Posted by DanielS on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 08:35 | #

Before I begin reading further into this essay I need to address this:

“unsatisfactory state of intellectual affairs which exists between myself and Daniel on the relevance and utility of sociology.”

GW is in the habit of arguing against the didactic distortions of useful concepts by Jewish and liberal academia.

He seems to need that school of thought so much as his argumentative foil, that he projects it on to me.

As I have said, earnestly and clearly, several times, I am not a sociologist. Nor have I been arguing on behalf of a solely sociological unit of analysis - the group. Hermeneutics, by contrast is a process of inquiry which moves from the concrete facts to hypothetical conceptualization - for example, of the group - and back again to verification. It can and does move to various units of analysis and observation as need be.

The likes of GW’s uneducated, right wing cohorts, such as Uh and Daniel A, but also Bowery - who is uneducated when it comes to the benign utility of the humanities - add to that the fans of Nazism and those interested in defending Jews (like Uh), egg him on against “sociology” and to attribute it and its distorted manifestations to myself.

Still, there is nothing wrong with a hypothesis of the group’s existence and its deserving advocacy. On the contrary - yes, we assert the hypothesis based on sensible evidence, facts and prevailing science that race exists, “the English people” etc. exist, and deserve advocacy. Nor is this hypothesizing contrary to ontological verification.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The unit of analysis is the major entity that is being analyzed in a study. It is the ‘what’ or ‘who’ that is being studied. In social science research, typical units of analysis include individuals (most common), groups, social organizations and social artifacts.

The literature of international relations provides a good example of units of analysis. In “Man, the State and War”, Kenneth N. Waltz creates a tripartite analysis with three different units of analysis: the man (individual), the state (a group), and the international system (the system in which groups interact).

This is not to be confused with the unit of observation, which is the unit described by one’s data (neighborhoods using the U.S. Census, individuals using surveys, etc.). For example, a study may have a unit of observation at the individual level but may have the unit of analysis at the neighborhood level, drawing conclusions on neighborhood characteristics from data collected from individuals.

It is also perfectly valid to begin from facts and very concrete behavior and from there draw an assessment of what authentically self interested, native nationalist behavior and being means; i.e., to begin from the subjective, genetic level and to draw inferences of culture and nation being an extended phenotype and epiphenomenon from there. Most of us, myself included, believe that is largely correct and there is no choice but to start from that position more or less in honest inquiry. However, the extended phenotype of native culture comes along anyway with the separatist defense of ethnonationalism. But taken alone without allowing for the feedback of the broader historical, social conceptualization, is to commit the naturalistic fallacy - and that is besides the ideas that GW summarily sweeps aside, which are often about 100 times better, more instructive, more important but not mutually exclusive to what he is doing with his ontology project. He wants to say that I am merely applying rules from without, instead of inferring them from within the interests, proclivities and requirements of White homeostasis.

When GW says that there is an unacceptable state of intellectual affairs between us, what he does not appreciate is that it is in large part his fault. He has thus far refused to see that what I am doing is not mutually exclusive to ontological verification, he has wanted to project inferential stereotypes of his reaction to Jewish abuses of concepts onto me and what I am doing.

His right wing cohorts are often motivated by similar reactions and predilections which dispose them to the naturalisitc fallacy and worse, some are steered by Jewish motivations to dissuade Whites from looking after group interests - “sociology is therefore bad, no matter how you apply it.”

Of course that is ridiculous, but we are dealing with right wingers and Jews, after all, so it’s about what you can expect.

Now then, I will suggest again that the audience think - I know it’s hard, but think:

If you are a Jew and you finally find yourself on top of the game when it comes to 1) money 2) media 3) academia 4) politics 5) business 6) religion 7) law…

You are going to want to create a zeitgeist where “the left” is the enemy, a general consensus by contrast arguing for “objectivity”, that this situation has come about as a result of the sheer ability and individual merit of Jews, their I.Q., their hard work - not of their (leftist) group advocacy of themselves.

Likewise, if you are a right wing (White or otherwise), de-racinating elitist sell-out, you are going to want “the left” to be the enemy.

No place for a socially interpretive and critical model now. No, that would not be convenient for Jews and deracinated right wing elitist sell-outs at this juncture.

You don’t want Jews to be the problem, you don’t want right-wing sell outs to be the problem, blind, dumb, disingenuous, unaccountable “objectivity” to be the problem, you don’t want incommensurate criteria to be the problem, you want “the left” to be the problem; and you will have the likes of Paul Gottfried broker a deal with right wingers, a quid pro quo with the “Alt-Right” wherein they will allow for a certain amount of implicit Whiteness in exchange for cooperating with Jews and deracinating right wing elitist sell outs, like Trump, against “the left”, its homeostasis of general group interests - its ethno nationalism against Jews and the right wing sell outs.

Of course they are going to want you to argue against “equality” - you don’t want to take anything away from Jews and race traitors, do you? They are unequal by their sheer objective merit.

They want you to argue against equality when in fact, what you want is the qualities of ethno nationalism.

Of course now that these Jews are on top and right wing sell outs are placated, they are going to want people arguing against social justice, against equality, against the left (group interests), and on behalf of the right - unaccountable, “objective” facts.

And stupidly, the alt-right goes along with this.

They also want people to argue against hermeneutics, i.e., against historical perspective…against its agency and that of social constructionism (the truly revolutionary pespectives, as opposed to this ontology project shit), instead they want you to argue for the naturalistic fallacy (again, now that the Jews are on top, and right wing sell outs placated, we should believe that what Is is what should be), that we should not believe in “sociology”, the group and accountability to it, etc.

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 13:11 | #

DanielS said:  the baby does not raise itself on a desert island with all it needs to know, including the ability to speak English, etc.

GW said: After all, isn’t communication proof of a social organisation, and isn’t “the social”, therefore, the over-arching, master category of all human existence?  Don’t sociologists categorise all animals which live their lives communicating within their own group as “social”?  Isn’t the important thing here not the animals but what is between them ...the language … the inter-action … and what that tells us about them?

This is a false either or and not a logical extension of what I would have said. I did not say “and therefore, the social is THE master over-arching category of human existence.”

To commit this straw man argument against me, it is necessary for GW to ignore what I say about hermeneutics and to listen to his right wing friends who want to argue against “sociology.”

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 15:24 | #

The evidence seems to run all one way.  “The social” must be a taxonomically valid term, no?  How, then, can Daniel’s zeal to rank sociology above everything else, and thereby his own comprehension of Man and kind over mine, and to validate thereby his novel solution to our existential impasse of an hermeneutical priesthood setting rules for the errant yet pliant white masses … how can that be ill-advised?

But I do not rank sociology above all else, that is the straw man that your stupid right wing friends have told you to impute to me and what you would impute to me at your stubborn puerile (in the sense of being overly competitive, like Bowery) convenenience.

I do not “set rules” from about, that is a stereotype of the left that you project onto me - that I take concepts and then apply them affectively to facts. You persistently ignore the descriptive aspect to the rules that I am suggesting - i.e., that they are descriptive of what White social systems do when healthy, in homeostasis.

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 15:39 | #

Well, before we concede the point, let’s re-survey the perceptual topography, and see where that leads.  It may surprise you.

Sense. Think. Speak.

[...]

But Man does not only survey, interpret and communicate the real through intellectual function.  He has two other great, older, faster systems of Mind operating alongside, namely the emotional and motor functions.  These don’t operate by associative thought and so don’t employ words in the internal communicative process.  It is true that thoughts may interdict and trigger the emotional system in the same way that external events do, ie, as part of the general experience of the real - the emotional system surveys the intellectual system’s output of thought along with everything else.  But emotion is a fast reactor, and its momentary contact with a thought is at the very beginning of the latter’s emergence into a linguistic product.  Indeed, emotion itself is rather close to the leading edge of the perceptual process – something entirely missed by Western intellectuals (who - Heidegger among them – appear to believe that thinking is really the only activity of the brain which is worth considering.  The rest is just too primitive and unreliable!)

GW is making a presumption here that if we talk about “communication” or attribute properties of communication to these natural processes, and use hermeneutics (as in fact we must) to inquire into them, that we are not taking them into account or are impervious to taking them into account.

That isn’t true.

So far all he is demonstrating is a willful misunderstanding of what I have been saying.  ... There is another contributing factor to why he is doing this, which I will suggest in a moment.

 

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 15:45 | #

One upshot of this snobbery is GE Moore’s Naturalistic Fallacy … “ought” as a non-sequitur of “is”.  So, of course, the large, hungry brown bear circles.  The intellectual, out for his morning constitutional in the woods, dryly adumbrates.  Beside him the gamekeeper, an unkempt emotionalist, knows only an urgent must, and clicks off the safety on his shotgun.  Of course, the Fallacy is better argued in terms of the higher-order system of refined sensibilities like conscience and guilt than the adrenal emotions.  But its essence remains: that in all matters, logical structure yields an objective verity that feelings are constitutionally incapable of achieving.  It thereby dismisses emotion’s life-wisdom, instancy, and depth, and relegates its validity as a perceptual tool as old as mammalian evolution.  One wonders if Mr Moore – rumoured to be a purveyor of common sense in many other areas - read Charles Darwin at all.

We’ve read Darwin, recognize that laws of natural selection apply to humans, but that for humans, in particular, the naturalistic fallacy is more a fallacy because we are more complex, have more agency - as we ought.

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 16:01 | #

Communication is a finite possibility and communication from intellect to intellect

On the contrary, one cannot NOT communicate.

, with its reliance on an imperfectly and accidentally acquired communicative method, most profoundly so.

It is imprecise that is true and may be frustrating to stem types, to those disposed to the epistemological blunder of scientism - those suffering from physics envy.

The point of departure with Descartes – Heidegger’s, point of departure, really - lies in the mode by which meaning is disclosed, and certainly not in this original, existential isolation. In the same way that Heidegger has to accept this aspect of the Cartesian model, so have we.

There is not original, existential isolation. There is difference in the corporeal being, but it is co-evolved and therefore operating on internally related rule-structures ...indeed, related to social being.

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 16:21 | #

So we find that, evolutionarily speaking (for respectable philosophy cannot propose in contravention of scientific knowledge, where the latter touches upon it), Nature conditions and constrains the organism to seek its own survival and its own reproduction in accordance with fitness.  Mind’s work of perception, interpretation, and decision is a grand fitness gain, basically.  All the while, beneath everything is a system of regulatory categories of driving, animalistic necessity: reproduction, evolutionarily adaptive choice-making, defence and advance of genetic interests.  Our individual life – as with the life of all individual organisms - really is this fundamental, and it is a fundamentality which reaches upward into the processes of daily living, motivating, informing, shaping, and, through the like nature of others (and only through their like nature), connecting, complementing, completing.

This part corresponds well with an aspect that I am becoming aware of as to why GW cannot bear to acknowledge value in what I am saying and has to resort to misrepresenting it with straw men and mischaracterizations. The evolutionary model that he discusses in this paragraph works well to justify highly competitive business practices, particularly good if you have a leg up, as you might in a male depleted generation of first first generation baby boomers - Thatcher’s declaration that there is “no such thing as society” would be just the thing.

I’ve misplaced it but I wish that I had ready to hand an essay that I was tasked to help with by some students of mine - they were business students. The essay was about competitive strategies to climb the corporate ladder - The acronyms TIP and TOOP were discussed as the two major strategies.

The winning position in the long run is to say “no” to just about any proposal, as that is mathematically likely to be the correct position - most business propositions fail.

You are to never give your competitor credit for anything - rather, you must trivialize anything that they might offer, while promoting your own irreplaceable significance, etc.

When I found that this is the kind of thing that business schools are teaching, I could have puked.

I suspect that another aspect of GW’s uncharitableness with regard to my contributions and mischaracterizations thereof, may stem from business enculturation, especially as it conveniently served that first generation of baby boomers - the social fall out and concerns of subsequent generations be damned.

It may work to an extent, even seem “natural,” but it is a naturalistic fallacy.

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 16:48 | #

In terms of the ultimate foundation of origin, of course, we have no such certainties.  But we might speculate that the repeating mechanics which initialised a momentarily living organism ... an original, single organism … not once but millions or tens or hundreds of millions of times, only for extinction to follow immediately each time … those mechanics set in train a self-sustaining process belonging not to mechanicity but to a finally original organism, resulting in an identity as that which has the novel action of Being and continuing to be.  The continuity might only have been a product of a less finite fuel source or a more efficient way of consuming fuel.  But however that worked, it was creatively sufficient, and identity assumed its cosmic role as the holder of interest or care for its Being, out of which came all other things … evolution, reproduction, Mind ... everything.

So, by this reading we can infer ontologically that identity’s care is for the overcoming of isolation’s tending towards death, rather than the overcoming of isolation itself.  In itself, isolation does not offend against identity, but belongs to it and serves it in other ways.  We can assign the positive value to identity’s care and the negative to identity’s vestigial but no longer mono-form isolation.  Poetically, we could associate the former with instinct, energy and movement, extroversion, self-actualisation, and the struggle for life, and identity’s vestigial but no longer mono-form isolation with essence, stillness, introversion, self-realisation, entropy and death.  The struggle for life finds its path in the struggle to know.  Its outward orientation has something of the natural tension and energy of the relation of the sexes, driving the organism into a world revealed in perspective, to be experienced as relational and non-relational, empathetic and antipathetic, and giving of life and taking of life.

We can take that idea of relation further, and translate it into the detail of human being.  For now, for the first time in this exegesis, there arises the possibility for Being to come into possession of its complete and natural constitution.  It is only through the idea that being is a property of identity that Heidegger’s notion of a constituted character of the being of beings, subject to variation in the way of being, makes sense.  By way of a somewhat crass example, the plain, factic is-ness of, say, the River Amazon is not at all that of the Atlantic Ocean, which is not at all that of a rain-cloud formation thousands of feet above the rain-forest, albeit that a water molecule from each always contains two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, or that the water cycle dictates that the river shall transport the molecule to the ocean, the ocean shall give up the molecule (maybe not exactly that molecule) to the cloud, and the cloud to the river (maybe not exactly that river).  Identity is a singular locus or point of differentiation, but its relation to being is subject to context, and Being itself – being is meant here, not behaviour – is responsive to same and, therefore, compound.  It is made of parts.

Very poetic but still a problem for us in the naturalistic fallacy. Part of our being is an insistence upon agency, especially as advanced people and part of our existential reality is the agency of our advanced antagonists along with the lack of agency of some of our primitive antagonists - its appeal to those with a yearning for the naturalistic fallacy - which takes us directly into the realm of ought.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 18:26 | #

There is no naturalistic fallacy in the emotional and motor functions.  It is a neat trick of the intellect, no more; and proof of the potentially fatal detachment of its method.  The intellect, of course, only exists itself through the “ought” of natural selection.

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 18:53 | #

There can be a naturalistic fallacy in the prescription of oughtness to emotional and motor functions in given responses - particularly in emotional responses, but even at times in instinctive motor responses. .

Posted by Dr_Eigenvector on Sat, 07 Jan 2017 16:46 | #

There is no naturalistic fallacy in the emotional and motor functions.  It is a neat trick of the intellect, no more; and proof of the potentially fatal detachment of its method.  The intellect, of course, only exists itself through the “ought” of natural selection.

That could be the new “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White.”

Posted by DanielS on Sat, 07 Jan 2017 18:21 | #

Good luck promoting that one, Dr. Eigenvector.

Actually, it might catch on with liberals (e.g., mudsharks): Emotional claims such as “We’re in love and we can’t help it” .. or “They’re just my feelings and I can’t help it” have actually been typically proposed in modernity as if unassailable warrants. 

However, after very rudimentary responses, particularly beyond childhood, there is a great deal of social construction (or cultivation thereof - same thing) that goes into the elaboration or not of emotions.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 08 Jan 2017 15:10 | #

Daniel, you are confusing the personality as an enculturated product with emotional function as such.  Try to think.  Moore’s thesis is that thinking as such cannot extrapolate an “ought” from an “is”.  This is a general claim, not a particular comment on enculturated personalities.  Let’s not make such obvious categorical errors.

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 08 Jan 2017 16:29 | #

Robert Hecht-Nielsen’s “confabulation theory”, a modified form of which I accept as a working hypothesis, posits that the neomammalian complex, aka neocortex, is comprised of about 4000 modules whose phylogenetic origin is musculature.  These modules can be “contracted” and “relaxed” just as can muscles—and this is more than mere analogy.  They are identical in evolutionary origin and “thought” can be thought of as “motion” which requires “coordination” just as does any motor control require coordinated contraction and relaxation of musculature.

His inspiration was his close relationship with his cat, imputing to it thought and emotion as he observed its motions.

“Confabulation” is nature’s way of imputing missing sense data (making present, as what statisticians call “expectation”, that which is absent)—including expectations of the future.  Confabulation theory reduces to Aristotelian logic in a certain environment.  In an uncertain environment, urgency may “contract” the cortical “musculature” rapidly, “jumping to a conclusion”.  In a more relaxed environment, the confabulations can take into account more knowledge before contracting into a conclusion. 

Interestingly, the way these 4000 or so modules interact produces what we think of as “grammar”.  The cross-cultural commonalities of grammar has its phylogenetic origin in motor coordination.  In Hecht-Nielsen’s words: “Grammar is an emergent property of confabulation.  It does not exist.”

Hecht-Nielsen is controversial but his pedigree is difficult to disparage.  His company, perhaps the first profitable neural network company, was purchased for hundreds of millions of dollars by the premiere credit rating company which then further supported his research in confabulation theory.  Confabulation theory has, however, subsequently dropped off the radar and all of the people associated with it are nonresponsive to overtures.  This can be explained by assuming that Confabulation Theory has been discredited and no one wants to talk about such an embarrassing episode.  However, it can also be explained by a plausible “conspiracy theory”:

An archived copy of a presentation RHN made in 2006 to Sandia Labs on a system for intelligence analysts has a revealing passage:  “Collectors and Analysts have no need to know how extraction system works (this knowledge should be highly restricted) – users need only know extraction system’s capabilities and how to use it.”  Subsequent to this, the son of a lead scientist of RNC’s, went from studying neurophysiology to becoming an infamous mass murderer apparently suffering from amnesia about the whole event.

 

Posted by DanielS on Sun, 08 Jan 2017 17:40 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 08 Jan 2017 10:10 | #

Daniel, you are confusing the personality as an enculturated product with emotional function as such.  Try to think.  Moore’s thesis is that thinking as such cannot extrapolate an “ought” from an “is”.  This is a general claim, not a particular comment on enculturated personalities.  Let’s not make such obvious categorical errors.

Guessedworker, I am doing no such thing. You are imputing what you take to be my will to impose rule structures onto facts - i.e., you are determined to impose a stereotype of “leftist” social engineering onto what I am doing.

I will ask you to think therefore about what I am actually doing.

“Rules” are not simply and only made-up social rules applied arbitrarily to facts. A rule is a word meaning that there is a logical sequence that follows - rules can be quite descriptive of what IS - the rule of gravity, for example.

Because they can bridge what IS, what OUGHT and what MIGHT be, rules are a particularly useful concept. That is why it is disturbing that you would attack this, as you seem to typically react to useful ideas, competitively and dismissively, as if it is mere Jewish academic claptrap.

In fact, how and where rules connect is and ought (and what might be) is very interesting, and I have every reason to believe, important.

After a certain point, people have more flexibility, and can follow different rules - which must be negotiated more or less with others.

I know it’s hard, but try to think about what I am saying instead of projecting what you want to believe that I am saying, or acting as if I am duty bound, for that matter to Moore’s definition.

The naturalistic fallacy as it is most useful would mean not so much that one is treating IS and OUGHT as one in the same (which seems to be more what Moore is saying), but rather the over-tightness with which more fundamental biological and physical laws are taken as what ought necessarily guide what humans do - it has to do with one’s concept of necessity, of which there are variants.

Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 08 Jan 2017 18:33 | #

I’m pretty sure there could be found at least one English woman, many in fact, whose unenculturated emotions would have them spread for a nigger.  It is the Rule of the Jackboot that says, “The fuck you will!”

PS. If talking too loosely about confabulation theory is a certain death sentence, one wonders why Bowery is still breathing.

Posted by James Bowery on Thu, 12 Jan 2017 16:51 | #

Extracting myself from the tar-baby posting under “Captainchaos” by holding onto a nearby tree branch known as an “analogy”:

In 1932 a New Zealand physicist discovered nuclear energy and in 1938 German physicists discovered the potential for autocatalytic nuclear energy in the fission of uranium.  These were published in the open literature.  Based on these published papers there were speculations about the potential for practical applications, including weapons, going on in the periphery of the culture right up until Hiroshima.  People engaging in these speculations were not killed because they weren’t insiders.  There were, however, quite a number of people associated with the Manhattan Project who were, shall we say, silenced.

Confabulation Theory is analogous to the discovery of uranium fission.

Posted by Captainchaos on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 06:54 | #

“tar baby”

Lulz

Whatever, Bowery.  Those are some mighty big words coming from a man who believes the Jews are aided by actual black magic (as if their control of banking and the media wasn’t a sufficient explanation for their power).

Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 14:33 | #

“Captainchaos”, whoever he is, does have at least one use:

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 14 Jan 2017 20:24 | #

The disconnection of thought from action has another facet that is hobbling genuine artificial intelligence.  This facet is in the foundation of the strongest theorem yet proven in computer science regarding induction—the “Gold Standard” of artificial intelligence:  A definition of its most crucial term in such a way as to divorce thought from action.

An aside to keep in mind:  There is, in academia and its industrial acolytes, a religious aversion to genuine artificial intelligence—but not because of the fear of “unfriendly AI” as many, such as Elon Musk, prominently argue.  That is a red herring.  They fear it because a genuine artificial intelligence, with a formally verifiable neutral point of view, will persuasively communicate the truth and do so indefatigably and exhaustively.  This will bury the academic sophists with truth even as it tailors its dialog for each individual of the general public.  This fear is most obviously expressed, as will be shown below, in recent controversies over “racist” behavior of artificial intelligence systems—not unlike the controversies over actuarial science setting “racist” insurance premiums.

The first line of defense against the advancement of genuine artificial intelligence is denial of the implication of Algorithmic Probability.  Quite simply, Ray Solomonoff essentially proved the importance of Ockham’s Razor in terms of computer theory and did so at the dawn of the computer age. However, a half century into the computer age, we still aren’t even beginning to exploring those implications in a practical way. Here’s an obvious implication that should have been pursued almost from the outset in the 1960s:

Whenever you have a dataset and are trying to come up with a predictive model, you have two basic options that avoid overfitting (overfitting is basically what happens when someone “learns” a bunch of data perfectly, as proven by their ability to regurgitate it, but can’t make any generalizations):

1) Use the data you have, not to create the model but to test it.
2) Approximate the data’s Kolmogorov Complexity program as best you can so as to approximate Solomonoff Induction.  Kolmogorov Complexity is the computer science term for Ockham’s Razor:  It is the length of the shortest program that can output the data.

#1 invariably ends up being impractical since you can’t _really_ construct a model out of first principles. In any event, as you start to “consume” your data in tests of your models, you end up refining your models which gets you into the land of post hoc theorization thence overfitting as you consume more data. The best you can do is what Enlightenment philosophers came up with: Experimental controls—which is to say, you have experimental setups, all identical except being treated in a slightly different way (including no treatment called “the control”).

The social sciences have become the modern equivalent of a theocracy given their impact on public policy—but social scientists haven’t reached the level of scientific ethics required for them to insist that their theories not be taken as justification for imposing experiments on massive human populations as is required by Federal arrogation of social policy from the Laboratory of the States. If social scientists had anything worthy of being called “ethics” they would insist on devolution of social policy to the States and Federal support of migration of people to the States whose social policies they find mutually agreeable.  I’ve called this Sortocracy:  Sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them. This directly addresses the scientific need for experimental variation as well as the ethical need for informed consent when dealing with human experimental subjects.

In the absence of such humility, the social sciences did have one other option:

Data compression to approximate Kolmogorov Complexity.

Note that I am not here talking about a general algorithm for data compression. I’m talking about a much simpler and obvious idea:
Comparing theories by how well those theories compress the same datasets.

And this is where I come to the first “religious aversion” to Solomonoff Induction:

Whenever I see arguments against the utility of Solomonoff Induction in the aforementioned role—comparing theories by the size of executable archives of the same datasets—they are _invariably_ (in my experience) strawman polemics. Yes, Kolmogorov Complexity is incomputable—but that’s not the argument. We’re not trying to come up with a program to compress the datasets! There is a difference between a program that compresses the datasets and a program that DEcompresses the datasets (the latter being the approximation of the KC program). This difference is so obvious that its conflation in these arguments—its _predicatable_ conflation—is reminiscent of Orwell’s notion of “Crime Stop”:

Selective stupidity to avoid violations of Ingsoc or the official ideology of The Party.

There are other, less obviously stupid, strawmen that arise from time to time but these are almost invariably in the category of philosophical attacks on Cartesianism or the scientific method itself. While it is fine to have those philosophical arguments, it seems rather silly to hold up practical application of Solomonoff Induction on that basis as virtually the entire structure of technological civilization is Cartesian.  I’ll address this argument against “Cartesianism” presently in a form that exposes the sophistry opened up when we divorce thought from action in Solomonoff Induction.

With this first line of defense against Solomonoff Induction, hence genuine artificial intelligence in place,  we witness a Social Justice Warrior movement to encode politically correct thought into the learning algorithms of “artificial intelligence”—producing models that are more complex than they need to be—but that’s “OK” because no one thinks complexity is in and of itself, important to minimize. The justification for this is that the information available to these learning algorithms is “biased” so these politically correct rules must be imposed on the learning algorithms to “correct” for the “bias” present in such things as—well—reality like FBI statistics on crime—correlations that may _really_ arise from causation, etc.

I have, for quite some time, been very—even extremely—insistent on a metapolitics of sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them—not merely to approach true “consent of the governed” but to supply social scientists with control experiments to tease apart mere correlation from actual causation.

However, there is another approach to the “correlation doesn’t imply causation” Thought Crime Stop when experimental controls are not available:

Solomonoff Induction

In order to even _try_ to think rationally about “biased information” in relation to AI, you need to understand Solomonoff Induction. It is based on Algorithmic Information Theory which is founded on Kolmogorov Complexity.

Kolmogorov Complexity is the minimum number of bits it takes to describe another bit string—where “describe” means it is a program that outputs the other bit string. This is, otherwise, known as Ockham’s Razor.

The Kolmogorov Complexity program of any bit string is _necessarily_ unbiased.

Information saboteurs attempting to get their biases past an inductive agent based on KC will have to do more than flood the bit string with biased information—they will have to exclude the laws of nature from the bit string.

The laws of nature are nature’s definition of “unbiased”.

In trying to talk to people about the philosophical importance of Solomonoff Induction, some raise the issue of the supposedly “arbitrary” choice of the computer upon which to write the KC program for some set of information.  This is an argument that Solomonoff himself made near the end of his life. This “arbitrary choice” leads one to be able to embed any degree or kind of bias one chooses in the KC program for some set of information.  (It is most interesting that Solomonoff torpedoed the crowning achievement of his own academic career shortly before his death.)

However, one can pull a Quine* on this objection:

A machine that can execute physical simulations can simulate its own physical operation. The program that models its own physical operation will have a minimum length—a Kolmogorov Complexity that one might call its Natural Complexity. Some machines will have a smaller Natural Complexity than others. This is not arbitrary anymore than are the laws of nature. 

When one takes into account all of the vast information available through “big data”, including the laws of nature embodied in the natural choice of Turing machine equivalent, as well as the vast array of information from all the sciences and all manner of cultures and human endeavors, the constraints imposed on the resulting KC program demand the explicit representation of bias, as such, so as to correctly predict which sources of information will emit those biases. This not only identifies the information saboteurs but the precise cognitive, cultural and other biases driving them to depart from reality.

This, in turn, permits the exposure of causal laws in the social sciences without the need to sort proponents of social theories into governments that test them.

It appears, then, that one of the gravest threats to the social sciences is also one of the gravest threats to the emergence of machine intelligence capable of solving problems like aging, life extension, pollution, war and genocide:

Social Justice Warriors that don’t, or won’t, understand Solomonoff Induction, Kolmogorov Complexity and the benefits that can arise from getting the social sciences on a rational footing when it comes to inferring cause and effect.

*Quine famously used quotation to treat propositions—or thoughts—as objects to be acted upon formally.  This exposes a variety of so-called “paradoxes” that all have the same roots going back to Aristotelian objectivism’s departure from Pythagorean mysticism.  The resolution is to recognize that consciousness is not primarily about thought but about purposeful action in the world:  technology.  Technology precedes science just as does action precede thought.  In the present instance of Kolmogorov Complexity’s “computer”—it is impossible to escape the engineering necessities of technology which includes computer simulations (of the computers running the simulations) that are, necessarily, incomplete but good enough to get the job done: technology.