Re: Give cheese to france?

[Tyler Durden]

"Read some of the sources. Few of you social democrats here have done so."

Poo-poo on such "sources". I can't believe that someone supposedly trined in 
physics really believes such sources to be of a huge amount of value.

I know I'll take heat for the following statement (deservedly--I admit it's 
a huge bias), but as a physicist myself, any political or social "science" 
is for me highly suspect if it does not rely upon mathemtical expressions 
and can not make quantifiable predictions. And for the most part, we've 
never seen that.

What I mean is that we can state all the political and economic theories we 
want, but in the end I doubt they have much relevance to reality. So I've 
never really gone out of my way to dig deeply into such sources. Social 
theories always seem quaint to me...they may have some real relevance at the 
time of conception, but technology (for one) takes such wild turns that many 
ideas which seem "obvious" at one point are almost useless a few years 
later. Like, imagine what even the most brilliant of late medieaval 
philosophers might have said about the future of fortifications. Many of 
such statements may have been insightful and "correct" at the time they were 
formulated, but they also probably could not have taken into consideration 
the existence and implications of gunpowder, which would wipe out the notion 
of a fortification (in the castle sense) just about completely.

Strong crypto is one form of gunpowder from the late 20th century. And while 
we can gesticulate about the probable implications, in the end I doubt 
anything that is said now will hold much relevance to the world as it will 
stand 30 years from now. So right now the only really valid "philosophy" is 
coding itself, and the generation of apps and structures based on this new 
gunpowder (which like gunpowder can't be put back in the can). This will 
(along with many other technologies) change the world into something we 
probably can't even imagine right now. And the only people who will be seen 
as having been "correct" in any sense will be those that developed 
technologies that will be used in the future. What we SAY will seem quaint 
and irrelevant. (Hey! Where's my flying car and domestic robot?)

-TD







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