchers, engineers, and scientists, think that artificial intelligence has gone wrong. And the way things have been going, it is not likely that AI researchers will get on "the right track" for some time -- since most of them cannot seem to understand the problem.

Several up and coming AI workers (plus Ray Kurzweil) have predicted that human-level AI will be achieved within the next 10 to 20 years. Where is the progress which they can point to, in order to justify these claims? Within their own imaginations, apparently. According to some of the thinkers and AI pioneers quoted at the link above, the problem of AI is not being approached correctly. One of the most piercing criticisms of the field seems to be that it is focusing on tactics rather than strategy.

...clearly, the AI problem is nowhere near being solved. Why? For the most part, the answer is simple: no one is really trying to solve it. This may come as a surprise to people outside the field. What have all those AI researchers been doing all these years? The reality is that they have largely given up on the grand ambitions of AI and are instead working on increasingly specialized subproblems: not just machine learning or natural-language understanding, say, but issues within those areas, like classifying objects or parsing sentences. _TechnologyReview

This is clearly true. What is tragic is that a large proportion of the current crop of top-level AI researchers do not seem to understand the difference between strategy and tactics, in the context of AI. Strategy in AI calls for much deeper level thinking than tactics, which may in fact be beyond the capacity of most researchers -- and even beyond the range of philosophers such as Dan Dennett, who has relatively low expectations for human-level AI in the foreseeable future.

As brilliant as earlier AI researchers a John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert may be (and may have once been) in their hay-day, the extent of the problem of human-level AI was too poorly defined for anyone to grasp the challenge.

Modern researchers who make boastful claims for the likelihood of achieving human-level AI in 10-20 years do not have that excuse. Clearly neither Kurzweil nor the other AI hopefuls truly have a grasp of the problem as a whole. And that failure will be their undoing.

What would it take to succeed at human-level AI? A closely-knit, multidisciplinary team of thinkers willing to try outlandish and counter-intuitive approaches to the problem -- well out of the mainstream. To achieve human-type machine intelligence, high level expertise in one's field is but the barest beginning, hardly a single step in the journey of a thousand miles. One must also have a child-like approach to the world, be both brilliant and incredibly humble in the face of the ineffable, and be able to integrate complex ideas from both within and without his own field of expertise into a new, working holism.

Of course it sounds like psycho-babble, but when approaching something far too complex for words, such failures of communication are inevitable. Al Fin cognitive engineers recommend that the concepts of "embodied cognition" and "preverbal metaphor" be kept foremost in in the minds of any hopeful AI developers.

For everyone else, don't get your hopes up too high. Higher education in the advanced world -- particularly in North America -- is moving into serious difficulty, which means that research facilities and funding are likely to be cut back, perhaps severely. The economies of the advanced nations, and the US in particular, are being badly mismanaged, which means that private sector efforts will also likely be cut back. The problem may require the emergence of an individual with the brilliance of Einstein, the persistence of Edison, and the wide-ranging coherent creativity of a da Vinci.

In other words, people need to become smarter -- at least some people. Then they can learn to evolve very smart machines. And perhaps to interface with networks of these very smart machines. Then, possibly, using this symbiotic intelligence to design even smarter people.

Because let's face it: Humans -- especially PC-cultured humans -- will only take us to the Idiocracy, sooner or later. And the Idiocracy will be not only stupid, but downright brutal.

Atlas Shrugged, Dumbed Down Electorate, and Idiocracy

Wikipedia Commons
Atlas Shrugged, The Movie Part I, is due to be released to theatres in one week. The book Atlas Shrugged was written by Russian emigre' Ayn Rand, in the 1950s, published in 1957. It is set in a society where people have forgotten how to think rationally, and are thus at the mercy of powerful groups who tell them how to think and what to do. It is a society very much like our society, and the book is a powerful cautionary tale for persons bold enough to think for themselves.

Modern society is breeding generations of persons incapable of rational thought, regardless of the amount of "education" they are forced to endure. In spite of everything, university students cannot think, cannot read or do maths, cannot write, cannot spell -- one could be easily forgiven for thinking that most college students do not actually belong in college.

Here is the problem with societies whose brightest lights are not so bright -- for whatever reason: The persons and groups that are chosen to lead these societies tend to exacerbate the "brain dimming problem," rather than to generate solutions to it. And so the process of "dumbing down" progresses along the path of least resistance until -- before you realise it -- a full-blown Idiocracy is in session.

From the point of view of schooling, when children typically enter first grade at about age 6 years, only one third are able to use any logical reasoning. That means that they are not ready for much of what is usually taught at that grade. This issue of readiness is a significant one for schooling and this table gives the first general information about readiness. Some teachers and principals have estimated for me that about one-third of the matters in junior high school require formal reasoning. Yet, at those ages (12-14 years) no more than 20% have reached that reasoning level.


That means that most of the children cannot understand the most significant matters being taught in junior high school. In essence they are being taught in a foreign language. The result is that such children begin to pay no attention and begin, as is now well known, to consider dropping out of school. When they arrive in senior high school and the lack of understanding continues, drop-out behavior becomes a real alternative.


Teachers surely know that there is a spectrum of ability levels of the children in their classes, but they don't know how to handle it. If teachers were really aware of the data in the table, they would know that significant modifications of their instructional level are needed for these non-ready children. That still wouldn't tell them what to do.


What is needed is what can be called cognitive level matching (CLM): matching the level of instruction to the expectations of the individual students. Now that we have the Shayer/Adey test (and others developed since then), teachers can discover the reasoning levels of their students and interact with them accordingly.


There is no question but that this is an enormous strain on the teachers, and requires that the teachers, too, be tested for their operating cognitive levels. The need for such testing is evident from the last line of the table which gives the data for adults. Adults remain at the highest percentage reached at the end of high school: only one-third can reason formally. So, acceptance of applicants to higher education schools should be based on testing of the cognitive levels of prospective teachers in addition to the information gathered from the usual SAT test taken at the end of high school for those preparing to go on to higher education. _The Fourth "R"

I think you see the problem with the all-too-reasonable recommendations given at the conclusion of the essay above: Teachers' unions would never accept the requirement that teachers actually be capable of rational thought in order to be employed as teachers. If ordinary members of government unions in Wisconsin were willing to skip work to demonstrate and occupy public buildings, faking medical excuses and abandoning their responsibilities just for the right to be forced to have union dues deducted from their paychecks, how do you think they will react if regulations come along that require them to be able to think like intelligent beings?

Modern dialogue at the highest levels is chocked full of logical fallacies. Even the more intelligent students are not typically taught basic reasoning skills -- nor are they given the ability to detect the common fallacies and illogical modes of reasoning. This lack of ability to reason is reflected in much "research" -- including research in sciences such as climatology and psychology. Naturally the problem extends down the bell curve (see graph at top) -- to the less intelligent. Overall, fuggiduhbowdit!

When faced with such a society of madly proliferating dimwits, John Galt chose to chuck it all and abandon society to its Idiocratic tendencies -- and he invited all rational and ethically ambitious persons to join him in safety. Society would eventually fall apart of its own inconsistencies and inadequacies, allowing Galt and his co-conspirators to return and help put the pieces together more rationally.

But fiction is fiction, and reality is fiction too er, reality, although often "stranger than fiction." If all the bright, competent, rational, and ethical persons dropped out of modern societies, it might be difficult to find enough working pieces in the aftermath to put together a functioning society. Difficult to say.

It is obvious that resources are flowing from the productive to the unproductive, and that the rapidly expanding government-dependent sector is on a determinedly kamikaze course.

You may not be willing to "go Galt," but you should have at least one fallback position. Preferably more. Optimally, a community of ethical, competent, and rational persons would stand ready to form a focus of competent recovery, should the situation warrant.

There is an ongoing counter-reaction to the Idiocracy, but the sheer numbers of Idiocrats and government-dependent persons argues against the success of the anti-Idiocratic forces. In modern societies, brain-rot tends to set in from the earliest ages and progress from there, unless the parents are truly exceptional.

It is likely to take a number of years for the parallel trends of societal breakdown to reach a climax -- if Obama is re-elected the derailment is apt to come a bit sooner.

The Best Defense Against Propaganda Like "Gasland" is to Learn How Things Are Actually Done

26Feb2011 MORE:New Scientist looks at the questionable tactics and claims of Gasland. The New York Times -- lately more of a tabloid rag than a purveyor of accurate news -- makes some new claims about threats of radioactivity released by wastewater from fracking. Time will tell. Certainly the developed world needs the energy and fuel from unconventional hydrocarbons to allow it to bridge into the era of advanced fission, advanced biofuels, enhanced geothermal, fusion, and other advanced nuclear and exotic particle reactions.

This video provides a brief summary of the oil and gas drilling process. If you pay attention over its few minutes, you will know far more about oil & gas production than most of the faux environmentalists who write propaganda pieces and make propumentary films on the topic, meant to sway public opinion.

The Oscar-nominated film Gasland is a fine example of the genre known as "propumentaries", or propaganda as documentary. Michael Moore is a master of the genre, but Josh Fox is certainly up and coming in the field with this entry.

Here is a website devoted to debunking Gasland

Here is a PDF from Gasland's maker meant to debunk the debunking of Gasland, called Affirming Gasland

A further debunking of Gasland can be found here and here and here

It should be said that for most thinking persons, Gasland debunks itself. But the film is not aimed at thinking persons, it is aimed at members of the Idiocracy, programmed by a failed educational system not to think at all. With that audience, the film has apparently succeeded -- since it is nominated for an Oscar.

President Obama's EPA and Interior Department have succeeded in proclaiming CO2 as a "dangerous pollutant" and in stonewalling offshore oil drilling at all costs. Obama's minions have shut down several coal mines and coal power plants. Obama's NRC is dragging its feet on newer, safer, nuclear plants. All forms of reliable energy have been targeted by Obama's regime. If the regime were able to find any significant pretense to pull the plug on shale gas, they would have done so by now. As it is, they are still looking for anything at all substantial they can use to shut down yet another form of energy. Gasland is certainly not that thing, but is rather in the category of a joke. But they are still looking -- hard.

You can bet a large number of overseas gas producers from Russia to MENA are very interested in seeing Obama take action against shale gas producers. Needless to say, lefty-Luddite greens of the dioff.orgy persuasion are likewise eager to intensify the Obama program of energy starvation in the US.

Dying US Counties: A "Baby-Bust" Phenomenon

Across the developed world, the "baby bust" is leaving its mark in ghost towns, ghost counties, de-populating cities and states, and an emerging displacement of older populations by newer populations of outside origin.

Dying counties in the U.S. were rare until the 1960s, when the baby boom ended. By 1973, as farming communities declined, roughly 515 counties — mostly in the Great Plains — reported natural decrease. The phenomenon then began to show up in industrial regions, such as upstate New York and California. Natural decrease peaked in 2002 at a record 985, or 1 in 3 counties, before increasing births and an influx of Hispanic immigration helped add to county populations during the housing boom.

Following the recent recession, birth rates have dropped to the lowest in a century. Preliminary census numbers for 2007-09 now show that the number of dying counties is back on the upswing. Recent additions include Pittsburgh and its surrounding counties.

James Follain, senior fellow and economist at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the University of Albany, said a new kind of declining city may be emerging in the wake of the housing bust — metropolitan areas that rapidly overbuilt earlier in the decade and then suffered massive foreclosures.

He cited as examples Las Vegas, Miami, parts of Arizona, and Stockton, Modesto, Fresno and Riverside in California. Like traditional ghost towns, Follain says, portions of these areas could spiral down from persistent loss of jobs and population and lose their reason for being.

Follain also pointed to a tighter fiscal environment in Washington that will limit help to troubled areas. The Obama administration announced this month it would shrink the government's role in the mortgage system to reduce taxpayer exposure to risk. House Republicans also are pushing federal spending cuts of more than $61 billion, even if it means reducing jobs.

"It's going to be a very slow recovery," Follain said. _AP-Yahoo

You may think that the population bust is mainly affecting Japan and Russia, but this deflationary trend affects virtually all European and Northeast Asian populations. While third world populations continue to expand, more developed nations -- with populations possessing higher average IQs -- are shrinking. The end result of these differential birthrates is a steady decline in the average global population IQ -- despite the so-called "Flynn effect."

It is clear that the higher-IQ populations of the world -- the people who drove the technological revolutions in medicine, agriculture, science, technology etc -- are fading, while the lower-IQ populations are on the ascendancy, numbers-wise. This is an ominous trend for the planet overall, since poverty, corruption, and eco-devastation are greater overall in low-IQ, third world regions.

It is time to face the facts about global population trends and what they mean for the intermediate term of the human world. The coming reality -- or should I say the "coming anarchy" -- will not be pretty. Those who are prepared will be better suited to reach the other side.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

Is Wikimedia Dumbing Down the Idiocracy?

NYT
Several areas of commerce, enterprise, and science remain the province of mainly-male participation. Physics, mathematics, advanced computer science, technical engineering, math-intensive sciences, aircraft test pilots and combat pilots, commercial sea captains, and so on. Most informed people understand that research is dominated by males, but few people realise that technical information intensive areas -- such as highly demanding reference information providers -- are also dominated by males. A lot of politically involved feminists would like to change that situation, but is there a danger in moving too forcefully from the top down when changes may adversely affect critically important services?

...surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of [Wikipedia's] hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

...The notion that a collaborative, written project open to all is so skewed to men may be surprising. After all, there is no male-dominated executive team favoring men over women, as there can be in the corporate world; Wikipedia is not a software project, but more a writing experiment — an “exquisite corpse,” or game where each player adds to a larger work.

...The public is increasingly going to Wikipedia as a research source: According to a recent Pew survey, the percentage of all American adults who use the site to look for information increased to 42 percent in May 2010, from 25 percent in February 2007. This translates to 53 percent of adults who regularly use the Internet.

Jane Margolis, co-author of a book on sexism in computer science, “Unlocking the Clubhouse,” argues that Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems of the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. “In almost every space, who are the authorities, the politicians, writers for op-ed pages?” said Ms. Margolis, a senior researcher at the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles.

...Ms. Gardner said that for now she was trying to use subtle persuasion and outreach through her foundation to welcome all newcomers to Wikipedia, rather than advocate for women-specific remedies like recruitment or quotas.

“Gender is a huge hot-button issue for lots of people who feel strongly about it,” she said. “I am not interested in triggering those strong feelings.”

Kat Walsh, a policy analyst and longtime Wikipedia contributor who was elected to the Wikimedia board, agreed that indirect initiatives would cause less unease in the Wikipedia community than more overt efforts.

But she acknowledged the hurdles: “The big problem is that the current Wikipedia community is what came about by letting things develop naturally — trying to influence it in another direction is no longer the easiest path, and requires conscious effort to change.” _NYT

The Wikipedia world is indeed a rough and tumble world of competitive edits and re-writes. If a person cannot withstand criticism and competition, they will not likely last long in that world.

The male hormone testosterone shapes the human brain in multiple ways not yet fully comprehended by science or society at large. Much of what science has learned about the influence of hormones such as testosterone on the gender differences so prevalent in society, is considered not politically correct -- and thus essentially unmentionable in left-leaning tabloids such as the New York Times, quoted above. Testosterone makes males more interested in objects than people, more competitive, have generally superior spatial and higher math skills, physically larger and stronger with greater stamina, tending to greater independence, and generally more logically determined and less emotional in the face of distractions.

Charles Murray's fascinating book, Human Accomplishment, provides a historical reflection of the phenomenon that Wikimedia's executives and critics are struggling with. Males have tended to achieve the lion's share of discoveries, inventions, and masterpieces of art, music, and literature as far back as history can tell.

A population shrinkage is occurring among the more intelligent people of the world -- Europeans and Northeast Asians -- while an explosive growth of population is occurring among the less intelligent people of the world. The average intelligence of the human population is inexorably dropping from near 90 points of IQ, downward -- close to the mid-80s and below. That qualifies as an Idiocracy.

In order to dumb down the Idiocracy, one must institute foolish rules of arbitrary and counter-productive governance, while educating the populace to accept dumbed-down groupthink rather than to think for themselves. It is easier than you might think. What Wikimedia is contemplating -- and what many western governments have done, and called affirmative action -- is an excellent example.

Obama, Like an Albatross, Hung 'Round the Nation's Neck

America is facing a significant restructuring, beginning with the state and municipal levels of government

Critical information about the image above and the muni and sovereign bond crunch

Will America choose a rational bankruptcy restructuring plan for the troubled states, or will Obama try to bail out his friends in public sector unions at the cost of the greater US economy?

Here is just one reason why American jobs are not coming back: weak demand. But there are many other important reasons -- including intentional job-killing and industry-killing energy starvation policies within the federal government. Oddly enough, almost all of the reasons for the endless recession center on Obama and his enablers.

The Obamacare scam that was forced through the Pelosi-Reid US Congress is a huge, job and business-killing monstrosity. But is Obama's "Net Neutrality" plan even more monstrous?

Around the world, America is perceived as weak under Obama. It is being called the post-American, Chinese century. But if the US can get the albatross off from around its neck, is it possible the US has a bit more life left in it?

Who could lead America out of the rapidly deepening pit that Obama is digging? There are no names mentioned as credible challengers to the albatross president. The only name that keeps being mentioned -- generally in terms of which leftist would like to kill her today -- is Sarah Palin. Just when you thought you'd heard the last of her, she keeps showing up.

America's ruling classes have built a byzantine edifice of state-sympathetic media -- in both the news and entertainment sectors. For three years, both media sectors have mercilessly and incessantly attacked anyone bold enough to criticise or contradict the albatross in chief. The media sectors have studiously avoided the glaring weaknesses and failures of Obama's policies, and have exaggerated the most insignificant successes into grand triumphs.

A lot of Americans have been stupid enough to fall for the agitprop. After all, average population IQ in the US is only 98 points. That means that about half of Americans have IQs below 98! A very scary thought, around voting time. Knowing that the average populution IQ of Mexico is 87 fails to provide reassurance for America's future ability to vote its way out of the quagmire of stagnant idiocracy.

Focus on the basic essentials for yourself, your families, your communities if you have them. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Chasing the Dream When Government Fails

Once the space-shuttle program ends this year, the only way to get people into orbit and to the International Space Station will be to buy seats on Russia's three-person Soyuz capsules. So NASA, through its Commercial Crew Development program, has given $50 million in grants to companies developing new spacecraft capable of carrying people and supplies into orbit and to the space station.

The recipient of the biggest chunk of this money was the Sierra Nevada Corporation, which received $20 million to develop the Dream Chaser. This spacecraft, the size of a business jet, will take cargo and up to eight people into low Earth orbit, where the space station is located, and then return and land on commercial airport runways. _TechnologyReview

SpaceDevAdvanced Dream Chaser
The NASA Space Shuttle program is reaching the end of its lifespan, and unless Americans want to keep hitching rides to orbit with the unpredictable Russians, an alternative path to space must be devised. NASA's pathetic $50 million Commercial Crew Development program is dwarfed by the agency's global warming budget -- and yet the pittance of an afterthought may prove helpful in seeding a private launch industry.

The "Dream Chaser" is a design that NASA reverse-engineered from the Soviet space program, while the Russians were busy reverse-engineering the NASA Space Shuttle.

In the 1970s, the Soviets tested a vehicle like it, known as the Bor-4. The crew of an Australian ship photographed it, and NASA used the image to reverse-engineer a similar craft. The resulting design, NASA's HL-20, underwent significant development and testing and was intended to be a lifeboat for astronauts aboard the space station. But the HL-20 program lapsed.

Six years ago, a small aerospace company that Sirangelo headed, called SpaceDev, licensed the design from NASA and began to modify it, for instance adding the hybrid motors. The motors burn an unusual fuel: a combination of recycled rubber and nitrous oxide. This has almost the same energy density as conventional fuel but can be burned in a more controlled way and thus might be safer, though only multiple flights can prove whether it is. Sirangelo compares the system to a burner on a gas stove that can be turned to a lower or higher flame. The same hybrid motor was used in SpaceShipOne, which won the X Prize in 2004, and will also be incorporated in Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, intended to fly tourists into suborbital space.

...Everything on the Dream Chaser except the initial launch booster and the fuel cartridges is designed to be reused. Still, turning a profit will require flying multiple Dream Chasers 50 to 100 times each, and Sirangelo admits that he doesn't know when that will occur. "We're entering an unknown world," he says. The company isn't disclosing exact figures, but Sierra Nevada, a profitable company founded in 1963, has invested tens of millions of dollars in the project—more than the company received from NASA this year. Sirangelo says Sierra Nevada plans to continue to invest own money in the project. "If we don't get to our milestones, we don't get paid," says Sirangelo. The company has applied for a second round of funding from NASA that will be given out later this year.

..."There is potential for the new vehicles to be safer than the space shuttle, but the only way you really know is by flying," says Pace. If the regulatory burden under which NASA labors were applied to commercial efforts to make crew vehicles, it would crush them—but what kind of compromise regulations will be written is still unclear. _TechnologyReview

Yes, it is most important to read all of the fine print. If the US government decides to crush private space enterprise, it can easily do so via "crushing" regulations, taxes, penalties, fines, licenses, and a multitude of other means that a legalistic bureaucracy tends to use to crowd out and destroy anyone outside the bureaucracy itself.

Smart people will devise workarounds, in order to get things done despite the blooming reign of idiocracy.

Why Not the Lagos Symphony Orchestra?

Video h/t: Instapundit
The London Symphony Orchestra presents a seasonal performance of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah, in the video above.

Handel was a German composer who transplanted himself to London, where he composed his greatest works, and where he was eventually buried in Westminster Abbey. Performances of Handel's Messiah are performed around the world near Christmas time.

What if cosmetic changes were made to the appearances of the singers and musicians in the video above, and the video were labeled "Handel's Messiah performed by the Lagos Symphony Orchestra?" Would you be surprised at the quality of musicianship, or by the ornateness of the performance hall? Would you be puzzled as to why Nigerians would celebrate Handel's Messiah? Would you be amazed that Lagos even has a symphony orchestra? (Lagos does have a symphony of sorts, in development)

Is it a mark of racism not to expect great performances from a Port-au-Prince Symphony Orchestra, or a Nairobi Symphony Orchestra? There is a Nairobi Symphony, by the way, although it can be difficult finding performances by the group on YouTube.

Why is it impolite to bring up such questions at faculty cocktail parties? You find symphony orchestras across East and South Asia, South America, North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand... In countries large and small across the civilised world, orchestras form and fight to survive through good times and bad. Even Antarctica would have a symphony if the scientists, technicians, and explorers stayed longer and outposts were close enough together to bring enough talent together.

Take a look at the list of African symphony orchestras. North Africa has three countries with symphony orchestras, all with a past history of strong European influence. South Africa has multiple symphony orchestras, but most of them will no doubt suffer the fate of the late Rhodesian symphonies. Kenya claims two orchestras, but they were no doubt formed under British colonial rule, and are likely struggling to survive. Ghana claims a symphony orchestra, but its website has not been updated since 2004.

No doubt it is quite gauche to discuss such a topic -- especially on Christmas -- but how do humans expect to solve their problems if they are unwilling to look at them clearly and unblinkingly?

Rapid growth in low IQ populations coupled with an implosion of high IQ populations results in a steadily decreasing global IQ. Low IQ populations combined with fanatical religions of conquest such as fundamentalist Islam lead not only to an Idiocracy, they lead to a violent Idiocracy. And while the Idiocracy movie was funny, it was not realistic. Coming idiocracies are almost certain to be very violent.

Every tax, regulation, law, and court judgment that leads to a re-distribution of wealth and resources from productive sectors to the coming Idiocracy, is dysfunctional. Political correctness is helping to bring about a coming anarchy, a growing Idiocracy. You may not be able to stop it, but for the sake of a decent future, stop voting for it!

Ray Kurzweil's Singularity Idiocracy University?

SingularityHub

Ray Kurzweil's Singularity University just wrapped up its second year's special summer session. The emphasis this year was on "a dozen more ways to help a billion people," according to Singularity Hub, which covered the session. In other words, an institution supposedly devoted to "the sinularity" was hijacked -- at least for this year -- to serve as a hard-flogged nag of the "appropriate technology" movement. The appropriate technology movement receives many billions of dollars a year from governments and foundations, and is already an important part of the curricula of hundreds of colleges and universities worldwide. So why did the Singularity University -- the only institution of its kind -- allow itself to be 'jacked by a worldwide monster movement which by all accounts is already over-funded and over-expensed by career bureaucrats and other rent-seekers?

Because the problems are so huge? Not really. Of course, the problems of the third world are certainly huge and in need of solutions. But the professional "problem-solvers" and "do-gooders" of the appropriate technology movement -- at least the bureaucratic part of the teams -- do not necessarily want to solve the problems at all. As long as the problems exist, these bureaucrats have lucrative careers in a high status, benevolent, and philanthropic occupation.

They have no reason to fear that the problems of the third world will suddenly fade away, or otherwise be solved by do-gooding appropriate technologists. The problems of the third world are institutionalised in a secure location, as well hidden as it is possible to hide a thing.

The endemic problem of the third world is corruption. If you do not change the corruption, you will not solve any problems other than to accelerate the growth rates of highly-dependent, non-productive populations of corrupt third world nations.

But the corruption cannot be changed as long as it is the nature of the people to accept this high level of corruption in their leadership. In general, there are three sorts of populations which accept high levels of corruption in their leaders:

1. populations living under dictatorships such as North Korea's and Iran's;
2. populations which are unable to create a large enough middle class and social mobility to dynamically bridge the gap between the very rich and the very poor; and
3. populations living in essential anarchy, without any rule of law

Some nations pass through conditions of dictatorship or anarchy, on the way to something better and less corrupt. But other nations and populations reside in a state of poverty and corruption virtually all of their existence -- regardless of how many NGOs, government aid programs, philanthropic gifts, appropriate technology programs, Peace Corps visits, or other benefits it may have received. Haiti is a good example. The continent of Africa contains several others. Asia and Latin America have other examples that may be a bit more complex.

The basic problem of the perpetually impoverished parts of the third world centers around the population substrate of those nations. What can the people accomplish under the very best of circumstances? How many top-rate people in the sciences, the professions, the trades, and other crucial occupations can these populations supply? To put it bluntly, "How can we expect these populations to climb out of their deep holes as long as their average population IQ is below 85?"

This summer's session of the Singularity University was not about the Singularity, by all accounts (provided by SingularityHub). Instead, it was about the Idiocracy, the perpetually corrupt and impoverished parts of the world that cannot be transformed from the outside, regardless of the best intentions.

There is nothing wrong with appropriate technology, or in trying to improve basic health and living conditions of persons in abject poverty and misery. It is appropriate that churches, charities, philanthropists, and other well wishers devote a portion of their time and resources to helping such people, if they can. But that is not what the singularity is about.

The singularity, as described by Kurzweil, is a mind-blowingly fast transition from a world where we can at least fool ourselves into thinking that we can keep up with important events and developments, to a world where all pretense of keeping up with the advances must be abandoned.

Whether such a world comes about as a result of highly advanced machine intelligences, or as a result of more intelligent humans learning to network their intelligences together (and with sub-intelligent but very fast machines), the end result of change too cheap to meter is the same.

There are millions of people and institutions in the affluent world working to improve the conditions of the third world, but only one Singularity University. We cannot afford to jump on anyone's bandwagon -- even the bandwagon of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and similar well-meaning philanthropic organisations -- if we expect to get past the Idiocratic bottleneck which threatens almost all societies at this time.

Singularity Dreams, Reality's Idiocratic Nightmare

ImageSource
Brian Wang was busy liveblogging the Singularity Summit this past weekend in San Francisco. Here is a short excerpt from Brian's weekend work:

The best of the 2010Singularity Summit

Shane legg has developed a formula and program that generates a continuous intelligence measurement for rating algorithms and systems This has the potential to more objectively guide the improvement of AI and algorithms.

Goertzel is using AI techniques to figure out useful things about the Genescient long lived flies.

Lance Becker on using cold and chemical cocktails to enable you to survive having no oxygen to your brain for hours instead of four minutes

The talk was not good but the work has big potential. Anita Goel is harnessing DNA polymerase in devices for rapid sequencing and as actuators.

The interesting inventions of Steve mann.

Details on brain computer interfaces

Combining neuroscience and machine learning as a hybrid approach to AGI _SingularitySummit_via_BrianWang

The rest of the coverage is available at the link above.

The amount of mental effort devoted to laying the groundwork for "The Singularity" is impressive, and not likely to have been wasted in the long run. Yet it can be somewhat depressing to contrast such astounding plans and dreams for the future with the sad economic, societal, and political realities of an encroaching Idiocracy of perverse "leadership" around the world.

From the university to the economy to the moral and political leadership of society -- the dregs and the offal have emerged to convene the prelude to the Idiocracy.

Many eyes are looking to dreams of the singularity in hopes of finding salvation from the entropic reality on almost every front. We will learn over the next decade or two how effective a well planned and executed future can be as an antidote to popular ideological poisons that have penetrated to the heart and soul of a corrupt society.

Wise persons will prepare for the possibility of extreme hardship between now and then.

More: Is it possible that the west has laid the groundwork of a marvelous future only to see other emerging cultures build the final structures?